Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations 9781138649620, 9781315625720

Citation preview

Salaam Bollywood

This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India’s cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear, developmental(ist) narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in the course of cinematic history. The chapters in the volume critically consider transformations of the Hindi film industry from its early days to its present self-referential mode, issues of gender, dance and choreography, Bombay cinema’s negotiations with the changing cityscape and urbanisms, and concentrate on its multifarious regional, national and transnational implications in the 21st century. One of the most comprehensive volumes on Bollywood, this work presents an analytical overview of the multiple histories of popular cinema in India and will be useful to scholars and researchers interested in film and media studies, South Asian popular culture and modern India, as well as to cinephiles and general readers alike. Vikrant Kishore is an academic, film-maker, journalist, photographer and currently Lecturer in Media at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Amit Sarwal is Honorary Associate Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and Founding Convenor of the Australia–India Interdisciplinary Research Network. Parichay Patra is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Film and Screen Studies, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Salaam Bollywood Representations and interpretations

Edited by Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra The right of Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra 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 has been requested for this book. ISBN: 978-1-138-64962-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-62572-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Contributors Foreword LALEEN JAYAMANNE

   Salaam Bollywood: introduction VIKRANT KISHORE, AMIT SARWAL AND PARICHAY PATRA

Part I Histories: mainstream and alternative  1 Myths, markets and panics: Bombay cinema and the historical significance of the popularity of two Gujarati stage plays at the turn of the 20th century KAUSHIK BHAUMIK

 2 The left encounter: progressive voices of nationalism and Indian cinema to the 1950s BINAYAK BHATTACHARYA

 3 Genre mixing as creative fabrication M. MADHAVA PRASAD

 4 What do the villains have? Indian cinema’s villains in the 1970s HARIPRASAD ATHANICKAL

 5 Inward bound: self-referentiality in Bombay cinema PRATEEK

Part II Bollywood dance: rereading history  6 Dancing to the songs: history of dance in popular Hindi films SHRUTI GHOSH

 7 Designing the song and dance sequences: Exploring Bollywood’s cinematic creativity VIKRANT KISHORE AND SUSAN KERRIGAN

 8 The item girl: tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing AMITA NIJHAWAN

Part III Changes in the cityscape, changes in cinema  9 Regionalist disjuncture in Bollywood: Dabangg and the consumerist cinema HRISHIKESH INGLE

10 Mourning and blood-ties: Macbeth in Mumbai MOINAK BISWAS

11 Black Friday: a screen history of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts RAJDEEP ROY

12 The re-mapped dialectics of contemporary Indian cinema: Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots SHAHEEN S. AHMED

Part IV Other regions, other nations 13 Marking out the ‘South’ in/of Hindi cinema: an approach via remakes NIKHILA H.

14 Between solidarity and the stereotype: Chandni Chowk to China S. V. SRINIVAS

15 The Khan Mania: universal appeal of superstar Shahrukh Khan in a post-globalised Bollywood era SONY JALARAJAN RAJ, ROHINI SREEKUMAR AND FIKRI JERMADI

16 Old wine in a new bottle: Bollywood films shot in Australia after 9/11 SANCHARI DE AND AMIT SARWAL

17 The way cinema was banished: the intervention of cinema studies in India PARICHAY PATRA

Index

Contributors

Shaheen S. Ahmed is currently pursuing her MPhil in Visual Arts from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. She has a Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from JNU and a postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, India. She has made presentations at international seminars (IACS Conference, National University of Singapore, 2013) and at national-level seminars (Karavan-e-Fikr, Jamia Milia Islamia, 2011 and 2012). Her core interests are popular culture and anthropology as well as the politics of the body. She is also experimenting as an arts practitioner. Hariprasad Athanickal teaches at the Department of Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, India. Apart from researching on South Indian cinemas and its origins in Madras, he is interested in colonial interventions in film regulation, film theory and philosophy of cinema. He organised an international conference on film cultures of South India in 2012 and is in the process of editing papers for a forthcoming collection. Binayak Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor at Amity School of Communication, Amity University, India. He has recently submitted his doctoral dissertation at the Department of Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India. His research concentrates on various aspects of the progressive nationalist politics and Indian cinema of the 1950s. He has published on Hindi and Bengali cinema, historical tendencies of the left politics in India and popular culture and resistance. He has served as a visiting faculty in the University of Hyderabad, Osmania University (Hyderabad) and the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts (Pune), India. Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His doctoral work was on the emergence of the Bombay film industry between 1896 and 1936. His recent publications include a guestedited Marg special issue on ‘100 Years of Bombay Cinema’ and the co-edited Project Cinema/City (with Madhusree Dutta and Rohan Shivkumar). He has contributed articles on the history of early Indian and world cinema to various journals and anthologies. Recently, he has started writing about the art practices of leading contemporary Indian artists. He was part of the collaborative art show The Rise of the BROWNationals (with Vishal K. Dar and Siddhartha Chatterjee) held at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, India, in

December 2012. He is co-editor (with Elizabeth Edwards) of Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (2009). Moinak Biswas is Professor, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, India. He edits the departmental publication Journal of the Moving Image (JMI) annually, co-edits the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and is the coordinator of the Media Lab in the university. He has published a monograph on Chaplin in Bengali and edited two volumes of Hemango Biswas’s writings and a collection of essays entitled Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema (2006). Sanchari De is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, India, and a recipient of the prestigious CSDS–ICSSR fellowship for her research. Her research interests include digital media, political mobilisation and information aesthetics. Apart from that, she keenly studies films, specifically New Iranian Cinema. Selected by the Erasmus Mundus India to Europe (EMINTE) scholarship programme, she has recently undertaken research as an exchange student at Lund University, Sweden. Shruti Ghosh is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at the Department of MMCCS, Macquarie University, Australia. She completed her Masters in Film Studies from Jadavpur University, India. She also has a Masters in Kathak dance from Prayag Sangit Samiti (Allahabad) to her credit and is trained in the Jaipur gharana style of Kathak, with experience of teaching Kathak for six years. Her articles have recently appeared in the Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Dance House Diary. Hrishikesh Ingle is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India. He has published on the cinema of the Indian diaspora and popular Hindi cinema, and is currently working on the experimental films in India and contemporary Marathi cinema. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on new media in India. His research focuses on articulations of cinema and film cultures in Latin America and India, for a cultural mapping of their alignment to the transnational turn of cinema. He has also presented his research at various international conferences. Laleen Jayamanne is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Previously, she taught cinema studies at the University of Sydney. She has published Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis (2001) and The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (2015). Fikri Jermadi is an award-winning Malaysian film-maker and academic. He completed his Masters in Fine Arts in Filmmaking (Film Directing) at the Korea National University of

Arts. He has been involved in over 20 productions as writer, director, producer and editor. Having served as the Filmmaker in Residence at Monash University, Sunway Campus, Malaysia, he is currently attached to the Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation at Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, as lecturer, where he is also pursuing his PhD in contemporary Malaysian cinema. Susan Kerrigan is Senior Lecturer at the School of Design, Communication and IT, University of Newcastle, Australia. A screen production scholar who specialises in creative screen practice research techniques, her current interests also include aspects of Bollywood film production and cinematic creativity. During 2012–13, she was President of the Australian Screen Production, Education and Research Association (ASPERA) and in 2014 convened the annual ASPERA Conference ‘Screen Explosion’. Vikrant Kishore is Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and has been active in the fields of film/television, journalism and academia, with over 25 documentaries and corporate films to his credit. He has been working towards the preservation of folk and tribal music and dance cultures of East India, under the aegis of the National Institute for Chhau and Folk Dances. His documentaries have been screened at various international film festivals and he has led dance groups in folklore festivals. A recipient of the IPRS Scholarship (Australia), he was a short-term fellow at the KJC Cluster of Excellence, Heidelberg University, Germany. He has been a jury member at several film festivals. His research interests are Bollywood cinema, Indian folk and popular culture, reality television programmes and caste politics in India. He has co-edited (with Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra) Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations (2014) and authored From Real to Reel: Folk Dances of India in Bollywood Cinema (2014). Amita Nijhawan completed her PhD at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She teaches Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, UK, and practical dance and writing. She has worked with the Royal Academy of Dance, Oslo Council, Bollywood Brass Band, Eastside Arts and others. She has received funding from the Gluck Fellowship, University of California, East London University, Roehampton University and others. She is a trained Kathak practitioner. Nikhila H. is Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies and Visual Communication, the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India. She teaches and researches in the areas of gender studies, film and visual studies, and her doctoral dissertation was on gender and partition. Her recent and forthcoming publications are survey studies on literary translations from Kannada to English, and on filmic and multimodal translations or remakes between different Indian languages.

Parichay Patra is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Film and Screen Studies, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and is currently working on the history of the Indian New Wave cinema of the 1970s. His research interests include transnational cinema, global art cinemas and cinephilia. He has presented at various conferences in India, Taiwan and Australia; organised a conference in the University of Newcastle; assisted in a research project on Jews in Indian cinema and has co-edited Bollywood and Its Other(s) (2014). M. Madhava Prasad is Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies and Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India. He has published extensively on Bombay cinema, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu cinema, popular culture and Indian politics and society. Among his current research interests are the modernisation of Indian vernaculars, structural bilingualism and Indian modernity. His publications include Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (1998) and Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India (2013). Prateek is a doctoral candidate in drama studies at the school of English Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland, Australia. He is a former Fulbright Fellow at Yale University and has published extensively in national and international journals on literature and film studies. Sony Jalarajan Raj is Assistant Professor for Communication Arts in the Institute for Communication, Entertainment and Media at St. Thomas University, Florida, USA. A professional journalist turned academic, he has previously worked as reporter, special correspondent and producer in several news media channels, such as BBC, NDTV, Doordarshan, AIR and Asianet News. For over a decade, he has been a faculty member in Journalism, Mass Communication, and Media Studies at Monash University, Curtin University, Mahatma Gandhi University and University of Kerala, and is part of the editorial boards of five major international research journals. His interests include communicative rationality, information flow, digital divides, news media influences on the public sphere and visual media. Rajdeep Roy is Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Film Production at Lovely Professional University, India. He has recently completed his doctoral research in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Critical Enquiry, La Trobe University, Australia. His book chapter ‘Bollywood and the Mumbai Underworld: Reading Satya in Retrospect’ has been published in Locating Cultural Change: Theory, Method, Process (2011). Amit Sarwal is Honorary Associate Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and

Founding Convenor of the Australia–India Interdisciplinary Research Network. He was an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University and Endeavour Asia Research Fellow at Monash University. He has taught as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of Delhi. His research papers have appeared in prominent journals. He has co-convened two film festivals and conferences in Perth and Newcastle and appeared as an expert on ABC Radio National, SBS Hindi Radio, Sky News and Australia Network. He has co-edited several books, including Wanderings in India: Australian Perceptions (2012), Bollywood and Its Other(s) (2014) and authored Labels and Locations: Gender, Family, Class and Caste (2015). He has recently been awarded the Endeavour Research Fellowship 2016. Rohini Sreekumar is pursuing her PhD from the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. She completed her Master’s in Mass Communication and Journalism from Mahatma Gandhi University, India, and has served as lecturer at the Little Flower College in Guruvayoor at Kerala, India. Her research interests include journalism practice, mediated public sphere and diaspora studies. S. V. Srinivas is Professor, School of Liberal Studies, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. He served as Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and also as Visiting Professor, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. He has held visiting positions at National University of Singapore, Hokkaido University, Georgetown University and University of Hyderabad. His research interests include cultural and creative industries and comparative studies in popular culture. He is the author of several essays on Indian and Hong Kong cinemas and has two books on film star politicians of South India: Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao (2009) and Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema (2013).

Foreword

At first slowly, now at a rather brisk and steady pace, scholarship on the popular Indian cinema is flourishing both in India and in the Anglophone West. In terms of the scale of production, audience demography and the aesthetics of popular and populist entertainment, drawing not only from India’s own richly syncretic performative traditions but also from Asian martial arts traditions as well as Hollywood, the Indian film industry is a complex mass cultural phenomenon. Through an attention to this global mix, this volume opens up a way of thinking about Indian cinema (both Hindi and regional cinemas) as being part of a new formation whose circuits are pan-Asian. This focus on the Asian region, largely to be thought of as an expanded idea of ‘the Asia-Pacific zone of contact’, holds promise for future research projects as well. Australia also figures within these terms of reference. The three editors, Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra, of Salaam Bollywood: representations and interpretation, all currently based in Australia, bring a richly varied set of perspectives to bear on the Hindi cinema based in Bombay/Mumbai, which since economic liberalisation has come to be known as ‘Bollywood’ – the globalised avatar of the Indian national cinema that began in 1913. As well, this volume explores the popular regional cinemas of India, such as the Telugu and Kannada films, which draw creatively from globalised Asian cinematic traditions of martial arts performance. The Indian-born editors based in Australia use their different interdisciplinary skills to shape a volume, which offers fresh insight into the history of Indian cinema within the context of the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai (Bombay) and of its impact on the film industry. And importantly, this volume situates that film history in its 100-year-old duration within the long 20th century. The convergence of film and media history, urban studies and the history of the relatively recent rise of academic scholarship on cinema in Indian universities makes this volume a highly selfreflexive and unique project, which I hope will stimulate new areas of research into Hindi cinema and of its significance both in India and globally. Divided into four parts, Part One offers a historical perspective on Indian cinema with its roots in theatrical history, while Part Two focuses on the choreography of songs and dances, the third part focuses on contemporary formations and the final part is on pan-Asian exchanges. The historical focus highlights both the creation of a mainstream popular cinema as well as alternative practices of film-making. The volume opens with Kaushik Bhaumik’s ‘Myths, markets and panics: Bombay cinema and the historical significance of the popularity of two Gujarati stage plays at the turn of the 20th century’, which reaches back to the Parsi

theatrical tradition that nourished early cinema in South Asia. Binayak Bhattacharya in ‘The left encounter: progressive voices of nationalism and Indian cinema to the 1950s’ delves into a canonical topic of Indian film scholarship from a fresh perspective that eschews the populist tendency of all cinemas concerned with the national imaginary. M. Madhava Prasad in his ‘Genre mixing as creative fabrication’ offers a productive paradigm for the generation of new syntax and idiom, while working with familiar generic conventions. Hariprasad’s ‘What do the villains have? Indian cinema’s villains in the 1970s’ explores the fascination that the 1970s villains exerted on the audience beyond a simple binarised good/bad opposition. Prateek’s ‘Inward bound: self-referentiality in Bombay cinema’ demonstrates the growth of a high degree of filmic self-consciousness within the cinematic mainstream. The second part of this book is an exploration of choreography, one of the major generic markers of Indian popular cinema. Shruti Ghosh’s ‘Dancing to the songs: history of dance in popular Hindi films’, Vikrant Kishore and Susan Kerrigan’s ‘Designing the song and dance sequences: exploring Bollywood’s cinematic creativity’ and Amita Nijhawan’s ‘The item girl: tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing’ explore this vital and unique performative element in Hindi cinema and show how it constitutes an important contribution to this cinema’s continuing popularity among both the Indian and global audiences. The third part examines the intimate link between the city and cinema, and tracks some of the major changes in film genres. This part orients the reader in terms of the changes that have occurred in a globalised India and of its impact on the invention of cinematic genres. These changes are explored in Hrishikesh Ingle’s ‘Regionalist disjuncture in Bollywood: Dabangg and the consumerist cinema’; Moinak Biswas’s ‘Mourning and blood ties: Macbeth in Mumbai’; Rajdeep Roy’s ‘Black Friday: a screen history of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts’ as well as in Shaheen S. Ahmed’s ‘The remapped dialectics of contemporary Indian cinema: Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots’. The fourth part about other regions/nations begins with Nikhila’s ‘Marking out the “South” in/of Hindi cinema: an approach via remakes’; to be followed by S. V. Srinivas’s ‘Between solidarity and the stereotype: Chandni Chowk to China’ and Sony Jalarajan Raj, Rohini Sreekumar and Fikri Jermadi’s ‘The Khan mania: universal appeal of superstar Shahrukh Khan in a post-globalised Bollywood era’. In the pan-Asian focus of the fourth part, Sanchari De and Amit Sarwal’s chapter, ‘Old wine in a new bottle: Bollywood films shot in Australia after 9/11’, deals with Bollywood films set and shot in Australia, indicating the growing relationship between India and Australia beyond providing an exotic location. The emerging scholarly engagement between the two countries is also a unique feature of this volume edited from Australia. And the volume ends with Parichay Patra’s chapter, ‘The way cinema was banished: the intervention of cinema studies in India’, which offers a reflexive historical account of the institutionalisation of cinema studies within India within an understanding of the transnational context of cinema studies.

This volume combines the work of senior scholars, such as M. Madhava Prasad, S. V. Srinivas and Moniak Biswas, with young scholars reflecting the growing maturity and diversity of interests among scholars of several generations working on Indian cinema. There is a sense here of the history of intellectual work itself and of the academic institutions that nurture such work and their links to transnational conversations. This attitude, I think, may be a function of the Australian genesis of this collaboratively edited volume. The familiar axis of Indian-US-British-based scholarship on Indian cinema is shifted somewhat by this work edited by three Indians living and working in Australia, which has robustly engaged with the AsiaPacific zone for some time now in the sphere of intellectual and cultural production. These are some of the unique features of this collection, which will no doubt stimulate further research projects formulated to pose interesting questions to Indian cinema as it evolves and mutates in this our ‘Asian Century’. Laleen Jayamanne

Salaam Bollywood: Introduction Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra

Salaam Bollywood: Representations and interpretations is concerned primarily with film histories, or the multiple histories, of popular cinema cultures in India. It is an attempt to study Bollywood historically – its gradual progression through the history of the postcolonial nation state and its culmination in a globalised culture industry whose phenomenal growth is captivating. ‘Bollywood’ has always been a loosely applied journalistic term, a quasiderogatory coinage that used to signify the inferior other of Hollywood for a considerable period of time. It came to prominence only with the disciplinary incarnation of cinema studies in India. From then on, Bollywood has continued its inclusive journey, gradually turning itself into a synecdoche for Indian cinema per se. M. Madhava Prasad (2003) has shown how Bollywood refuses to ‘explicitly exclude the middle/art genres from its field’.1 Even though the book has ‘Bollywood’ in its title, Salaam Bollywood concentrates more on the process of becoming, on the way in which the popular cinema industry in India evolved into its globalised media avatar known as Bollywood. By the term Bollywood cinema, scholars refer to these globalised cultures that have emerged following the economic liberalisation of the 1990s.2 The larger significance of the culture industry transcending the traditional cinema exhibition network, the advent of the corporate-industrial-financial capital in the Indian cinematic scene, the proliferation of the ancillary sector of film production/ exhibition and cinema’s consumption by the enormous Indian diaspora worldwide are some of the essential traits of this globalised industry. For Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2007), Bollywood is a nostalgia industry where cinema is treated as memory, where the dissemination of culture and cinema effects have become more significant than cinema itself, the text being relegated to the margins. Issues related to the changing distribution and exhibition infrastructure, implications of the small budget multiplex films and the uses of cinema beyond the notion of box office success dominate debates on Bollywood. All these traits have wider connotations for South Asia, and, considering the significance of Bollywood, critical studies devoted to the latter seem to be inadequate. Most of the anthologies published recently focus primarily on the travels of Bollywood and the rise of the Indian diasporic audience worldwide. Salaam Bollywood differs considerably from that trajectory. It tries to arrive at the global industry known as Bollywood considering it as a destination through the various phases of film production and development of film cultures. The book germinated in the context of the centennial celebration(s) of Indian

cinema and it considers the history of Indian cinema in retrospect. It cherishes an intention to read the multiple histories critically, without being confined to the domain of a revisionist account of a bygone era of cinema. Recently published anthologies on Bollywood focus more on specific aspects of the industry. Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti edited Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (2008) focuses primarily on song and dance sequences and the wider cultural dissemination of the latter in the context of globalisation. Edited by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande, Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation and Diaspora (2010) seems to be interested in discussing the post-Cold War, post-liberalisation Indian economy and its multifaceted implications in the cultural mainstream in general and popular cinema in particular. There are articles on gender issues, law, queerness and the emergent Hindutva forces, but the book revolves around the question of the nation state and the cultural imaginary after liberalisation. Edited by Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto, Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema (2011) has a special focus on the process in which Bollywood evolved historically. But it contains only a handful of articles devoted to some extremely specialised areas in the history of Bombay cinema. Edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat, Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA (2012) is a relatively more comprehensive one as it includes a few articles on Bollywood’s ‘other’ – the other industries in India. Even then, the book gives greater importance to the issues concerning globalisation and diaspora. Edited by Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra, Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations (2014) expresses interest primarily in various others of the mainstream popular, and its quest for otherness is extended to the multifaceted forms of the other, exploring aesthetic, linguistic, sexual, regional and generic otherness. All these recent anthologies have oriented themselves towards some specific and specialised understanding(s) of Bollywood. Salaam Bollywood, on the contrary, aims for a holistic view of the changing cinemas. It has an equal share of the historical trajectory of Bombay cinema, the emergence of a new cinema aesthetic after liberalisation, new reading methods and Bombay industry’s negotiation(s) with other cinema industries in India and abroad. Beginning with critical readings of various historical periods of Indian cinema, Salaam Bollywood tries to locate those traits and characteristics that had considerably influenced Hindi popular cinema through the ages. These traits are located beyond cinema, in the age of pre-cinema, in the domain of theatre and other pre-cinematic arts. The discussion on theatre ranges from pre-cinema era to the era of progressive nationalism and literary/cinematic/theatrical radicalism. Genre conventions and complexities has always been a relatively underexplored zone in the discussion of Indian cinema. So, the volume focuses on genres, marginal characters, creativity and creative practice aspects and the emergent trends in Indian cinema as well. The book makes an attempt to analyse the creativity in Bollywood, with special references to the influence of traditional

theatre and folk forms in it, the mixing of genres, evolution of the various dance forms onscreen, collaborative processes in choreography and the reorientation of the old film form. The book has been divided into four parts. Starting with the mainstream and alternative histories of Bombay cinema, it moves on to the alternative reading strategies, concentrating on choreography as a creative practice. Then, it moves to the discussion of the changing dynamics of the city of Mumbai and the cinema it houses, before concluding with the transregional and transnational associations of Bollywood. Various changes that are taking place or have already taken place find their way into the discussion and a number of tangential issues other than cinema have been emphasised. Changes in film form as well as in the forms of urbanism, the changing face of the city and its subterranean domains, changes in the responses to the issues of sexuality and gender feature strongly in these parts, along with Bollywood’s interactions with and responses to the regional and other national cinemas. The emergent panAsianism and the transnational character of film studies help us to reconsider Bollywood’s negotiations with Asian nations and Asia-Pacific regions, in terms of reappropriation of genres, reception of stars and the industry’s considerable impact on India’s cultural diplomacy. What differentiates Salaam Bollywood from other anthologies is a comprehensive overview of the cinematic history that begins with the pre-cinema experience and ends with the notion of the transnational, an emergent area of research in film studies. Indian cinema studies has always been obsessed with the nation-state and the industry’s complex negotiations with it, the transnational aspects of the popular being largely overshadowed by the national cinema camp. The global histories of Indian cinema3 have recently emerged as a site of inquiry, with wider investigation into the existence of these transnational associations back in the colonial days.4 This book wishes to make significant contribution to this emerging network. Part One – ‘Histories: mainstream and alternative’ – specifically looks into the mainstream and alternative histories; it has five chapters that engage with the various ages of film production. Kaushik Bhaumik’s interest in pre-cinema helps him to trace the origin of Bombay cinema to the Parsi theatre repertoire, with special references to the Gujarati stage plays with Puranic/Hindu mythological narratives. Bhaumik establishes the connection between these Puranic themes and the emergent mercantile culture of the city of Bombay. His chapter explores the way in which these themes transcend the explicit symbolic logic of cinema and get circulated in the films that followed. From the age of pre-cinema, the part moves straight to the post-independence formative years, the 1950s to be specific. Two chapters engage critically with two different aspects of post-independence cinema. Binayak Bhattacharya critically examines cinema’s negotiation with nationalism, as evident in the cinemas of the 1950s. In literary criticism, the notion of preand post-independence progressive radicalism and nationalist politics in India has received its due importance.5 Bhattacharya looks at the umbrella genre known as social,6 an aesthetically ambiguous genre that accommodates various other genres. He argues that this mode of film

practice, despite being ambivalent about any conscious political choice during its formative years, was gradually shaped by left-wing progressive cultural movement, especially by the leftist cultural organisations like the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). Bhattacharya’s chapter is followed by M. Madhava Prasad’s reading of the formation of the social in the 1950s, and he takes up Hindi as well as Telugu films as his sites of inquiry, locating the fabricatory technique of genre mixing in them. He recognises symptoms of ideological reform and ‘formal subsumption’7 in genre fabrications, instances of which include the socialising of the mythological genre in Telugu industry and the Bengali social’s transformations in its Hindi remake(s). From the 1950s, it moves on to the 1970s, a decade of politico-social upheaval and schism in film form. Hariprasad looks at the most turbulent period in the history of Indian cinema, with references to the villains/outlaw characters that frequent the cinema of a time marked by extreme state repression, student uprisings, Maoist guerrilla movements and the National Emergency of 1975–77. He charts out the trajectory of these outlaws and shows how they, along with their cinema of popular justice, went out of memory. Prateek’s chapter deals with the self-referentiality in cinema, with instances where Bollywood looks back at its own past. It moves back and forth in times, looking simultaneously at a 1948 film and a 2007 blockbuster, exploring the connections therein. This chapter works as an introduction to the retro mode in contemporary Hindi popular cinemas. Part Two – ‘Bollywood dance: rereading history’ – concentrates on the history, approach, design and choreography of the contemporary Bollywood song and dance sequences and uses it as a tool to read film history. Shruti Ghosh works on the pre-Bollywood (pre-1990s) cinema’s deployment and changing perceptions of choreography; and Susan Kerrigan and Vikrant Kishore read Bollywood dance sequences with a detailed review of the related literature. Ghosh’s chapter tries to find the new aesthetics that choreography articulates, with instances from it being recognised as an autonomous constitutive element in Indian popular cinema, locating the discursive shifts that have taken place. Kerrigan and Kishore’s chapter engages with the issue of choreography with first-hand interviews with established filmmakers and choreographers such as Kunal Kohli, Onir, Tanuja Chandra, Longinus Fernandes and Remo D’Souza. These interviews reveal the creative practices that Bollywood filmmakers use during the collaborative production of the song and dance sequences, and how the role of a dance director is a unique and creative role that is quite specific to Bollywood films. In addition, they delve into the issue of the use of song and dance sequences as promotional material, something that adds significantly to the narrative of popular cinema. Amita Nijhawan’s chapter closes the section on dance with its interdisciplinary approach. Nijhawan uses both dance and film studies analyses as she looks at the sense of rupture that item dance numbers create. She does not ignore the other provocative events involved, issues that made the overabundance and wide popularity of item numbers possible. Her quest ranges

from Indian myths concerning dancing girls to the kind of femininity it evokes. Part Three – ‘Changes in the cityscape, changes in cinema’ – engages with those changes in cityscape and forms and experiences of urbanism(s)/urban cultures that bring in subsequent changes in cinema. Hrishikesh Ingle critically examines the regionalist/small town films made in Mumbai and the return of that genre in the contemporary Bollywood that targets a multiplex audience. This regionalist turn in Bollywood helps to create a sense of representational realism. The three chapters that follow Ingle’s work on the regionalist cinema deal exclusively with the changing metropolis. Moinak Biswas concentrates on the idea of kinship, the genre conventions and the notion of violence in the urban underworld, as represented in contemporary Bombay cinema with references to an adaptation of Macbeth. Rajdeep Roy focuses on the transnational terrorism of the 1990s and the Hindu right-wing nexus in the city of Mumbai and its underbelly, with a detailed textual analysis of Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2004) – a film based on the Bombay blasts of 1993. Shaheen Ahmed critically analyses another Anurag Kashyap film, namely That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011), as she finds the emergence of the new woman figure a matter of critical interest and goes on to explore the latter’s association with the changing metro, branding her as the flaneuse à la Benjamin. The other film text that she picks up is Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012), even though it revolves around a metro far removed from Mumbai. The concluding part – ‘Other regions, other nations’ – explores some of the trans-regional and transnational links of Hindi cinema. It begins with Nikhila’s article on the complex negotiations between Hindi and regional cinemas of South India (Kannada cinema, in particular), with a special focus on the way Kannada cinema seeks to insert itself into the national. She considers the possibilities of remakes and its various corollaries, with a close textual reading of Hindi remakes of Kannada popular films that reveals the way in which the Hindi industry de-territorialises/re-territorialises them. Other chapters in the part look primarily at the way in which Bollywood opens itself up to the trans-Asian cinemas/industries. Asian Transnationalisms, emerging trends in film studies and Indian cinema’s negotiations with them are some of the major issues with which these chapters are concerned. They concentrate on various areas, appropriation-adaptation, reception, multinational production and theorisation. S. V. Srinivas writes on the Hong Kong martial arts cinema and Bollywood with references to Nikhil Advani’s Chandni Chowk to China (2009), and his interest lies in the emergent pan-Asianism and the reappropriation of genres. Pan-Asianism, Asiaphilia or Asianisation are some of the critical terms that are being circulated in the context of the cinemas of such celebrated American or French auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson (see Hunt 2008). Srinivas, using Paul Willemen’s concepts, recognises the question of economic value as a major issue in the discussion of pan-Asianism in Indian popular cinema. The problem, for him, lies in translating cultural value into

economic value. Sony Jalarajan Raj, Rohini Sreekumar and Fikri Jermadi’s chapter takes up the case of the reception of Bollywood stars in places like Malaysia. This chapter is a representative of the global Bollywood-Diaspora-reception model. Sanchari De and Amit Sarwal’s chapter deals with the Bollywood films set and shot in Australia, Salaam Namaste (Siddharth Anand, 2005) being a case in point. The chapter tries to explain the newfound interest of Bollywood in Australia, with references to the collapse of the American dream of the diaspora following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is to be noted that all the three co-editors of this volume situate themselves within the Australian academia, where a burgeoning interest in cinemas of South and Southeast Asia can be located.8 The volume ends with Parichay Patra’s chapter on the emergence of transnational cinema studies, the problems of the national cinema school and the subsequent changes in Indian cinema studies. It is an introduction to the new world of cinema studies, tracking the reasons behind Indian Film Studies’ self-imposed insularity, and it makes a strong argument in favour of the concluding part that engages with Indian cinema and its Asian connections. As editors of the volume, we wish to thank Laleen Jayamanne for kindly consenting to write a foreword for our book. The idea of this volume took shape in a number of conferences in Australia. One of them was the ‘Salaam Cinema: Past, Present and Future – Celebrating 100 Years of Indian Cinema’ symposium, jointly convened by Hema Sharda and Amit Sarwal at the University of Western Australia, Perth, on 13 May 2013, the other being the ‘Bollywood and Its Other(s)’ conference at the School of Design, Communication and IT, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, on 21 February 2014 (co-convenors were Vikrant Kishore, Susan Kerrigan and Amit Sarwal). We thank Hema Sharada, Susan Kerrigan and all the participants and staff of the two universities for their kind help and cooperation in promoting Bollywood research in Australia. M. Madhava Prasad’s ‘Genre mixing as creative fabrication’ was originally published in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, Copyright 2011 © Screen South Asia Trust. All rights reserved, it is reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi. We thank M. Madhava Prasad for allowing us to reprint his work and Ravi S. Vasudevan for helping us to acquire the reprint rights. Moinak Biswas, S. V. Srinivas and Amita Nijhawan have kindly revised their previously published works for us. We take this opportunity to thank them all.

Notes 1 The emergence of multiplex as an exhibition site and the resurfacing/resurgence of realism with the small budget independent cinema in Mumbai is significant, as it has created a niche audience of its own, despite remaining within the domain of Bollywood. It has pushed the boundaries further, with Bollywood remaining an umbrella term, an all-

encompassing culture industry. 2 M. Madhava Prasad and Ashish Rajadhyaksha have published extensively on the globalised industrial cultures of Bollywood, among others (see Prasad 2003; Rajadhyaksha 2007). 3 For a detailed discussion, see Vasudevan (2010). 4 For the transnationalism of the 1920s cinema, see Sinha (2013). It traces the way in which American cinema and its Indian counterpart formed ideological and politico-cultural associations. 5 See Priyamvada Gopal (2005), who considers K. A. Abbas’ films along with the literary texts of Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai et al. 6 For a detailed discussion of the term, see Prasad (1998: 46). Citing Rosie Thomas, Prasad has shown how the social became the dominant genre, forcing other genres to be appropriated and subordinated. 7 For a detailed discussion of these terms, see Prasad (1998). 8 In Australia, Indian diplomats are supporting cultural collaborations in the form of organising Bollywood festivals. Bollywood film festivals in Australia have made inroads into the suburban places as well and are not confined to the multicultural metros like Melbourne and Sydney. In 2014, Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) featured a special section on Indian documentary cinema, curated by Shweta Kishore and supported by Monash University, where documentary film-makers like Anand Patwardhan and Deepa Dhanraj were present as guests.

References Dwyer, Rachel and Jerry Pinto, ed. 2011. Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gopal, Priyamvada. 2005. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. London: Routledge. Gopal, Sangita and Sujata Moorti, ed. 2008. Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hunt, Leon. 2008. ‘Asiaphilia, Asianisation and the Gatekeeper Auteur: Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson’, in Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, pp. 220–36. London: I. B. Tauris. Kishore, Vikrant, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra (eds). 2014. Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya and Rajeswari V. Pandharipande, eds. 2010. Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation and Diaspora. London: Anthem Press. Prasad,

M.

Madhava.

2003.

‘This

Thing

Called

Bollywood’,

Seminar,

525.

http://www.india-

seminar.com/2003/525/525%20madhava%20prasad.htm (accessed on 8 July 2015). ———. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2007. ‘The Bollywoodisation of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, in Preben Karsholm (ed.), City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, pp. 111–37. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Roy, Anjali Gera and Chua Beng Huat, eds. 2012. Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press. Sinha, Babli. 2013. Cinema, Trasnationalism, and Colonial India: Encountering the Raj. London: Routledge. Vasudevan, Ravi S. 2010. ‘Geographies of the Cinematic Public: Notes on Regional, National and Global Histories of Indian Cinema’,

Journal

of

the

Moving

Image,

94–117.

http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2010/geographies_of_the_cinematic_public_notes_on_regional_national_and_global.pdf (accessed on 8 July 2015).

Part I

Histories Mainstream and alternative

1 Myths, markets and panics Bombay cinema and the historical significance of the popularity of two Gujarati stage plays at the turn of the 20th century Kaushik Bhaumik

Through the 19th century, Indian mercantile communities had been growing in wealth and status through colonial trade in opium and cotton. Most of this trading in Bombay was carried out by Gujarati-speaking businessmen. The opium trade to China, followed by the cotton boom following the American Civil War, had established the city as the industrial capital of the subcontinent. The period following the plague of 1896 was one of immense changes for the city of Bombay. Not only did the plague entail a huge loss of population through deaths, morbidity and exodus, but it also shook up the entire socio-economic framework of the city. This is an aspect that is being researched extensively, pointing to the event’s status as a watershed in the city’s history in modern times. The colonial government and the Gujaratispeaking elite reacted to the gravity of the situation by refurbishing the city through massive urban renewal projects financed by the city elite. The sheer scale of investments in projects of urban renewal in the wake of the plague is a good indication of the power of these mercantile communities in Bombay. Huge investments of Indian capital in the colonial infrastructure had a number of implications, two of which form the focus of the chapter. The first was an obvious one – increasing opportunities for business also increased the volume of speculation in the market. The second fallout was in the cultural front and this involved the increasing modernisation of the communities and their emergence into public life, leading to the formation of a vibrant public sphere defined by debate and agonistic competition over wealth and cultural performance. This was more apparent after the period of the plague, something that I shall refer to later in the chapter. Out of this second development came a substantial investment in public entertainments and cultural production, the most important of which was the institution of the Parsi Theatre that before the advent of Bombay cinema in the 1920s was the biggest indigenous mass entertainment medium on an all-India scale. The chapter that follows is largely an informed speculation upon the possible reasons for

the popularity of two stories, those of the kings Harishchandra and Nala, in the repertoire of the Parsi-Gujarati theatre, stories that if the sheer number of performances and their legendary status are anything to go by were important articulators of Indic public imagination in the period between the 1870s and the 1910s.

Harishchandra and the Bombay merchant Of all the stories from the Indian epic-pauranic traditions that of Harishchandra had until recently been the most popular in public performance.1 Gandhi referred to the seeing of a play version of the tale as a child in Porbandar as being a turning point in his life, his turn towards a lifelong preoccupation with being stringently truthful. It is, of course, now a well-known fact that the first feature film produced in India in 1913 was a treatment of the same storyline. When V. Shantaram made Prabhat’s first talkie Ayoddhyachhe Raja he meant Harishchandra, king of Ayodhya, and not Rama. What is not so well known is that, before that epochal moment of the arrival of Indian cinema, the story had had a long life on the Indian stage in multiple versions for almost 40 years. Originating on the Bombay stage, performances of the tale had travelled to all corners of India and had the made the careers of many a playwright, actor and theatrical company. It should be noted that this story was played out more frequently on the stage than the story of Rama. The core of the Harishchandra story involves Vishvamitra first denuding him of his kingdom and then coming back time and again to ask for various sums of money to be paid to him within specific periods as part of a promise the king had made to the sage. In order to do so, Harishchandra auctions himself and his family away as slave assistants to an untouchable dom (the head of a crematorium) and earns his money by burning dead bodies. His family undergoes enormous travails; and he loses his son to snakebite, but just as he is about to burn his son Vishvamitra intervenes and tells him that he has passed his test and as a boon revives his son. For the Bombay merchant, such a story had very personal meanings. The merchant, above all, was famed for being a man of his word, which in premodern times was all that ensured the passage of goods on credit and the redemption of costs on the safe passage of the goods. Such an informal system of word of mouth was also what contracted the debtor to the creditor at levels of monetary transactions. Recent research on Gujarati mercantile communities has revealed the role of bardic communities in ensuring the flow of investment through the practice of tragu that involved fasting unto death, as well as mutilating the family and self to the point of death, in order to exert moral pressure on the culpable party to redeem the debt.2 It might be noted in passing that such a method of extracting debts through extreme moral pressure has a lot in common with the Harishchandra story, where the king harms

himself and his family in order to redeem a word of honour involving monetary debt. The fact that the story of Raja Harishchandra or Harichand forms an integral part of the bardic repertoire of folk theatre performances in western and north-western India makes the connection between this story and mercantile communities of the region, the bards served a marker of collective identities. It is to be found in an Ismaili ginan of Pir Sadruddin as well as in the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs. Indeed, to date, it is the most frequently performed story in the repertoire of folk theatre narratives, cutting across the entire spectrum of such performances across every region of India.3 Harishchandra’s story has to be understood against a time of intense speculation that made the returns from investments uncertain, creating more opportunities for sudden loss against time-tested mechanisms of investment, thus bringing visions of financial and social ruin quite easily to the fore. The stable kingdom stood for a world of stable investment, which is then torn apart by a debt demand. For the merchant, the inability to pay back debt meant loss of face, social ostracism and loss of jati. Thus, a play that made an untouchable out of a king of the solar dynasty was all the more poignant for the audience code, as it did the threat of becoming a social untouchable through the inability to pay back debts incurred. Also, this devilish vision of downward social mobility was made doubly painful, with the traumatic visitations of physical labour and disease on wife and child as well as the threat of menial labour that for all practical purposes reduced a merchant to the status of the untouchable. For the merchants of Bombay who styled themselves as urban princes in this period, the play dressed up in regalia must have cut quite close to the bone in a period of great financial uncertainty. But, such a play could also be read by upcoming traders as a graphic depiction of the vicissitudes of the world of business, one that entailed enormous hard work in order to keep oneself solvent as well as great sacrifices made by kith and kin for making a household tick along. Much was made of everyday scenes of menial labour carried out by wife and son, scenes that would have reflected the everyday in ordinary trading households of the city that were run on family labour. Here, exile could be read as leaving the familial home due to the worldly demands of success and coming to live in a city to set up trade. And, indeed, so much of early Gujarati prose would be dedicated to this issue of loss of status and face due to boom and busts in the market, stories full of pathos of the diligent and suffering wife and the calamitous visitation of illness upon the child at home (usually a son) that resulted in spectacular melodramatic gestures and denouements of equally spectacular turns of fortune restoring peace and prosperity. Harishchandra could then serve a double purpose of consoling merchants at a time of grave economic upsurge that made status unstable for even the most powerful (the fall of the cotton king Premchand Roychand, the unofficial ruler of Bombay, is still the stuff of legend, a cautionary tale for contemporary businessmen of the city) as well as reiterating the need to keep the mercantile ethic of honesty intact during such times of uncertainty. As we shall see in

the case of Nala, ethics could easily go astray and cause enormous damage to prestige as well as to the fabric of a kingdom, here standing in for the infrastructure of the mercantile world. Harishchandra advised merchants to keep working hard despite reverses as well as keep on struggling in an honest manner on a day-to-day basis to make good in the world of speculation and business. Thus, both successful old timers and newcomers were joined together in the story, and this was possible because of the specific condition of the onset of capitalism that increasingly posed the question of solvency in terms of time. The fact that modern markets were more stringent as regards the laws of debt repayment as well as regards daily survival in the commodity market made time the prime player in urban life. Above all, to appear in secular law courts in the full glare of the public gaze was something unbearable to countenance for members of the mercantile community fiercely defensive about the issue of ‘face’. One could be bankrupted for not keeping time in matters of debt repayment and all kinds of calamities became the fate of families hurtling down the economic downhill. Vishvamitra, the time traveller, is indeed time itself in the form both of a sudden misfortune as well as that of debt that demands timely satisfaction in the most drastic fashion testing human endurance to its utmost. But for the newcomer into business, Vishvamitra is time as the bare minimum income that would ensure the survival of the nuclear family that was just beginning to become somewhat of a norm in Bombay. The proscenium of the public stage merely emphasised the public nature of modern time’s vice-like grip on people’s destiny exercised through money now circulating through faster and institutionalised channels of the public market and the law.

Nala-Damayanti and the Bombay merchant It is said that in Bombay anything and everything could be gambled upon. And, indeed, Gujarati merchants retain a notorious reputation for gambling to this day. This, of course, is codified in the connection between the worship of Laksmi, the goddess of wealth, during Diwali, the consecration of the new bahi (account books) and auspiciousness of gambling on the day. After all, gambling is an extension of the speculation in the commodity market that still forms the bulwark of this community’s pre-eminence in mercantile circles in India. But today, gambling in other forms is not something that anyone in the mercantile community would be proud to admit. And yet, gambling formed a part of the world of entertainment of the Bombay merchant’s world in spectacularly public ways at the turn of the century. One of the favourite modes of gambling was to speculate on the date of the arrival of the monsoon and on which house would be the first to receive raindrops. Much excitement and festivity went along with waiting to hear the first patter of raindrop in a bucket placed on the rooftop terrace of the houses of the merchant princes. Success at such forms of gambling added to the

reputation and charisma of a merchant. But, it also shows how much of the city’s identity itself was tied to speculation as a public adventure through the thrills its elites sought through gambling in such spectacular ways. But change was on the way; we shall see how plays dealing with the story of Raja Nala and his consort Damayanti would articulate mercantile anxieties about practices, such as gambling, in the same period that Hariścandra was giving lessons in business ethics. As Velecheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman put it, ‘Wherever one goes in the subcontinent, Nala was there first’ (2011: 1). The story has a long tradition of adaptation into the corpus of the Jaina Apabhramsa literature, and thus a longstanding relationship with western India and in particular Gujarat. In more recent times, it became symbolic of Indian modernity through Raja Ravi Varma’s painting depicting Vidarbha princess Damayanti listening to the swan praise Nala’s virtue, a eulogy that would lead to her falling in love with the king of the Nishadhas. The tale was played on the Parsi-Gujarati stage innumerable times and was filmed many times by various film companies in Bombay during the silent era. Like Harishchandra, this tale found more favour with Gujarati audiences than did a similar tale from a more famous epic. The tale recounts the vicissitudes of Nala, who having lost his kingdom to his brother at a game of dice goes into exile with his wife Damayanti who had chosen him as her consort in preference to the gods. Thinking that his wife would be happier without his unhappy presence, Nala abandons her while she is sleeping. Damayanti after much travail finds refuge in the kingdom of Chedi, while Nala afflicted by the Karkotaka Naga loses his beauty and becomes the charioteer for Ikshvaku monarch Rituparna, a master at dices. Nala befriends the monarch and learns the art of dicing and uses the skills to regain his kingdom from his brother. But before he does so, he has been reunited with Damayanti. The motifs of exile, moral and physical struggle during that period and the loss of dear ones unite the Nala and Harishchandra story in a single moral universe of sorts. However, such a fall is in Nala’s case a result of his addiction for gambling, something that makes the moral lesson his life has to teach quite different from Harishchandra’s. The latter is seen as a paragon of virtue, keeping his word at any cost and has no moral flaws like Nala’s. But, as in Indian tales of this type, even Nala is not without virtue. Far from it! By his very position as a king, he is the apotheosis of virtue. In the story, Nala’s fall is due to an affliction by Kali, the same dimension of time and history that lends its name to Kaliyug, the last of the four great ages of mankind – the most flawed one – after which Apocalypse must destroy the world and the world reinvented in Vishnu’s dream. Nala’s addiction for gambling is momentary, for which lapse he has to suffer much. And this motif of a momentary lapse of reason leading to much suffering would have been very attractive to Bombay merchants in the throes of a speculative age. On the one hand, speculation is a gamble with chance, a moment of investing fortunes into the futures market that can either make or break a merchant. On the other, the volume of

gambling proper goes up in a speculative age, leading to much perdition and misfortune in the life of the gamblers. Many a silent film, play and story in the Gujarati cultural world would symbolise the world of early modernity through the motif of gambling that leads to the ruination of individuals and families. If Harishchandra portrayed the general rigours of a mercantile world on account of its being anchored in an ethic of keeping one’s word, then Nala dramatised the fickle nature of time and fortune revolving around the very moment of investment warning individuals against gambling unwisely in any form. But the Nala-Damayanti story has another dimension that was equally important for the Gujarati audiences at the turn of the 20th century. It is one of the great love stories of India, a story that almost always finds its ways into any anthology of romantic tales of yore, alongside the loves of Pururava and Urvashi. And, indeed, the cry ‘He Nala’ that Damayanti utters in the play when she carries out a desperate search for Nala in the forest became a byword in the Gujarati world in this period and continues to be legendary. The trick sequence where Damayanti recognises the mortal Nala casting aside four gods disguised as Nala lookalikes to test Damayanti’s love was the pièce de résistance of every performance of the story – in theatre and cinema alike. For entire generations, it came to symbolise the vicissitudes of love and longing in difficult times. But at the turn of the last century, a story centred around two young lovers would have been momentous, given that modern love and the modern conjugal couple were just beginning to emerge in urban public life as new and much contested institutions of modernity. Suklaji Street in Bombay, an area adjacent to the Native Town but also to the indigenous entertainment district of the city around Grant Road, had become the refuge for young couples living outside marriage, and the police reports of this period are replete with negotiations with cultural trouble that the rise of love marriage amongst the middle classes was creating in Bombay, a city in transition. The Nala-Damayanti story, with its sequences of young lovers stripped of their patrimony wandering homeless in the wilderness, enduring separation and heartbreak, the woman being preyed upon by predatory men, was in some ways ideal as a cameo representation of real-life experiences that lovers thrown out of their homesteads on account of their passions into the wilderness of the new urbanity would have to endure.

Myths of capital in early 20th-century Bombay The plays discussed earlier show how myths were being consumed in the turn of the century in Bombay by residents of the city, to make sense of the momentous changes sweeping across society in this period. And, indeed, these plays were unique in their appeal to audiences. Between 1882 and 1922, the Victoria Natak Mandali held 4,000 shows of Vinayak Prasad Talib’s version of Raja Harishchandra, including a show for the royalty in London. The Natak

Uttejak Mandali held over a thousand shows of their version of the play, in this period, a similar ecstatic reaction to Nala-Damayanti shows that ran for thousands of shows alongside Raja Harishchandra.4 One of the main reasons why these particular plays had subcontinentwide popularity cutting across class and caste was that these stories were entangled in a complex historical matrix of caste mobility, from nomadic pastoral untouchability to urban mercantile elite-hood for vast swathes of Indic populations, a subject beyond the purview of this chapter. Most playwrights seeking fame in the world of the Bombay stage turned a hand at composing a version of these tales. This turn to myth to understand the modern was understandable, considering that such stories were part of the everyday life of Gujarati communities through recitation and casual storytelling being passed on through generations as morality tales by which individuals could live an ethical life. The stories could immediately call up a collective response through their symbolic power – a king in the play implied a kingdom, and therefore a collective seeking moral redemption as a collective through the redemption of the destiny of the monarch from whom all the glory of the world and the good life of citizens emanated. But, also, it needs to be noted that these texts were the most time tested, and therefore formally the most elegant and coherent narratives that were available to Gujarati communities that could articulate their experiences of modernity. It would take quite some time for literature and cinema to find the cultural confidence to create well-honed narratives set in contemporary realities that could give audiences a sense of a well-crafted cultural spectacle. And when they did, they went back to themes and motifs in these two stories again and again, as is evinced, for example, from the extremely popular novels by K. M. Munshi and Narayan Vissanji Thakkar and countless popular novellas and short stories that all the time kept referring laterally to the simultaneous popularity of these tales as such in print, celluloid and stage. Here, I would like to draw attention to certain key aspects of this phenomenon of stage mania in Bombay that connect it with the onset of a consumer economy in the city at the turn of the century. To begin with, both plays deal with hardships entailed by sudden misfortune and loss of wealth. But the loss of wealth is also coded in the exile episodes in both plays as a loss of all the good things in life, and therefore objects of consumption. Not only this, in exile the essential goods necessary for survival are found to be completely lacking. Both Harishchandra and Nala lose their sheen; in Nala’s case literally so, while trying to earn their upkeep through troubled times. Untouchability, both as social stigma and a descent into menial labour, is a real threat in both plays; Harishchandra’s labour for the untouchable dom merely emphasises this point. Thus, the central pathos of the plays revolves around the loss of goods of consumption in the lives of the protagonists. Now, such a condition is exacerbated with the onset of capitalist economies where consumption comes increasingly to be defined by commodities paid for by money, and therefore increasingly by wage labour as one goes down

the social hierarchy. Both social status and social survival come to be mediated substantially by money and wage labour. As such conditions intensify, the competition for money goes up, leading to speculative behaviour bringing consumption out of its everydayness and posing it as a social problem. However, in both plays, the problematic is also set up at a different level, at that of the symbolic value of wealth in maintaining social cohesion and the mercantile duty to generate a wealthy life as a social duty. Conspicuous consumption here is seen not as accruing to the merchant’s personal benefit but for creating an aura of general prosperity that all of society could partake of. However, the problem with conspicuous consumption is that it has to consist of the best things that the world has to offer in a particular cultural universe. Now, precisely because the merchant has to carry out his role as a symbol of social prosperity daily, the gap between conspicuous consumption and the mercantile every day is minimal; wealth is his sole life force. Thus, his entire existence is in some ways left to the mercy of fashions and the relative powers of the players in the field, which in the main is determined by the stability of market size. Any variation in these factors throws the system into uncertainty and prepares the ground for a period of speculation, which spells doom for the merchant. The fall from conspicuous consumption for the kings in the play is, therefore, in some ways the end of their social existence, since being symbolic centres with very specialised social functions, they had no other existence outside conspicuous consumption, something that was true of the merchants as well. What capitalism does is that it makes speculation the law of the market. It opens up the merchant’s world to ceaseless competition, and therefore puts the entire system of conspicuous consumption under absolute uncertainty and competitiveness. Thus, in Nala’s case, we detect an element of competition over wealth, and therefore objects of consumption by the fact it is his brother Pushkara who gleefully gambles him out of his position. Where the worlds of the merchant and that of modern consumerism connected up was that with the onset of capitalist commodity markets the entire economic world was being opened up to an ever-proliferating rank of competitors and making the system progressively uncertain for everyone concerned. Competition drove up conspicuous consumerism amongst the merchants, as anyone entering the mercantile world now had to project themselves as keepers of the wealth of the market signified by the collection of all that money could buy. Conspicuous consumption also sent messages to the public of the worth or credibility of the merchant’s ability to become a Big Man in a hypercompetitive society, one Big Man seeking to outdo the other in creating costlier commodity facades (including patronage of the Parse stage) for their business enterprises. In a more mundane key, reform and demographic shifts meant that a hierarchical society was opening up, liberating individuals or communal groups from traditional community ties towards forming a populous middle classes to make a living through the market. This was all the more for the Gujarati world that entered modernity under the sign of the market in contrast to Bengal that did the same under the sign of

knowledge. This essentially meant that for the middle class man choosing to make money from petty trade and speculation as the professional activity of choice entailed keeping the mercantile code of conduct as regards debt, face and solvency and remaining connected to the ethic of consumerism in a manner similar to the merchant (much as the modern Indian lawyer would by an unconscious prod from the histories of caste in India slide ineluctably into the code of the shastric Brahman through the ideology of the ‘argument’). In short, everyone wanted to become king, and thus everyone could relate to the plays in question as a commentary on their destinies. But as soon as everyone wanted to become king, the chances that kings would become increasingly vulnerable to fickle fate also escalated, completing the irony already coded into these texts in their original historical contexts.

Conclusion The specific focus on the early history of the modern Parsi-Gujarati stage should not distract us from the fact that the popularity of the Parsi Theatre was a pan-Indic phenomenon. Much of the mythological imagination of modern India was put into place by the Parsi Theatre versions of pauranic tales, the knock-on effects of which were obviously felt through the annals of cinema that followed. Also, the fact noted about the pan-Indic popularity of the Harishchandra and Nala stories, a fact that preceded the Parsi Theatre, but a phenomenon into which this theatre fed and took forward into the era of modern mass popular culture emanating from a metropolis like Bombay into the rest of the subcontinent. These narratives were as wildly popular in Bombay as they were in Calcutta, Madras, Lahore and throughout the chains of mofussil towns that the Bombay Parsi Theatre companies and their more local variants went visiting during the theatre season. If metropolitan culture has been dynamic in sopping up everything to reference in the popular front of cultural production, popular traditions have been equally dynamic, if not more so, in connecting up with metropolitan modes of representation. It is clear from evidence about cultural production in early 20thcentury India that traffic between categories of cultural production was in a ‘viral’ mode of mutual contagion – all pervasive in all directions and speedy to boot. While this viral mode of mutual generation between metropole and countryside has in practice allowed for the erosion of earlier configurations of cultural production, certain elements of the pre-20th-century cultural practice were taken up and elaborated further down the line, while giving rise to new cultural practices to emerge through the push and pull of culture responding to rapid historical transitions (e.g. the invention of new religious cults through the entirety of 20th century is one such fascinating development within the logics of modernity in India). So, what was it of the late 19th- to early 20th-century meanings of the Harishchandra and Nala plays taken forward through Bombay cinema, once it established itself as the urban

entertainment medium in the 1920s? One can probably see the shadow of Nala casts on Himansu Rai’s Prapancha Pash (1929). On a looser plane, one can indeed read multiple aspects of film, such as Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), with its tale of an accursed husband figure going into exile leaving his wife behind and the wife going through melodramatic travails afterwards. The fact that the charismatic husband is physically blighted forcing him to abandon his wife and children is a case in point, as is the fact that Nala, as studies of the Indic dispersal of the story have shown, is most vibrantly alive to the lives of untouchable and lower caste peasant-martial groups, as the one depicted in the film. Similarly, the mode of representation of Mother India being harassed by the moneylender, who takes advantage of the knowledge of the economic impotence of her husband, is both visually and thematically reminiscent of events in the Harishchandra tale, as configured by the Parsi Theatre. But these are mere speculations at best and it would require a remarkable amount of intergeneric data, presently absent, to corroborate such genealogies. But if there is a strand of the various contemporising glosses of that the Parsi stage applied to these tales that might be fruitfully followed up for the history of Bombay cinema that followed subsequently, then it would be the steady ascendance of the job-like suffering male blighted by a sudden reversal of fortune due to a variety of reasons – failure of the economy, political disasters, familial disputes and social tensions amongst others; in short, the ‘unlucky man’, as the melodramatic dynamo driving the connect between film and history forward through the decades that followed. If Hollywood made a neat compartmentalisation of romantic melodrama for unlucky women and the Western and noir for unlucky men (we might here quote Hitchcock telling André Bazin that Hollywood films were made for women), then Bombay cinema places both men and women on the side of romantic melodrama, and indeed a case can be made for the ‘unlucky man’ being the dominant sufferer in Bombay cinema melodrama than women. Or rather, one can qualify this by saying that female suffering more often than not proceeds from male misfortune which is the calamitous divide the vicissitudes of history imposes on the fabric of life and history from which all melodramatic tension proceeds. Although there were countless other plays/literary creations that had the trope of the ‘unlucky man’ as their melodramatic core, none came close to the manner in which Harishchandra and Nala articulated the certain ideological values of Indian society during the period under consideration. As at the level of folk culture so on the stages of the metropolitan, these two pauranic characters have had to bear the brunt of cultural labour in articulating historical shifts in a certain register of Indic social life, more than Rama, more than the Pandavas – that of the sudden visitation by an irrationality in the temporal fabric of culture from without (as in the case of Harishchandra) and from within (as in the case of Nala). What unites the narratives is the extent of the irrationality concerned, its total alien character to history, marked most superficially by notions of suddenness, an alienness that in turn allows for following the laws of melodrama the depiction of an extreme fall from historical grace.

This extreme play of the sudden, or of ‘luck’ read as life defined by a certain texture of time, is also marked by a single important fact – the kings who go into exile do so as individuals with only their wife/wife and child in tow in contradistinction to the exiles of the more illustrious divine heroes of Indian myth making. This fact of the individuality of the one afflicted by the kink in cultural time is of supreme importance in considering the contextual importance of these plays for the rise of modernity, modern individualism and the nuclear family in times of economic uncertainty. Thus, what these plays were also beginning to articulate, beyond the particular context of the mercantile, was the generalised dramatic social tension afflicting Indic societies at the turn of the 20th century accompanying the individual’s emergence from a caste-ensconced communal identity (a cosmic identity) to the full glare of modern individualism (a social identity). However, what is of importance is that the gendered logic of the melodrama of kingly suffering is a modern gloss on tales where the one who suffers is a king and not a generic male figure, the ill luck of the king being a cosmic disaster in terms of the caste ideology. As Brigitte Schulze (1998) has very usefully argued with respect to Phalke’s films (including a discussion of Raja Harishchandra) the indexical quality of cinematic imagery allowed for an appropriation of filmic content by audiences in ways beyond a film’s explicit diegetic symbolic logics. Films were read on their ‘skins’ as it were – to borrow a phrase for Laura Marks (2000) – in an intimate register of the corporeal skidding filmic meaning towards the carnal and the contemporary everyday of ordinary tactility of human relationships. One can argue that the Parsi stage had begun to do this thing by adding a layer of the ‘ordinary’ everydayness and every-personness to and beyond its allegorical intentions that allowed the trope of ‘king’ to slide into the general category of ‘male’ in the minds of the spectator. As I have discussed before, something of this was happening with the erotic dimensions of the Nala tale done by the Parsi Theatre. And thus, it is that in times when everyone wanted to become king in the promises of a speculative market scenario, the king too had to become just a man losing his transcendence of history and falling into the symbolic economy of gender play in the modern. But one could also argue that as much as the plays mark the fall of the king into the realm of modern gender, they also mark the fact that the Parsi Theatre/Bombay film hero would have to sustain the hubris of the king/man sustaining the well-being of an entire cosmic order as the source of all life. The fall from such heights of sovereignty would lead to untold suffering for the self and the cosmos now shrunk to the size of the family faced with the fickle ways of history that were to follow. Or to put it another way, if the king’s body was divine it was also by that token the most vulnerable to kaal’s, Father Time’s, slightest discrepancies, making the body a very ‘touchy’ one, the slightest of contretemps causing a calamitous erasure of the ego, a heightened feeling of being ‘unlucky’. It is this touchiness that is transmitted to the body of the Bombay film hero, a fact conveyed viscerally through shrill melodrama around the trope of ‘luck’. We are here not very far away from Devdas – that endlessly bountiful fount of itchy,

touchy cultural plasma – that never seems to exhaust itself in articulating the fate of Indian men through the entire period of Indian modernity till date, a skin that might have its origin in the divine body of the king … a body that was so ‘touchy’ precisely because it entailed certain journeys to be made between untouchability and touchability through the medium of money.

Notes 1 For a description of the many passages of Harishchandra through the annals of the rurban nautanki theatre of North India, see Hansen (1993). 2 For a riveting description of tragu, Gandhi and late colonial Indian kingship in Western India, see Vidal (1997). 3 For Harishchandra in the Ismaili tradition, see Moir and Shackle (2000). 4 For a recording of the careers of these plays in the Parsi Theatre, see Gupt (2005).

References Gupt, Somnath. 2005. Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development. Trans. Kathryn Hansen. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Hansen, Kathryn. 1993. Grounds for Play: The Nauṭanki Theatre of North India. Delhi: Manohar. Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. Moir, Zawahir and Christopher Shackle, eds. 2000. Ismaili Hymns from South Asia: An Introduction to the Ginans. London: Curzon Press. Narayan Rao, Velecheru and David Shulman. 2011. ‘Nala: The Life of a Story’, in Susan S. Wadley (ed.), Damayanti and Nala: The Many Lives of a Story, pp. 283–315. New Delhi: Chronicle Books. Schulze, Brigitte. 1998. ‘The First Cinematic Pauranik Kathanak’, in V. Dalmia and T. Damsteegt (eds), Narrative Strategies: Essays on South Asian Literature and Film, pp. 50–66. Leiden: CNWS. Vidal, Denis. 1997. Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

2 The left encounter Progressive voices of nationalism and Indian cinema to the 1950s Binayak Bhattacharya

Aaj Himaalay Ki Jyoti Se Dil Hamne Lalkara Hai Dur Hato Aye Duniyawalo Hindustan Hamara Hai … Shuru Hua Hai Jung Tumhara Jaag Utho Hindustani Tum Na Kisiko Aage Jhunkna, German ho Yaa Japani. The above song in Kismet (1943) is seen as staged as a dramatic performance in an opera house in Bombay. The performance is divided in three segments. The first segment shows the marching of a band of the patriotic Indian soldiers, the second depicts an assembly of Indian citizens taking oath to free their beloved motherland and the third presents the Bharat Mata (Goddess India) and the soldiers marching in front of her. The citizens are shown as worshipping Bharat Mata while greeting the soldiers with flowers. The interludes between two consecutive segments are being marked by the insertion of a black curtain having an outlined map of undivided India on it. The lyrics of the song precisely target the Japanese and German intruders and carefully bypass mentioning British. As there is no such marker available to differentiate between the Japanese and the British aggressors, the spirit of the song offhandedly starts echoing the voice of militant Indian nationalism. It is also shown that the performance is being applauded by the audiences. But the film, interestingly, never tries to position itself as a perpetrator of nationalist politics. Made as a ‘war effort’1 film in the midst of the Second World War, maintaining this ambivalent status was a prerequisite condition before Kismet. The political stance that Kismet maintains does merely reflect any exceptional instance in Indian cinema’s peculiar liaison with the nationalist politics. Irrespective of the presence of any monitoring agency, like the censor board, Indian cinema’s apparent ambiguity towards nationalist politics have always remained as a major characteristic during the preindependence period. Since the beginning, it continued to be a site of a protracted struggle

over the forms of national imagination. Moreover, Indian cinema can also be seen oscillating between the two tendencies of the binary, what Willemen calls the ‘discourses of nationalism’ and the ‘national specificities’ (1995: 210).2 And, as a site of this conflict, Indian cinema carries forward a number of specific representative norms and conventions. It retains its status as an elusive yet ambiguous medium to accommodate various national specificities and also to exhibit the conflicting status of the cinematic imagination of the nation. Interestingly, even after having a major stake in the various sectors of the film industry, the mainstream nationalist organisations seldom exercised their influence in organising the aesthetic-industrial vis-à-vis the political representational strategies of the films. My primary attempt in this article is to produce a historical overview of a significant period in the chronology of Indian cinema where a particular mode of film practice can be seen emerging as the characteristic dimension of it. The mode can broadly be classified as social, carrying several cultural and political coordinates which engage with the pro-filmic social realities. The emergence of this mode, roughly from the 1930s, is not typically characterised by any conscious political effort. But the consequent phase follows another route of development where the left-wing progressive cultural movement plays an important role in developing it further. The focus here would also be to discuss how the progressive cultural movement or/and IPTA (a mass cultural wing of the Communist Party of India), mediating between the ‘discourses of nationalism’ and ‘national specificities’ during the 1940s and 1950s, help shaping an elusive yet specific characteristic dimension of Indian cinema. Within a larger perspective of political history of Indian nationalist movement, I would like to situate the organisational and extra-organisational achievements of IPTA to estimate its responsibility in mediating the process which reconstructed the practice of Indian cinema as an emblematic representation of the emerging independent nation.

Signs of the early engagements with nationalism Cinema’s engagement with a larger domain of popular politics does not only get reproduced in the various forms of representation, but also revealed through the industrial modes of film production where the forms of capital investment attain their respective positions in the ‘national’ realm of a film industry. The essential features of these industrial and aesthetic operatives are complementary in nature where the politics in command always engages in dialogue with the forms of cinematic representation. Undoubtedly, the national cinemas work as ‘economic weapons’ to resist the pervading effects of aggressive capitalism while functioning simultaneously as a powerful entity to promote and preserve the basic essence of ‘cultural nationalism’ by prioritising the national values (Williams 1995/2002: 7). The concept of ‘national’ takes the form of a functioning value system whose coordinates seem to operate

as defining parameters determining the status of a specific cultural product. Cinema, being a social and political practice, thus attains the status of a national cultural exercise. Nevertheless, there lies a difference between the state-sponsored initiatives and the popular modes of film productions in engaging with nation and nationalism. State initiatives provide direct evidence, where cinema works under several constraints and in most cases produces monolithic nationalist discourses. On the other hand, the field of the popular seems to provide a rather less controlled perspective and cinema engages with politics within a flexible set of territorial coordinates. To measure the extent of any great social or political change, one naturally takes resort to the popular domain of cinema because the films of that domain ‘reflect and keep in circulation values and behaviours associated with a particular nation’ (Williams 1995/2002: 8). The nations in question, argues Susan Hayward, reproduce nationalism with ‘two distinct modalities and mentalities’ in the form of ‘reflecting the rapid ascendency in national individualism’ and ‘decadence and ruin mobilised by the implicit narcissism of such a nationalism’ (2005: 5). And therefore, as a ‘product born at the interface of these two moments, cinema becomes inscribed (metaphorically at least) with the juxtapositional traces of ascendency and decline on the one hand, and on the other, of nationalism and narcissism both associated with that time’ (2005: 5). Indian cinema originated at the ‘interface’ where the act of the characteristic construction of a ‘modern’ nation moulded by colonial agencies and the concern for a decaying legacy of ‘tradition’ had been negotiating with each other. Cinema thus happened to appear as an important site of a protracted struggle over the form of national imagination. The muchdiscussed works of Phalke stand for this formative tendency of Indian cinema where, in most cases, he had fixed his agenda at par with a powerful rhetoric of national emancipation – swadeshi (self-dependence; Rajadhyaksha 1987: 64). Phalke, preoccupied with his vision of a national film industry, enabled the production of the ideal images of Indian nation. Shortly after the release of Raja Harishchandra (1913), he started writing about cinema in two Marathi newspapers – Kesri (run by Tilak) and Navyug. His writings provide an interesting account detailing how the institution of cinema and the apparatus could be appropriated by the non-western cultures for their different ideological and financial reasons (Phalke 1988: 51– 4). Influenced and inspired by Phalke’s activity, Bal Gangadhar Tilak presented an idea of indigenous Indian cinema by 1915 (Kaul 1998: 15). Tilak’s vision was to make use of film as a better supplement of Marathi nationalist theatre which, since the 1880s, had grown out of his idea of cultural revivalism and proved to be successful to convey anti-British messages through the use of Indian mythological themes (Shoesmith 1987). During 1917–18, Tilak offered to join hands with Phalke and a few others to set up a nationalist cinema enterprise with a working capital of Rs 500,000. Apart from Tilak and Phalke, Seth Ratan Tata and Manmohandas Ramji were the proposed stakeholders of the enterprise. As Phalke’s interest

was more in developing a new idiom for cinema that could perform patriotic duties, the project ultimately broke down because of Ramji’s concern to check the profitability of the proposed venture (Kaul 1998: 16). Shortly after, he managed to meet another group of Bombay-based textile entrepreneurs – V. S. Apte, Mayashankar Bhat, L. B. Pathak, Madhav Jesing and Gokul Damodar. The Hindustan Film Company was formed in 1917 with Apte as managing partner, Phalke as working partner and the others as financing partners. According to the agreement, Phalke’s earlier films became the property of this new company (Kaul 1998: 16). However, similar efforts to make swadeshi films can also be seen in the works of two young enthusiasts – R. G. Torney and N. G. Chitre. They made Pundalik based on a theatre staged in Bombay and released it in 1912. Even before that, Hiralal Sen established his Royal Bioscope Company in Calcutta in 1898 and started to film real-life events and staged theatre (Ray 2009: 20). With a specific undertone of nationalism, these filmed theatres proved to be successful in drawing attention of the viewers. Perhaps, his most famous work is a full-length newsreel on the anti-Partition movement in Bengal during 1905. The film, Grand Patriotic Film: Anti Partition Demonstrations and Swadeshi Movement, was screened at the Town Hall, Calcutta, on 22 September 1905, in the midst of the movement and was a success. His documentary on ‘Delhi Durbar’ (1912) was banned by the colonial authorities due to some political reasons. According to the written records, this was the first occasion where a newsreel was banned in India (Ray 2009: 41). Meanwhile, the model of swadeshi politics was gradually getting identified with the image of M. K. Gandhi since his emergence as a national leader. As the Champaran and Kheda Satyagraha (1918) and Khilafat Movement (1919–24) created a nationwide impact and the colonial authorities recognised him as the most powerful political leader, Gandhi eventually emerged as the most powerful iconic figure of Indian nationalism. His photographs and political activities started to appear in news at regular intervals. In a full-length newsreel of T. Jansen, a freelance cameraman from the United States, The Great Bonfire of Foreign Clothes (1915), Gandhi was shown as the most prominent amongst the other nationalist leaders. It ran for two weeks at the Globe Theatre and West End Theatre of Bombay and received enthusiastic responses. Ironically, as the rules of the existing regulatory authorities were not adequate enough to prevent this screening, the exhibition continued for almost one month without any authoritarian intervention (Kaul 1998: 15). Meanwhile, anticipating the danger of films depicting the nationalist cause and citing several concerns about the cultural, civic and hygienic norms in the film theatres in India, The Cinematograph Act was passed in the British Parliament in 1918. By the terms of this act, four separate censor boards were set up in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Rangoon in May 1920. Later, another board was set up in Lahore in 1927. In 1921, a mythological film Bhakta Vidur was denied exhibition by the district magistrate of Karachi and the local officer for Bombay State because ‘it is [was] likely to excite disaffection against the Government and incite people

to non-cooperation’ (Vasudev 1978: 25). Moreover, the film was considered as ‘a thinly veiled resume of political events in India, Vidur appearing as Mr Gandhi clad in Gandhi cap and khaddar shirt. The intention of the film is to create hatred and contempt and to stir up feeling of enmity against the Government’ (Vasudev 1978: 25). This was perhaps the first censorship controversy in India (Rajadhyaksha 1999: 26). Nevertheless, the aesthetic forms through which the early Indian cinema responded to the nationalist politics had been developing gradually in terms of various generic tendencies. These tendencies can broadly be categorised in two different streams, namely the mythological and early realist. And between these two broad categories, the most practiced form was the mythological and historical. The mythological films reflect an attempt to get rid of the anxiety of possibly being branded either as anti-British or anti-national. It did not only help the industry to reduce the possibilities of being rejected by the censor board, but also encouraged to maintain a more generous and non-partisan nationalist position to protect their commercial interest. Through this allegorical device, it appeared feasible for the industry to keep the political sanity of their films and also to secure the supply of regular audiences. Films from this tendency, like Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913), Lanka Dahan (1917), Sri Krishna Janma (1918), Baburao Painter’s Sairindhri (1920) and so on, were successful in establishing an early nationalist tradition in Indian cinema through mythological films. The second mode of response can be identified on the level of cultural contents. Gandhi’s critique of Western civilisation and the call for Hind Swaraj received a good response from the burgeoning industry and encouraged the film-makers to bring forward relevant political contents and motifs in the visuals and narratives. The early works of D. N. Ganguly, an alumnus of Tagore’s Shantiniketan School, can be noted here. His first venture after forming ‘The Indo-British Film Company’, Bilet Ferot (England Returned; 1921), was a satirical silent film on the educated Bengali people who blindly aped the Western culture. The film also made satirical comments on the natives who detest everything they found alien to their culture. Debaki Bose, once a crusader against British rule during the Non-Cooperation Movement and an assistant editor of a Congress weekly, Shakti, joined D. N. Ganguly in the mid-1920s. He then scripted and directed one of the landmarks of Bengali cinema of the silent era Panchashar (1929). With his liberal humanist approach, Bose ‘brought to his films a rare sensitivity, a spirit of humanism and commitment that set the tone of Bengali cinema for years to come’ (Burra 1981: 21). Nevertheless, it could be a wrong proposition to categorise the early Indian films and filmmakers between the two tendencies, instead of reading these as thematic modes of responses. In fact, the works of Baburao Painter can be well exemplified as a combination of both of them. His notable work Sairandhri (1920) was based on a play, Keechak Wadh, an episode from the Mahabharata, written by Marathi playwright K. P. Khadilkar. In the film, he tried to camouflage his political ideas and comments in allegory. The play was banned because of the

alleged criticism of Lord Curzon. In the film, the representation of the killing of Keechak was horrifying, and the scenes were deleted by the Censor Board (Vasudev 1978: 26). Five years later, Painter made one of the earliest realist fictions in India – Savkari Pash. It was based on money lending business in rural India and the troubles of poor farmers. Burra comments, ‘he recreated the life of a village peasant with amazing realism’ (1981: 24). Meanwhile, several anxieties about the status of the Indian film industry forced the colonial authority to form the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) in 1927. Keeping in mind the dominance of the American films on Indian theatres, the committee in its report urged the government to promote the ‘Indianness’ in cinema by various means and to restrict the American influence. The suggestion was to create a ‘national atmosphere’ for Indian cinema (ICC Report 1928: 61). It also outlined a possible thematic for Indian cinema where ‘its own history, literature and scenery and in its festivals, fairs and melas which would, and should, appeal to Indian audiences cannot be gainsaid. Much of it can also be utilised by suitable handling so as to have a universal appeal’ (ICC Report 1928: 61). However, the proposals offered by the committee were rendered futile. Not only was this due to the government’s reluctance, but also the talkies era, which took off within a year after ICC submitted its report in 1928. The arrival of sound in cinema was consequently followed by the establishment of a new series of immensely powerful sectors of Indian cinema – the regional cinema industries. By the late 1920s, there began several efforts to develop film industries in major linguistic regions on the basis of the construction of various regional and linguistic communities.3 Moreover, the systematic introduction of a well-equipped studio system in Indian industry from the late 1920s did not only strengthen the position of the Indian subjects within the institution of cinema, but as Shoesmith notes: ‘establishment of the studios [also] represented a desire to remedy this situation through a process of modernity which at the same time conferred a degree of social and cultural legitimation upon the industry and its major figures’ (1987). I find this period of debate, deliberation and conflict as one of the most vibrant phases in the history of Indian cinema, as the rise of various dissident discourses within the domain of nationalist politics corroborated the process. The complex perspective, formed due to the major political developments, acted as a matrix for the industry, which in the near future was to develop a new rhetoric of social as the most eligible discursive form of Indian cinema.

Constituency for a social genre The dominant stream of Indian nationalist movement led by Gandhi was never a homogeneous conglomerate, despite its relentless attempt to practice a policy of universal inclusion. By the mid- and late 1920s, many notes of dissent started emerging to confront

Congress hegemony over the national imagination. Signs of dissent were most prominent among the Muslim and Dalit (untouchable) communities. In 1916, the Lucknow pact was signed between Congress and Muslim League, recognising the demand for a separate electorate for the Muslim community. Khilafat Movement was indeed an outcome of this treaty. However, in the 1937 elections held under the Government of India Act 1935, Congress emerged as a winner in almost all the provinces except in Punjab, Sind and Bengal, but refused to enter into any political coalition with any ‘other’ party, namely the League (Chattopadhyay 1984: 138). History entered into a new era of conflict between Congress and the League thereafter. On the other hand, though it started to gain momentum during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Dalit movements in India continued to remain absent from the nationalist agenda for a long time. Under the influence of Gandhi, for the first time, the 1920 Lahore resolution announcing the beginning of the NonCooperation Movement also noted that the removal of untouchability stands as an essential precondition to attain Swaraj (Bandopadhyay 2009: 353). However, the 1931 Bombay session of the All India Depressed Classes Leaders’ Conference led to a major conflict between Gandhi and the most influential Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, as it demanded the depressed classes must get the opportunity of separate electorate (Bandopadhyay 2009: 355). Though the stalemate was apparently resolved by the Poona Pact (1932), the drift was still there. The Indian National Congress ceased to exist as the sole representative of the Indian people. Also, the emerging sector of the working class movement shaped one more important mode of disagreement with the nationalist mainstream. Various national unions of workers and peasants were started to be formed from the 1920s. Despite a strong Congress influence, these unions started engaging with utterly different forms of struggle. Within a few years of its formation in 1925, the Communist Party of India emerged successful in building several powerful centres of trade union activities. Even after being declared illegal in 1934, most of its organisers either went underground or joined the Congress to continue their political activities. Also, a strong socialist block acquired significant strength within Congress. A virtual coalition of the communists, radicals and socialists started raising several new issues, annoying the right-wing Congress policy makers. And the moment marked by the beginning of World War II made it inevitable to bring radical changes in their political line. However, these years also witnessed the dawn of the progressive cultural movement, which was soon to emerge as an imperative agent in restructuring an alternative national culture for the upcoming nation state. The cinemas of India, on the parallel, were experiencing several transformations in their industrial as well as thematic structures, particularly after the arrival of talkies and the establishment of the big studios. One of these developments, as Shoesmith notes, was the struggle between the competing forms of Indian capitalism and the non-capitalist (presumably premodern) market forces (1987), the formal equivalent of which emerges into vision in the

representational terms of the films the studios made. Prabhat, the first one to be established among the three major studios of the 1930s, came out experimenting with the modernist ideological stances while dealing with the broad thematic of contemporary social hierarchy. Their benchmark production was undoubtedly Sant Tukaram (1936). The film is celebrated as a benchmark in the generic category of devotionals not only for its interpretative remarks on the issue of untouchability, but also for its unique use of representational politics largely influenced by the philosophical stances of the Dalit movements of Maharashtra (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 90). Prabhat continued with social themes in the films like Kunku (or Duniya Na Mane in Hindi; 1937) dealing with the issue of widow remarriage or even films like Manoos (1939), Shejari (or Padosi; 1941). The other major studio, New Theatres in Calcutta, developed their own generic conventions of adopting modernist narratives and visual styles into films. For most of the film historians, it appears as an applied project of the Bhadralok nationalism (Mukherjee 1942). Apart from adaptations of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s social archetypal novels and stories by other eminent writers, mostly based on social discriminations, they also tried to redefine the mythological tales through their modernist approach. Starting from Dena Paona (1931), New Theatres productions list the early social films like Palli Samaj (1932), Kapalkundala (1933), Devdas (1935), Grihadaha (1936), Mukti (1937) and devotionals like Chandidas (1932), Vidyapati (1938) and so on. From the late 1930s, it started engaging itself with most contemporary themes. As in Mukti (1937), perhaps for the first time in Bengali cinema, the working class appears on screen as a group of people, virtually as a ‘class’, in the guise of exploited tea garden workers. Gradually, New Theatres took a new turn towards progressive social realism through a new range of young directors like Bimal Roy, Satyen Bose, Hemen Gupta et al. Roy’s Udayer Pathe (1944) is a significant example of this endeavour. The operatives of Bombay Talkies, however, were structurally different from all other studios, as it was set up as a full-fledged corporate body with a composite board of directors. Himanshu Rai successfully established association of Bombay Talkies with the European technicians which eventually set a high technical standard for film-making in India. With the release of Achhut Kanya (1936), a breakthrough film on the socially sensitive theme of untouchability, Bombay Talkies received critical appraisal as well as huge popular responses. It eventually influenced them producing a series of films on various social issues, like Janmabhhomi (1936), Izzat (1937), Prabhat (1937), Bhabi (1938), to name a few. Meanwhile, the beginning of World War II came as a big blow to Bombay Talkies. But this apparent jeopardy in maintaining the financial viability of the studio eventually opened another way for some interesting experiments to take place. The compelling changes in the order of their production signified in their films made during this phase, like Naya Sansar (1941), Kismet and so on. Kismet, apparently being a crime thriller and made as a ‘war effort film’, provides a cinematic account of the impending crisis of the studio system and the film industry in India.

Ravi Vasudevan notes that the films made during the wartime crisis ‘integrate their narratives into such a perception of the social norm’ and ‘the film industry also generated information about its industrial arrangements in terms of the same familial metaphor’ (1991: 183–4). The crisis that was inscribed in the structural feature of Kismet was eventually an impending one for the existing studio system and was further deepened by the end of the war. But, on the other hand, this crisis transformed the arena to accommodate newer experiments within its fold, as a whole lot of new producers emerged by the early 1940s as important stakeholders of the industry. The wartime money circulation in the domestic economy resulted in a temporary boom which helped these new producers to emerge. Shoesmith, referring Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, categorises three emergent tendencies of this era: First, the nature of the audience started to change from being essentially middle class to ‘mass’ audience; second, the control of the industry was shifted from the hands of the film-makers and studio owners to the film financers and distributors; third, the dynamics of relationship between the industry and various government agencies began to alter to a large extent (2009: 440). For Chidananda Dasgupta and Ashis Nandy, the 1930s and 1940s were the time when a ‘mixed social audience’ dominated the spectatorial positions, and specifically the 1940s shows the signs of impending changes in this paradigm (Vasudevan 1995: 312). This transformation, eventually set off after the arrival of the talkies, continued to be altered in every important historical juncture. According to the Film Enquiry Committee Report (FEC Report) the total number of cinema theatres was merely 275 during 1927–28, whereas it experienced a multiplied growth during the following decade by reaching to a number of 1,657 in 1938 (Vasudevan 1995: 336). The reason was perhaps the production of a large number of films in different language zones which successfully attracted a large number of people to the theatres. During the studio phase, the construction of a definite set of audiences used to be done by formulating specific strategies for production, distribution and exhibition by the studio itself. The new phase, which segregated the hitherto integrated functions, also transformed the industry into multifarious and divergent. The decade of the war, specifically the structural transformation of the industry during the early 1940s, signals the impending triumph of the social films. The socials appeared as the most eligible ideological representative of the popular cinematic forms. Vasudevan suggests that the ‘fictional processes’ available in the ‘socially symbolic narrative forms’, predominant in the representative domain of Indian cinema during the 1930s and 1940s, often ‘parallel, interrogate, and question the authoritative functions communities have exercised under the colonial and post-colonial Indian states’ (2010: 127). At this point of cultural disaggregation, I argue that the establishment of the generic form of social manifests an important and causal attribute of the transforming industry. Previously, the studio convention of the social films used to generate a specific form of social criticism, apt for the middle class audiences. But the

changing scenario demanded an alteration in this mode where the genre was to be reconfigured and extended at par the cultural politics of the emerging nation state to accommodate various dissident cultural forms into the ambit of a national spectatorial territory. Consequently, a considerable number of social films started to emerge as legitimate and responsible social entities by ‘making a critique of Indian society and setting up an agenda for change’ (Vasudevan 2010: 103). Vasudevan notes elsewhere that these new bunch of films consolidated ‘a redefinition of social identity for spectators’, as the mass audience who were previously engaged in appreciating the moral and sensational narratives ‘were now solicited by an omnibus form which also included a rationalist discourse as part of its attractions’ (1995: 312). The social, therefore, appeared as an aesthetic assimilation of the then existing national cultural scenario. It continued to retain its characteristic as an elusive generic category where several different modes of cultural otherness could easily be accommodated. The relative ‘openness’ of the industry also went on attracting new talents, young script writers, poets, musicians and directors, who in time, eventually, turned out to be instrumental in redefining the agenda for the future developments in Indian cinema.

The progressive impetus Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, a promising face of the progressive journalism of the late 1930s and an instrumental figure of the progressive cultural movement, was once assigned by the Bombay Talkies producer Sashadhar Mukherjee to write a screenplay based on his own story about the plight of a radical journalist and his fight against the mainstream media. The film, Naya Sansar (1939), was indeed a success and opened his way for a few more assignments. Not only Abbas, but also a few progressive writers like Sadat Hasan Manto and Munshi Premchand started working in the industry as early from the 1930s as storywriters. They worked for the films Kisan Kanya (1938), Apni Nagariya (1940) and Mazdoor (1934), respectively. But these involvements were rather abrupt and the sprinkles of political realism that came out of their works were too inadequate to be considered as milestones in the process. However, the first instance of an organised left-leaning cultural movement in India was perhaps the progressive writers’ conference at Lucknow in 1936. The conference was itself a response to the call given by renowned intellectuals, like Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, François Burbose and Rabindranath Tagore, to develop a broad-based anti-Fascist united front for cultural struggle. The conference led to the formation of the All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA). Undeniably, it was a grand success, as it networked with a whole range of writers and intellectuals who, for the first time in history, were looking for a radical alternative to redefine the national lineage they used to belong. Munshi Premchand’s presidential address at the conference carries the essence of this literary radicalism:

We have no use today for those poetical fancies which overwhelm us with their insistence on the ephemeral nature of this world […]. We must, resolutely give up writing those love romances with which our periodicals are flooded […]. The only art which has value for us today is that which is dynamic and leads to action. (Pradhan 1979: 248) However, the emergence of this new realist approach coincides with the formulation of the idea of a progressive nationalist agenda in culture. For Rajarshi Dasgupta, the progressive cultural movement appears as ‘both a nationalist undertaking and a search for a new means of generalizing communist ways of thinking among people, a strategy approved by the international leadership’ (2005: 81). However, there were debates and confusions over the forms of realism that were to be practiced, as the expressive mode for the progressive cultural movement and the practitioners often confused ‘socialist realism’ with ‘social realism’ as the latter happened to be more loose and inclusive (Biswas 2007: 42). Nonetheless, the progressive writers’ movement went on accommodating writers and intellectuals not only from the leftist stream, but also from liberal democratic traditions and before them, reflecting the social realities in their works appeared as an immediate task. The manifesto of AIPWA clearly mentioned the need for a literature that would reflect the ‘radical changes taking place in Indian society’. It also urged the Indian writers ‘to give expression the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature’ (Pradhan 1979: 20). As a radical literary movement, it earned significant success in Bengali, Hindi and Urdu literary spheres, where almost an entire generation of writers became either directly or indirectly aligned to this movement. However, AIPWA played another important role in bringing a number of radical individuals in contact who, in the next few years, were to form IPTA as the first radical nationalist assembly of the cultural workers from almost all sectors in India. The first All India People’s Theatre Conference was held in Bombay in 1943 and IPTA announced its organisational programmes and objectives. The humanitarian appeal of the movement quickly became so influential that it then happened to be almost unthinkable for any concerned cultural practitioner to bypass it. In fact, ‘it is impossible not to take the crucial role of the IPTA into account in understanding the culture of the period, even where the artist in question was not directly affiliated to the organisation’ (Biswas 2007: 42). One of the main tasks taken by IPTA was to forge a radical form of popular art by redefining it politically. They sought to do it by reinventing the folk art forms and mixing them with avant-garde and realist art practices. In an attempt to break through the conventional cultural performances, touring the village as well as the workers’ slums became an integral part of the IPTA’s activities. During its formative period, various troupes travelled from village to village with a series of one-acts and full-length plays, ballets, songs and so on (Chowdhury 2009: 49). By redefining

the art as well as an artist’s duty, IPTA had not only vowed to alter the hitherto existing social definition of art and artists, but also transformed an individual artist into cultural worker, inseparable from the political collective he belonged to. In this fascinating journey, the Great Bengal Famine (1943) marks a turning point, as IPTA’s public appearance comes with the staging of the Bijan Bhattacharya’s play Nabanna (The Harvest), a political chronicle of that disaster, in 1944. Moinak Biswas writes: The famine also brought home the fact that the world is linked into a fateful unity by the forces of modernity even as it exploded the ahistorical illusions that urban educated classes would nurture about Indian villages […]. Bijan Bhattacharya’s Nabanna brought upon the Indian stage completely new protagonists in the form of starving Bengal peasants. (2007: 41) Not only the famine and Nabanna, several events that took place successively during the 1940s were addressed by the artist activists associated with IPTA. The events started with World War II and continued through the Quit India Movement (1942), the Great Bengal Famine (1943), communal riot (1946) and a number of popular upsurges, including the mutiny in Royal Indian Navy (1946), Tebhaga peasant movement (1946) and finally the Partition (1947), marking some significant junctures in the glorious phase of IPTA history. To address the nation and its people, apart from Bengal, similar efforts were carried out in Bombay, Madras, Punjab, Andhra and other western provinces to harness the idea of a progressive culture. In the Andhra region, IPTA exploited the popular form of burrakatha, in which a central narrator weaves a historical story in a satirical way to attack the opponent. In Maharashtra, they used the popular form of tamasha to present social criticism and propaganda. One of the major founding figures of IPTA Maharashtra, Annabhau Sathe, made another significant contribution by revitalising the ancient form of powada, a recital version of an epic poem by two singers through Akle Che Gosht (War of Wits), a contemporary satire about a moneylender and a peasant (Richmond 1973: 323–5). Also, dance gained importance as a form of nationalist propaganda when the Central Ballet Troupe of the IPTA, under the leadership of Shanti Bardhan, produced India Immortal in 1944. Encompassing the last 2,000 years of Indian history, the ballet was an expansion of an earlier work called The Spirit of India. However, the India Immortal soon became IPTA’s major captive force appealing to all classes as a representation of the common man’s ability to defeat foreign oppressors (Chowdhury 2009: 52). Although the making of progressive films was in the agenda of IPTA, it took 3 years since its inception to make one (Pradhan 1979: 248). Moreover, like the other nationalist leaders, they too envisaged film only as an extension of the theatrical performance and not as an independent medium (Pradhan 1979: 248). The lone cinematic effort of IPTA was Dharti Ke

Laal (Children of the Earth, 1946). It was jointly produced and directed by IPTA Pictures and K. A. Abbas. Being a loose adaptation of two plays by Bijan Bhattacharya, Nabanna and Jabanbandi and Jab Khet Jaage, a Krishan Chander story, it was primarily aimed to bring the path-breaking effect of Nabanna onto the screen (Bisaws 2007: 42). They drew their inspiration from the French and Spanish Popular Front cinema, important constituents in the struggle against fascism in Europe. IPTA resolution regarding Dharti Ke Laal notes: […] from the very beginning it has been the ideal of the Peoples Theatre co-ordinate its stage movement with that of the film movement either by arranging film shows of progressive film depicting the life of the people like ‘Grapes of Wrath’ or by producing films in consonance with the ideals of the People’s theatre. (Pradhan 1979: 248) In appreciation of the film Abbas said, ‘it is a new field of activity for us but with the help of our members, well-wishers and sympathizers we hope to produce a real People’s film!’ (Pradhan 1979: 251). During the same year (1946), Chetan Anand made Neecha Nagar, deriving the plot from Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depth with the peripheral assistances of IPTA. The production of the film was largely supported by the organisation. Significantly, Anand’s experience with formal experiments (German Expressionism and Russian iconography; latter to produce a visual effect of mass revolutionary potential) introduced a fairly new pattern for Indian cinema. It received the grand prize in the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Moreover, as Moinak Biswas notes, Neecha Nagar provides the first instance where the subject of the real ‘mass’ appears in its full political vitality in Indian cinema (2002: 66). Marathi film-maker Bijoy Bhat, although not quite aligned with IPTA, made Samaj Ko Badal Dalo in 1947. The Andhra chapter of IPTA, Praja Natya Mandali, made Puttillu (1950); the Kerala chapter, popularly known as KPAC, also ventured into film-making. In 1950, Nimai Ghosh made Chhinnamul (The Uprooted), taking Partition as its theme. The director Nimai Ghosh was a sympathiser of IPTA. Like Neecha Nagar, a large participation of IPTA workers made this political venture successful. Chhinnamul is remarkable because of its realist aesthetic approach. It used the city space of Calcutta as its backdrop and deployed a classical documentary style to depict the real lives of the refugees in railway stations, roadside and refugee camps. Chhinnamul eventually acts as a prelude for the realist approach in Indian cinema that came to enter the arena in the upcoming years (Biswas 2007: 52). There was another important film on partition produced and directed by Kranti Shilpi Sangha, cultural wing of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, Natun Yahudi (The New Jew, 1953). It was an adaptation of a popular play of the same name by Salil Sen. Nevertheless, most of the films I have mentioned here cannot be taken as ‘IPTA-produced’ in its immediate sense. But, on the other hand, these can simultaneously be considered as

popular representatives of a bunch of films which carry the thematic conventions that IPTA often experimented with. It, therefore, becomes easier to trace IPTA’s indirect effects in Indian cinema, as one can identify the changes that started to take place on the levels of themes, characterisation, dialogue, acting style since the 1940s. Also, apart from the established progressive cultural icons of the film industry, like Bimal Roy with his fairly long lineage of being an IPTA associate since 1943, a large number of activists joined industry as scriptwriters, lyricists, music directors, actors and choreographers who immediately became instrumental in transforming the performative domain of Indian cinema. Among the film personalities who were with IPTA were actors like Balraj Sahni and Zohra Sehgal, musicians like Ravi Shankar, Anil Biswas and Salil Choudhury, poets like Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Prem Dhawan, Shailendra and Kaifi Azmi, scriptwriters like K. A. Abbas and V. P. Sathe, directors like Bimal Roy, Shambhu Mitra and Mohan Sehgal, to name a few. However, the organisation has always maintained an ambiguous, rather reluctant, stand towards cinema. And that became more evident during the Bombay conference held in 1953. Interestingly, the organisation could neither ignore the instances of success that its activists achieved in Bombay and other film industries, nor it could applaud generously in those occasions. The Bombay conference of IPTA is significant for bringing the context of song, dance, theatre, cinema and so on into discussion. The conference resolution suggested formation of various subcommittees. Among the subcommittees formed, there was also a film subcommittee headed by Ritwik Ghatak, Balraj Sahani and Sobha Sen (Pradhan 1985: 162). It submitted a report titled Film Must Help Common Man which stated: ‘progressive workers of the film industry should organize themselves wherever there is an opportunity, to make their opinions more effective, the stress being laid on progressive writers and directors, who lend their creative talents in the making of films’ (Pradhan 1985: 163–4). The report eventually throws light on the plea to grant IPTA workers freedom to work irrespective of organisational affiliation. It seems interesting, as the organisation recognises the right of an activist to work as an individual while simultaneously planning to intervene into the established film industry through various means. The report further notes: ‘a guild of writers on an all India basis would be of great help to the writers in their creative problems, thus ensuing success to their work. This collaboration will help to bring healthy reflections on the progressive and intellectual section in the industry’ (Pradhan 1985: 163–4). It is difficult to garner from the available sources what the plan IPTA made or whether they had any plan for cinema at all. Moreover, they seemed to slip away from their earlier stand. An article that appeared in Unity, the all-India organ of IPTA, soon after the Bombay conference reflects their reluctance about cinema: […] the film and capitalists have developed an intimacy for each other […]. With regard to other arts, namely, painting, music, literature this sort of assistance of the capitalists is not

deemed indispensable or necessary at the beginning […]. That is why an amateur theatre is possible, but not an amateur cinema. (Pradhan 1985: 470) Meanwhile, the members of IPTA’s ‘film commission’ started to disperse – Ghatak was expelled from the party in 1955, and Balraj Sahani became irregular in the organisational activities. In the documents from later years, it is hardly possible to sense any progress in regard to cinema. Eventually, the organisational policies of IPTA also started to change from this period. So, it will not be an exaggeration to say that if the 1940s was the phase of waxing of the IPTA movement, then the 1950s will represent the gradual waning and stagnation. Hence, the direct connection of IPTA with cinema slowly but surely vanished by this time. But despite its organisational doldrums, the IPTA effect continued to remain as one of the key players in bringing the signifiers of the great national importance into play. However, there were several signs of reform in the cinematic agenda of industry prior to the IPTA phase. As I mentioned earlier, Udayer Pathe (Humrahi in Hindi; 1944) stands as a perfect example of this. Produced as a New Theatres venture, the film perhaps for the first time in Indian cinema presented a progressive intellectual as the hero whose heroism was attributed to his ‘ability to articulate class consciousness’ (Chakravarty 89). It tried to respond to the changes taking place in the realm of the mainstream nationalist politics during the 1940s, through the metaphor of cross-class alliance aimed to fight oppression and social hierarchy. Hence, the portrayal of an intellectual as an organiser of the working class movement and his relentless struggle against the rich and the ‘exploiters’ largely coincides with IPTA’s agenda of transforming an artist into a cultural activist. Indeed, Udayer Pathe was often considered as an ‘IPTA venture by proxy’ (Biswas 2007: 44). Along with Udayer Pathe, most of the films released since the early 1940s were seen trying to develop a formal alternative to the hitherto existing nationalist ethos. It was indeed an attempt to corroborate with the industry’s agenda to cope up with the war and the post-war scenario where, as Vasudevan argues, ‘the symbolic narratives generated by the cinematic institution have [had] become the stable, long-term reference points for the fantasy of a non- or asocial norm’ (1991: 183). And, to a large extent, the progressive cultural movement and IPTA played a major role in stabilising the cultural and aesthetic norms of the social films. They used to carry a sense of moral legitimisation where, broadly within its territory of nationalist imagination, several notes of resistance and resilience formed the basis of their progressive yet elusive cultural politics. As there was no such moral or political obligation in accommodating left-wing artists and performers, IPTA activists readily emerged as instrumental and easy choice for the industry to produce socially sensational visual and literary narratives by virtue of their practical knowledge and intellectual command over the domain of performance. Moreover, as the independent Indian nation state went into proclaiming its political stance in favour of the cause of socialism while incorporating a

number of policies once considered as the sole discretion of the communists, the domain of the mainstream nationalism and the progressive cultural movement appeared overlapping with each other. Thus, in a few years, the political avant-gardism of IPTA was to find its respective constituency within the domain of Indian cinema of Nehruvian era, and their discourse was to largely be absorbed and proliferated as the voice of the new nation.

Conclusion Apart from the mainstream commercials, any careful observer of the history of Indian Cinema would note that from the mid-1950s there emerged a specific pattern of film-making practice, which was largely influenced by the conventions of various realist film movements from all over the world. The release of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955) marks the ceremonial beginning of this trend. There were two more significant events in this regard, which I feel worth to be noted here. In 1952, India held its first international film festival. The participants of the film industry, critics and the film enthusiasts assembled to encounter the hitherto unknown domain of world cinema. For a long time, the films of Hollywood had been continuing to be considered as a standard model for them. But now, as they got an opportunity to experience the charm of international film movements, like Italian Neorealism, it eventually provided an option to the serious film-makers to outline their works differently. And the post-independence scenario made them accommodate some formal innovations of Italian Neorealist movement. I have in mind films like Do Bigha Zameen (1953), Footpath (1953), Naukri, Boot Polish (1954), Shree 420 (1955), Jaagte Raho (1956), Naya Daur (1957), Phir Subah Hogi, Madhumati (1958) and so on. On the other hand, by that time, a substantial section of the Indian middle class population started thinking about cinema in a rather serious way. It was mainly the film societies which symbolise this endeavour. And since 1947, the year when the first ever cine club in India was formed by Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Dasgupta et al., the number of the societies kept multiplying (Majumdar 2012: 732). Film societies did not only introduce a practice of serious film criticism in Indian media, but also kept reiterating the urgency of conscious film-making that could provide a ‘good taste in cinema’ (Majumdar 2012: 739). It is not coincidental that who’s who of the film societies would play several important roles in establishing and running the first ever film institute in India. Though it is difficult to identify any direct connection between IPTA and these two developments, still it is largely possible to the correlation in the level of the individual attachment. Most of the then stalwarts of the film industry leading the realist extravaganza in different fronts of Indian cinema had either direct or indirect lineage of IPTA, as I have mentioned before. Moreover, those who were active in the film societies were also inclined towards it and some of them were even active participants (Majumdar 2012: 733).

And most of their activities were invested in reconfiguring the then existing domain of Indian cinema.

Notes 1 The most acute problem faced by the industry during World War II was the shortage in raw film stocks. In absence of any Indian manufacturer, it then became extremely difficult to import materials. Moreover, the mushrooming number of new production units multiplied the problem. The number of the new producers was increasing exponentially – during 1940, there were 42 new producers among a total number of 100, collectively releasing 171 films, whereas in 1942 the number of the new producers rose to 55 among 108, releasing 163 films altogether. And out of these 108 producers, most of them started their business within a year or two. In order to control the situation, government put a limit of 11,000 feet on the length of the possible use of raw stock film for a feature. It also started to follow a stringent rule in allocating raw film stock among the producers with a condition that the benefitted production units will have to make at least one feature film out of every three as a ‘war effort’ film. This ‘war effort film’ must be made to support the agenda of the Allied forces in the war (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 130; Shoesmith 2009: 444). Films like Kismet (1943), Doctor Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946), Manasamraksanam (1945; Tamil) are examples of it. 2 Paul Willemen makes this distinction between the ‘discourses of nationalism’ and ‘national specificity’. For him, ‘the specificity of a cultural formation may be marked by the presence but also by the absence of preoccupations with national identity. Indeed, national specificity will determine, which, if any notions of identity are on the agenda’ (1995: 210). On the other hand, nationalist discourses ‘forever try to colonise and extend themselves to cover, by repressively homogenising, complex but nationally specific formation’ (1995: 210). He further suggests that the ‘construction of national specificity in fact encompasses and governs the articulation of national identity and nationalist discourses’ (1995: 210). 3 Interestingly there is no such film production centre in the large Hindi-speaking belt of North India, although it is the Hindi film which, for a substantial period, counted the maximum number of films released in a single calendar year and still enjoys the privilege to be considered as the most popular representative of Indian cinema. However, the construction of Hindi language as the de facto national language of India emerged out of a prolonged process of historical deliberation and struggle since the late 19th century (Brass 1974; Orsini 2002). The status attributed to the world of Hindi cinema also followed similar routes (Chakravarty 1993; Prasad 1998; Lelyveld 2009).

References Bandopadhyay, Shekhar. 2009. From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Barnouw, Erik and S. Krishnaswamy. 1980. Indian Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Biswas, Moinak. 2007. ‘The City and the Real: Chinnamul and the Left Cultural Movement in the 1940s’, in Preben Kaarsholm (ed.), City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, pp. 40–59. Calcutta: Seagull Books. ———. 2002. ‘Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema 1940–60’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Monash

University. Brass, Paul R. 1974. Language and Politics in North India. London: Cambridge University Press. Burra, Rani, ed. 1981. Looking Back: 1896–1960. New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals. Chakravarty, Sumita S. 1993. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema: 1947–1987. Texas: University of Texas Press. Chattopadhyay, Gautam. 1984. Bengal Electoral Politics and Freedom Struggle: 1862–1947. New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research. Chowdhury, Darshan. 2009. Ganonatyo Andolon (Bengali). Calcutta: Anustup. Dasgupta, Rajarshi. 2005. ‘Rhyming Revolution Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal’, Studies in History, 21(1): 79–98. Film Enquiry Committee (FEC). 1951. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee. New Delhi: Government. of India Press. Hayward, Susan. 2005. French National Cinema. London: Routledge. Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC). 1928. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928. Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch. Kaul, Gautam. 1998. Cinema and the Indian Freedom Struggle. Delhi: Sterling Publications. Lelyveld, David. 2009. ‘Talking the National Language Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani in Indian Broadcasting and Cinema’, in Asha Sarangi (ed.), Language and Politics in India, pp. 351–67. New York: Oxford University Press. Majumdar, Rochona. 2012. ‘Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India’, Modern Asian Studies, 46(03): 731–67. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2009. New Theatres Limited: The Emblem of Art, the Picture of Success. Pune: National Film Archive of India. Orsini, Francesca. 2002. The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1947: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Phalke, D. G. 1988. ‘Dossier: Swadeshi Moving Pictures’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2(1): 51–73. Pradhan, Sudhi. 1985. Marxist Cultural Movement in India, Chronicles and Documents (1947–1958). Volume-II. Calcutta: Navana. ———. 1979. Marxist Cultural Movement in India, Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947). Calcutta: Shanti Pradhan. Prasad, M. Madhava. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 1987. ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14(15): 47–78. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen. 1999. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. London: Routledge. Ray, Somnath. 2009. Hiralal Sen: A Monograph. Pune: National Film Archive of India. Richmond, Farley. 1973. ‘The Political Role of Theatre in India’, Educational Theatre Journal, 25(3): 318–34. Shoesmith, Brian. 2009. ‘Changing the Guard’, Media History, 15(4): 439–52. ———. 1987. ‘From Monopoly to Commodity: The Bombay Studios in the 1930s’, in T. O’Regan and B. Shoesmith (eds), History

on/and/in

Film,

pp.

68–75.

Perth:

History

&

Film

Association

of

Australia.

http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/hfilm/BOMBAY.html (accessed on 11 May 2015). Vasudev, Aruna. 1978. Liberty and Licence in the Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Vikas. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2010. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Permanent

Black. ———. 1995. ‘Addressing the Spectator of a “Third World” National Cinema: The Bombay “Social” Film of the 1940s and 1950s’, Screen, 36(4): 305–24. ———. 1991. ‘The Cultural Space of a Film Narrative: Interpreting Kismet (Bombay Talkies, 1943)’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 28(2): 171–85. Williams, Alan, ed. 1995/2002. Film and Nationalism. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Willemen, Paul. 1995. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, pp. 206–19. London: British Film Institute.

3 Genre mixing as creative fabrication1 M. Madhava Prasad

Film genres are of two kinds: those that derive from pre-cinematic narrative or performative traditions and those that are internal to film history. The importance of genre for film production and distribution as well as for film study is most clearly evident in the case of Hollywood, where it is a phenomenon related to the era of what is known as classical Hollywood cinema, dominated by the giant studios and characterised by mass production. In the Indian film history genre, distinctions appear to have played a less significant role; one reason for this being the absence of the kind of industrial production logic prevalent in Hollywood in its classical era. This perception has prevailed despite clear evidence of the presence of found genres in Indian cinema before independence, including those that derive from pre-cinematic traditions as well as established Hollywood genres (Bhaumik 2001). The emergence of the hold-all ‘social’ (Thomas 1985), which soon became the defining feature of commercial Indian cinema, and whose advent resulted in the marginalisation of the other genres, seems then to coincide with a time of transition beginning with the war and intense political mobilisation following independence and partition. It is only in the last two decades that a self-conscious genre cinema has emerged through the efforts of Ram Gopal Varma and others (Vasudevan 2010: 383–97). Against that background, to which I will briefly return in the conclusion, this article takes up the question of relations internal to the history of film production, of which the relation between genres, old and new, between generic differentiation and apparent indifference (as manifest in the social) is a part. Genre mixing is a provisional way of naming that relation in order to bring it into focus as an object of study. All popular films to a greater or lesser degree are hybrids, drawing from a range of existing genres. As such, it would be reasonable to conclude that there is nothing remarkable about any activity that might be termed ‘genre mixing’. It is a routine activity in the industry, with several known and also, presumably, unpredictable results.2 The cinema of the 1950s poses a specific issue within this discussion. Its novelty has been universally acknowledged, but we need to skirt the idea that this derived from a pure beginning rooted only in the social context of the time. For, such a description is apt to miss

something important. There are periods of generic stability interrupted by moments of innovation that are at first sight indistinguishable from the routine production of hybrids because they too, rather than starting from scratch, work with existing materials. Within such fabricating activity then, it would be useful to distinguish the routine production of hybrids from those instances that result in lasting reconstitution of the available materials themselves. We are aware of the historicity of genres – the decline of some, the rise of others – in the career of popular cinema. But this remains at the level of an awareness of flux, of the judgement of time, rather than a grasp of material processes of immanent change. The mortality of genres seems here a function of their organic constitution, a congenital ephemerality. Another explanation is that social change renders them obsolete and new ones come to take their place, which merely suggests that death is hastened by extraneous factors. Although the eventual determining role of social change cannot be denied, given that a cultural commodity relates to the social context to the extent that producer and consumer share an ideological common ground, the marketability of consumer goods obeys other logics of consumer desire and product innovation that need to be taken into consideration in our cultural analysis of film texts. Consider, as the most obvious example, the career of the mythological genre of Indian cinema. Does its disappearance from the Hindi film industry in the post-Independence era constitute a demise, organic or otherwise? If so, what of the genre’s prolonged period of vigorous health (to persist with the metaphor) in the Telugu industry? To what can this prevalence of a genre in one linguistic region after going into decline in other regions be attributed? Then again, since genres do not simply disappear but continue to survive in less visible market segments, what does the difference in status of the mythological in one territory and another signify? For example, if the genre declined from a position of preeminence in most regions, in Telugu it regained centrality for a considerable period of time. And what of the spectacular revival of its fortunes on television in the last two decades, which coincided with the rise of Hindutva and so reinforced the expressivist hypothesis with the apparently obvious and quite transparent link with Hindu nationalism? How was a relation of mutual nourishment forged between these two instances? Are the social circumstances sufficiently different to explain this variation? On the other hand, we are familiar with the argument that in India, at least since Independence, generic differentiation has been extremely weak and its possibilities overwhelmed by the dominance of the ‘social’ genre. Even where such differentiation seems to exist, it is as if differences in costuming and setting have been employed to slap on weak genre facades to the self-same ‘social’. Indian cinema had no pure beginning from film technology in a neutral state of unlimited potential, but developed out of a cinematic apparatus which was already in formation, if not well formed. This involved a transfer of culture/ideology inseparable from the transfer of technology. Hollywood genres have thus served as models for the development of Indian cinema from very early times. It is to this

history of a relation of dependence followed by intermittent efforts at reinvention that I wish to draw attention. The attempt to find entirely indigenous sources for Indian film form has not been very successful. This is not surprising, given the dubious psychological assumptions on which such hopes were founded. Since India is a modern nation state that rose up from a colonial territory, it is doubtful (and in any case hardly desirable) that there should be an Indian essence preceding India’s existence. That there was the legacy of history, the ruins and mental traces of past glories and disgraces, is beyond doubt. The cinematic apparatus was subject to local modes of use and there have been, from the beginning, attempts to mix and match whose rationale is of cultural-historical interest, but not to be taken simply as evidence of cultural self-expression. The role of the early Hollywood genres, in particular the action films and socials, has been crucial in this respect, because they too were part of ready-to-hand cultural resources out of which something new had to be forged. Thus, by genre here is meant a combination of what comes from the West as part of the cinematic apparatus package, as well as what was available in the popular theatre and literature, from which the industry drew freely. As film historians have noted, the early decades of Indian cinema, right up to the 1940s, were dominated by a set of genres and their combinations: the mythological in the first instance, then the costume film or ‘historical’, the stunt and action films and the devotional, in addition to the social, which in that period was primarily concerned with issues of social reform and critique as well as giving expression to anxieties about national cultural identity (Bhaumik 2001; Vasudevan 2010: 103–4). In retrospect, this period appears to have been one of reasonably stable genres. More importantly, all these can without exception be characterised as found genres: they are adopted, more or less ready-made, from the popular stage, or from Hollywood. But in the 1950s, to follow Vasudevan’s account further, ‘the industry reformulated genre and audience appeal’, leading to ‘the induction of the sensational attractions of action, spectacle, and dance into the social film’ (2010: 104). Valentina Vitali (2007) presents a sharply contrastive view of the transition to the 1950s, which she sees as a period of disappearance of the action film and its valorisation of physicality and the concomitant triumph of a middle class–oriented grand spectacle, which suppressed physicality in the service of spiritually elevating tales of national allegiance. This was, even in Vitali’s account, a transitional repression which was lifted by the 1960s. While they are vastly divergent propositions, both accounts point to a change involving introduction or elimination of attractions coinciding with the rise of a new nation state. In any case, I want to draw attention to what seems to be common to these and other accounts of the transition into the first decade of Indian independence and after: a new cinema, product of bricolage, of genre mixing, is coming into existence. The social, a genre label that the industry regarded as ‘quite superficial’ and did not do justice to most of the films to which it was applied (Vasudevan 2010: 104), seems to have

arisen as a sort of compromise formation with a high degree of formal variability. For Indian film studies, an important question has been why such a diverse body of films remained generically undifferentiated and continued to be classified as ‘social’. Of course, here we must not lose sight of the fact that the disappearance or marginalisation of early film genres, especially those set in historical, mythological or fantasy spaces, distanced both in time and space is not specific to India. While the decline of costume films happened much later in India than in Hollywood, the classical stage melodrama has continued to provide content to Indian popular cinema right up to the present. This last fact is an important clue to the global distribution of aesthetic sensibilities along a faultline that divides a large part of the world where affect remains entangled in the realm of necessity, from societies which have wrested a significant degree of freedom from necessity and have even, by some accounts, entered a phase of ‘reflexive modernization’ (Beck 1992). While this constitutes a world historical difference, in both spheres cinema’s communal or at any rate public function, its vocation as the legatee of the theatre’s social role is everywhere tied to contemporary visual and thematic content. In that sense, the dominance of the ‘social’ genre merely participates in the dominance of an aesthetic of contemporaneity, which is a worldwide phenomenon. Of the two mutually opposed trends in cinema the world over, for which we can employ the terms ‘filmas-writing’ and ‘film-as-performance’, the latter has served the communal function in all societies where it has taken root. The absence of generic differentiation within this overall contemporary framework and the persistence of the classical melodrama have to do with socio-economic factors such as the degree of capitalist penetration which we need not go into here. Instead, what will interest us in what follows is the evidence of a fabricatory energy that led to the development of new tendencies within the social and other genres. There is evidence of the soldering together of available genre parts to make something that works in new ways to produce cultural meaning for a new era. It is worth reiterating here that the relation between popular text and social context is at best indirect and that it is only at the level of form that we may hope to grasp the ideological significance of Indian film cultures. Given the ready-made content and character types with which the popular cinema works, it is in such efforts at fabricating new forms out of old ones that the cultural work of historical importance may be happening. Such, in any case, is the premise behind this preliminary exercise in inventory and description. One way of mixing genres is discussed by Lalitha Gopalan (2002) in her analysis of J. P. Dutta’s 1989 film Hathyar. There, it is a question of shifting from one generic ambience to another in the service of a thematic drift that involves exploitation of the interval. This ‘promiscuous relationship’ with two genres is seen by Gopalan ‘as a means to undermining our anticipation of a narrative built around intervals’ (2002: 90). Gopalan also uses the term ‘genre mixing’ to refer to the mixing of Western genre elements with ‘a series of local

features’ (2002: 22). Another instance that is similar though, perhaps, with an entirely different cultural significance is the tendency, noted by S. V. Srinivas, for certain Telugu films (in particular those featuring the star Venkatesh) to begin in a modern, urban setting with no suggestions of any anchoring in the past or in other spaces, and after the interval, move back into the genre spaces of the rural melodrama with which the star is associated. In such cases, a strong and well-established link between star and genre (rural melodrama), and a stable audience formation around them, would seem to be coming under the pressure of contemporary social change. In a recent film, Aadavari Matalaku Ardhale Verule (2007), the first segment revolves around IT workers, first in Hyderabad and then in Sydney, and seems to successfully rehabilitate the star Venkatesh in multiplex-style genre space such as the IT industry and urban spaces associated with it, along with his office supervisor-heroine (Trisha). The post-interval segment, however, takes them both back into the rural rich farmer milieu with its property-related intrigues, familiar to Venkatesh fans, where the star’s muscular persona can be brought into play. Genre worlds are forced into a marriage articulated, as Gopalan noted, by the interval. This repetitive combination seems to indicate precisely a desire for new generic values that is abandoned time and again in favour of more familiar pleasures.3 These are some of the interesting instances from relatively recent periods of Indian film history where genre mixing may be shown to have an ideological significance.4 The practice bears witness at the very least to a struggle for meaning that must be waged by means of assemblage rather than invention. What I wish to take up in the following are three instances of genre mixing from the 1950s, a time of excitement and anticipation of change on all fronts in the subcontinent. I hope to establish through these instances the activity of fabricatory energies, which have brought new generic contraptions into existence, whose difference from the original forms is culturally significant.

Socialising the mythological Being highly valued by Europe, India’s civilisational heritage also became dear to India’s colonised elite. Among the effects of this in postcolonial thinking is the tendency to see the operation of rasa theory and the unconscious influence of epics and puranas on the Indian creative mind. Thus, not only is the presence of the mythological genre in Indian cinema regarded as of decisive cultural significance, even the social films are considered merely mythologicals in disguise. But if, in a spirit of contemporaneity, we ignore the command of the (post)colonial superego (‘Be different, unique, totally unlike the West!’) and assume a radically synchronic (hence historical) field of investigation as our locus, a new history written from the perspective of the present, a periodisation of the history of the Indian mythological film genre

immanent to film history becomes possible. In 1957, Vijaya Productions released Maya Bazaar, a mythological comedy based on a popular stage play, better known to audiences until then by the title Sasirekha Parinayam.5 The story is a Mahabharata spin-off extending the internecine conflict of the epic to a competition between the warring cousins for a marriage alliance with Balarama, who is tricked into an alliance with the Kauravas by Sakuni, their evil uncle. The rest of the plot revolves around the efforts of Ghatotkacha, Bhima’s son by the forest-dwelling Hidimba, and Krishna, the silent abettor, to break the alliance and get Sasirekha married to Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu who, according to South Indian kinship rules, has the first right of refusal as it were for Sasirekha’s hand, being the son of Subhadra, sister to Krishna and Balarama. The Maya Bazaar (Market of Illusions) of the title is a distraction conjured by Ghatotkacha’s accomplices to keep the Kaurava security guards occupied while they disrupt the marriage preparations – it is a supermarket with shops selling shining brass utensils, fashionable footwear, helmets for soldiers and other consumer goods. Several screen versions in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu beginning in the 1930s all the way to the 1990s are recorded in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. It would have been interesting to see how the stage versions and the early screen versions dealt with the episode of market consumerism, and indeed whether and how many of them even featured this narratively unimportant comedy scene. However, since none of these is readily available, I will content myself with describing generic features which are traceable to the social genre in Telugu cinema, which by the mid-1950s had made impressive strides and provided Maya Bazaar with its winning star cast. By the mid-1950s, when Maya Bazaar was in the making, the Telugu social had established itself and was home to the star careers of N. T. Rama Rao (NTR), A. Nageswara Rao, Savitri, Sowcar Janaki, Bhanumathi and others, along with character actors and comedians like Jaggaiah, Gummadi, S. V. Ranga Rao, Relangi, Ramana Reddy and Suryakantham. As I have argued elsewhere, the Telugu film industry, like others in the South, went through a period during which actors’ reputations were tied to a still vibrant theatre. It was in the 1950s that the first full-fledged movie star constellation emerged in the South Indian industries (Prasad 1999). Among the big Telugu socials of the 1950s, in which this ensemble features repeatedly, are the following: Shavukaru (1950); Samsaram (1950); Palletooru (1952); Pellichesi Choodu (1952); Devadasu (1953); Ardhangi (1955); Missamma (1955); Rojulu Marayi (1955); Bhagyarekha (1957); Appuchesi Pappukoodu (1958). In addition, there were the so-called folklore films, which gave NTR’s career a huge boost in these formative years, notably Malleeswari (1951) and Patalabhairavi (1951). The first striking feature of Maya Bazaar then is that it is a ‘multistarrer’, featuring practically all the big names in the Telugu film industry at the time, including the character artists and comedy actors. The mythological revival was to a significant extent dependent upon this borrowing of star value from the social and folklore

genres. But more was required if this genre was to break out of the marginal position to which it had been relegated by the then dominant social genre and break into the mainstream as a viable big budget proposition. One can speculate about the reasons for Vijaya choosing to film a popular stage mythological at this point. Are there socio-cultural factors at work here? Undoubtedly! But it is redundant to invoke such factors simply because they are already required to explain the popularity of the stage play. There is no mystery here to be unravelled. What is essential is the film industry’s relation to the popular theatre, a relation of dependence turning into competition which, by the end of the 1950s, would be resolved in cinema’s favour. What was historically significant was the film industry’s ability to enhance the pleasures of the mythological beyond its religious content and its comedy interludes, and thereby wean audiences away from the theatre. Star value and narrative and spatial features of the social genre were the two new elements that Vijaya introduced into the mythological. If we compare the Telugu mythologicals of the 1950s and 1960s with a much later film like Jai Santoshi Maa (1975), the difference will become clearer. The latter film belongs in the ‘devotional’ genre, which combines mythological and contemporary social worlds into a cosmic unity. It was a low-budget film with no stars. It turned out, in the end, to be part of a socio-religious event, giving rise to a minor goddess cult. Maya Bazaar, on the other hand, mobilised all the resources at a powerful studio’s disposal to create a spectacle in which there is little attempt to invoke piety, the devotional’s staple affect. A strictly ideological reading of this development would seek to explain it as a revival of interest in the mythological deriving from this or that social cause. But it is more pertinent to see it as an event in the history of cultural capitalist enterprise engaged in the effort to expand its market. What is new here is not the ideological work (which the theatre was already undertaking) but its capitalisation, enabled by the successes achieved with the social and costume films. The mythological genre had a difficult time imagining the life world of its characters. As critics have pointed out, Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings provided some help in visualising the world of gods and demigods (Rajadhyaksha 1987). But these only contributed to the representation of a nondescript idea of royal splendour, flattened by the lingering theatrical influence, often reduced to mere painted backdrops. The world of the ancients as visualised in early mythologicals lacked volume, a sense of lived space. As long as their divine and semidivine status was being foregrounded in narratives steeped in piety, the flat backdrops and halls populated with gilded columns were enough to convey a minimal sense of space. But in the 1950s, the big studios of Madras (Chennai) decided to bring the characters closer home, to give them a contemporary habitation. Thus, you could say that in the effort to refashion the mythological for modern times, the studios imported elements from the social into the genre. But it could also be said with equal plausibility that having firmed up the stable features of the social genre, the studios found that they were able to use the knowledge gained in this process

to refurbish and revivify an inert genre like the mythological and infuse it with new life. The former reading would be broadly culturalist, retaining the idea that a cultural predilection finds new ways of expressing itself, while the latter reading endows the industry with a greater degree of initiative and locates the new version of the genre within a production logic specific to the film industry. It may not be an insignificant fact that such a revival of the genre should be inaugurated by a mixed genre film, a comedy mythological. Although subsequently many serious mythologicals were made, a set of features from the social that were introduced into the genre in Maya Bazaar continued to be employed in them. Let us inventory some of these elements. At the level of plotting, the comedy track was skilfully woven into the mythic narrative; thus, in Maya Bazaar, the popular comedy actor Relangi plays the role of Lakshmanakumara (Duryodhana’s son and Sasirekha’s unwanted suitor) which could just as easily have been rendered with villainous features. Most subsequent mythologicals found some way or other to include a comedy track. The climactic free-for-all fight scene also occurs occasionally. The key elements, however, are domestic space and the theatrical performance. The latter was a standard feature of the Telugu social throughout the 1950s. Stage performances were abruptly introduced into the image track, often with little or no diegetic motivation. It was a way of acknowledging theatre, both maintaining the historical link with the stage and achieving distance from it. It was as if cinema could only free itself from the stage by placing the camera in the auditorium as spectator of theatrical performance. In the process, the stage is redefined as a space for fantasy projections. In Maya Bazaar, an audience, including Krishna, watches a dance drama performed on a proscenium stage. It is Krishna’s own childhood that is the theme of the play. In the middle of the performance, Krishna is distracted by Draupadi’s call for help from the scene of her disrobing – shown in a corner of the screen – and performs his miracle in a trance-like state, his right hand raised in benediction. When the trance ends, the rest of the audience anxiously inquire after his health; contrary to expectations, the divine figure seems physically affected by the effort. This space, the private auditorium, is an example of the kind of spatial infusion that the industry effected on the mythological genre in this decade. The lives of the pouranic characters acquire social volume, as they sit and converse in drawing rooms on sofas around a centre table, with framed paintings decorating the walls. In Lava-Kusa (1963), a later film, Rama and Sita, in the privacy of their chambers, contemplate a painting depicting their days in the forest and indulge in nostalgia. In yet another film, a pile of miniature-sized painted portraits of young men is given to the heroine for selecting a groom. In addition, the epic characters are given a distinctly middle class profile. In Maya Bazaar, Balarama’s wife refuses a favour from the groom’s party, accepting which might connote social inferiority, with the words ‘Manakem thakkuva?’, a familiar expression asserting equality of rank, still current in modern Telugu. Krishna himself, responding to Balarama’s perplexity about the bride’s odd

behaviour, explains, ‘Ee kalam pillalu anthele annayya’ (‘Girls these days are like that, brother’). Thus, a combination of genre features from the social are imported, enabling mythological tales to be fitted into the social format, and rendering the characters familiar by endowing them with spatial and affective features associated with the aristocratic/middle class world of the social genre. The revival of the mythological in the late 1950s with this film can thus be seen as the result of a consolidation of a middle class audience with a consumerist outlook, which at that time was still the audience profile that really mattered to the industry. The mythological had been associated throughout its early history with a credulous audience of pious Indians. It is clear that, in the 1950s, the middle class was lured to this genre by recasting the entire pouranic metropolis and its inhabitants as a modern urban bourgeoisie.6

Hindi film or Punjabi social? The Bengali film Sabar Upare (1955), one of the Uttam Kumar–Suchitra Sen series from the 1950s, tells the story of a young law graduate who finds out from his mother that his father, whom he believed to be dead, is serving a life sentence in a small town prison for a crime he did not commit. Determined to find out the truth, he leaves for Krishnanagar where, with the help of Suchitra Sen, he uncovers the truth behind the event and secures his father’s release. The trap for his father was laid by the actual murderer and his lawyer, with the help of a disreputable widow who bears false witness. Uttam Kumar meets this lady and discovers her complicity. Her role in the film is a minor one of an accomplice whose testimony is important for solving the murder. In Kala Pani (1958), the Hindi film based on Sabar Upare, the widow is replaced by a tawaif (courtesan), thereby clearing space within the narrative for a parallel narrative in which a romance builds up between the hero and the tawaif. This entire addition, intercut with the developments in the main plot, is treated as a plot hatched by the hero to get a letter in her possession which will prove his father’s innocence. She, a scheming seductress, proves vulnerable to romantic feelings and falls for the hero. The romantic hero’s irresistible charms are thus introduced, an extra-thematic factor materialised in Dev Anand’s star persona, developed from Hollywood models. Poetry is the enabling ingredient. Here, we have a case of an entire segment that is anchored in the autonomous literary discourse of Urdu poetry (of which one of the comedy team with whom the hero shares lodgings is a practitioner) and includes song, dance and the visual elaboration of the generic space of the kotha (courtesan’s salon). A segment of this type, while retaining the quality of a series of inserted attractions, including music, romance and comedy, also imparts to the entire film an atmosphere, a defining social environment. When considered alongside those changes which involve eliminating the aspirational content of the middle class narrative of Sabar Upare (such as the

mother’s heroic sacrifices for the son’s legal education), these features ground it in what is arguably a Punjabi or generally North Indian urban public space combined with Hindu domesticity. In addition, a song sequence in folk musicians’ disguise, an early example of the standard preclimax song in disguise which was a standard feature of popular cinema through the 1960s and 1970s, is clearly borrowed from the folklore/costume film genre. While in Maya Bazaar the mode of mixing was akin to an infusion, here it is a question of ‘fitting’ the Bengali social’s textual body with a number of extraneous elements. These accommodations then transform the middle class social into a variant of the romance genre in modern dress. Kaushik Bhaumik, in his historical account of the Bombay film industry, has shown not only the importance of the Punjab market for the Bombay film, resulting by the late 1930s in ‘orienting its production strategies towards regional tastes’, and the role of acting, singing and writing talent from Lahore, but also the determining role of the language situation in Punjab in the evolution of Hindi film form (2001: 121; see also Chapter 5, especially 135–41). The loss of thematic and iconic integrity that the Bengali ‘social’ genre undergoes in the hands of the Bombay film industry has many causes. The evidence that this film offers can, of course, be taken to confirm the kind of judgment that Satyajit Ray had passed on Hindi cinema, commenting on its lack of social specificity. On the other hand, it would also appear to hint at the possibility that in this manner, a social specificity – centred around the Urdudominated public life of North-Western India – is here inscribing itself onto the Bengali social. The result was the creation of a new form which, in spite of the ‘nationalisation’ of the Hindi film industry in Bombay, would henceforth and for a long time retain these regional features. What is quite unique about this evolving Hindi film form is the constitutive contrast between its key components: the repressed and high moral character of its thematic content, the oftremarked Punjabi-Hindu character of its social world and the Urdu diction which often conveyed subjective and, more specifically, erotic dispositions out of character with the social world depicted. I do not know enough to say whether this duality reflects the state of affairs in North Indian urban contexts of language use, but there seems to be a story here waiting to be told about the circulation of popular genre fiction and perhaps also film in a northern modern urban culture. There are indications that older linguistic and cultural forms could only survive on a national platform by parasitically invading the social and giving it a specific cultural colouring.7 If at first glance we define the social as a form without the hybridising elements drawn from other genres (the kotha, the gangster’s den, the ‘club dance’ etc.), it appeared in the Hindi film industry by courtesy of the Bengali and ‘Madrasi’ film-makers,8 with the Muslim social remaining the only socially coherent variant to be based in North Indian milieux. But language remains salient to the expanded hybrid version of the social, with literary diction generating significant visual motifs such as the garden as the space of romance. If this is the case, then perhaps only some costume changes (women in saris) and domestic spaces (pooja room) remain to distinguish the ‘Hindu’ from the ‘Muslim’ social. As Bhaskar

and Allen (2009) have argued, the Muslim social’s survival depended on an increasing recourse to the distinction assured by nawabi iconography, further underlining a certain redundancy involved in this bifurcation.9 In any case, the seismic rumblings caused by the meeting of different types of talent and genre preferences from Lahore, Calcutta, Pune and Madras (to mention only the metropolitan centres) in the Bombay industry and the resulting reformations around which the industry stabilised in the 1950s are a matter of decisive importance to the history of Indian film form.

Romance and responsible government I will conclude this exploration with one more instance of such tectonic activity around film form. Here, again, it is a question of one of the multiple guises of the social. In social films before the 1950s, romantic scenes between young couples were attractions inserted into family melodrama. This trend continues in South Indian industries for much longer – for Hindi, see films like Bari Bahen (1949) and Kundan (1955). A typical southern film of this kind is Schoolmaster (1958). It is the story of a traditional schoolteacher’s family breaking up due to the children’s selfishness accentuated by modern social pressures. A college romance leading to marriage and estrangement from the family is the occasion for the song and dance diversion staged in the proverbial garden. Patriarchal concerns about the stability of the joint family provided the narrative framework, within which such attractions could be inserted as furtive activities of young people to which often only the audience was admitted. Gradually, however, the film text wrests more and more time away from these familial concerns and expands the time of romance, the process aided as we have seen by the literary resources of Urdu. (The delay in introduction of such changes in South Indian cinema could be attributed to the absence of such resources, which compels the industry to adopt the visual strategies of Hindi cinema, and then invent a linguistic register of romance to go with it.)10 In the process, however, the romantic hero has also been transformed into an action hero, who will show his prowess when the time comes to defend the existing social order against threats from evil forces. The social in its restricted form clearly has no place for such a figure, insofar as the family melodrama that is its core content is peopled by characters subject to fate and chance, moral failing and recovery. This core content is still present in the hybrid social that, flowering in the 1950s, soon becomes the emblematic form of popular Indian cinema. But its difference is the result precisely of a genre mixing that transposes the romance hero of the action film (in its various forms such as folklore, Ruritanian romance, costume drama) and the political space in which his actions are staged (a kingdom to be protected, a princess to be saved) onto the social. The helpless characters of classical melodrama are supplemented by the superhuman abilities of the folklore hero. It is in this manner that the social acquires that political

dimension, consisting of the narrative and spectacular function of absolute power, which would become more and more pronounced in the southern industries, leading to the rise of film-star politicians. The construction of this form of the social as a national form, with the romance segment (and other spaces like the court room) expanding as far as the Urdu lyric and Urdu public discourse allowed, and the stunt films providing a political framework derived from fable and romance narrative, is a historic act of cultural invention effected by many hands and reflecting, at this formal level, an ideological solution to the problem of political inexistence;11 and the fugitive activity of the modern which, unassisted by social transformation, functions as a fantasy inseparable from utopian political desire.

Conclusion I have considered three instances of ideological reform effected through the practice of genre mixing. The social features in all of them. While in the first instance its resources are used to revive a genre, in the other two instances, what we get is evidence of the construction of different varieties of the social, which could also be described as different compromise formations arising from the irresolvable contradictions of Indian socio-political life. What is the nature of the necessity that leads to the induction of the absolutist features of the folkaction hero and attractions deriving from Urdu literary sources into the ‘social’? Whatever the answer to that question, it is clear that the response of the industry to that necessity was forged from out of its own accumulated resources, its formal capital. If this is true, I believe it poses a formidable challenge to our modes of cultural analysis. Let me briefly return to the question of found genres. I think it is possible to posit a direct correlation between the state of formal subsumption characteristic of Indian society until a decade or so ago12 and the reliance upon found genres (or the absence of cinema-specific genres until now) that marks the cinema of that period. What remained unavailable to popular cinema was a cognitive relation to the social substance which might have paved the way for the advent of new genres. It is only when the capitalist organisation of society becomes entrenched does the aesthetic realm begin to pose cognitive questions of reality. What was achieved through fabrication was an adequation of filmic representation to the enthusiasms of the spectator, thus making possible gratifications which refer to social reality only by indirection, through formal characteristics.

Notes 1 A part of this article was first presented at the conference on ‘Indian Cinema in the 1950s’ at the Nehru Memorial

Museum and Library, New Delhi, November 2009, and later published in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2(1) (2011): 69–81. Copyright 2011 © Screen South Asia Trust. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi. I thank Ravi Vasudevan and the BioScope referee for their valuable comments and permission to reprint it here. 2 For a concise introduction to the scholarship on genre in Hollywood, see Chapters 1 and 2 of Steve Neale’s Genre and Hollywood. In dealing with genre in the Indian context, the Hollywood instance is of great importance as the source of some genres as well as isolated generic elements. The mythological/devotional and the dacoit films are perhaps the only genres developed indigenously, although these too might have had some Hollywood models. Altman makes a distinction between film genres and genre film (cited in Neale: 27), of which Neale develops an improved version – generically marked film versus generically modeled film (Neale: 28) – which has limited relevance to the Indian industry, which developed the social as a sort of hold-all genre. The work of fabrication that I am dealing with here relates to films that may well be described as ‘generically marked’ in a strong sense, except that they are also often composed almost entirely of generically modeled segments. They are a mixed bag of genre elements, and it is in the fitting of elements from one genre to another and developing new genre models that these films do the kind of culturalhistorical work that is our concern here. 3 The segmentary world of the average IT worker, with a rural background and education, further training in the city funded by agricultural incomes via dowry and other informal financial instruments, and work abroad facilitated by body shops, is uncannily reflected in this generic blend (see Xing Biao 2007 and also Prasad 2009). 4 For other examples of such ideological work pitting genres against each other in a war of position, see Prasad 1998: Chapter 9. 5 The heroine and consequently the film versions go by other names too, such as Surekha Parinayam and Vatsala Haran (see Rajadhyaksha and Willeman: 618). 6 In this way, the mythological is confirmed as the ‘Brahmin’ among the Indian genres, as Sudhir Kakar observed. 7 At a conference organised by the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, on ‘Cinema and Society: Interplay of Contexts’, 4–5 September 2004, Javed Akhtar referred to the popularity of European popular fiction in translation among the Urdu-reading public and the origins of Nasir Hussain’s oft-repeated romantic comedy formula in these fictions. Bhaumik provides detailed evidence of the Urdu-dominated public world of urban Punjab in the 1930s. 8 Known in popular parlance as ‘story films’, these catered to urban middle class taste and were considered especially attractive to women audiences. 9 After a few films of the 1940s, representations of Muslim middle class and working class life ‘more or less disappeared from the genre … until it resurfaced much later, in the New Wave’. The Muslim social of the interim was ‘infused with social and cultural forms and values of the elite, which were so central to the Muslim Historical and the Muslim Courtesan film’ (Bhaskar and Allen: 66–7). 10 The compulsion arises from the fact that the cinematic apparatus as received from the West is already fitted with the romance plot, as D. R. Nagaraj (2006) pointed out. The local industry cannot, or does not wish to, conceive a cinema without it. This type of romance is different from the courtly variant drawn from Urdu culture. 11 By political inexistence, I mean a state of being, experienced by the vast majority of Indians, of inclusion in a nation state without the necessary regrounding or convocation that alone can guarantee political existence. See also Prasad

(1999). 12 For the argument about formal subsumption, see Prasad (1998).

References Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE Publications. Bhaskar, Ira and Richard Allen. 2009. Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. Delhi: Tulika. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2001. ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Oxford. Gopalan, Lalitha. 2002. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI. Nagaraj, D. R. 2006. ‘The Comic Collapse of Authority: An Essay on the Fears of the Public Spectator’, in Ashish Nandy and Vinay Lal (eds), Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema, pp. 87–121. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge. Prasad, M. Madhava. 2009. ‘Body Shops: Where Cultures Meet’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 10(2): 315–19. ———. 1999. ‘Cine-politics: On the Political Significance of the Cinema in South India’, Journal of the Moving Image, 1: 37– 52. ———. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 1987. ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14–15: 47–78. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen. 1999. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Rosie. 1985. ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity’, Screen, 26(3–4): 116–31. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2010. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. Delhi: Permanent Black. Vitali, Valentina. 2007. Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian Labour System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

4 What do the villains have? Indian cinema’s villains in the 1970s Hariprasad Athanickal

Apart from being the most dominant cinema of India in terms of the revenue it generates, Bombay cinema, or the cinema produced in Hindi to be precise, has always projected a national mandate. In other words, a lot of contemporary issues ranging from independence, nation-building, patriotism and unemployment to disillusionment with the way the dream of the nation turned out have made way both as representation and referent into Hindi cinema.1 Taking cues from the unhappiness and disillusionment in the society at large, evoked by the realisation that the promise during the time of independence has stayed just a promise and rampant unemployment among the youth, Hindi cinema in the 1970s started creating heroes who have been characteristically referred to as the ‘angry young men’.2 This coincided, at the same time, with the passing of a generation of romantic heroes (like Dilip Kumar and Sunil Dutt) and an emergence of a new generation of actors (like Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmedra) who did not easily fit with the mould of a romantic hero. Albeit the notion of the romantic hero and an inward looking cinema of an extremely personal and melancholic kind like that of Devdas (1936; 1955) and Andaz (1949) made way for an inclusive social cinema with more allegoric or representative characters, the embryonic form of which, though, could be seen even earlier in films like Mother India (1957) and Do Bigha Zameen (1953). However, the cinema of the 1970s, especially the ones with the angry young man in the central role, fit the characteristics of the social genre in a peculiarly immediate way, in terms of its impact on the audience making it popular and its impact lasting at the same time. While the romantic heroes in Hindi cinema were on the wane, along with the films centred on the angry young men, there emerged newer kinds of villains in the 1970s. The claim here is not that there were no villains in Hindi cinema before the 1970s; however, the villains in the 1970s were well developed in all aspects. While the angry men fought against the system, the rotten system was represented and given a human form through the villains. Hence, all popular films of the decade also had very significant villainous characters immortalised by actors like Pran (about 29 films in the 1970s alone), Prem Chopra (about 65 films) and Amjad

Khan (about 45 films). However, the attempt in this chapter is not to investigate the career of these individual actors. On the one hand, it is to evaluate the notions of the classificatory principles in the constitution of these characters and, on the other, to engage with heroism in general as a precondition to the category I am interested to explore in the cinema of the 1970s. While the heroes proclaim that they could be the custodians of culture and morality – in Deewar (1975) the hero proclaims, ‘[…] mere paas maa hain’ (‘I have my mother with me’)3 – the villains are most often found at the other end of the spectrum. It would be safe to say that with the negative shades dominating the characterisation of many of the heroes of the period – like that of Amitabh in Deewar – the archetypal distinction between the hero and the villain slowly started disappearing. In spite of that, the villains are located at the periphery of cinema’s accepted moral milieu and are at loggerheads with the law of the land. They happen to be dacoits, underworld dons and other petty criminals. I wish to locate these villains in the cultural and historical contexts of both the cinema as well as the contemporary discourse of state and morality in this chapter. Beyond the quintessentially marked dialogues and stylised acting by the likes of Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh in Sholay (1975), Prem Chopra in Bobby (1973) and Pran in Don (1978), the chapter tries to explore the material existence of these villains. Hence, the chapter strives to posit the dilemma within the films of this period in a close analysis of the hero’s boasting of the possession of the mother culturally and, as a counterpoint, the material existence of the villain. The first aspect I would like to discuss pertains to the physical and material attributes of the villains. Or more directly and plainly, I would like to dwell on the following question: What do the villains possess? A logical and related question could be where do they come from or what is their social, historical and political location? At this juncture, as an academic, one also seriously begins to think why there were no serious studies on the villains and why was it that the heroes received all the attention while it is the combination of both that raised the overall impact of the film.4 I surmise that attempt to answer these questions would provide interesting insights into a hitherto unchartered area and that would make our viewing of Hindi Cinema in general and the 1970s cinema in particular more challenging, complete and balanced. Nevertheless, any attempt of this ilk will have to necessarily engage with the peculiar nature of the generic organisation of Hindi cinema, too. To that effect, an understanding of the development of the genres like ‘social’, ‘melodrama’ and ‘romance’ will have to be addressed. Since the hero is always pitted against the villain in Hindi cinema, one needs to also understand what constitutes the hero. Star studies as part of film studies has given rise to a lot of interesting readings of the heroes. The popular cinema as a system and a commercial endeavour has to have identifiable personas for an overall impact of the film. Star system as part of the discourse in making cinema popular has used the hero, the protagonist, or the central figure in the narrative as a trope to this end. In this perspective, cinema to become a

popular medium is a prerequisite to have heroes, as a human form of the values that the cinema proposes to project. If we look at the history of Indian cinema, from the perspective of the hero, it is easy to see that there are several kinds of heroes and that the constitution of the hero has evolved through a series of development. I would argue that the development of this system was effected through three significant transformations in this regard. These can be listed, though their appearance is not in any chronological order: (1) the fighter, (2) the romantic hero and (3) the good fellow. While the fighter is the one who opposes the ills in the society (like in the case of Sivaji Ganesan in Parasakthi 1952), the romantic hero (like Dilip Kumar in Andaz) winning the hearts of women or the heroine and the other characters who need to give sanction to the union of the two and more importantly the audience. In the third kind (immortalised by Raj Kapoor in many of his films), however, patriotism comes up along with several other aspects like humour, poverty and romantic love. Instead of delving deeper into these categorisations and discussing them individually, it would be important to note that in several of the Hindi films in the 1970s these three kinds of qualities could be attributed to the same character. Hence, this can be said to be overlapping, and sometimes overplaying, one aspect over the other. Arguably, it is in the 1970s that, for the first time in Hindi cinema, the hero has started showing negative shades as well.5 It is as if the film industry has an unwritten rule of thumb or a sneaky suspicion that only if an actor cuts it with the romantic hero’s role that he could be considered a star.6 It might also be considered as a conventional wisdom derived from the examples through history. In the larger imaginary of Indian cinema, there is also the matter that romance is pitted as modern idealism against the backdrop of raw traditionalism. In simple terms, then, the role of the romantic hero successfully played by an actor could be the commencement of his stardom. In a story where the romantic hero achieves his goals, as is expected, the one who opposes the seemingly logical unison of the couple becomes the villain. In other words, while the audience expect the couple to unite, there is always an awkward and unexpected hindrance. This villain could provide a serious opposition to the hero in his endeavours and the clash between the two provide a gripping spectacle for the audience. This opposition plays out, on the one hand, as a clash of interests culminating at a certain critical juncture in the narrative inevitably resulting in a physical duel; and on the other, in terms of a vendetta setting out to mark a personal agenda, so much so that if the villain does not have such an agenda, the hero would have no reason to fight the villain. The villain’s cause in the romantic film has to be necessarily situated in this personalised fabric and oppositional logic. However, the existence of the conflict between the hero and the villain in the crudest structural terms, under the larger exegesis of the patriarchal system, does not have the dimensions that the same conflict has in the Indian genre of ‘social’ films. Having said that, given the peculiar generic organisation of Hindi cinema, the genre of romance is always inevitably coupled with ‘melodrama’ and the ‘social’.7 As a consequence, the aforesaid conflict cannot be understood as a distinctive element

of a particular genre alone. In order for us to understand the villain and the way the conflictual relationship of the hero and the villain plays out, we might need to engage with the way in which Indian cinema per se has located its hero. It would be safe to say that the hero who is a fighter is typical of Indian cinema across the regional languages, especially in the ‘mass’ and ‘crowd’ films. There is, however, a slight difference between this category and that of the action hero that we find a lot in the Hong Kong films and the Hollywood. In that sense, the fight does not have to be taken in literal terms in the fighter hero films. Moreover, it is easier to locate the villain in the films where we have a fighter hero. But, who exactly is this fighter hero and what does he fight for or against. To put it simply, the fighter hero stands for larger good in the society, and that very fact pits him squarely opposite the villain. The fact that the villain has to be against the very moral values that the hero upholds makes it easier for us to come to terms with the constitution of villains in these films. Suffice to say that in these kinds of films, the equation between the hero and the villain is always constituted within a direct oppositional logic. As described by Yves Thoraval, the heroes (or heroines) are usually ‘brutes but dispensers of justice in conflict with the “villains” of the world of crime and corruption of the cities, or with the henchmen of some feudal rural lords or tormentors of poor peasants’ (2000: 120). To make this argument clear, a parallel or a contrast could be derived from classical Hollywood cinema, especially from the Hitchcock ones like Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958). In the suspense variety of films that Alfred Hitchcock mastered, there is no frontal oppositional logic as in Hindi or Indian cinema; on the contrary, the logic works with the audience’s conviction of who the hero is or a villain is. In the case of a Hollywood film, the audience’s conviction is being constantly challenged to that crucial moment of realisation or epiphany where the loose ends of the whole plot are revealed to them. In doing so, some of these films venture into exploring the shades of grey between the concretised black and white of characterisation. By extending the same logic, classical Hollywood’s positioning of the relationship between the film and its audience could also be discussed. In both cases, namely Hindi cinema and the Hollywood, the manipulation of the audience to believing the story is the ultimate aim. However, Hollywood does not take the intelligence of the audience for granted. By misleading them, and making them aware after a period of their own inability to identify the misdirection that the unravelling of the story has offered, they are led to a kind of enjoyment, while they ruefully accept their newfound knowledge of the identity of the actual villain. Hindi cinema’s positioning of the hero and the villain vis-à-vis the good and evil cannot be explained only in terms of an easily foregrounded conflictual relationship, too. More so, since the way in which cinema wants its audience to react to this positioning depends a lot on the popularity of the film itself. What is clear to see, however, is that Hindi cinema pushes its audience to choose either of these two positions and leaves no other possibility to settle on. In

that sense, Hindi cinema does take the audience for granted. That the audience would only want either of the two options provided to them or that they will only choose one option from the two provided where they will psychologically align with the good and the concretised form of which is the hero is the pretext on which Hindi cinema is built. Therefore, there was this need for the hero to be the epitome of all virtues. Hence, the fighter hero, most often, does not have to elaborate on his convictions, methods and the logic underwriting his existence. We see a lot of villains opposing these fighter heroes, too. But the villain does not necessarily have to be a rounded character. In an interview, Prem Chopra claims that the roles of the villains are ‘better written and are not just about having menacing laughs and feisty one-liners’ (2014). He elaborates, previously there were heroes and villains; the former was all about chocolate boy looks, good behaviour while the latter was all about negativity. Now-a-days the villains that we see in films are very layered. They have a back story as to why they became villain and are very interesting. (2014) As mentioned earlier, there were a lot of films in the 1970s Hindi cinema where the actors, such as Prem Chopra and Pran, who were famous for donning the roles of villains, acted out the same oppositional conundrum, although it would be inappropriate to say that in all these films they have acted only as villains. Though they have also acted in character roles, especially later in their career, they were definitely typecast during the 1970s. It is almost a given that the screen persona of a hero or for that matter even the villain is a sum total of the many roles she/he might have played in earlier films. A fact we should not overlook is that many of these actors who played the roles of the villains later on donned the roles of comic characters in an apparent role reversal, especially when the crude binary positioning of the hero-villain era gave way to more amorphous and layered arrangement of these categories.8 The general pattern of understanding of Hindi cinema of the 1970s has been centred on the angry young man as the hero, who has several archetypal characteristics of the villain. Ashis Nandy calls him ‘the anti-hero’, who, ‘when he turns against the villain, also turns against the “passive”, “effeminate”, ineffective hero’ (1998: 8). He is viewed as a representative of that notyet-realised state and its citizenship. Thoraval remarks that it was the film Zanjeer (The Chain, 1973) which launched the whole new wave of ‘angry-young man films’, signalling the end of the ‘civic’ ideal of the post-independence period and the new era of brutal struggle of solitary hero fighting alone against injustice. In this film, which launched the Bachchan ‘myth’, the hero goes from the status of a ‘cop’ to that of the upholder of justice (outside the law). He searches for a masked criminal wearing a chain on his wrist (hence the title of the film), who had killed his parents when he was a child. He decides to ‘clean up’ Bombay, a theme which

has again become common in recent Hindi films (Thoraval 2000: 122). Popular perception of the failed aspirations of the young postcolonial state made it impossible for the scholars of Indian cinema to approach this hero any other way. Here, in the 1970s, this hero is looking back at the state and finding faults with it. In their elaboration, the critics claim that the people who are angry are so because of the shattering of their dream. They also claim that, for the first time through this angry young man, a hero of the film happens to be not a romantic hero of tender emotions and feelings or the guy next door of virtues epitomised in the codification of the persona. The audience do realise their disappointment of the abstract dreams they had for the new state being given a concrete form while watching the angry young man films. The hero is angry because he is forced to be angry by the circumstances and is not given any occasion to be tender and magnanimous. According to Tejaswini Ganti, after the first wave of filmmaking dominated by aspirations of Nehruvian approach of India in the world and the dual tasks of nation-building and economic development, [t]he second era of filmmaking took place against a backdrop in the early 1970s of widespread social and political unrest and growing disaffection with the government that culminated in the state of emergency put into effect by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. Films from this era differed considerably from those of the previous one in terms of how the state, the male protagonist (commonly referred to as the hero), and villainy were represented. (2004: 24) Making up the hero’s present are the unpleasant memories of a troubled past – the uncanny feeling that he is being deceived and draws parallels with the perils of partition. This leaves, in some sense, no chance for a conventional villain, a self-centred aggressive man who refuses to be driven by a higher moral world, because the hero himself has turned out to be the villain with a cause. A villain in such a context becomes the one who initiates the hero into crime and crime here has to be understood as a crime of a specific nature, namely, anti-state. Eventually, the hero rises in the social hierarchy of crime to be the villain’s associate, ally and buddy, while he also realises that he is being cornered and manipulated for the villain’s petty personal gains. Jealousy, competition and rivalry between the two then give the villain the kind of final resolution that the audience are made familiar with through earlier films. When Hindi cinema went on to venture into the largely notorious underbelly of Bombay in the decade, this sort of a conflict-ridden plot gained popular approval. Deewar, for example, has a young kid doing odd jobs for the smugglers and learning the trade being in the middle of illegal activity very early in life. He grows to become a big don, while realising that the life or virtue and morality would not result in material progress. Contributing to Deewar’s appeal

and popularity was the implication of the life stories of some of the famous underworld dons in Bombay. Connected with the hyperbolic stories that got circulated, some of these dons were good at heart and were lovable too, so much so that many of the films brought out the background of the players from the underworld and made sure that they be understood within the context of their surroundings and circumstances. This resulted in a double bind in Hindi cinema; on the one hand, cinema wanted the underworld to be understood sympathetically, and on the other, it tried a commentary of the state of the nation which found the very same underworld illegal. The petty crimes a villain does in the films of the 1970s also endorsed a specific kind of reading for the characters. While some of them ventured into murders, others were into smuggling of illegal goods, and many of them indulged in petty crimes alone and another group indulged in just thuggery. Some of them belonged to the underworld and the crimes they committed had higher dimensions like in the case of smuggling. The black market trader, who sold the smuggled goods, like gold/silver, electronic equipment, foreign liquor and such stuff, belonged to the lowest in the ranks of illegal trading. His crimes did not have the range or dimension of the large-scale smuggler; nonetheless, he also revelled in the same illegal and hence criminal activity, especially from the perspective of the law and the state. It is in such a perspective that the generic name ‘outlaw’ given to most of the criminals to be understood. Of course, their rank and file changes according to the gravity of the crimes they committed. In the case of Gabbar Singh (Sholay), for example, crimes are personalised first with Thakur and later with the anti-heroes. Much like Don Quixote, barring the social equality agenda, Gabbar was liked by the audience for the cuteness of his action, dialogue delivery and to a larger extent for the comic overtone of his behaviour. He brought a fresh lease of life for the villain, as a necessity in Hindi cinema.9 The other outlaw villains depicted in Hindi cinema generally belong to the following categories: the rapist, the nefarious policeman, an orthodox patriarch, a corrupt politician and the like. Out of these, the patriarch is an authoritarian figure and his villainy is coupled with his inability to accept the coupling of the star-crossed lovers, and hence not being modern enough. He does not like anyone, especially the young, challenging his authority. The politician as a villain was not completely part of the Hindi cinema of the 1970s. While the hero stands for some abstract value, the villain is always personalised. He is not given a legal systemic choice to argue for himself (neither in the film nor in the writings about films). He is never acquitted and given an ordeal without proper conviction or hearing. Hindi cinema’s fascination with the underworld has no parallel anywhere else, except in the film critic’s obsession for the nexus between the underworld and Hindi cinema.10 The 1970s is arguably the period when, for the first time, Hindi cinema has shown interest in the workings of the underworld; the reason for this undue fascination, one might be tempted to say, being the economic nexus that many of the producers had developed with the underworld around

that time.11 But such a line of reasoning would be deemed inappropriate if we take for granted the workings of what is loosely termed as the underworld. Understood against Hindi cinema’s frame of reference, the underworld is the conglomerate or syndicate of smugglers, money launderers and people generally accepted as involved in several illegal activities. How these people get into these illegal activities is not an important question for the analysis here. However, what is important is the nature, history and the contexts of these activities, and how they had had a lasting effect on the cinemas to follow in the later decades. Arguing that the roots of the mafia gangs in Bombay were in the Congress government of 1982, when they let local criminals out of prison ‘on the condition that they would break the textile mill workers’ strike’, Meena R. Menon defines the early goons this way: Though tales of working-class men turning into mafia dons have been a popular ingredient in the city’s films, the complexity of their class allegiances has never been dealt with adequately. (2013: 103) Manipulating the books to evade taxes used to be a practice during the pre-independence period and was in effect considered an act of nationalist fervour. The fact that one was paying taxes to a foreign ruler made this seemingly illegal activity pass as an act of valour and made the people involved feel accomplished in the film industry, where overt political propaganda met with legal consequences during the colonial period.12 Just the same way, many of the illegal (read underworld) activities I listed in the previous paragraphs were once deemed legitimate – sometimes for want of legal systems in place and other times as a matter of accustomed routine. The movement of commodities between borders, which continued for ages, became illegal once the state introduced sanctions. This resulted in branding many of the activities becoming proscribed and the players involved felonious. Hence, seen in perspective, the fact that these activities were the only way towards the movements of commodities before they were deemed unlawful gives us a fascinating insight into the working of the underworld. To illustrate further, trade as a systematic and major activity between regions across continents, especially through the Indian Ocean,13 was a centuries-old practice and was made illegal by the British in the late 19th century.14 This proclamation was aimed at political gains, especially for the monopoly of the sea trade. For the networks of people, like the traders, merchants and sailors who lived through this informal trading system of exchange which had continued for several centuries, an abrupt transformation of their activity into something which is illegal spawned a huge problem. For many of them, this was their only livelihood. Police restrictions and legal actions were widespread following the rule, even though they continued to indulge in such businesses. If we concentrate on the basic nature of the work some of the villains do in the films of 1970s, it is easy to see that they are members

of such illegal trade networks. That makes the others who oppose the villains directly on the side of the codified law. This friction between the statist law and outlaw traders not only plays out in the storyline and characterisation of the films of the 1970s, but also dictates the mise en scène. If we focus on the arrangements of the props in some of the scenes from the films of the 1970s, we would be surprised to see the amount of foreign goods deliberately presented in the scene. The watches, electronic goods, cooling glasses and brands of scotches that are displayed in these films explain the deliberate nature of the film-makers to bring this activity to the fore. The materiality of these foreign goods needs a lot of social and political explaining.15 As a matter of fact, the Customs Act of 196216 and the Merchant Shipping Act17 were seen as deliberate attempts at curbing the luxurious living style of a particular class, the nexus of which to the underworld is shown through the portrayal of villains in these films. Cinema of the day while siding with this affluent class, which could afford the smuggled goods, had to defeat the villains by the end of the films for the disavowal of the same activity. Coincidently, this is also the period when a lot of western music got introduced into Hindi cinema. Whatever was foreign, especially material things, could only be brought by paying customs duty to the state; Hindi cinema brought western music, which is also foreign, in a deliberate attempt to scoff at the absurdity of banning such material stuff. Music, a major component of Hindi cinema, could not be taxed or gauged through a material measuring system. This can be noted especially in the club dance sequences and other such activities where the villain is involved with.

Dacoity For the elaborate networks of studios and other paraphernalia located there, though Bombay is accepted as Hindi cinema’s home, the stories that it tells are from all over the Hindi heartland. Given the global audience base in recent times, several other places within India and abroad started getting accepted as settings. Apart from the Mumbai-centred stories, the local-flavoured stories needed to find some resemblance to the reality in the villages. What Hindi cinema did was not to find suitable stories in the villages to suit the purposes of the industry. Discussing the peculiar casting that Sholay had, Anupama Chopra says: Until then, all Hindi film dacoits came from the same cookie-cutter: They worshipped “Ma Bhavani”, wore dhotis and big pagdis, had four inch tikkas on their foreheads, and roamed dusty valleys that were usually Rajasthan posing as Chambal. They were bad but honourable. (2001: 38)

The dacoit as villain is born out of this projection. Even for a moment, I am not suggesting that dacoits did not exist in real – the notorious Chambal forest and the dacoits within that are perfect examples of the menace – but the point that I am driving home is rather about the nature of fictionalising these dacoits. The dacoit caricatured as a mogul with a harem and elaborate luxury is really going overboard with imagination. The petty crimes of theft that the real-life dacoits indulged in could only contribute to a precarious existence. However, the punishment according to the IPC for dacoity (while the legal definition of dacoity is complex, even booth capturing during elections is charged under dacoity) is very serious. The point is that it is not only the Hindi cinema, but also the legal system that could not necessarily devise the actual range of crimes committed in this fashion. The circumstances in which they had transformed into petty criminals comprise a large history of India’s treatment of its villages. The failed welfare measures, which never reached the villages, could have very well led to the rise of dacoity in the villages and regions bordering the forests. On a much larger scale, however, the legal definition of dacoity has to be understood within the context of the conflict between urban and rural spaces in India. In a country where the divide between modern and premodern could not be clearly made, dacoity is most often a reference to the unruly behaviour of the rural ruffian. Certain values and morals are attached to the act of dacoity by the educated, cinema-going urban population when they get exposed to the village reality. The fact that the film-making minority also belongs to the very same elite ensemble with their own morals and values make their approach towards dacoity much more complex and convoluted. It is in the wildest of the imagination of such an elite group that the dacoit becomes the one who looks, kills and rapes for fun. The ‘grey’ areas where dacoits cut loose are in the mind of such public in their own attempt at judging dacoity by their own standards, and it is in this imagination that these monstrous individuals are created. The fact that these ‘border’ areas were part of the caste equation was nevertheless omitted by Hindi cinema for convenience. It is in this hitherto unchartered and imaginary territory, which I call ‘border’, between caste system and modernity that one needs to locate the dacoit villain. Gabbar Singh is given a superhuman figuration through the Thakur’s personalised vendetta in the film Sholay. The heroes Jay and Viru in Sholaydid not have any history of personal issues with him. What they have is an attributed vendetta that gets developed and complicated within the narrative time. To be more precise, it was Thakur’s agenda to have a revenge on Gabbar for having destroyed his family and killing his wife and children. Gabbar on his part raids villages, bullies people who do not concede the things he want, drinks with his motely followers, shoots aimlessly for fun, enjoys dancing by girls (a tasty and acquired habit, at that) and, more than all that, enjoys whatever he does almost hedonistically. Modelled on Don Quixote without the social concern, as was mentioned earlier, he caught the imagination of the audience unlike any other villain before him. Children were asked to sleep before dark so that Gabbar will not be able to catch them ([…] door gaon me jab bacha raat ko rota hai to maa

kahti hai: beta soja … soja nahi to Gabbar Singh aa jaayega [in the distant villages when children cry in the middle of the night, their mother tells them: if you don’t sleep Gabbar Singh is going to come]). Through the rhythmic dialogue delivery and mannerisms, Amjad Khan has immortalised this character and for the first time in the history of Hindi cinema the dacoit looked cool. It sure did make the career early for Amjad Khan. The other side of this fame was typecasting and the almost identical roles he received following the success of Gabbar before bad health untimely cut his life short. The fearsome dacoit as a figure from the dark, from the borderland of the so-called civilisation, has to be explored a little further. The fact that this kind of a villain, though killed or captured at the end of the films thus contributing to the moral triumph of the hero, had to be loved by the audience in order for the film to be successful is one of the biggest contradictions in the understanding of cinema. What we see then is not an absolute hatred for the villain, but an identification for the darkness within. This darkness, I argue, is not real or reflective of any real-life event or real incidents; on the contrary, these characters are made to evoke a rather darker side of human nature. The audience are enthused to confront their own suppressed fear of the potential formation of a villain from the collection of the people that one might encounter every day in one’s own, the geopolitical space much away from the actual milieu in the borderlands. Dressed in dishevelled uniforms, carrying guns, wearing bullet garlands and galloping through the dust from a distance made a spectacle and a possible affiliation to the tough demeanour that was made famous by the Western in Hollywood cinema. Indian cinema does have its own parallels to the Western, and indeed all genres. Though some of these films could not reach the highs of the Western, definitely dacoity did provide our very own milieu for such a spectacle.

Policemen gone wrong The role of the policeman in Hindi cinema has always been discussed in the statist interventionist arguments on Hindi cinema. The policeman always arrived late at the scene of the crime, so as the general public can mete out the punishment to the criminal.18 Apparently – the state whose representative the police are – could not punish the criminals the way public want them to be punished, and even if they are punished, it is always after a delay of a prolonged legal procedure. The public want the criminal to be punished then and there in the archaic barbaric way in front of all of them to create fear in others and to be a model of punishment. In this aspect of the criminal justice system incorporated within the Hindi cinema, a policeman gone wrong – a bad and corrupt policeman – is symbolic of the system’s own incapacity. He provides an occasion for a different kind of reflectivity as a crucial spoke in the wheel of the state which has not lived up to the expectations of its subjects.

A bad policeman is someone who does not practice the system of justice, according to the law. He takes bribes. He loses his cool in front of the hero who argues with him for the wrongs he had committed, as a result of which most often the policeman carries a grudge against the hero. He also establishes a nexus with several criminals, criminal politicians and the like, which eventually pronounces his doom. The fact that the villains are not given a realisation of their own faults is an important aspect of the codification of them in Hindi cinema. The classical villain, according to the theory of tragedy, is doomed knowing his faults fully well. The hero in such a circumstance also has faults, sometimes psychological, which he overcomes through constant struggle. He also realises his fault and takes measures (like gouging of eyes by Oedipus for loving his own mother) to set straight those faults. In the same vein of the Greek/classical theory of tragedy, the characters go through a transformation. And death for the villain for the faults he had committed happens only after an ordeal, which in effect is part of the realisation for him. The villain in Hindi cinema is not given that luxury. Since he is to be killed or handed over to the authorities for appropriate punishment that the audience expect, the villain is not given an option to change his ways. To come back to the discussion of the policeman as a villain, it has to be noted that he cannot be handed over to the authorities unlike other villains we have discussed previously. Since he belonged to the wrong system for a period of time, what he might have to go through is different from others in this category. He should be given a raw punishment by the public or the hero in an enactment of premodern and primitive death-forwrong kind of justice system. However, by portraying a bad policeman, the film does not completely bring the notion that the whole system is rotten and by the logic of one belonging to the large group standing for the group. There is still a possibility for the system to correct itself.

Conclusion: the afterlife of the villains from the 1970s The argument in this chapter has been that there was something significant happening with the villains in the 1970s Hindi cinema, and that a materialist understanding of these villains could produce quite significant insight into the working of the society and cinema in India. It should be noted that I am not arguing for an exclusivity for the villains of the 1970s. However, what is significant is the importance they have received in the narrative development of the 1970s cinema as well as the screen time they occupied during this period. If we do an analysis of the particular shots that were used to depict the villain characters and analyse their screen time, like Bordwell and colleagues (1985) attempted in their analysis of the Classical Hollywood cinema, it would be evident that they received a lot of attention from the part of the film-makers. It would also be interesting to view the diegetic importance of the villain

during this time in several of the films unlike in any other era. This is the reason why I argue that they should be studied closely. This study straddles two important aspects in the history of Hindi cinema, namely the 1970s Hindi cinema and the villains within them, the former for the significance of the change in the direction Hindi cinema has taken in terms of the themes, issues as well as the incision it made in articulating the aspirations of a disillusioned mass who were reacting to the sorry state of affairs in the new young Indian state, and the latter for the codification and concretisation of the evils in the society in the forms of individuals, who as part of the popular justice system only afforded by Hindi cinema get their punishment within the film itself. While we attempt a study of the villains, there are two or three aspects that we should not ignore. In the context of the history of Hindi cinema, the actors who played the roles of the villains continued to do so for a longish period. Some of them later on shifted to character roles, but they stuck to the basic oppositional logic of the central character and by the same logic the central them or value of the film. But the actors do not live the life of such ideas, ideologies and are never driven by the same logic of their characters. This is not a point that deserves mention in any scholarly or serious study. However, Hindi cinema and the way the audience react to Hindi cinema are such that the screen life and personal life are given not much of a boundary line in the overall exposition of the system of Hindi cinema. Hence, personalities, especially in the 1970s, were not given a celebrity status. There are not many villains around in films these days in the mould of the ones in the 1970s; what we have are comic villains, like the one played by Boman Irani in Munnabhai MBBS (2003) and 3 Idiots (2009). Interestingly, the actors who played the villains in the 1970s were never given a celebrity status, like the way they enjoy it these days. After acting in films in the roles of villains, some of these actors get mentioned or get recognition only towards the end of their life. Except for Amjad Khan, who was acting in several other character roles during the same period donning the roles of the villains, his screen persona was definitely different. It has also got to do a lot with the one-off nature of his character in Sholay, as already mentioned. This character actually did strike a chord in the audience’s mind-set where he was treated as a lovable villain and not as a condemnable beast. What the 1970s Hindi cinema propagated in their treatment of the villains, however, could be termed retrospectively as an enactment of ‘popular justice’. The idea of popular justice, though underdeveloped here in this chapter, offers a further dimension and should be elaborated at a later stage.

Notes 1 M. Madhava Prasad attributes two tendencies within the industry in this regard: ‘One committed to an ideological mission in keeping with the goals of the postcolonial state’s controlled capitalist development and aspiring to the

achievement of a homoginised national culture, the other moored in a pre-capitalist culture, employing a patchwork of consumerist and pre-capitalist ideologies and determined to maintain its hold over the production process from the outside’ (1998: 32). He goes on to explain how the struggle between both these tendencies influenced most of the wishes articulated by both the industry as well as the public alike (ibid). 2 For a detailed analysis of the angry young man, the interiority of the hero and Amitabh Bachchan as a typical example of this interiority, see Mazumdar (2001: 238–64). 3 This dialogue from Deewaar is quintessential Indian melodrama for he who takes care of the mother takes the moral high ground and has the approval of the tradition. 4 There are a number of references to the strong characters and the acting capabilities of these villains. There are idiosyncratic journalistic pieces as well. A constant engagement to approach them critically, however, is absent. 5 This negativity has to be understood vis-à-vis the genre of the social, especially since dark traits of personal nature in the hero could be found even in the 1940s. Mazumdar refers to these heroes as ‘psychotic’ (2001: 239). 6 Interview with Shah Rukh Khan on Koffee with Karan, where Khan was talking about his relationship with Yash Chopra who suggested him the romantic hero’s role like in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) for the first time, while he was already doing some roles with negative shades like in Baazigar (1993). 7 Ravi S. Vasudevan argues that in the 1950s Bombay cinema had turned towards this form, especially as a way to address the issues of modern life (2001: 105). 8 Richard Dyer in his classic work on the stars points to two angles which are required to understand the screen persona; first, the constitutive elements of stars, what they consist of, their production; second, the notions of personhood and social reality that they relate to (2013: 2). He also claims that ‘a star image consists both of what we normally refer to as his or her “image”, made up of screen roles and obviously stage-managed public appearances, and also of images of the manufacture of that “image” and of the real person who is the site or occasion of it. Each element is complex and contradictory, and the star is all of it taken together’ (2013: 7). 9 Khan was so popular among the kids of the generation that he went on to act in a number of advertisements (e.g. Britannia Biscuits) in the same attire. 10 Just to give the reader an idea as to how many articles were written on this topic, see Roy (2011) and Virdi (1993). Virdi claims that ‘[t]he narrative of Deewar parallels the story of Haji Mastaan in interesting ways. Haji Mastaan was a dockworker in Bombay and rose to the position of a powerful smuggler operating in Bombay’s underworld’ (1993: 27). 11 Hindi cinema’s fascination with the Bombay underworld has several levels of engagement – some of the actors were friends with the underworld dons, and some of them were girlfriends of the dons. There were movies produced by proxy producers, whereas the actual financiers were part of the underworld. Several stars had allegedly frequented Dubai as a guest of the fugitive underworld don Dawood Ibrahim for his parties. Reports of alleged threatening calls from the underworld being received by the members of the film industry do the rounds frequently. The relationship had turned ugly with the assassination of Gulshan Kumar in 1997, which is said to be the handiwork of another underworld don, Abu Saleem, who is behind bars now. From Deewar and Zanjeer in the 1970s onwards to Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobara! in the 2010s, several films were made based on the lives of the players in the underworld in Bombay. 12 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy says, ‘[t]o the star this extra sum, this payment “in black”, was of course tax-free. This not

only made it especially attractive but gave it a patriotic tinge. For years the withholding of taxes from the British Empire had been held a service to freedom’ (1980: 127). 13 There is also an important approach to the history of Hindi cinema where it is seen as a bazaar with its very frontal exhibition of its commodities, which also means that Hindi cinema caters to several kinds of people with varied tastes. There is also another dimension to the Indian Ocean culture that Bombay was part of, since that brought a culture which is inviting and open and in practice removed from the hierarchical and caste-ridden one, which Indian society was elsewhere. 14 The Sea Customs Act (India Act VIII, 1878 dated 1 April 1878) prohibited and restricted several goods especially by sea. The same Act regulated the movement of merchant ship from and to Indian shores and stopped the informal trade between Indian ports and Persian Gulf, for example. If these merchant import and export to take place there had to be paid duty to the government. 15 ‘Social and political explaining’ of a commodity here is based on the ‘Introduction’ of The Social Life of Things, where Arjun Appadurai explains that we have to follow the things themselves ‘for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context’ (1986: 5). Georg Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money (1900/2004), has also contributed to this argument presented here. 16 Through the Customs Act, 1962 (Act No. 52 of year 1962 dated 13 December 1962), the central government prohibited the import or export of goods which mainly ‘hamper the security and sovereignty of India’. The basic aim was to prevent smuggling and shortage of food and also conserving of foreign exchange to save the value of India’s currency. 17 The Merchant Shipping Act, 1958, was meant to regulate and control merchant shipping according to the national interests. 18 See Madhava Prasad (1998) for an ideological understanding of this delay.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Arjun Appaduari (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, pp. 3–63. New York: Cambridge University Press. Barnouw, Erik and S. Krishnaswamy. 1980. Indian Film. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Chopra, Anupama. 2001. Sholay: The Making of a Classic. New Delhi: Viking. Dyer, Richard. 2013. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Routledge. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2004. Bollywood: A Guidebook of Popular Hindi Cinema. New York: Routledge. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2001. ‘From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The “Angry Young Man” and the “Psychotic” Hero of Bombay Cinema’, in Ravi S. Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 238–64. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press. Menon, Meena R. 2013. ‘Mumbai’s Mid-section: Notes from the Underground’, in Maddhusree Dutta, Kaushik Bhaumik, Rohan Shivkumar (eds), Project Cinema City, pp. 99–108. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Nandy, Ashis. 1998. ‘Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics’, in Ashish Nandi (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, pp. 1–18. New Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan. Prasad, M. Madhava. 1998. Ideology of Hindi Cinema: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. PTI. 2014. ‘Prem Chopra: Villains Are Better Etched-out in Movies Now’. 2014. The Indian Express, 13 September, http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/prem-chopra-villains-are-better-etched-out-in-movies-now/ (accessed 17 July 2015). Roy, Rajdeep. 2011. ‘Bollywood and the Mumbai Underworld: Reading Satya in Retrospect’, in Partha Pratim Basu and Ipshita Chanda (eds), Locating Cultural Change: Theory, Method, Process, pp. 98–119. New Delhi: Sage. Simmel, Georg. 2004. The Philosophy of Money. 1900. David Frisby (ed.). New York: Routledge. Thoraval, Yves. 2000. The Cinema of India (1896–2000). Delhi: Macmillan. Vasudevan, Ravi S. 2001. ‘Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture’, in Ravi S. Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 99–121. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Virdi, Jyotika. 1993. ‘Deewar: The “Fiction” of Film and “Fact” of Politics’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 38 (June): 26–32.

5 Inward bound Self-referentiality in Bombay cinema Prateek

With the noticeable proliferation of films, such as Om Shanti Om (2007), Road (2000), Movie (2009), Luck by Chance (2009), I Hate Luv Storys (2010), The Dirty Picture (2011), Chal Pichchur Banate Hain (2012) and Bombay Talkies (2013), a new hermeneutic category has emerged in Bombay cinema, the Hindi cinema of India. These films, due to their power to represent the self in the act of becoming, are often termed as self-referential. Possibly, in this act of becoming, these movies redefine and reassess the process of movie making by reanalysing the politics of the cinema apparatus, cinema institution and dominant theories of spectatorship. Self-referentiality is often considered by critics as an exclusive preserve of European cinema with auteurs, like Federico Fellini (8 ½ [1963]) or Francois Truffaut (Day for Night [1973]), but a close analysis of Indian mainstream cinema can elucidate how the technique of selfreferentiality has always been an integral part of the inner dynamics of creative Indian directors. Since its inception, the self-referential film scholarship in India has been haunted by the spectre of Mahesh Kaul and Latika’s Gopinath (1948), which probably started and stated the trend of self-referentiality. By musing on Gopinath, this chapter intends to show how the formation of modernity, as the result of India’s colonial encounters with the West, led to the rise of self-referential cinema. Second, the chapter examines the role played by the IPTA in heralding this new era of self-referential movies. Finally, I will inquire why and how selfreferential cinema has undergone a sea change from being a narrative of trauma/loss in Gopinath to a narrative of triumph/recovery in Om Shanti Om (2007). Before I start a probe into the myriad meanings of self-referentiality in Gopinath and what led to their rise, I would like to mention that self-referentiality, arguably, is a part of a larger process of self-reflexivity. Self-referentiality has two components – self and referentiality. Self-referentiality, in its various avatars, becomes an act of referring to itself. Thus, a selfreferential movie is one which refers to itself, and in turn points to the process of movie-

making. In other words, self-referentiality becomes a tool of inquiry into the ontology of cinematography and the grammar of film. In the broadest possible sense, all art have elements of self-referentiality, that is, art shows its artifice. Albeit in my analysis of Gopinath, I will only look at those elements of self-referentiality, which are consciously and deliberately grafted by the director. I will touch on attempts by the director to ‘defictionalise’ film, that is, on gestures that interrogate or reflect on the cinematic medium in the course of the film. Self-referentiality has always been present in literal works. Self-referential Indian texts can be traced back to passages in the works of Bhasa, Banabhatta, Bilhana and Dandin in Sanskrit. In literary theory, the extremely self-reflective narrative is called metafiction, a ‘fiction whose primary concern is to express the novelist’s vision of experience by exploring the process of its own making’ (Christensen 1981: 9). To theorise, one can say that meta-cinema is one where the primary concern is to express the director’s own vision of his own making. Moreover, epistemological analysis shows that the concept of reflexivity was ‘borrowed from philosophy and psychology. Reflexivity referred originally to the mind’s capacity to take itself as object–– for example, Descartes’s cogito ergo sum––but was extended metaphorically to the capacity for self-reflexion of a medium or language’ (Stam 2000: 151). Contrary to the view that self-referentiality is a so-called postmodern phenomenon, I would like to stress during my analysis of the movie Gopinath that this is not a recent development: possibly, filmic self-referentiality is as early as the movie Gopinath.

Formation of modernity Most influential theories of modernity in Western social theory, like the ones offered by Karl Marx and Max Weber, contain one principal idea. It is generally believed that modernity is a single, homogeneous process and can be traced to a single causal principle: In the case of Marx, it is the rise of capitalist commodity production; for Weber, a more abstract principle of rationalization of the world. (Kaviraj 2010: 15) Although the conventional historical argument is that Indian modernity was an aftermath of the dissemination of European values in the subcontinent, with independence in 1947, India as a free nation, for the first time on its own accord, embraced the ideals of modernity: the rise of a capitalist industrial economy, the growth of modern state institutions and resultant transformations in the nature of social power, the emergence of democracy, the decline of the community and the rise of strong individualistic social conduct, the decline of religion and the secularization of ethics.

(Kaviraj 2010: 15) These European aspects either seeped into the Indian narratives unconsciously during the colonial rule or willingly embraced in the postcolonial period that led to the formation of ‘modern Indian self’. Consequently, one can explain the upsurge of self-referential genres, such as atmakatha (self-story), atmacharit (self-chronicle), apbiti (one’s own experiences), jivani/zindaginama (autobiography), in India during the colonial period in the light of the formation of the ‘modern self’ which became the central issue around which all these narratives revolved (Hansen 2011: 28). Thus, the narratives turned self-referential as they tried to assess and define ‘the modern self’. Like the self-referential narratives before him, Kaul and Latika’s self-referential narrative of Gopinath in 1948, a year immediately after the independence, was an ontological study of the self-stranded between the traditional and the modern. This study of self is emphasised in the movie with an employment of the cinematic device of flashback by Tiresias-like narrator. The use of flashback in self-referential narratives started by Gopinath becomes quite a trend in the early self-referential Indian cinema, with movies such as Aag (1948) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) imitating the cinematic technique. Moreover, by the time Mahesh Kaul and Latika made Gopinath, they had already worked in many movies. Some of the movies in which Mahesh Kaul played either the role of an actor or a director are Naya Sansar (1941), Apna Ghar (1942), Angoori (1943) and Paristan (1944). Latika played the role of an actress in Dr Kumar (1944) and Jugnu (1947). Their long association with the modern technological medium of cinema gave them an insight into the ‘real’ world of cinema. This recognition of reality beyond the veil and the urge to articulate it and its influence on the self of the actor/director can be contemplated as one of the rationales that led to the formation of the first self-referential movie Gopinath. Alternatively, the creation of Gopinath can be credited to the director’s desire to unmask the actor from the mask of a character and to speak in the voice of an actor: Like the secluded wife, the theatre [stage] performer was arguably a subaltern subject who rarely spoke in his own voice. In writing of his life, he harnessed the force of selfrepresentation to break the silence, to speak his own existence into being. (Hansen 2011: 33) Gopinath ensures a reorientation towards the self and interrogation of normative structures, especially the family with ‘the invention of private life’, which is one of the hallmarks of selfreferential narratives (Kaviraj 2004: 95–8). With the invention of private life, the director enables the male and the female protagonists to introspect on the present state of things such as dearth of jobs in villages and the rise of immigrants in urban cities like Mumbai, where the plot unravels. The hero (Mohan, played by Raj Kapoor) finds himself crushed under the weights of private life (symbolised first by his mother and later by the heroine [Gopi, played

by Tripti Mitra]) and his love for public life (symbolised by the heroine Neela, played by Latika). By the end of the movie, Mohan renounces the world of cinema and acknowledges his responsibility as a husband cum saviour of Gopi. By naming the prime character in Gopinath as Mohan, a name acquired by Lord Krishna in a moment of awesome generosity when he enchants all women of Dwarka, the hero becomes a godly symbol that can be used for didactic purposes. Furthermore, Mohan’s last words to ‘sane’ Gopi (afterwards, she becomes neurotic, or to use a Bhakti parlance, she becomes Meera seeking her Mohan) avowing his wish to leave his house for good, and unmarried Gopi’s promise to Mohan’s mother of never leaving Mohan’s house, should be read as instances showcasing the concept of an individual separate from the community or collective body. These instances are not only considered necessary to writing about the self, but they also create introspection and interiority, the hallmarks of selfreferential narratives. Besides, these self-referential instances ‘presupposes a writer’s intent upon reflection on this inward realm of experience, someone for whom this inner world of experience is important’ (Weintraub 1975: 823). This reflection on ‘inward realm’ is shown by naming the movie within the movie as Gopinath, where Mohan will play the character of Mohan (another name of Krishna) while Neela Devi will play the role of Radha. The irony is explicit, as by playing the ‘reel’ role of Radha in the movie within the movie, Neela wants to challenge the ‘real’ role of Gopi, as Neela retorts in front of her director friend: I want to see how long reality last in front of the imitation of reality. (Gopinath) The vision of inward realm is further presented through the figure of Mohan that aligns with the paradoxical figure of the fool, present in all ancient literatures in the comic guise of a wise buffoon. The paradoxical figure of the fool emerges in the process of self-encounter. The character of Raj Kapoor is an amalgamation of Vidhushaka, clown and didact in classical Indian drama, and of the Zen monk and the Sufi fakir, the mendicant and minstrel of medieval India. The paradoxical fool: is a mediator of spiritual discourse. In Europe he gains a historical position of another order with Cervantes, catapulting aristocratic chivalry into madness; and with Shakespeare, fascinated by the inquiry into the secret terrain of mortal melancholy. (Kapur 2000: 189) Gopinath further reinforces the importance of the inner realm of experiences as Mohan, in the end, rejects the plea of Gopi’s brother to send her to a mental asylum by saying that he will take care of her because Gopi is his ‘mother’s bride’.

Role played by Indian people’s theatre association In the Indian context, modernism in its double discourse with nationalism forms a paradoxical narrative; the paradox arising out of nationalist art’s use of traditional or indigenous motifs and modernist’s fascination for progressivism or internationalism. Yet, this paradoxical position is a marker of India’s particular form of modernism: Given India’s sustained struggle for independence and the precise mode of its decolonization, its cultural life is alternately conservative and progressive. (Kapur 2000: 341) The relationship between the notion of tradition and nationalism and modernism is a particular feature of cultural development in postcolonial societies. The secret politics of desire on the part of the director to engage with the self is connected with the formation of modernity, which inspired the Indians to break away with the stereotypical definition of the Orient: Colonialism replaced the normal ethnocentric stereotype of the inscrutable Oriental by the pathological stereotype of the strange, primal but predictable Oriental––religious but superstitious, clever but devious, chaotically violent but effeminately coward. (Nandy 1989: 72) In the early stages of modernity formation, Indian directors, such as Mahesh Kaul and Latika, found themselves at crossroads as they tried to seek an alternative to the colonial narrative. The two principal hegemonic discourses that were rampant during the time were nativism (a complete surrender to Eastern values) and neo-colonialism (a celebration of Western ideals). IPTA’s arrival into the scene with the dictum of cross-pollination solved the problem arising out of the two narratives. IPTA, a cultural front of the Indian Communist Party, active from 1943 in several regions in India, used several international models ranging from Chinese to Brechtian to living folk and popular forms, such as Jatra, to bring out the disillusionment and fragmentation of the modern self. One of the early examples of IPTA engagement with international practices is of the play Shanti Doot Kamgar (Working Class: Messenger of Peace) written by Habib Tanvir in the late 1940s. In China, during the civil war: the communist activists would visit restaurants, and other public places, cook up some kind of quarrel between themselves, and when people’s attention was sufficiently drawn to them, one of them would scramble up on top of a table and deliver an agitational speech summoning support for the cause of the Red Army. (Tanvir 2013: 76)

Tanvir, inspired by the Chinese example, wrote a play about world peace. IPTA laid down the mantra that one should not alienate oneself from international narratives to present the disillusionment of the modern self. In fact, one should present a medley of Eastern and Western voices/values so that Indian self, which is the product of colonial encounter, can be captured. Gopinath follows this mantra to the cue, as the directors present the interaction of the rural Eastern world with the urban Western world. Mohan and Gopi are presented as the representative of the rural world while Neela’s world is coloured with Western hue. The Western ambience is constructed either with the help of the English language used in the dialogues between Neela and her friend (role played by Mahesh) or with the use of Western props such as cigars and Western suits/dresses. In contrast, the Eastern world is constructed both with the help of the camera that captures the restlessness of the mother for not arranging a marriage for the college-going son and the unconditional devotion of Gopi (the name suggestive of a cowherd girl devoted to Lord Krishna). By the end of the movie, one finds that both the worlds are merged together as Neela gives up her evil self and transforms into a woman who has been humbled by the sacrifice of Gopi. In the wake of the IPTA, self-referential cinema articulated Saidean discourse of ‘enlightened postnationalism’, that is, ‘of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world’ (Said 1994: 230) and revamped the image of the Orient. Thus, self-referential cinema becomes one form of cure, as it cures the society by giving voice to postcolonial fragmentation and dilemma. Simultaneously, IPTA also fights against the discrimination between the so-called great linguistic traditions and the little linguistic traditions. The directors of the movie brilliantly pose the dilemma of high and low linguistic registers by juxtaposing braj bhasa lyrics and khari boli lyrics of the songs sung by Gopi and Neela. By starring an IPTA activist Tripti Mitra as Gopi, the directors ignited a sense of awareness in the masses so that they can understand the difference between the real and the unreal. The movie depicts the potential of cinema to seduce as well as socially aware people.

From narratives of loss to celebration This section investigates the transition of self-referential cinema from disenchantment with linearity to enchantment with postmodernist tendencies. This new component in cinema is the result of what is generally called the ‘death of the subject’ or, to say it in more conventional language, the end of individualism as such: The great modernisms were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the

conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style. (Jameson 1983: 114) Consequently, self-referentiality in Bombay cinema can be defined as a concept which leads to mirroring of the past into the present. It is a strategy of articulating past concepts and norms into the present works. There are two principal techniques of imitating the past: parody and pastiche. Unlike Mahesh Kaul and Latika who believed in instructing the audience through the use of satire, Farah Khan uses the concept of pastiche in a postmodern sense. Pastiche can be defined as ‘an instance in which a cultural production imitates the style of another cultural production’ (Austin 2008: 51). Alternatively, it can be defined as ‘blank parody’ (Jameson 1983: 114), especially with reference to the postmodern parodic practices of self-reflexivity and intertextuality. By this, it is meant that rather than being a jocular but still respectful imitation of another style, pastiche in the postmodern era has become a ‘dead language’ without any political or historical content, and so has also become unable to satirise in any effective way. Where pastiche used to be a humorous literary style, it has in postmodernism become devoid of the ‘satirical impulse’ and ‘laughter’ (Jameson 1983: 114). Though pastiche and parody participate in ‘the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles’ (Jameson 1983: 113), but fundamentally they are different: In classical (and modern) parody the ‘game’ consists of diverting a text from its initial meaning toward another application that is known in advance, and to which it must be carefully adapted […]. Parody is a game of skill; the Oulipism, like roulette, is a game of chance. But because the transformation of a text always produces another text, and therefore another meaning, this chancy recreation cannot fail to turn into a re-creation. (Genette 1997: 48) In contrast to parody, pastiche is a sheer imitation without any transformational or recreational trait. Unlike parody, pastiche is not an imitation of a single text but of the indefinite possibilities of a text (Hutcheon 2000: 38); thus, it holds the possibility of turning its spectators into detectives trying to figure out the primary sources of the work. The tool of pastiche used by Farah Khan in Om Shanti Om at first gives her freedom as she does not have to preach or instruct the audience like the directors of Gopinath. Second, Farah Khan uses pastiche as an experimental cinematic device, whereby she can celebrate while paying homage to another film-maker’s style and use of cinematography, including camera angles, lighting and mise en scène. For instance, Om Shanti Om seems to be a pastiche of Karz (1980), and the reincarnation motive adopted by Farah Khan resembles the thematic of

reincarnation movies in Hollywood started by Noel Langley’s The Search for Bridey Murphy in 1956. The crisis of the project of modernity is felt in Om Shanti Om, as the movie rather than gazing inward to understand the modern fragmentation looks outward and celebrates the fragmentation by partaking in pastiche. Like nostalgia films, Om Shanti Om in its urge to imitate the cinema of the 1970s: far from being a pointless satire of such now dead forms, satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again […]. It does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period (the serials), it seeks to reawaken a sense of the past associated with those objects. (Jameson 1983: 116) Unlike historical films, pastiche films ‘do not represent our historical past so much as they represent our ideas or cultural stereotypes about that past’ (Jameson 1983: 118). Moreover, the act of remaking can be problematised by engaging with Baudrillard’s argument of appearances in discussion. A close thematic analysis of the self-referential text of Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om shows how the modern day Indian cinema has become a Baudrillardian instance of ‘simulation’, which results into pastiche and exhibitionism. In Baudrillard’s view, there have been three orders of ‘appearance’ since the Renaissance: the order of ‘counterfeit’ being the dominant scheme from the classical period up to the industrial revolution; the order of ‘production’ of the industrial era and the order of ‘simulation’, the current postmodern (or modern) phase, a phase controlled by the code and signs (Baudrillard 1983: 83). Simulation, which is a third order sign in Baudrillard’s theory of ‘hyperreal’, means the creation of a real through conceptual models presented by the media. Thus, for a reality to exist, it needs to refer back to these conceptual models. The media show us what fashion, art, music and so on should be like and if these models are accepted by the masses, the simulation becomes our perception of reality. The line between what is real and what the media dictates to us breaks down, creating a hyperreal world where it becomes difficult to demarcate between real and unreal. This difficulty in demarcating between the two worlds is candidly shown in Om Shanti Om through the character of Om’s ‘filmy’ mother (played by Kiron Kher), whose real dialogues with Om are nothing but an echo of the past dialogues of mothers with their sons in Bombay cinema. For instance, her dialogue when her reincarnated son visits her for the first time – ‘You have come back, son’ – reverberates the words of the mother

(played by Rakhee Gulzar) in the movie Karan Arjun (1995) after seeing her two reincarnated sons. Thus, the character of the mother in Om Shanti Om reveals how reality imitates the artificial world of cinema, and becomes hyperreal; that is, illusion becomes reality. In the second half of the movie Om Shanti Om, Farah Khan petrifies the audience by turning the high culture of an award ceremony into the low culture as actors abuse (Abhishek Bachchan) and are ready to shoot (Akshay Kumar) on not receiving an award. This blurring of boundaries destabilises the audiences as well as the filmic text, and thus it can be considered an instance of postmodernism in cinema: the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture […] they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw. (Jameson 1983: 112) Moreover, these self-referential films produce an awareness of both films and film-making, a kind of discourse not only on films, but also on film-making/film acting, as choreographed on film. This self-parodic approach of movies becomes a chronicle of a commentary and hypertext on Bombay cinema. Alternately, one can say that at the beginning stages of selfreferential cinema, disenchantment with linearity was symbolic of creativity and cure, while in the case of present directors it is indicative of two rationales: first, the dearth of new storylines and, second, Bombay cinema has come of age where self-referentiality has become synonymous with nostalgia often registered through recycling old plots and songs.

References Austin, James F. 2008. ‘Pastiche Expelled: A Proustian Guide to French Pedagogy’, Dalhousie French Studies, 84: 51–63. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Trans. Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext (e). Christensen, Inger. 1981. The Meaning of Metafiction: A Critical Study of Selected Novels by Sterne, Nabakov, Bart and Beckett. Bergen: Universitetsforl. Genette, Gerard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Hansen, Kathryn. 2011. Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Hutcheon, Linda. 2000. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1983. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture, pp. 111–25. Washington: Bay Press.

Kapur, Geeta. 2000. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2010. The Trajectories of the Indian State: Politics and Ideas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———. 2004. ‘The Invention of Private Life’, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds), Telling Lives in India, pp. 83–115. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Nandy, Ashis. 1989. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Tanvir, Habib. 2013. ‘Janam Comes of Age’, in Sudhanva Deshpande (ed.), Theatre of the Streets: The Jana Natya Manch Experience, pp. 70–87. Delhi: Janam. Weintraub, Karl J. 1975. ‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness’, Critical Inquiry, 1(4): 821–48.

Part II

Bollywood dance Rereading history

6 Dancing to the songs History of dance in popular Hindi films Shruti Ghosh

Filmfare,1 in one of its recent issues celebrating Indian Cinema Centenary (24 April 2013), conducted a poll to indicate India’s most popular actors, films, directors, songs and so forth,2 where the (Filmfare) readers cast their votes for those stars who have made most impressions over the decades. I am particularly interested in the popular dance sequence category, since the polling, I note, reveals significant aspects of Hindi film dance, popularly referred to as Bollywood dance. The one to top the list is Chhaiya Chhaiya … starring Shah Rukh Khan from the film Dil Se (1998), followed by few Madhuri Dixit songs. In each instance, what is quite telling is the mention of a ‘song’ while referring to a dance. The song lyrics (generally a phrase or first few words) designate a dance, and not the name of any dance form, which would perhaps have been more fitting for the category. Identification of a dance through a song gives us further key to understanding Hindi film dance. Within the larger category of Hindi film dance, I suggest, one witnesses different emerging styles where each produces almost an idiom of its own. This chapter explores these different styles of dancing emerging from 1940 to 1990, and in the process analyses the relationship between a song and dance in Hindi cinema. I refrain from using the term ‘Bollywood dance’ since in my opinion it is a separate category and not synonymous with ‘Hindi film dance’. Admittedly, Bollywood dance is a mushrooming category being taught in several schools in India and abroad. Especially among the diaspora, it is considered as yet another Indian dance genre thriving across the globe. One also hears dissenting voices among the dance scholars regarding Bollywood dance’s troubled relation with Indian classical and folk dance forms. I note that Bollywood dance is a reenactment of the filmed dance. When a dance which has already been filmed is later taken out from it, learnt and performed in other spaces like corporate shows, weddings, diaspora community festivals, college shows, dance schools and so forth, the repeated or re-enacted version is what I consider as Bollywood dance. The film dance is inhered within the space of a film, whereas the performing spaces lying outside the film are initiator of Bollywood dance.

This chapter does not concern itself with the myriad dance activities occurring in these different spaces, but instead focuses on particular film dance sequences. I must clarify that I do not delve with narrative analysis of the entire film but focus only on the dance sequences found within a film. The different performing spaces which spill over the film frame and cross the boundaries of the industry are ‘analogous to the film industry’ as Ashish Rajadhyaksha points out, and ‘might best be seen as more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities’, engendering a culture industry called Bollywood, ushering with the economic liberalisation taking place around the 1990s (2003: 27). The Hindi film industry forms only a small part of this larger culture industry, and thus must be separated from Bollywood. The latter, as he notes, is a special brand of cinema growing within the Hindi film industry and is characterised by features hitherto unseen.3 Since the Bollywood gharana remains outside the concern of this chapter, it does not discuss about post-1990s films. For the present analysis, I will borrow the two categories of ‘archive’ and ‘repertoire’ formulated by Diana Taylor. Taylor uses these categories to study the importance of performance in America. ‘Archive’, she opines, consists of items like maps, texts, letters which are ‘supposedly resistant to change’, whereas ‘repertoire enacts embodied memory’ comprising of all that are ephemeral like dancing, singing and gestures (2003: 19–20). I will elaborate how these categories can yield insightful understanding in the context of Hindi film dance.

Playback singing and song picturisation Barring few exceptions,4 dance in Hindi films is always accompanied by a song which acts as a prerequisite. In other words, a dance necessitates (prior) existence of a song but not vice versa. (There are many song sequences which are marked by an absence of dance.) Hence, the dance composition is shaped to a great extent by the lyrics and musical arrangement of the song. By ‘composition’, I mean both the act of choosing specific dance movements, which suit the song, and conceiving a manner of staging or filming those steps, which involves discerning framing of the shot, camera angles and editing. Since the task is to set a scene for the song, the entire process can also be described as ‘song picturisation’, a term I will use henceforth in the chapter. The rise of this film song genre, as Bhaskar Chandavarkar opines, dates back to the 1940s, which has thus been considered as a starting point in the present discussion (1987: 18–24). To abstain from misconstruing about film music, let us bear in mind that the music in Indian films have existed right from the days of the silent cinema; but the typical ‘song’, as understood today, did not emerge until the 1940s. Ashok D. Ranade further explicates that the particular model of film song that has been adopted over the decades were ‘the more processed version

of a literary intent’, which were starkly different from the verse in tune songs of early talkies and became popular in the 1940s (1980: 10–11). The efflorescence of various dance styles in Hindi cinema, in my opinion, is conditioned upon this particular song genre. This antecedent placement of a song is further aided by the playback singing technique emerging around the mid-1930s. Though the mainstay of this chapter is film dance, further deliberations upon the ‘song’ is imperative as it is related to picturisation of the dance. Hence, another moment of deferral is called for, as we look back at the advent of playback singing before analysing the dance. New theatre’s 1935 film Dhoop-Chhaon (also made in Bengali as Bhagya Chakra) is considered to be the first film which systematically established playback as a standard practice. Prior to its introduction, several movement restrictions were imposed on the actors, who were also singers themselves. These singer-actors acted and sang simultaneously during the shooting of the song sequence and their voice was recorded on the spot. To ensure that the recording machines could capture their voice clearly, the actor’s movements were restricted within a marked zone and they were given minimal movements to prevent any exhaustion which could hamper the breath and affect the singing. This also meant that the entire song had to be sung and shot at one go without allowing any interruptions. The Raaslila dance sequence from Kalanaka Bhanajan (1931) helps illustrate the point.5 Radha and Krishna are seated on a decorated swing which is placed in the centre of the frame. They are surrounded by a group of gopis (Krishna’s conduits) who are standing in a semicircle and singing in praise of the couple. As the gopis address the lovers, they raise their hands in a particular gesture pointing towards them. Though the gopis are standing in a frontal position facing the camera, they occasionally turn their face away from it while addressing the duo. In those moments, the fluctuations in their volume levels are starkly evident as the words of the song become unclear and the musical instruments are heard more loudly than the singing. The lack of clarity and imbalances in sound levels give us some hint about the spatial configuration, the positions of the respective performers and their interactions with the given technical equipment. As opposed to the musicians sitting closer to the sound recorder while playing the instruments, the actor-singers are standing at a distance, thus enabling the recorder to pick up the sound of the instruments more clearly than their voices. The actor-singer’s movements, albeit very minimal, compel her to move away from the stationary microphones which work effectively within a limited zone. Playback singing brought significant changes to such patterns of recording and picturisation of song by forging a split between acting and singing, the two activities hitherto conjoined to the same temporal coordinate.6 It enabled a song to be recorded in a studio prior to its filming. The pre-recorded song could then be carried to the shooting spot as an independently existing music track to which the dance steps were employed. While this meant that the actors had to lip-sync to the already existing song, they could move more freely across different spaces and

execute various dance steps. In terms of staging, playback facilitated use of cuts in between shots which could be sutured later. A dance sequence from Achyut Kanya (1936) can be discussed in this context. There are two lead dancers accompanied by four co-dancers on the stage. A large crowd has gathered to watch them. As the dancers lip-sync to the song ‘churi main laya …’, they move around the stage in circles and turn front and back to the audience. The chorus dancers too move in circular and diagonal patterns and change their positions through criss-cross movements. As the lead dancers execute short footwork at different junctures in the song, interplay of sound and rhythm is created through the interaction of their ankle bells and percussion which helps build crescendos within the performance. The choice and the freedom to cover greater space and accommodate more rhythmic movements are quite evidently new initiations which foster dynamicity in the picturisation. Further, owing to the cuts in between the shots, we get a glimpse of the onstage performers, the onscreen audience and the exchange of looks between them. An innovative editing of these shots not only helps define the particular space and place being depicted in the film, but it also lifts the tempo of the entire sequence. At this point, it would be useful to look at an instance where the dance is not composed to any given song but instead to an instrumental piece. Uday Shankar’s Kalpana, which is said to have created an awakening in film dance, serves as an apt example. But few things need to be stated about the film before I analyse the dance. Kalpana stands as an iconoclast as far as Indian dance and more precisely Indian film dance is concerned. Though the film did not earn much commercial success, it received critical acclaim and appreciation from only niche audience. It also left an impact on directors like Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor who borrowed several elements from Kalpana’s dance sequences in their films. The Ghost Dance Sequence in Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) and ‘Ghar aya mera pardesi …’ in Kapoor’s Awaara (1951) evidence Kalpana’s influence. It is often difficult to identify particular song and dance sequence in Kalpana given the complex structure of the film where they are enmeshed into the narrative in a certain manner. I thereby propose a thematic categorisation to analyse the dances, mainly comprising of mythology-based dances, dream sequence dances and, what I refer to as, topical dance sequences. The first one depicts the tales woven around Gods and Goddesses, whereas the second one relates to the story of Udayan (played by Shankar himself), the central protagonist of the film. The last category signifies the different dance pieces in which Shankar focuses on contemporary issues like education, women emancipation, industrialisation and its impact, the prevalent economic imbalance, among others. To distinguish one category from other, Shankar employs a particular set of dance movements, costumes and stage decor for each category. Kartikeya and Shiva-Parvati – the already existing stage productions of Shankar’s troupe – are the two major mythology-based dance pieces featuring in Kalpana. In the absence of a song, the dance pieces are composed to the instrumental musical piece, which acts as the given

score. A number of rhythmic movement patterns are created such that they match up with the beats and tempo of the given score. In these sequences, Shankar uses the defining elements of Indian classical dance like the mudras (coded gestures) rasa (nine main emotions used in Indian performing traditions), aharya (costume) and different dance postures borrowed mainly from Kathakali and Bharatnatyam. The use of close-up and mid-close-up shots foregrounds the intricacies of the facial expressions and gestures along with the movement pattern of the Indian classical dances. Also, the entire set is designed in a fashion as to simulate temple courtyards. But Shankar blends these elements with several others, which he adopted from dance traditions of countries like Java and Bali (Sarkar Munsi 2011). Through this mélange, he produced a unique dance style which earned recognition much later, but during his time his work faced severe criticism. Though the dancers do not lip-sync to any song, they sometimes use words or a phrase as a spoken text in between the dance. For example, in the piece on education,7 a group of dancers appear wearing graduation robes and carrying certificates in their hands. Each one of them raises a slogan in his/her respective vernacular language saying that the prevalent education system is useless. In terms of costume, set and dance movements, this piece differs starkly from the mythological pieces. Shankar uses quotidian movements and yet infuses a stylisation in them, such that they appear as rhythmic dance steps. Unlike the gigantic arches and decorated columns used in mythological dances, this particular set contains rostrums, wooden blocks and stairs, creating a visually multilayered space. The orchestrated movements of the chorus against the backdrop of the layered space produce fascinating visual patterns. The overall effect of this piece becomes more intensified, as Shankar chooses long shots and top-angle shots to capture the different movements and lines in their entirety. The piece on man and machine also bears similar characteristics.8 Thus, Kalpana not only foregrounds the experiments Shankar was conducting at the level of fostering a new dance vocabulary, but it also articulates how Shankar was trying to conceptualise ‘movement’ with respect to camera and editing, the two quintessential components that distinguishes film dance from the rest. So far, I have discussed how a particular dance is composed to a given song or a musical score in a film. Let me conclude the section with an example where the dance is absent in a song sequence. I will look at ‘ayega aanewala …’ from Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949), which is a supernatural thriller and also a story of reincarnation. Hari Shankar (played by Ashok Kumar) lands in a deserted palace and feels something eerie about the place. To his surprise, he discovers his portrait there. As he stands bewildered, suddenly he hears someone singing and starts following the voice. While on the soundtrack, we hear the song in Lata Mangeshkar’s voice, we find Shankar traversing through different spaces – the corridors, the stairs, the alleys and the hall – within the palace. He finally reaches a garden where he spots a woman swinging at a distance and singing. The song establishes a link between the two characters as it sutures these spaces, which would in due course gain centrality in the film’s

narrative and signals to the chain of supernatural events to be unfolded later in the film. The playback singing, as we can deduce, facilitated exploration of different spaces on screen, incorporation of various actions and execution of orchestrated dance movements. Gradually, through the repetitive use of these techniques, one could trace the evolving parameters of filming a song, which in turn helped determine specific moments for a song to appear within the film’s narrative and allocated certain functions to a song. A romantic song was thus meant to depict the budding affair between the hero and the heroine, whereas the pangs of their separation found expression in a sad song. A further enrichment to the song genre was provided by the music composers, who coming from various parts of India brought with them elements of their respective musical traditions, which were infused with the Hindi songs to give rise to variety like devotional songs, qawali, classical songs and so on (Chandavarkar 1987 and 1988a/1988b). Subsequently, different dancing styles befitting the songs came to populate the film dance scenario.9

Romance and rain Romance and rain have shared an intimate relation in Hindi films where several romantic songs have been shot as rain sequence. This category focuses on those songs where rain shapes the picturisation. The iconic rain songs, like ‘Pyar hua iqraar hua …’ from Sri 420 (1955), ‘Rimjhim ke taraane …’ from Kala Bazaar (1960), ‘dumdum deegadeega …’ from Chhalia (1960) and ‘Dil tera deewana …’ from Dil Tera Deewana (1962), are marked by an absence of typical dance movements. The image of two lovers getting half wet as they share an umbrella, walking on the city streets amidst washed neon light and occasional passerby paints a picture of a quotidian urban scape, and yet infuses a dramatic register that drifts away from the real world. The change in the actor’s gestures and behaviour, like the sudden quivering of eyebrows, the fast breathing, quick exchange of looks, playful loitering, heroine’s frantic running away from the hero and his mischievous banter, marks this shifting register, thus complicating the idea of ‘dance’. These gestures heighten the playful repartee building up between the two which is already signalled by the (text) song. Besides depicting the romance, as Piyush Roy notes, these songs were ‘means to convey sensuality without resorting to crude exposure’ (2007: 3). Dance with all its vigour and vivacity in these songs emerged in the later day films. One can think of ‘aj rapat jaye …’ from Namak Halaal (1982), ‘Kisiki haath na ayegi …’ from Chaalbaaz (1989), ‘katey nehi …’ from Mr India (1987), ‘tiptiptiptip bearish …’ from Afsana Pyar Ka (1991), ‘Dekh zara dekho barsaat…’ from Yeh Dillagi (1994) and ‘tip tip barsa …’ from Mohra (1994). Studio sets resembling the urbanscapes, which had already become a hallmark of these sequences, were retained in the later day films, too. But this time, they were adorned

with shops, mannequins, benches, bikes and of course the chorus dancers, turning the space almost into a stage and inviting the actors to dance. The foot-tapping steps, frequent use of raincoats and umbrellas as dance props and the orchestrated movements of the chorus facilitating line-dancing patterns which became a trademark of these dance sequences unmistakably remind us of Gene Kelly’s famous ‘Singin’ in the rain …’ number. Interestingly, around the same time, when dance was making its presence felt in these songs, they became an object of severe criticism for depicting overt sexuality. Several film-makers and actors opine, as Roy (2007) observes, that these dances have become a means of circumventing the strictures of censor board as they evoke only titillation through exposure. At what point does the image of a wet sari-clad heroine, who has so far been sensual, appear sexually threatening? Is it the dance and the dancing body that change the register? When and how does a movement become sexual from being sensual? This is not the scope to discuss at length about the importance of such questions though, but I will point out that they instigate further probing into the notion of what is considered as a dance, more precisely a Hindi film dance movement.

Classical dance and defining ‘not-quite-there-ness’ Just as the Indian non-film dance world operated (for several decades)10 through two distinct categories, namely classical and folk, categories reinvented and invested with much vigour at the wake of Indian nationalist movement and post-independence era, Hindi films have also formulated their own version of classical and folk dances. The choice of having these dances are most often determined by the presence of heroines like Vaijayanthimala Bali, Waheeda Rehman, Asha Parekh, Jayashri and Hema Malini, who are trained classical dancers themselves. The song sequences functions as the heroine’s introduction in the narrative. The songs like ‘Pawan deewani …’ from Dr. Vidya (1962) and ‘Dekho bijli dole …’ from Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon (1963) featuring Vaijayanthimala and Asha Parekh, respectively, can be cited as examples. On other occasions, the song provides moments of (first) encounter between the hero and heroine leading to their romantic affair. One can think of ‘tathai tatathai …’ from Tere Mere Sapne (1971) and ‘Mere saath koyi …’ from Do Anjane (1976) featuring Hema Malini and Rekha, respectively, in this context. Though most often these dances have no explicit connection with the main story, it is the heroine’s fame as a dancer which is reckoned as a selling point for the film, and thus justifies such inclusions. On the other hand, these dancer-actresses inspired many directors to make films where ‘dance’ played a key role in the narrative. Jhanak Jhanak Payel Baaje (1955), Meri Surat Teri Aankhen (1963), Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne (1964), Guide (1965), Teesri Kasam (1966), Amrapali, Kinara (1966) and Mehbooba (1976) are some such dance-oriented films.

A close look at the mise en scène of these dance sequences evidences how a set of visual markers have come to delineate and define the ‘classical’ within the popular Hindi film context. The dancers mostly perform in a rectangular or a circular space, decorated with pillars and arches having statues of Gods in the background to simulate temple courtyards or royal courtrooms where traditionally the classical dances were performed. Their costumes are derivative of the traditional Bharatnatyam and Kathak attire and so are the dance movements. The characteristic movements, like aramandi (half sitting postures), the neck movements, the mudras (coded palm gestures) of Bharatnatyam and chakkars (pirouettes) and tatkaar (footwork) of Kathak, carefully mixed with other movement vocabularies define the ‘classical’ in these films. Second, in most cases, the song consists of a brief percussive piece, either in the beginning or in the end, which incites the dancer to perform fast-paced movements. These brief musical prologues/epilogues highlight the nritta aspect of classical dance, whereas the greater part of the song where the dancer demonstrates the lyrics of the song through her movements and gestures foregrounds the nritya aspect.11 The carefully maintained distinction between the two and their display as if fulfill the traditional mandates thereby heightening the fervour of the classical. Here, one can refer to ‘chhamchham nachat …’ from Chhaya (1961), ‘Ram kare kahin …’ from Gunahon Ka Devta (1967), and ‘Meri Payalia …’ from Jugnu (1973). Critics referring to this as ‘pseudo classical’ opine that it ‘is a filmic equivalent of calendar art versions of Ajanta murals and Tanjore glass paintings, taking over the icons of large hipped, full bosomed beauty developed for example by Ravi Verma’ (Rajadhyaksha and Willeman 1999). Much to the dismay of the classical practitioners, the mixing and modifying of classical movements raises questions about the authenticity of representation of classical dances in popular films leading to vulgarisation of the dance forms.12 Among the incessant debates, the repetitive use of these visual codes has strengthened the association forged with filmic classical, subsequently leading to building up of a repertoire of movements and mise en scène, from which the later day choreographers borrow while creating a classical dance. In other words, one witnesses the preparation of a list of movement vocabulary only within the corpus of film which shapes the film dance repertoire. The insistent (re)appearance of the same visual codes and movements in later day films can be seen in the tandav dances from Chaalbaaz (1989), Chandni (1989) and Damini (1993) or songs like ‘Ajao naagraaj …’ from Maqsad (1984), ‘suraj naache …’ from Paththar Ke Insaan (1990) and ‘saat suro ki taar …’ from Sangeet (1979). In due course, the repertoire builds up an archive of film dance movements. I shall elaborate upon the notion of ‘archive’ and ‘repertoire’ later.

Mujras Mujra dance, a feature within Kathak, has also incited much debate regarding authenticity of representation. It emerged during the Mughal rule and was performed by the courtesans in

their kothas (mansions where the courtesans lived and performed). Owing to the activities of the missionaries and nationalist enterprises, the courtesans – a persona best described as an amalgamation of a dancer, poetess and a singer – were made synonymous with prostitutes in the 19th century which brought much misfortune to them. However, the courtesan persona has been immortalised by commercial cinema, which has both heightened their enigmatic appeal and yet pointed towards their status as fallen women in the society. Devdas (1955), Pakeezah (1972), Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977), Umraao Jaan (1981), Sadhana (1958), Kala Pani (1959), Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978) and Suhaag (1979) contain some of the most remembered mujra dances. In each of these films, courtesan character plays an important role in the narrative. But there are few films like Ganga Jamuna (1961), Mere Huzoor (1968) and Taxi Driver (1973) where a mujra seems to be a mere inclusion, though there is no explicit connection with the plot. The depiction of the authentic Kathak in films has been of crucial concerns for Kathak practitioners like Kumudini Lakhia and Birju Maharaj. These practitioners, coming from families of hereditary Kathak dancers, are considered as the custodians of the authentic form, and subsequently their choreographies in films like Umraao Jaan and Shatranj Ke Khiladi are more revered than the others. The question of authenticity, as we see, gets tied to deeper forces of hierarchisation operating among the choreographers. Unlike these hereditary practitioners, choreographers like Surya Kumar, Badri Prasad and P. L. Raj who composed mujras for commercial films like Jahan Ara (1964), Bahu Begum (1967), Suhaag, Taxi Driver and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar did not come from such training backgrounds. Though their work met with huge financial success, they have always been relegated to the domain of popular, and hence labeled as inauthentic. However, I must note that almost all the mujra sequences contain the visual markers – both in terms of movements and mise en scène – which lend them the recognition of Kathak. The quintessential Kathak movements like chakkars (pirouettes) and tatkaars (footwork), costumes resembling Jaipur or Lucknow gharana attire,13 the white marble columns and chandeliers, accompanying musicians seated on the floor, all evoke reminiscences of Mughal courts and kothas. To what extent these movements and mise en scène correspond to what is considered as authentic Kathak is a different question. But their recurrence in the mujra sequences foregrounds the operating repertoire and how it lends the recognition of Kathak to these dances.

Classical dance in historical films Sometimes, this archive interestingly turns the filmic classical dances into authenticators of history in what has been considered as historical drama or period piece films, perhaps quite disregarding the debates concerning ‘authenticity’. While depicting the Ancient Golden Age or

the Medieval Mughal Age – the two historical eras which have caught the imagination of Hindi films – they use Bharatnatyam and Kathak as markers of respective eras, irrespective of whether these dance forms actually correspond to the mentioned eras. Anarkali performing Kathak to a thumri in the royal court of a 16th-century Mughal ruler, Salim, as depicted in Mughal-e-Azam (1960), seems hardly tenable. It raises questions about the form in which Kathak (would have) existed in the 16th-century India and produces disorienting accounts of the musical genre of thumri which did not emerge until the 19th century. Similarly, Amrapali’s performance of Bharatnatyam in Lekh Tandon’s Amrapali, a film about a court dancer in the North Indian city of Vaishali around 500 BC, completely jeopardises the hitherto existing accounts of the dance, which is identified as a South Indian classical dance form. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the crucial significances such representations engender. However, I have discussed elsewhere how the commercial Hindi cinema, in trying to capture a past through aural-visual markers, redefines ‘history’ and rewrites histories of Indian classical dances.14

Fun, frolic and folk dancing ‘Folk’ is a contentious term, often conflated with ‘regional’, and has come to refer to the dance and musical forms associated with the quotidian activities of the common people. Within the corpus of Hindi commercial cinema, folk is made synonymous with ‘rural’. These films, while exploring the variety of Indian folk forms have picked up certain movements and dressing styles from each of these forms, assembled them together and tagged them as ‘folk’. This kind of tagging undoubtedly blurs the specificity of each form facilitating a homogenisation. In a number of films, a folk female character is represented through her knee length flared skirt, the dupatta (lengthy scarf) and headgears adorned with feathers and flowers. I am reminded of Minu Mumtaz in ‘Boojh mera kya nam hai …’ from CID (1956), Vijayantimala in ‘daiyaa re daiyaa …’ from Madhumati (1958), ‘Jaani tum to dole …’ from Dr. Vidya, ‘Dhoondo Dhoondo re saajna …’ from Ganga Jamuna, Asha Parekh in ‘Yaar chulbula hai …’ from Dil Deke Dekho (1959) and Mala Sinha in ‘Chaand si mehbooba …’ from Himalay Ki God Mein (1965). As far as the movement vocabulary is concerned, it is the hopping, skipping, holding hands, alternate shoulder quivering which characterise folk. The assemblage of different movements encapsulated by the term ‘folk’ help distinguish itself from the ‘classical’ within the domain of film dance. Such distinction engenders further construction of identity of each dance form. For example, as opposed to the classical, the folk repertoire is said to evoke fun and frolic, which runs in contrast to the rigidity the former demands. The homogenising impulse is yet again problematised by the urge to simultaneously preserve cultural differences. Can we not talk about the significant presence of Bhangra

dances, where the turban-headed heroes with their characteristic shoulder shrugging and vibrant leaps reminds us of the North Indian folk form? Be it Shammi Kapoor in ‘yeh tere haath …’, Dev Anand in ‘Ladi najariya …’ or Amitabh Bachchan in ‘teri rab ne bana di …’, the iconic Punjabi male is hard to overlook. Same is true of the representation of dance forms like the Maharashtrian folk form Lavani – ‘Mungda” from Inkaar (1977) and ‘humko ajkaal …’ from Sailaab (1990) and Gujarati folk Garba in ‘dholitaro …’ from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), for example. Some of the evolving features of the filmic folk dances are the line dancing of chorus dancers, use of long, mid-long and top shots to capture the formation of circular and semicircular patterns achieved through synchronised movement of the chorus covering almost the entire performing space, the positioning of the hero and heroine at the centre stage which separates them from the chorus, face-to-face dancing with the partners and execution of movements in alternate directions producing various line patterns.

Holi dances Most of the above mentioned picturising principles are echoed in dances depicting festivals like Holi. Holi plays a pivotal role in most of Indian classical dances (mainly in Kathak), where the playful interactions between the iconic romantic duo of Radha and Krishna find vivid expression. The imprints of such tradition are carried onto the film screen where Holi provides the opportunity to show the intimacy between the hero and the heroine. Another reason which can be attributed to Hindi cinema’s fascination with Holi is the spectacular nature of the festival, which adds visual splendour to the dance sequences in films. Some of the iconic Holi dance sequences are ‘Holi re aya re …’ from Mother India (1957), ‘Aj na chhodenge …’ from Kati Patang (1970), ‘Holi re holi …’ from Paraya Dhan (1971), ‘Holi ke rang …’ from Namak Haram (1973), ‘Holi kedin …’ from Sholay (1975) and ‘Rang barse bheegey …’ from Silsila (1981).

Western dance: vamp, villain and all that is west The film music composers have been adopting tunes and rhythmic patterns from different ‘western’ musical traditions from the 1940s. Similarly, the choreographers, too, had been weaving in movements from Jazz, Waltz, Hip Hop, Break and Salsa with Hindi film dance, giving rise to the ‘western dance’ category. The movements that define western dance repertoire are markedly the hip flicks, hip shakes, arm flicks, chest thumping and crunching, wave formation with torso, rolling on the floor, head turns on the floor and so forth. Considering that eastern-western binary engenders a host of complications, I describe this category as one that explores into various non-Indian dance and musical traditions. It is very

hard to discern the presence of a particular dance form in any sequence. Instead, one finds imprints of different dance styles being put together, which once again highlights the ongoing mélange that build up the movement repertoire in films. The non-Indian dance has long been associated with the vamp character – a fallen woman coming from a devious background and is often a confidante of the villain. She appears in heel shoes, skimpy dresses and puts on weird hairdo, unlike the heroine who is a symbol of Indian culture and tradition. The stark contrast is untiringly repeated over decades to sustain the eastern-western distinction so as to be able to articulate upon Indian womanhood. The dance numbers bear crucial significances for the vamp, since dancing western corroborates her being ‘western’, that is, not Indian/traditional, and therefore provide attestation of her identity and social position; otherwise the vamps have little to do in the entire film. The spaces in which they perform are either shady hideouts of the villains or hotel rooms. The dance takes place on a raised platform, at a distance from the guests who sit and dine around their individual tables. A group of musicians playing non-Indian instruments accompany the vamp. She sometimes comes down from the platform and makes her way among the guests trying to seduce them with her moves. Cuckoo, the Anglo Indian dancer, was one of the earliest vamps of Indian cinema. Her appearance in Mirza Saahibaan (1947), Anokhi Ada (1948) and Awaara (1951) remains memorable till date. Among others were Helen, Bindu and Padma Khanna, who popularised this genre and they were equally skilled dancers as the mainstream heroines. Some of the iconic vamp dances are ‘Mud mudke na dekh …’ from Sri 420 (1955), ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo …’ from Howrah Bridge (1958), ‘Nigaahon ne feka hai …’ from Jaali Note (1960), ‘Baithe hai kya …’ from Jewel Thief (1966), ‘Aa jaane jaan …’ from Inteqaam (1969), ‘Piyatu …’ from Caravan (1971), ‘Ajkiraat …’ from Anamika (1973), ‘Mehbooba …’ from Sholay, ‘Mera naam Shabnam hai …’ from Kati Patang and ‘Hussn ke laakhon rang …’ from Johny Mera Naam(1970). In the contemporary parlance, what is referred as an ‘item dance’ is often seen to have come down from the vamp dancing tradition. Though there are overlaps between the two, it would be erroneous to conceive of a continuing thread that binds them. Considering the changing notion of dancing ‘skill’, as it is perceived (mainly within the film industry and in reality shows) today, the place allotted to an item dance within a film narrative and the visual stylistics pertaining to it, I argue there are distinctions between an item and vamp dance. However, ‘item dance’, which I perceive mostly as post-2000 phenomenon, remains outside the scope of this present discussion. So far, I have mainly focused upon a female performer. Barring few instances, like Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jamuna and Naya Daur (1957) and Shammi Kapoor in Tumsa nehi Dekha (1957), Dil deke Dekho, China Town (1963) and Junglee (1961), the male dancer earns a visibility not until late 1970s and early 1980s. Shammi Kapoor’s fame as a dancer entails an

understanding of how an actor’s idiosyncratic body language gets translated into dance vocabularies, and I shall elaborate upon this later. As far as the phenomenon of male dancing in the 1980s is concerned, the two names that are hard to miss are Mithun Chakraborty and Govinda. While the former gained popularity with his version of Elvis Presley’s movements, the latter shot to fame with his own impeccable breakdancing style. The entire male dancing phenomenon, yet again, came to be considered as western dancing. These male dancers occupied the centre stage when it came to dancing at discotheques, pubs, hotel rooms and sometimes open streets. Film after film, huge sets were built up, where one could see them dancing on painted glass floors among psychedelic lights with heavy drum beats. I will mention Disco Dancer (1982), Dance Dance (1987), Naach Govinda Naach (1992) and Ilzaam (1986) in this context.

Star dancing: idiosyncrasy and idioms Coming from one of the illustrious film families of Bombay, Shammi Kapoor’s decision to take up dancing, unlike his colleagues, was impelled by an urge not to get overshadowed by his father Prithviraj Kapoor and elder brother Raj Kapoor – two towering film personalities. It was more of a conscious decision to carve out an individual identity. After his initial films, he underwent a complete makeover with films like Tumsa Nahi Dekha, Dil Deke Dekho and China Town among others, and dance proved to be a crucial component in this process. He was not a trained dancer, but what he produced became a quintessential Shammi Kapoor style (Vesuna 1988: 77). Though few elements of shake dance can be discerned in some proportions, but coupled with Kapoor’s idiosyncratic body movements – ecstatic head movements, jumps and leaps, comical facial expressions – a new dance idiom emerged. Kapoor claimed that those movements were his own innovations and not the contribution of the dance directors. But such claims seem hardly tenable, given the fact that it was Herman Benjamin, the dance composer, who actually composed Kapoor starrer songs (Singh 2007: 40) like ‘Aja Aja …’ from Teesri Manzil (1966), ‘Ajkal tere mere pyar ke charche …’ from Brahmachari (1968) and ‘badan pe sitarey …’ from Prince (1969). But undoubtedly, the idiosyncratic expressions, soon identified as typical Shammi Kapoor movements, helped popularise an endless list of films of that decade. Another actor who shot to fame with his dancing talent was Jeetendra. He was not a trained dancer, but soon evolved a style of his own which earned him the name ‘jumping jack’; ‘takitakitaki re…’ and ‘Naino mein sapna…’ from Himmatwala (1983) till date remain the most iconic among his dances. But he had already made a name for himself as a dancer with his earlier performances in ‘tum se o haseena …’ from Farz (1967), ‘Dhal gaya din …’ from Humjoli (1970) and ‘Chadti jawaani …’ from Caravan (1971).

Bhagwan Dada should top the list as far as individual dance style is concerned. He was neither trained nor a conventionally good-looking hero. Rather, he was a short heighted person who played comic characters in the films of the 1950s. ‘Bholi surat…’ and ‘shola jo bharke …’ from the 1951 film Albela immortalised Bhagwan’s dancing, which is marked by a slow-paced movement, with bent knees and slight raising of arms. This movement was later picked up by Amitabh Bachchan. The popularity of Bachchan’s dancing is attributed to choreographer Kamal, who thought Bhagwan Dada’s steps would suit him (Singh 2007: 41). ‘Jahan teri yeh nazar …’ from Kaalia (1981), ‘Bachke rahna re …’ from Pukar (1983), ‘khaikepaan …’ from Don (1978), ‘miley jo kadi …’ from Kasme Vaade (1978) and ‘ke pag ghungroo …’ from Namak Halal are some of the best-known Bachchan numbers. Needless to say that the list of dance styles I have proposed is incomplete. These styles might appear limiting to approach the vast array of Hindi film songs and dances produced over the decades, all of which cannot be fitted within the mentioned categories. Moreover, there are overlaps between the categories in terms of the use of movement vocabularies or picturisation aesthetics that makes it difficult to speak of stable dance categories. For example, an entire section can be contributed to the songs picturised on the leading comedians of Hindi films. ‘Ek chaturnaar …’ and ‘sawariya …’ from Padosan (1968) or ‘Nir ta ta dhang …’ from Chandan Ka Palna (1967) are fine examples where the ace comedians like Mehmood and Dhumal are seen to be performing classical dances. Does the use of classical dance and particularly the bol parant (recitation of rhythmic compositions) relegate them to classical dance category? How does one categorise the inimitable dancing of Kishore Kumar in ‘aake seedhi lagi …’ from Half Ticket (1962) and ‘eena meena dika …’ from Aasha(1957)? Do we consider Johnny Walker’s very peculiar bodily dispositions in ‘tel maalish …’ from Pyasaa (1957), ‘Yehhai Bombay meri Jaan …’ from CID and ‘Jane kahan mera jigar …’ from Mr and Mrs 55 (1955) as dance? Since it is not possible to discuss all these various dance sequences within the limited scope, I have considered only those dance styles which I perceive as the dominant or frequently used in Hindi films.

Conclusion What makes a dance movement (appear) filmic? How does a choreographer compose a movement which is recognised as Hindi film dance? How does one define (and describe) Hindi film dance? The oft-repeated ascription of ‘hybridity’ to describe dance in Hindi films is inadequate. The identification of a dance movement as ‘filmic’ calls for a consideration of an existing repertoire – comprising of the ephemeral elements like particular movements, gestures and expression – which has been built through its continuous performance in several films. Just as

chakkars, tatkaar and gat nikaash signify the Kathak repertoire, particular hip flicks and chest popping represent film dance repertoire. In both the cases, the repertoire has been formed through continuous performance of the practitioners. These practitioners repetitively perform these movements in several films and in so doing retain the dance movement – the memory of the movement, the skill of doing the movement and the knowledge of the movement – within their dancing bodies. However, in case of Indian classical dances, one also comes across various dance treatises and notation systems which contain detailed account of different movements, gestures and bols (mnemonic compositions).15 These written documents serve various functions. On one hand, they help preserve the compositions as the written words seek to capture or fix the dance, while on the other, they articulate a theory of dance which illustrates the codes of dance performance. In the process, they facilitate an overall codification of the different dance forms, whereby each can be distinguished from another and therefore taught in accordance with the respective rules. I must note that the aspect of embodied learning continues to remain crucial, since the written codes and theories act as only partial aids in grasping the dance in its entirety. It is the absence of such written codes in popular Hindi film context which might be seen as an impediment in determining the repertoire, and therefore adds to the perception of it being hybrid and devoid of any critical attention. I am suggesting that it would be erroneous to acknowledge the (presence of) repertoire in terms of the (presence or absence of) the written codes. One needs to locate the repertoire of Hindi film dance within the body of the dancers (choreographers and onscreen performers) as well as in the body of the films where the dance sequences appear repeatedly. To rephrase, one can gather evolving patterns and codes of filmic dance movements and gestures by observing their reiteration in several films. The continuous performance of these codes becomes imperative in producing and preserving the repertoire. Moreover, it is useful to note how the film dance sequences also serve a selfdocumentation. Film being a recorded medium preserves the dance movements, whereby enabling the spectator to revisit a dance by replaying the particular sequence in the film. One can, therefore, say that the film dance sequences become archives in themselves. Without disparaging the questions of authenticity, representation, travels and transformation of dance, I am suggesting that Hindi film dance should be thought in terms of the internal cataloguing, which helps trace the history of dance movements within films. The dance categories discussed in this chapter may be considered as a useful key to approach the repertoire.

Notes 1 Filmfare is one of the leading Hindi film magazines of India which was first published in 1952. This English-language

magazine has found a huge circulation all over the country and has also formulated awards for Bombay as well as the South Indian film industry. 2 Though the polling claims to speak of Indian cinema as a whole, it takes into consideration only the Hindi films coming out from the Bombay film industry, popularly called Bollywood, thus rendering an effortless conflation of ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindi’, which is problematic. 3 Rajadhyaksha describes how the brand of Bollywood films emerging in the wake of economic liberalisation speaks through a number of specific markers – like particular narrative and mode of presentation – which attest their brand identity. While these markers reflect the ethos of an evolving lifestyle fostered by the new economic climate, it also determines a particular language adopted by this category of films. 4 Uday Shankar’s directorial venture Kalpana (1948) had few dance sequences, where the dances were composed to instrumental music pieces. The famous drum dance sequence in S. S. Vasan’s Chandralekha (1948) does not contain any song but a heavy percussion music piece. Some of the Yash Chopra films made in the latter half of his career from the 1990s, like Chandni (1989), Lamhe (1991), Darr (1993), Dil to Pagal Hai (1997), feature dance sequences set to instrumental music pieces (apart from regular songs). 5 Since the chapter entirely concerns popular Hindi films, the mention of a Bengali film might seem to be out of place. There are mainly two reasons for incorporating the Bengali film in the discussion. First, it is pertinent to the present context as it illustrates the arrangements of song picturisation prior to the coming of playback, and thus helps to draw a comparison with the song sequences, I analyse later in the chapter. Second, it must be borne in mind that the introduction of playback affected not only Hindi films, but also Indian cinema as a whole. In other words, with the coming of talkies and later the playback system, the film-making practice as it existed in various parts of the country underwent a change. So, the particular features, which I discuss with regards to song picturisation before the advent of playback system, are true of both Bengali and Hindi films. 6 Playback singing posed a threat to the careers of many actor-singers, who until then had been leading film stars. Owing to the split between acting and singing, it was no more imperative for an actor to be a skilled singer. The division of skill thus encouraged the emergence of two separate groups of performers, each endowed with a particular expertise. 7 This piece is known to the dancers as ‘Old and Young’. The members of the performing troupe of the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre performed this as a part of the recreated choreography Labour and Machinery by Amala Shankar in the late1970s (see Sarkar Munshi 2011). 8 This particular composition titled Labour and Machinery was an already existing stage production of Shankar, which he reworked for the film. 9 As I mentioned in the beginning, not all songs were set to dance. Several romantic songs are picturised without putting any dance in them. Similarly, sad songs or devotional song sequences do not contain dance. Therefore, it would be erroneous to consider that each song genre will find its counterpart in a dance. I am particularly focusing on those kinds of songs which have always been meant for dancing in the Hindi film corpus. 10 Beside the Indian classical and folk, one also notices the thriving presence of Indian contemporary dance, a genre that has emerged only in recent years. The dance institutions which have been set up from late 1930s to early 1960s mainly taught classical and folk. 11 Nritta and Nritya are two major components of all Indian classical dances. The former signifies abstract movements,

techniques and movement pattern of a particular dance form and does not concern itself with the mimetic charge which is found in the latter. Nritya signifies acting where the dancer impersonates as various characters and narrates a story through the dance. 12 In an interview, Pt. Gopikishan Maharaj, one of the leading Kathak exponents who also choreographed for many films, expresses his dissatisfaction with the vulgarisation of Kathak dance which according to him is a result of commercialisation. Looking back upon his own works and those of other traditional practitioners, he opines that coming from a Kathak background, these practitioners have an in-depth knowledge of the dance form, whereas most of the other choreographers’ work reflect their ignorance and disrespect to the form (Shankar 1995). 13 There are marked differences between the attires belonging to Jaipur and Lucknow Gharana (school) of Kathak. Jaipur gharana dancers wear a long flowing skirt, a blouse and a dupatta (scarf), whereas the other school of dancers wears long flowing frock along with churidaar (leggings) and dupatta. 14 In my dissertation (2008), I have discussed how popular Hindi cinema uses dance and music, that is, aural-visual markers, to represent the past. 15 Bhatkhande style and Vishnu Digambar style of notation, named after the respective founders Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, are the two main notation systems used in Hindustani classical music and dance. Carnatic music and dance also have their specific notation styles such as Swarasindhu style introduced by Nagaratna Sadasiva. Among the dance treatise, Natyasatra (Bharata, 2nd century AD) and Abhinaya Darpan (Nandikesvara, 2nd century BC) are considered to be the two most important Sanskrit treatises on Indian dance and drama.

References Chandavarkar, Bhaskar. 1988a. ‘Song of the Instruments’, Cinema in India, 2(2): 22–7. ———. 1988b. ‘The Arrangers’, Cinema in India, 2(1): 20–3. ———. 1987. ‘Now It’s the Bombay Film Song’, Cinema in India, 1(4): 18–24. Ghosh, Shruti. 2008. ‘Dance as a Site for the Invention of Tradition: Study of Choreography in Hindi Historical Films (1960s– 1980s)’, Unpublished Master’s dissertation, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, India. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2003. ‘The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, 4(1): 25–39. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willeman. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Ranade, Ashok D. 1980. ‘The Extraordinary Importance of the Indian Film Song’, Cinema Vision, 1(4): 4–12. Roy, Piyush. 2007. ‘Rain Drain’, The Sunday Express, 10 June, pp. 1–3. Sarkar Munsi, Urmimala, 2011. ‘Imag(in)ing the Nation: Uday Shankar’s Kalpana’, in Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Stephanie Burridge (eds), Traversing Tradition: Celebrating Dance in India, pp. 124–50. New Delhi: Routledge. Shankar, Pt Vijay Mishra. 1995. ‘Interview of Pt Gopikishan Maharaj’, Chhayanat, 2(1): 14–16. Singh, Suhani. 2007. ‘Move Moghuls’. Time Out Mumbai, October, pp. 36–43. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke

University Press. Vesuna, Sheila. ‘The Lion Roars No More’. 1988. Star and Style, May–June, pp. 71–2 and pp. 77–8.

7 Designing the song and dance sequences Exploring Bollywood’s cinematic creativity Vikrant Kishore and Susan Kerrigan

Indian love of dance is deeply cultural. Dance is embedded in India’s folk music traditions and religion, and the use of song and dance in Bollywood films is a natural extension of those recognised cultural forms and these factors have helped contribute to Bollywood’s global successes. In 2012, Bollywood’s global ticket sales exceeded that of Hollywood, with 3.6 billion Bollywood tickets sold compared to Hollywood’s 2.6 billion (Sardana 2012: 5). Bollywood/Hindi films stand apart from Hollywood films, as it generally utilises elements from multiple genres, which has been dubbed as the masala (spicy) genre of films (Ganti 2004; Kaur and Sinha 2005; Dudrah 2006). Song and dance sequences feature as an integral part of the mainstream Bollywood films. Interviews with contemporary Bollywood directors and dance directors reveal unique creative practices that Bollywood film-makers use during the collaborative production of films. These highly collaborative processes, especially in terms of designing song and dance sequences, are unique to Bollywood film-making, and confirm the creative contributions of the dance directors, which is not a fully recognised position in western or Hollywood film awards (Simonton 2004a and 2004b).

Literature review The use of song and dance sequences in Bollywood films can be traced to the first talkie Alam Ara, produced by Ardeshir Irani in 1931 (Gulzar et al. 2002). Bollywood film song and dance sequences are highlighted with colourful costumes, exotic locales, an assorted mix of dance movements and numerous supporting dancers. These elements allow the Bollywood song and dance sequences to provide audiences with an opportunity to fantasise and entertain (Ray 1976: 74–5). Dasgupta argues that film songs are important to Bollywood cinema: ‘there are number of ways in which the popular film in India struggles to overcome the built-in naturalism of

cinema, and to bend this medium, developed in a Western technological society, towards its own industrial, mythical style of discourse’ (2008: 33). This mythical style of discourse refers to the frequent song and dance sequences that are prominent in Bollywood films. Given the ubiquity of song and dance sequences, the question can be posed: Are Bollywood films musicals? In answer to this question, scholars agree that Indian films have been inspired by Hollywood musicals. Over the years, Hollywood musicals have been imitated/copied/mimicked, indigenised and hybridised by Bollywood, which is why many in India refer to these films as naatch-gaana (song and dance) cinema. This format has come about because in India the majority of films aim to provide mass entertainment where all the human emotions are presented as part of one narrative, which we term as ‘a single ticket – multi-entertainment phenomenon’. Bollywood has closely followed the Hollywood musicals genre through plot and structure. For example, Yash Raj Films, a well-established Hindi film production house, represents a classic style of Bollywood film-making, with a high quotient of melodrama and an emphasis on the spectacular presentation of song and dance sequences. Their films, such as Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007), typically follow a Hollywood musical structure. However, while there are similarities, it is worth noting that there are obvious differences between Bollywood films and Hollywood musicals. The Hollywood musical genre reached its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, but the genre declined during the 1960s and since that time only a handful of Hollywood musicals have been produced (Cohen 2002). Bollywood cinema, on the other hand, developed its own style and genres in terms of narratives, aesthetics, presentation and packaging for the viewers (Kishore 2011). As Langford contends: In fact the conventions of musical integration in Hindi cinema are fundamentally different, operating not at the sub-generic level (i.e. the distinction between the [Busby] Berkeley and [Arthur] Freed musical) but in a trans-generic manner: musical performance is an accepted dramatic convention in a discourse which operates according to different regimes of verisimilitude and concepts of realism than the Hollywood or European model. (2005: 100) Langford describes a Hindi form of ‘verisimilitude’ and argues that this approximation to reality is culturally underpinned by the longstanding traditions of Sanskrit drama, classical and folk music and dance forms and folk theatre of India (see also Kishore 2011). Noted Indian film critic Dasgupta is of the opinion that the song and dance sequences are an important element of the Bollywood cinema, with strong roots coming from the mythical tales of Ramayana and Mahabharata. Furthermore, Indian gods provide a very deep cultural connection with the dance genre, called nrtya. Misra and colleagues assert that ‘even the gods dance, and the dance of each god has a different connotation’ (2006: 433). For example, the dance of Lord

Ganesh was considered a dance of creation and well-being. It shows the way true creativity can shape the whole universe. Misra and colleagues further mention six other Indian gods and their style of dances; for example, Maha Kali addressed evil through dance, whereas Sri Krishna and Radha dance represents the merging of individual souls to become the universal soul (2006: 433). These religious and cultural dance traditions confirm the deep cultural connection India has had with dance, which has been used for centuries to communicate ideas and concepts about religion, folk culture and mythological storytelling. These socio-cultural and historical connections to dance are important. Given that the use of music, song and dance in Bollywood films is a cultural necessity rather than a signifier of a genre as it has been seen in western and Hollywood cinema, it can be claimed that, as Bollywood scholars argue, music song and dance does not signify one specific Bollywood genre, because music song and dance is universal to Bollywood cinema. Furthermore, Bollywood cinema has its own unique genre classifications (Kishore 2011); for example, Devotional, Historical, Romantic, Horror, Masala, Social and Muslim social films (see Dudrah 2006) which incorporate the use of music, song and dance. What is critical for Bollywood film-makers is how they use music, song and dance in the narrative; will it be embedded in the narrative as part of the story or will it be used as an escape from the narrative (Kishore 2011: 55–9)? Song and dance sequences are utilised to heighten the effect of a momentous event unfolding in the story through a musical rendition of the character’s emotions and intentions. This can be seen, for example, in Bollywood film director Guru Dutt’s skilfully interlaced song and dance sequences in films like Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959). In the 1970s, popular film-maker Nasir Hussain featured song and dance sequences as a spectacle, with huge sets, colourful dresses and props, western outfits and dance moves. Hum Kisise Kum Naheen (1977), directed by Hussain, could have been classified as a western musical, but for the Indian audience it was a masala action film that incorporated nine song and dance sequences, which progressed the romantic and emotional subplot of the film. Bollywood film-makers became very skilled at crafting song and dance narratives. As a natural reaction to what became a predictable form, they began to use song and dance as an escape from the narrative, utilising the mode of dreamlike situations and fantasies for a purely spectacle purposes. In the film Dil Se (1998), it is argued that the hero and the heroine adopt personas in the song and dances sequences which have nothing to do with the characters of the journalist and the terrorist they play within the narrative (Basu: 161). From one perspective, this brief analysis, of how song and dance are used as part of or as an escape from the narrative, points to a certain predictability in Bollywood cinema. While some see this predictability as a weakness, Dudrah argues that Bollywood narratives are ‘formulaic entertainment for the masses’ (2006: 32). However, other creativity experts argue the opposite – that form (cinema), formula (plot and narrative) and format (film genre) are the tools filmmaker’s use to enhance creativity (McIntyre 2012: 118–32). Nonetheless, Bollywood dance

directors are charged with the creative task of choreographing song and dance sequences whether they reflect the narrative’s intention or act as an escape from it.

The rise of the Bollywood dance director Bollywood dance directors have to understand the role of the song-dance within the films narrative – what is the dramatic purpose of the song and dance, how will that affect the tone and emotion of the characters that are in the lead or in the background of the song-dance? Are there certain mannerisms or an emotional mood that the character/s need to be continuing or amplified within the song-dance? The dance director also considers the kind of camerawork and lighting, which will be required to enhance the given dance situation and if there are particular dance step needed to highlight a specific sentiment of the song. A dance director needs to have a specific understanding of the cinematic techniques required to capture a dance performance for cinema. In the West, choreographers are mostly employed on musicals and they would have to work closely with the film’s director when producing dance sequences for camera; but in Bollywood cinema, the role of the person designing or choreographing the dance sequences has developed beyond the western approach. Therefore, the person who designs, plans, choreographs and helps film and edit the song-dance sequences is aptly bestowed with the designation of dance director and he is seen as a key creative contributor, essential to Bollywood cinematic creativity. Bollywood cinema has had many prominent dance directors over the decades, such as Gopi Krishna – Mehbooba (1976) and Umrao Jaan (1981); P. L. Raj – Junglee (1961); Hiralal – Jaanwar (1965); Suresh Bhat – Tumse Accha Kaun Hai (1969); and Kamal – Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). All these dance directors were adept in various Indian dance forms and had expertise in some or the other Indian classical dance forms, but they did not hesitate in experimenting with different dance forms from others parts of the world.1 P. L. Raj, Hiralal and Suresh Bhat were instrumental in popularising western dances like rock ‘n’ roll and twist in films of the 1960s and early 1970s (especially the ones starring Shammi Kapoor and Jeetendra). Hiralal presented a Beatles music video–style song-dance sequence Tumse Hai Dil Ko Pyaar in the film Jaanwar. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Kamal developed as an extraordinary choreographer with films like Laila Majnu (1976) and Dharamveer (1977). This stylised dance choreography that captured the essence of the narrative situation, as well as his fantastical treatment of song and dance sequences, made him a popular dance director of that time. Suresh Bhat used disco dance in the film Disco Dancer (1983), which turned the lead actor Mithun Chakraborty into a major dancing Bollywood star, as well as popularised disco as a dance genre in the Indian subcontinent. The 1980s will probably be remembered for the dominance of the dance director Saroj

Khan, who changed the way the world sees Bollywood dance and also gave the dance directors more power on a film’s production. Saroj Khan has won numerous awards, which include eight Filmfare awards (India’s equivalent to the Oscars) for choreography/dance direction.2 Khan’s brilliance meant she was given opportunities to independently direct her dance compositions. Saroj Khan is remembered for her collaboration with the reigning lead actresses of Bollywood Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit and can be attributed to the hypersexualised, overtly eroticised dance and double entendre moves in the 1980s Bollywood cinema. Dance directors, such as Farah Khan, Chinni Prakash, Shiamak Davar, Ganesh Acharya and Ahmed Khan, dominated the late 1990s and 2000s. Farah Khan and Shiamak Davar were successful in ending the domination of Saroj Khan in Bollywood films. Their western popular genre inspired dance movements and their ability to utilise colourful sets and decor to maximise the effect of the song and dance sequence were something different, which the audience of the late 1990s and early 2000s appreciated. Farah Khan in her first song-dance sequence ‘pehla nasha …’ in the film Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander (1992) experimented with slow motion. In films such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2001) and Kabhi Alwida Na Kehna (2006), Farah enmeshed skilful choreography with glamour, sensuality and an over-the-top glitzy set-up. Shiamak Davar’s stylistic choreography not only made the song and dance sequences popular in films such as Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Taal (1999), Dhoom 2 (2006) and the Hollywood film Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), but his style of dance choreography also started a dance school movement worldwide.3 The 21st century witnessed the arrival of many talented dance directors and choreographers, including Vaibhavi Merchant – Bunty aur Babli (2005), Umrao Jaan (2006) and Krissh (2006); Bosco-Caesar – Bluffmaster (2005) and Jab We Met (2007); Ganesh Acharya – Omkara (2006); Ganesh Hegde – Koi Mil Gaya (2003) and Dum (2003); Raju Khan – Lagaan (2001) and Krrish (2006); Remo D’souza – Awarapun (2007), Mission Istaanbul (2008) and Rock On! (2008); and Longinus Fernandez – Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Guzaarish (2010) and Barfi (2012). In 2004, Farah Khan moved on from dance director to directing the film Main Hoon Na. Sanjay Leela Bhansali has done the same having directed Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1998) and Devdas (2002). Both are now celebrated Bollywood film-makers. Other dance directors and choreographers who have moved into film directing include Bhansali’s one-time assistant Vikramaditya Motwane. His films Udaan (2010) and Lootera (2013) have received rave reviews and won many awards. The South Indian superstar and dancing sensation Prabhu Deva also ventured into directing Bollywood cinema with the 2007 blockbuster film Wanted which featured Salman Khan. Deva’s 2012 film Rowdy Rathore also achieved phenomenal success. Though the transition from dance director to film director may be a logical one, some do not succeed. Ahmed Khan found the transition challenging. His two films Lakeer –

Forbidden Lines (2004) and Fool n Final (2007) failed to meet commercial expectations. Another notable dance director Remo D’souza, who is interviewed later in this chapter, is making his presence felt in Bollywood with his successful directorial venture – a 3D dance film ABCD (2012) and the award-winning Bengali film Lal Paherer Katha (2007), in which he utilised West Bengal’s folk and ritualistic mask dance form Purulia Chhau. Though all these dance directors have creatively made their mark in Bollywood cinema, there still seems to be an uneasy relationship between the new breed of dance directors and the old. Saroj Khan has been somewhat supercilious about the dance directors, who are currently the favourites in Bollywood cinema. Khan states: Dance has changed completely over the years. It does not have value. One dance movement is copied by all, whether it is Bosco-Ceasar, Shiamak Davar, Remo or others. They don’t create the dance from the heart, they just watch others. Farah Khan and Vaibhavi Merchant have a few steps which they keep on repeating in all their songs. They don’t have their own identity. Only Chinni Prakash and Ahmed Khan have their own style. Choreographers used to have a unique style, whether it was Hiralal, Sohan Lal, P. L. Raj or Oscar Vijayan. Look at my songs … they are all different because I choreograph according to the lyrics, and not the rhythm. Nowadays, dance choreographers don’t compose dance. I compose all my dances. I teach my assistants the steps and they teach it to the actors during rehearsals. But when we are shooting, I dance and show the steps myself. (quoted in Patcy 2012) Saroj Khan’s opinion does sound a bit caustic, but then it does not do away with the fact that the process of designing a song and dance sequence is a skilful task that requires lots of planning, understanding of the film-makers point of view, utilisation of the right choreographic and dance techniques, having the right set-up, training the actors and finally bringing all the elements together to life on the silver screen. No matter what has been said for or against Bollywood cinema, one thing clear is that it is a film industry that has global presence and reach with the Bollywood song and dance sequences becoming a big drawing force. Ganti notes that ‘song and dance sequences are one of the most distinctive features of Bollywood cinema’ (2004: 3), and therefore those who create these song and dance spectacles need to be recognised for their cinematic creativity.

Cinematic creativity Simonton (2004a and 2004b) has been able to determine that film-makers, film technicians and actors are recognised for their cinematic creativity by studying film awards and nominations for 1,132 Hollywood films from seven cinematic award associations.4 Simonton’s (2004a, 2004b

and 2005) studies argue that Hollywood cinematic creativity is underpinned by collaboration and he identifies specific film-making fields, which are indicative of cinematic creativity: The typical feature film is the product of the separate contributions of directors, screenwriters, actors, cinematographers, film editor’s, composers, art directors, costumes designers and has host of specialists in makeup, special effects and sound. What makes these cinematic collaborations especially intriguing is that the individual contributions are not completely submerged or blended in the final product. (Simonton 2004a: 163) Simonton’s understanding of collaborative creativity indirectly spotlights creativity at the individual level. McIntyre has defined creativity as ‘an activity where some process or product, one that is considered to be unique and valuable, comes about from a set of antecedent conditions through the conditioned agency of someone’ (2006: 2). Following these ideas, Kerrigan argues that ‘creativity is a systemic and iterative process which can be internalised by an agent who is conditioned through creative practices’ (2013: 124). While Simonton’s findings are significant for western cinematic practice, they are controversial when used as a theoretical background for understanding Bollywood’s cinematic creativity. First, the award categories that Simonton has analysed omit the role of choreographer, which is as we have established above a critical component of the antecedents of Bollywood cinematic creativity. The omission of the choreographer from Simonton’s research may simply result from an omission in the data – the awards that were analysed simply do not present an award for choreography. In the United States, the Best Film Choreographer is presented as part of the musical theatre awards called the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards. Furthermore, the musical categories recognised by western cinema awards are ‘songs’ and ‘scores’, and Simonton notes in his findings that: Both score and song, had a much more ambiguous association with cinematic creativity, whether in terms of reliability or validity. Particularly striking is the finding that the Oscar and Golden Globe awards for best song both have negative validity coefficients. This result replicated what was found in two earlier studies in which it was shows that this negative effect even survives control for genre, such as whether or not the film was a musical. In contrast to opera, film music (and especially songs) has a more peripheral, even antagonistic involvement in the creative product. (2004a: 171) In a second article on group artistic creativity, Simonton offered a plausible reason as to why the production of film music appears to play a minimal role in cinematic awards: ‘the composer’s contribution is more likely to take place in the post-production phase after more

of the other collaborators have completed their work. It is a case of collaboration without interaction’ (2004b: 1516). In Bollywood cinema, the interaction between the musicians, filmmakers and the dance director is one of the first collaborative encounters that decides the aesthetic course of the film; how the narrative will unfold with the use of song and dance, what kind of songs to be employed, what kind of lyrics to be utilised, which particular singer/s will be apt for the actor/s5 and what kind of dance will go with the situation are some of the key elements that are taken into consideration and that provide a clear direction for the development of the film’s narrative. Thus, the designing of the song and dance sequences in Bollywood cinema can be termed ‘collaboration with interaction’. From this perspective, it can be claimed that choreographers of dance directors are crucial to Bollywood film, and Indian film awards recognise the individual creativity of dance be it Bollywood cinema or a regional cinema, where choreography or dance direction awards feature prominently; for example, the Filmfare Awards, the Stardust Awards, the IIFA Awards or the Zee Cine Awards. With this in mind, the Bollywood interview data gathered in this study not only confirms the idea that Bollywood’s narratives are designed specifically to integrate songs and dance into film as an essential element of the story, but also supports Simonton’s finding that ‘individual filmmakers contributions are not completely submerged or blended in the final product’ (Simonton 2004a: 163).

Methodology In exploring the cinematic creativity of Bollywood film-makers, Vikrant Kishore, the lead author of this chapter, used a semi-structured interview method. This postdoctoral research draws on interviews with film-makers conducted from 2007. These film-makers agreed to be identified and they openly discussed their creative and collaborative process as used in Bollywood film production, specifically focusing on the creation of song and dance sequences. The main participants were Bollywood choreographers and dance directors Remo D’souza and Longinus Fernandes, and Bollywood film directors Kunal Kohli, Tanuja Chandra and Onir. Remo D’souza started his career as a backup dancer in choreographer Ahmed Khan’s group and later started assisting Ahmed in various projects (Personal Communication 2009). In 2000, D’souza got his first project as an independent dance director for the film Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar (2001). After choreographing more than 50 films, D’souza moved on to direct his first film Lal Pahere’r Katha (2007). D’souza’s Bollywood directorial debut was with the 2011 film F.A.L.T.U. Longinus Fernandes, a disco dance champion in the late 1980s, started his career as a choreographer under the guidance of Farah Khan. Fernandes’ first film as an independent choreographer was Dil Ka Doctor (1995), but he achieved popularity with the dance-based reality show called Jhalak Dikhla Jaa, – Season 1 (2006; Indian version of Dancing with the

Stars). Fernandes also received acclaim for the choreography of the song ‘Jai ho…’ from the film Slumdog Millionaire. Longinus is one of the most sought-after Bollywood choreographers to date. Film director Kunal Kohli was offered his first Bollywood film Mujhse Dosti Karoge! by Yash Raj Films in 2002 (Personal Communication 2009). Kohli has since then directed blockbusters such as Hum Tum (2004) and Fanaa (2006). Kohli also started his own production house Kunal Kohli Productions in 2007. Film director Tanuja Chandra found success as a screenplay writer for films such as Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) and the India’s National Award-winning film Zakhm (1998). Chandra is also well known for her women-oriented films such as Dushman (1998) and Sangharsh (1999). National Award-winning film-maker Onir’s first film My Brother Nikhil (2005) was critically acclaimed and so was his second film Bas Ek Pal (2006). Onir heralded the era of social networking–based crowd-sourced Bollywood films with I AM (2011), an anthology of four short films. Onir represents the new breed of film-makers who believe in investing into the content of their films rather than relying on star power and song and dance sequences.

Interview analysis Established Bollywood film director Onir explains how Bollywood narratives use song, dance and music: I would say in Bollywood film music plays an important part so that’s how I would define it. Bollywood equals musical as there are many other elements that structure the films narrative and not just the song and dance alone. (Personal Communication 2009; sic) Among the prominent contemporary film production houses in India are Yash Raj Films, Mukta Arts, Sanjay Leela Bhansali Productions, PNC films, Adlabs and Factory productions. These film production houses are known for their spectacular song and dance sequence presentation. Films made without song and dance sequences are made in India, but these are generally dubbed ‘experimental’ rather than mainstream Bollywood cinema. Onir confirms the international reputation of song and dance sequences for Bollywood films (Personal Communication 2008): ‘if you look at songs and dance they have been there even in Satyajeet Ray films which are accepted internationally everywhere because they form an integral part of the narrative’ (Onir 2008). Another Bollywood director Chandra describes how Bollywood movies implicitly reflect Indian cultures celebration of song and dance:

[Song-dance] never make a viewer feel as if you were going out of the plot of the film… So, it truly is DNA of a story telling of Hindi movie you know it’s not something that was imposed on you from outside. (Personal Communication 2008; sic) Chandra prefers to utilise song and dance sequences in her films; for her, the song-dance can either extend a character’s emotional moment or push the narrative forward: I always wanted the song to make the plot go ahead but it’s a personal choice where I think that ok if we reached a certain point and I just need to extend that emotion that I am feeling at that point I will put a song in there and then through that song make the character and the plot go ahead. (Personal Communication 2008; sic) Traditionally, the music director is the first person to be employed on a film, and for Chandra working with the music director is an intimate and important part of the process of song creation: The music director comes up with the tune and melody, which sort of stays in my mind … that’s really important. I just have to sort of … like I said, download all my emotions and feeling on to him and the tunes comes out of him you know I think many directors should be involved … because it is for them to decide how a particular music is telling the story which the director is putting on to celluloid. (Personal Communication 2008; sic) The lyricist also plays a significant role, in terms of crafting the emotional content of the songs and the narrative. The lyricist creates suitable lyrics/ words/poems to fit into the story’s situation, thus highlighting the emotional mood of the narrative. Chandra explains how she approaches the production of original songs for her films: I always want the song to make the plot go ahead, but its a personal choice, where I think, that ok if we reached a certain point and I just need to extend that emotion that I am feeling at that point, I will put a song in there and then through that song make the character take the plot ahead. Now what I find lovely is that … there are so many movies made and individually each story has original new songs composed for it. So there is always this enriching bank of music that has been created all the time, you know, which is wonderful, which is great! (Personal Communication 2008; sic) Renowned film-maker Kunal Kohli feels that it is important that the song situations should be

incorporated at the screenwriting stage, and for that involvement of a good lyricist is quite important (Personal Communication 2009). He is of the view that the majority of the Bollywood film song and dance sequences are designed as a part of the narrative. Kohli states: My songs are written at the screenplay time, I write exactly what the character is trying to say in the song, which is penned in the screenplay and then given to the lyrics writer and the music director and they are told that this is what we need a song that says this. For example, in Hum Tum, the characters are talking about the difference between men and women, that will lead to an argument [between the hero and heroine] and at the end of the song the boy will kiss the girl to shut her up. That was written in the screenplay. Then Prasoon Joshi as a lyricist came in and Jatin-Lalit as music directors joined, thereafter a verse like ‘… ladki kyoon na jaane kyoon ladkon si nahi hoti’ [Why the girls are not like Boys] is written. (Personal Communication 2009; sic) Bollywood film-makers tacitly understand that song and dance sequences serve different purposes for the narrative. Sometimes, it is used to hold the emotional moment being experienced by the characters or it can be used as a relief from the intense emotion of the plot. A more recent phenomenon is of the use of song and dance sequence as an ‘item number’, which is a music video that is used as a promotional tool for the film. Bollywood narratives that incorporate song and dance are generally built around fixed situations, which Kishore described as: Romantic song and dance Celebratory song of an individual/couple, family or community Buddy song Lament over a misfortune song and dance Climactic confrontational song and dance (the protagonist/s challenging the villain/s) Cabaret, or bar dance ‘Item’ numbers (2011: 57) This list of possible situations may make song and dance narrative devices appear formulaic. Indeed, when you consider that Bollywood produces around 200–250 films every year and if most of these films have four to six music and dance numbers, then that is around 1,200–1,500 song and dance sequences created annually. Moreover, the Indian music industry relies heavily on Bollywood soundtracks with the release of the item number (in music video forms) and the film’s music albums preceding the film’s release; the sheer volume of Bollywood production, even for commercial purposes, requires an intense level of creative skill, collaboration and creative practice.

Therefore, the Bollywood conventions that enable the production of such large volumes of song and dance benefit from the kind of organisation that can be identified in the production of Bollywood films; but it is important to note that there is a difference between using systematised procedures and adhering to conventions versus being predictable and formulaic. Indeed, Bollywood film narratives regularly come under attack for being too formulaic, whereby McIntyre argues the ‘conventions, traditions, rules and structures of the form or format are so readily apparent and so rigidly used’ (2012: 129) that film critics and audiences lose interest in the film because of its predictability. McIntyre argues it is problematic when television becomes formulaic and television creators need ‘to be aware that structures, of the type seen in forms and formats aren’t just constraining; they also enable the making of television’ (2012: 130). A similar argument can be used for Bollywood cinema, whereby the inclusion of fixed song and dance situations should not be seen as being predictable and noncreative, it should be seen as both constraining and enabling Bollywood cinematic creativity. Dance directors or choreographers work very closely with other key creative team members, particularly the film’s producer and director. Dance director Longinus Fernandes, who won the Best Film Choreographer in 2009 at the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards for his work on Slumdog Millionaire,6 articulately puts forward his view of the creative collaboration that takes place between the choreographer and the film-makers. He states, ‘firstly I get a brief from the film’s director and then have a meeting to discuss the director’s vision, if the director has got, a clear visual concept in his mind then he guides you and helps you’ (Personal Communication 2009). Fernandes further adds: As a dance director, as director of choreography I have earned the authority to do exactly whatever I feel is right, but I have to be in loop with the director because it has to work for his film … Mr Danny Boyle helped me [for Slumdog Millionaire]. You know when we were filming ‘Jai ho’ he told me this is what my thing is, this is what I need to do, this is what I need to achieve. He told me whatever you do I am up with it. So it’s a two way street. (Personal Communication 2009; sic). Fernandes elaborates on his approach to ensure that the song and the dance sequence are an integral part of the narrative; he states, ‘the first thing in the creative process begins from hearing the song, from the song it is the situation, from the situation it is about taking the film forward, once you achieve that then you know you are on the right track’ (Personal Communication 2009; sic). When the song/musical production of a film has been completed, the dance director is brought in to choreograph the songs in the film. Dance director Remo D’souza explains: Sitting with the director and producers are a must, to understand what exactly they

require out of the choreographer or the dance director. A good outline of the plan is vital for the dance director/choreographer; it is only then they will be able to visualise and finalise the choreographic elements of a particular dance sequence. (Personal Communication 2009) Longinus Fernandez explains that the director and producer’s briefing about song and dance sequences is rewarding because it provides the director’s vision about how the song and dance sequence fits within the film’s narrative, or sits as a separate element to the narrative (Personal Communication 2013). At this stage, Longinus also discusses the budget for the song and dance sequence and this gives him a clearer picture as to what he can achieve through the choreography, costumes and dance extras. Fernandes adds: If the dance director ends up planning something on his own and if it turns out quite extravagant, something which might not suit the budget or the resources of the producer, also, it may not fit into the genre that the director has envisaged then it is of no use, no matter how creative your vision and planning is. It does require fitting into the film within the director’s vision and producer’s budget. (Personal Communication 2013) The settings for the song and dance sequences are also extremely important given that they can be used as an escape to a comic situation, a romantic rendezvous or a dreamy interlude; but they can also be (mis)used to convey eroticism and sexual intonations. Scenarios and locations for these dance settings can be the cabaret or the nightclub, the tawaif’s (courtesans) or a song and dance in a rainy situation, which are used to convey the aesthetics or emotional overtones of song and dance sequence. Therefore, each song and dance sequence has its own list of criteria that the film’s producer and director provide the dance director with: Theme of the song and dance sequence Song location in the films narrative Actor/s who will perform the dance Dance style to be utilised Chorus line dancers Dance locations When all these elements come together, the dance director is able to create a dance sequence that builds a character through choreography. Fernandes states that for him ‘choreography, to be very, very honest is Bob Fossey, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire in Singing in the Rain … you know [song-dance in films such as] My Fair Lady that is choreography’ (Personal Communication 2013). A dance director is required to do more than just to create a dance;

they have to be able to apply a sense of dance. Fernandes argues: It is not just about dancing, it is about taking a character and presenting it like a diva, or taking a character and presenting it like a star. Such as, Shah Rukh Khan on top of a train, was total out and out, what do you say, a ‘star-treat’ [a spectacle], and he was [presented] like a ‘style-bhai’. (Personal Communication 2013)7 Fernandes has an innate understanding of his job, which is to promote the Bollywood star and he describes his work as a ‘designer’. ‘This is about song design, taking the star quality out of a very artist. And that is very, very important’. Fernandes explains how he designed the song sequence for Ranbir Kapoor in his debut film Sawariya (2007), which contributed to Kapoor’s success as a Bollywood star. Fernandes states: When Ranbir Kapoor was doing his first flip, for the first time when people saw him on screen it was in Sawariya, that [sequence] was done by me. That had some kind of definition of the character, the presentation of a character coming down from the curtain. Being on stage, dancing like a one-man show on stage for a lady and trying to win a heart. So at that time he was not a star but that song made him a bigger star than what one could expect. (Personal Communication 2009) Another essential element for consideration by the dance director is the film actor’s danceability. Fernandes explains that his role as dance director is to elicit a performance from an actor and enhance their on-screen style: Bollywood dancing is about being expressive, letting your inhibitions flow, being passionate about what you are doing, and at the end of the day, you’ve got to be pleasing to the eye. If you look at Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, they are not all great dancers but they are great performing artists. That’s what gives it that flavour in their songs. Dancers and performers, right up there I’m sure there are very few. I can only remember not one but two. One is Hrithik Roshan and the second is Shahid Kapoor. These people are real kick-ass, hard-core, dancing stars. But the others like Govinda, if you were a little bit more behind, Anil Kapoor, a little bit more behind, Amitabh Bachchan. That man says it all––being a non-dancer but having the best songs and the biggest hits of all times in the film industry. Especially songs like ‘Dekha hai re socha na …’, ‘Khai ke paan Banaras waala …’, ‘Pyaar me dil pe maar de goli …’, or ‘Saara jamana.’.. … That man had style! (Personal Communication 2009)

Dance director Remo D’souza explains how he works with different actors’ dancing abilities: I don’t want my actor to look like a non-dancer in the song and the other thing is if the actor is very good, then, I see to it that I do a very good dance song which has a wow factor, like I would say Love Story 2050, I had Harman Baweja, who is a very good dancer. And we introduced different, different kinds of dances from all over the world like BBoying from Korea, we had Locking and Popping, Break Dance and everything. This worked well according to Baweja’s style of dancing. (Personal Communication 2009) Tailoring a dance to the danceability of an actor shows a sophisticated awareness of the form of dance, which is not dissimilar to incorporating Indian dance styles in a Bollywood dance, as Remo explains. He intentionally uses this technique to engage non-dancing audience members: Everyone loves Punjabi dance whenever the dhol and everything comes out, everyone’s hand will go out and they’ll start dancing, if a non-dancer is there, he’ll automatically keep his hand and start dancing. So, it’s a very famous dance form in Indian culture basically. And the way we use it, is a very, very different kind of field because we have a different kind of music but we have like for example ‘Rock ‘n’ roll soniye …’, in that also with rock ‘n’ roll they have few steps of Bhangra as well. And everyone jumping, and doing all those Bhangra steps. (Personal Communication 2009) D’souza’s intuitive knowledge about how to mix traditional and western dancing styles and dancing ‘on-camera’ came from his own performance background, appearing in Ahmed Khan’s production of Rangeela (1995). D’souza reminiscences: ‘that one close up changed my whole image. From that one close up I became famous among the dancers, then slowly I became assistant for Ahmed Khan and then came 2000 where I got my first break as a video choreographer’ (Personal Communication 2009). Choreographer Longinus Fernandes points out that ‘one needs to understand that what it is like to dance in front of the camera; it is very important for a choreographer’ (Personal Communication 2009). D’souza echoes a similar point of view and agrees that choreography for films is somewhat different from that of stage choreography. D’souza claims: Choreography for the camera requires a different sort of understanding and training. You need to know the camera angles; you need to understand editing, without that you can’t choreograph for films. Also, you need to understand the play between the lights and shadows … all this together really helps to bring out the choreographer in you as a

filmmaker. (Personal Communication 2009) Both Fernandes and D’souza point out a fascinating aspect of the song and dance sequences in Bollywood cinema, which they refer to as ‘signature dance moves’. According to D’souza, ‘signature dance movements are quick dance steps, either a hand or feet movement, eye rolls, head thumping or facial expression, that can be easily copied or mimicked by the audience when they hear that song on radio or a nightclub or at home in their music system’ (Personal Communication 2013). D’souza further mentions: Song and dance sequences of Bollywood plays an important role in the day to day life of the Indian film goers … be it any festival, or celebrations Bollywood song and dance is the first thing that you will see that mark these festivities … people enjoy dancing, and since majority of these people are not trained in dance in anyway, their point of reference to dance is always Bollywood films, and what can be better than an easy dance style that they have seen on the silver screen being performed by the film stars they love. Therefore, it becomes important for us to design simple yet attractive signature dance movements that can be easily imitated by the cine-goers. (Personal Communication 2013) Fernandes provides another perspective. He argues that India is a land of festivities with a strong dancing culture that provides a wealth of movements for Bollywood dance. Fernandes mentions he is quite inspired by Indian classical and folk dances and tries to utilise elements of these dance forms in his choreographic style. He believes that his job as a choreographer requires him to design dance steps and movements that can be easily picked or mimicked by anyone. Fernandes asserts that his particular approach to choreography is a bit different from the other choreographers. His aim is to take this potpourri of dance styles that is inspired by various dance forms directly to the audience through his films. He terms his signature dance moves as the ‘Lungi Style’. Longinus asserts: That style is what everyone in this world can do, and that’s what you’ve seen in ‘Pappu can’t dance …’, that’s what you’ve seen in ‘Jai ho …’, that’s what you’ve seen in Saawariya, that’s what you’ve seen in whatever song that I’ve done…. With ‘Pappu can’t dance …’, just with the flapping of the hands [dance move], I make it a point to reach the audience. I’m a people’s man. Whenever I do anything I want to know for sure that every second Tom, Dick and Harry can follow [my dance] with a smile on his face. (Personal Communication 2013) Fernandes is of the view that dance directors must be able to create a masala style (spiced up)

through dance, which involves the blending of Indian and western dance steps. Fernandes draws on the 1970s western pop groups like Boney M and Abba, and he aims to stay ahead of his contemporaries with his own style of choreography. He states: The kind of steps that I incorporate in my dance is basically the retro style of John Travolta. 1975 ‘Staying Alive’ mixed with ‘Tragedy’, then little bit I add ‘Billy Jean’. There’s that walk … the walk of John Travolta was the rage. The same kind of style, but one-step ahead. Michael Jackson’s moon walk was a rage during the 1980s. I want to go one step ahead and make my walk the rage. (Personal Communication 2013; sic) Similarly, D’souza points out that he enjoys the flexibility Bollywood dance provides in utilising disparate elements; he likes to experiment with western dance styles and reinvent them as Indian: For example, if I take a Jazz movement from the West and put it in a song like ‘Shava Shava …’, so it becomes very Indianised form of Jazz but nobody will think this is Jazz, but everyone will say, oh, this is a Bollywood style of dance but it is a jazz movement but with the outfit, with the way we shoot and everything, it becomes Bollywood. (Personal Communication 2009; sic) Dance directors work very hard to achieve a level of creativity that will surprise and wow audiences and will bring them into the cinema. The craft of mediating different dance styles and making them palatable and acceptable for an audience is an example of creative practice in action (Kerrigan: 124). As Fernandes states, ‘creativity for me is something that is very, very, unusual, out of the box, what people can’t expect. You have to be able to expect the unexpected’ (Personal Communication 2009). Csikszentmihalyi makes a similar claim, using more theoretical and generic language to be creative: ‘one must internalise the rules of the domain and the opinions of the field, so that one can choose the most promising ideas to work on, and do so in a way that will be acceptable to one’s peers’ (1999: 332). Dance directors like Fernandes and D’souza are so skilled at being creative that they tacitly and culturally draw on Indian’s antecedent conditions by incorporating traditional Indian and western dance moves into a choreographed sequence, which shows the actor’s danceability and can also connect with the audience. Dance directors are also charged with the task of creating ‘item numbers’, which exist outside of the narrative and are also designed specifically to lure an audience into the cinema. Item number developed in the late 1990s, according to Kishore: The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a boom in these non-narrative song and dance

sequences. Spurred by the popularity of the MTV style hypersexualised music videos, the late 1990s also witnessed the rise of the ‘item numbers’. These song-dance sequences, labelled as ‘item’ numbers, have generally nothing to do with the storyline of the film, they are simply a tool of distraction, a mechanism to make the film look more spectacular, and of course a ploy to showcase hypersexualised, glamorised, fetishised and eroticised imagery. (2011: 173–5) D’souza understands the importance of his role in creating item numbers; this is evident, as he explains how audiences appreciate his work as a choreographer and dance director: They see the song first and then they buy ticket and then they go to see the film. So, it’s basically, the choreographer is the main guy who gets people into the theatre. So, it’s a very, very important role, a choreographer plays. (Personal Communication 2009) According to Chandra, Kohli, Onir, D’souza and Fernandez, Bollywood ‘item numbers’ primarily exist for the sole purpose of publicising and promoting the film so that the film and the film’s music album can become a commercial success. Fernandes has directed many item numbers; he explains his conceptual understanding of the item numbers: ‘the idea about an item song is only to glorify your promotion’ (Personal Communication 2009). Item numbers represent a dominant mode of glamorisation and hypersexualised situations, where titillation and seduction is foremost, and blatant exploitation of sexuality (specifically female) becomes essential. Fernandes thinks item numbers work in two ways – first, they provide entertainment, and second, they provide titillation: They [the audience] feel enlightened because it’s like a relief in the middle of the film, suddenly you see one item coming and going, and it’s like a relief. It’s like a stress buster. Otherwise it’s not required. If your film and your story is so strong and if you’re sure about what you are doing with your script then you don’t need it. The item numbers are also targeted towards the people who are looking for some sexual imagery in the films … with the semi-clad females, that’s what the filmmaker tries to provide or sell … a skin show through these item numbers. (Personal Communication 2009) Not all Bollywood film directors like the changes that have occurred due to the use of item numbers. Onir has criticised obvious recognisable changes that have taken place with Bollywood narratives and how they use song and dance sequences (Personal Communication 2008). He feels that over the last 15–20 years, Bollywood film-makers are using music, song

and dance differently. He observes that: Increasingly the role of songs and dance have become more like music videos and films which are not an integral part of the narrative so that is the weakness’. He also stresses that there are a lot of filmmakers who use songs more intelligently than just having them for the sake of entertainment and titillation. (Personal Communication 2009) Some critics argue that item numbers are reducing the authenticity of ‘song and dance’ sequences in the Bollywood narrative. As Chandra explains: I think lyrics are sadly lacking today you know there are just too many songs which don’t say anything that to tell you the truth is a slight dumbing down of songs in Hind movies and I think it comes as a demand from the producers where they feel a song is basically there to full in the crowd, make a movie a hit, show some heavy duty choreography, have a kind of a glamour to the whole thing. (Personal Communication 2009) As a dance director, Fernandes is under no illusions when it comes to the commercialisation of ‘item numbers’: To me I think it’s a creative piece of work, but then it’s more commercialised, you know because then the neckline must show then the hips must show, then the bum cut must show. You know all that is becoming part of the bargain now. It has become another part of the limelight now, it’s what you’re selling. At one point of time sex and skin wouldn’t sell so much like what it is selling today. That is the demand of the public like when you see Murder (2004), when you see actress like Mallika Sherawat, and Katrina Kaif, simply wearing a shirt and nothing else … obviously no pants … like in the item number ‘Sheila ki jawani …’…. It has got a mass appeal. (Personal Communication 2008; sic) What is being recognised here by Onir, Chandra, D’souza, Kohli and Fernandes is the change in purpose of the Bollywood song and dance sequence, particularly with the use of item numbers as a film’s primary marketing tool. While item numbers have been critiqued for their derogatory portrayal of women, this sensitive issue needs to be carefully analysed because some films are intentionally exploiting the item numbers’ ‘sex appeal’ for profit. Those who make Bollywood cinema and those who critique the social content of Bollywood film narratives will be carefully watching these issues unfold to ensure that the public’s demand to have fairer representations of women through Bollywood cinema is achieved. It will be

interesting to see if the ‘item numbers’ with their signature dance moves will be able to survive as an enduring part of the Bollywood narrative.

Conclusion The commercial structure of Bollywood and the importance of ‘selling’ song and dance numbers in the form of ‘item’ numbers appear to be challenging the representation of women on film, and also challenging the traditional Bollywood narrative structures. While we are hopeful that these issues will redress over time, what is clear is that the Bollywood cinematic process has developed some unique creative processes that are directly connected to the production and interpretation of Bollywood music, song and dance. These dance director and film director interviews confirm that the production techniques and cinematic processes used by Bollywood differ when compared to Hollywood cinema. The production of a Bollywood film’s narrative challenges Simonton’s finding that musical scores are forms of ‘collaboration without interactions’ and that songs are ‘peripheral, even antagonistic’ to cinematic products. This research also confirms that Bollywood’s cinematic creativity exists because of its use of cultural antecedents that can be traced from the Indian religious, ritualistic and folk dance forms that have become culturally significant and internationally recognised intangible art forms. The Indian appreciation of dance influences all aspects of Indian culture, and as a film represents culture it is a not surprising that music, song and dance have become essential elements of Bollywood cinema, because cinema is culturally representative. Saroj Khan, a dance director, has critiqued the work of modern dance directors claiming they lack originality because the choreography reuses dance moves in predictable and obvious ways. Khan obviously sees the reuse or reworking of western dance moves or traditional Indian dance steps into choreography as being unoriginal, and therefore, from her point of view, lacking in creativity. However, the evidence presented here confirms that dance directors are completely aware of the process of recycling dance moves, and that their creativity is enabled and constrained through their understanding of dance forms. The choice to incorporate ‘foreign’ and ‘traditional’ Indian dance moves is done intentionally to engage audiences. The choreography in Bollywood films should not be seen as being formulaic. Instead, it is actually an example of creativity that attempts to reach out to the audience. In addition, these interviews confirm that the dance director’s individual ‘contributions are not completely submerged or blended in the final product’ (Simonton 2004a: 163). Dance directors can, therefore, be deemed creative because they act as culturally conditioned agents who are engaged in iterative and recursive creative practices (Kerrigan: 124). In this case, it can be argued that Bollywood cinematic creativity respects the cultural origins of music, song and dance and elevates the role of the dance director to that of a key

creative team member. A dance director’s cinematic collaborations ensure that their interpretations and design of the song through choreography are consistent with the narrative, the costumes and the location, and are able to showcase each actor’s danceability to enhance the film’s narrative and the characters’ emotional journey. Music, songs and dances are essential elements of the Bollywood film narrative, and the dance director’s individual contribution to the cinematic process confirms that Bollywood’s cinematic creativity is unique and innovative.

Notes 1 This list of dance directors is not exhaustive; we have included the most popular dance directors from 1960 onwards. Pre-1990s dance directors include Satyanarayan Master, Badri Prasad, Surya Kumar, Benjamin Herman, Sohanlal Khanna, Manohar Naidu, Subal Sarkar and Sachin Shankar. 2 Saroj Khan choreographed some fabulous hybrid dance forms in films like Jaanbaaz (1986), Nagina (1986), Nigahen (1989) and Chalbaaz (1989). She also crafted beautiful folk-based dance composition in the film Sailab (1990) and her classical dance choreography along with the maestro Pt. Birju Maharaj in the film Devdas (2002). She won the Filmfare Award eight times from 1989 till 2008. 3 Shiamak Davar International is ‘one of the largest dance schools in the world, reaching out to over 70,000 dance enthusiasts’ (http://www.shiamakdavar.com.au/ boasts). 4 The seven awards were Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics and Los Angeles Film Critics Association 5 The playback singers generally sing Bollywood songs; the actors simply have to mime the songs in front of the camera. 6 Other film choreographers nominated for the 2009 award were Kenny Ortega for High School Musical 3, Patrick De Bana and Pedro Gomes for Fados, Anthony van Laast for Mamma Mia and Aakomon ‘AJ’ Jones for Centre Stage Turn It Up (Hetrick 2009). 7 The term ‘style-bhai’ refers to a stylistic person or a style icon. Bhai in Hindi means brother. In recent years, the term bhai is also used for an underworld don in India.

References Basu, A. 2008. ‘The Music of Intolerable Love: Political Conjugality in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se’, in S. Gopal and S. Moorti (eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, pp. 153–76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chandra, Tanuja. 2009. Personal Communication. 2 July. Cohen, S. 2002. Hollywood Musical: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1999. ‘Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity’, in R. Stenberg (ed.),

Handbook of Creativity, pp. 313–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Souza, Remo. 2009. Personal Communication. 5 July. Dasgupta, C. 2008. Seeing Is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema. New Delhi: Penguin. Dudrah, R. K. 2006. Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies. New Delhi: Sage. Fernandes, Longinus. 2013. Personal Communication. 14 December. ———. 2009. Personal Communication. 7 July. Ganti, T. 2004. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London: Routledge. Gulzar, L. M. Joshi, and D. Malcolm, eds. 2002. Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema. London: Dakini Books. Hetrick, A. 2009. ‘Darling, Alvarez, Kowalik, Kulish, Glenn and Fernandes Win Astaire Awards’, Playbill. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/129784-Darling-Alvarez-Kowalik-Kulish-Glenn-and-Fernandes-Win-Astaire-Awards (accessed on 26 November 2013). Kaur, R. and A. J. Sinha, eds. 2005. Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. New Delhi: Sage. Kerrigan, S. 2013. ‘Accommodating Creative Documentary Practice within a Revised Systems Model of Creativity’, Journal of Media Practice, 14(2): 111–28. Kishore, V. 2011. ‘Representations of Indian Folk Dance Forms in the Song and Dance Sequences of Contemporary Bollywood Cinema’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, RMIT University. Kohli, Kunal. 2009. Personal Communication. 5 July. Langford, B. 2005. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McIntyre, P. 2012. Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice. London: Palgrave McMillian. ———. 2006. ‘Creative Practice as Research: ‘“Testing Out” the Systems Model of Creativity through Practitioner Based Enquiry’, in Speculations and Innovations: Applying Practice Led Research in the Creative Industries. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology. http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/43093/McintyreP.pdf (accessed on 13 November 2013). Misra, G., A. Srivastava, and I. Misra. 2006. ‘Culture and Facets of Creativity: The Indian Experiences’, in J. Kaufman and R. Sternberg (eds), The International Handbook of Creativity, pp. 421–55. New York: Cambridge University Press. Onir. 2008. Personal Communication. 8 July. Patcy, N. 2012. ‘Saroj Khan: Actresses Now Don’t like to Work with Me’, Rediff Movies, 29 March. http://www.rediff.com/movies/slide-show/slide-show-1-interview-with-choreographer-saroj-khan/20120329.htm (accessed on 10 December 2013). Ray, S. 1976. Our Films, Their Films. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Sardana, M. M. K. 2012. ‘Bollywood on the Wings of Technology and Its Contribution to the Economy’, ISID Discussion Notes. New Delhi: Institute for Studies in Industrial Development. http://isidev.nic.in/pdf/DN1202.pdf (accessed on 10 November 2013). Simonton, D. K. 2005. ‘Cinematic Creativity and Production Budgets: Does Money Make the Movie?’ The Journal of Creative Behavior, 39(1): 1–15. ———. 2004a. ‘Film Awards as Indicators of Cinematic Creativity and Achievements: A Quantitative Comparison of the Oscars and Six Alternatives’, Creativity Research Journal, 16(2–3): 163–72.

———. 2004b. ‘Group Artistic Creativity: Creative Clusters and Cinematic Success in Feature Films’, Journal of Applied social Psychology, 34(7): 1494–520.

8 The item girl Tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing Amita Nijhawan

The Bollywood film Bunty aur Babli (2005) is a classic film plot where two con artists start in hate and end up in love. They pair up in a series of humorous and unlikely scenarios to hoax and hassle the public, with policeman Dashrath Singh (Amitabh Bachchan) close on their heels in hot pursuit, though secretly sympathetic. In best Bollywood tradition, Bunty (Abhishek Bachchan) and Babli (Rani Mukherjee) traipse through this ramshackle romp with catchy song and dance numbers, and in doing so, they get public if not critical approval. The item song in this film’s very catchy and popular soundtrack, ‘Kajra re …’, is an arresting example of how bodies (abetted by cinematic techniques) of dancing women in Bollywood, with their fusion of classical and contemporary dance techniques, and classic Bollywood film and dance genres (have the potential to) construct new sites of sexual desire and female identity in India. While these spaces of articulation of female sexuality are not immune to the circulation of female bodies in a globalised Indian economy, and are in fact implicated in this, at the same time women in these dance numbers have the opportunity to convey a kind of femininity that is new to Indian popular culture and to the articulation of Indian femininity. Partially responsible are several factors, these include the easing off of the censors who would like to make Bollywood films more accessible worldwide,1 the MTV-revolution that occurred early in the 1990s, the political-economy of making music videos in India,2 the granting of industry status to Bollywood3 and the revamping of the cosmetics industry.4 This chapter has three goals. It studies how bodies of dancing women in item songs produce stories and ideologies and how they render, reproduce or rupture Indian myths about femininity. Recent trends in item dances produce a sexuality that seems less confined by nationalist demands. Or, to go further, perhaps these bodies produce nationalist ideals of femininity that have so far been disavowed as ‘Indian’. Second, it explores the key role of dance and body movements – rather than just the narrative or script – in producing and not merely reflecting ideologies of femininity and stories of the nation.

Third, it investigates the role of dance space as a space that provokes fascination and anxiety, in that as a ‘fantasy’ space it is often denied ‘realness’, and yet it is a space with potential for production of emerging cultural and gender ideals. Item songs are big-budget song and dance numbers that are played on television countdowns for several months at a time, and work as snappy advertisements for a film and original music score5 with their quick cuts and sexy imagery. These songs light up the charms of the female dancer,6 sparking postcolonial nostalgia for apparently glamorous and untamed femininity and an untethered nation. Item songs are not a new trend in Bollywood. Big song and dance numbers performed usually by the female lead or supporting role have existed since the start of Bollywood with films like Aar Paar (1954) with item song ‘Babuji dheere chalna …’; Mughal-E-Azam (1960) with item song ‘Jab pyar kiya to darna kya …’; and Pakeezah (1971) with ‘Chalte-chalte yoon hi koi mil gaya thaa …’. So, what are the main characteristics of an item number? An item number: often has an audience within the film – the nightclub audience, the men in a brothel, the audience in an auditorium, a wedding party; is framed on some sort of stage; sets up the characters and relationships between various protagonists; uses several set and costume changes; is made up of various styles and genres, which can be classical Indian dance, bhangra, folk dances, salsa, belly dancing, hip-hop and more; has hook steps that are repeated in social dance situations like clubs and weddings; is the highlight of the film, and played in television countdowns several times a day before and after the film release; and conveys the relationship of the main dancing woman with her own sexuality, and that of the male protagonist, the audience in the film, and the film-going audience. An analysis of traditional Bollywood genres of dancing women and of the myths that predate them, however, reveals the prevalent (non-)location of the female dancer as an absence or negation in the popular Indian imaginary. This negation is a denial of female sexual desire and desirability by the nationalist project, and simultaneously a denial of male sexual arousal that was seen in Gandhi’s era as a threat to the work of the nation.7 Dancers in India seem to arouse a curious confusion in the minds of the audience. Not an ambivalence because that would suggest an indifference, but maybe an anxiety, a collision of fascination on the one hand and fear on the other. The only way to come to terms with the apparently overgenerous charms of the female dancer is to deny her realness, her motives or her very existence. Key Indian myths and discourses of dancing women as well as genres of dancing women in Bollywood, like the courtesan, the vamp and the working girl, reveal and

highlight this panic.

Sita, Menaka and the forlorn Devadasi Indian myth and ideology do not see dancing women as especially ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’, but instead, undomesticated and untamed, either because of their ‘nature’ or through force of circumstance. A dancing woman is associated with sexual, erotic and spiritual skills that go hand in hand with her dance talent and haunting beauty. This beauty and dancing ability seem to align her with sex rather than love, body rather than emotion, frivolousness and wilfulness rather than duty or obedience, creating tearing dichotomies that divide ‘independent dancing woman’ from ‘motherly, domesticated woman’, the latter whose morals are more closely aligned with the national project,8 the former whose intentions are hard to judge or control. As stories go, the Menaka myth is a seductive example of the latter. In this story from the Indian mythological epic, the Mahabharata, sage Vishwamitra is meditating in the forest to achieve the status of saint or maharishi, when the Gods (i.e. Indra, a God who feels threatened by Vishwamitra’s growing powers) send Menaka, an apsara,9 to test and break his will. Menaka is an accomplished dancer, a temptress, who lures Vishwamitra away from his tapasaya, seducing him with her dancing, teasing and beguiling with her charms.10 The Gods of Wind blow away her clothes to reveal her intoxicating body as she dances, and Vishwamitra is consumed with passion. When they bear a child, Vishwamitra rejects both mother and baby as symptoms of his lapse. The Menaka myth makes men beware of women with an overpowering sexuality. Like Aphrodite, whose mythic sexual attraction lives on into current lore but whose spiritual and creative energies are more hidden, a woman/dancer with such overwhelming sexual fascination as Menaka can lead men into unchartered and fear-invoking territory, or at least, a loss of control. In Indian mythology, Menaka could be an alter ego to Sita, the wife of Rama, who follows him through years of exile from his kingdom only to be abducted by a rival king. Rama eventually rescues her after a long and bloody war, which is the key story in the Ramayana, and restores her to her rightful place by his side after many years in captivity. She then comes under suspicion for adultery and asks Mother Earth to accept her into her bosom as a trial of Sita’s purity and innocence. Sita, who pays a lifelong penalty for taking a step outside the patriarchal boundary, the Laxman-rekha,11 is in Indian mythology and spirituality the idealised wife, who takes her husband’s word as the word of God, obeys his wish and understands his judgment and integrity as supreme. In pictures, cinematographic and televisual representations,12 the difference in character between Menaka the ‘other woman’ and Sita the wife is implied by the essential difference in their bodies and body movements. While paintings of Sita that date from the 17th and 18th

centuries and sculptures from the 11th and 12th centuries reveal a young, nubile, erotic woman in filmy garments;13 trends in the 20th century, and even more so in the 1990s when the country was heading towards a more nationalist trend, show a more chaste depiction of femininity. In these depictions, bowed head and downcast eyes mark Sita’s obedience and chastity, while Menaka holds her head high. When Sita makes eye contact, it is usually to impart womanly wisdom, often as an assertion of respect and obedience for her husband’s wishes and command. Her eyes are soft and soulful. Menaka’s eyes are fiery and playful and they invite, incite and penetrate the male heart, challenging him to rise to her desire. Sita is bare of all accessories, besides her wifely sindhoor (the vermilion in her hair, a sign of her married status), while Menaka wears jewellery on her head to frame her seductive face, on her hands to display their agility, her midriff to show off the swing in her fertile and inviting hips and on her feet to give accent to her dancing.14 Menaka’s negation is in her very existence; she is an apsara who is a teasing and temporary embodiment of unrequited passion. While she is safe from the confines of domesticity, she is denied emotion or autonomy as a woman. She is only following the commands of the male Gods, doing what they have asked, literally dancing to their will. And for this she pays a price. The nationalist movement during the anti-colonial struggle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries15 and the heightening of Hindu nationalist sentiment in the 1990s are crucial in the design of these trends in gender signification.16 Mira Nair brought to the screen a filmic version of another popular Indian folk story in her film Kama Sutra: The Tale of Love (1996) that demarcates clear lines between the wife and the courtesan, the good woman and the bad woman. The film is a self-orientalising picture of ancient India, where the kings are decadent, lazy, puerile and fickle, the wives mistreated, the dancers worshipped for their skill in erotic love. In this story, Tara and Maya, the princess and her servant, grow up together, setting up a relationship based on resentment and jealousy. While Tara marries a king from a neighbouring state, it is the temptress Maya who seduces him on his wedding night and captivates his imagination. Tara, the upper class wife, dresses in heavy saris that hide her body, keeps her eyes lowered and prepares mistresses for her royal husband. She is not as accomplished as Maya in either dance or the erotic arts, and is frigid in bed. Maya’s body, in contrast, is like a graceful snake – she floats, her hips swinging, her breasts thrust out and proud, her midriff long and bare, displaying a flat stomach, an inviting navel, accenting the curve of her body between breast and hip, her back in a permanent arch. Tara’s heavy sari covers her head and body and acts as the shroud of her domesticity, so that her anonymous body is a marker of her (husband’s) family rather than of her as a woman. The sari is heavily laden with cultural meanings [in Bollywood] of nostalgia, tradition, womanhood, nationalism and social status, the full range of which are developed in the Hindi movie. Mothers or mother-figures always wear traditional, sober saris. In older

movies that contrasted the heroine with the vamp, the heroine almost invariably wore a sari as an emblem of her chastity and goodness. In recent years the unmarried heroine, who is usually a teenager, wears Western clothes before marriage but changes into a salwar-kameez, but more often the sari, after marriage. (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 87) The entire course of the film rests on Maya’s abundant sexuality and her dancing skills. This fatal sexuality leads to acts of grim manipulation and violence, in the end leaving her violated, betrayed and alone. The devadasi or royal dancer’s body is a popular site of contestation.17 Academics love to talk about her, bring her out of the jangle of dancer’s bells as a ghost of all Indian dancers, oppressed, misunderstood and, in the end, reformed. Her story recalls that in the 19th century she was an independent servitor (a telling contradiction) of the temple, and shared her talents with the royal court and any noble patrons who were inclined to support her. In this way, she also supported the temple, numerous artisans and musicians and her own children. Colonial and nationalist discourse colluded in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries to debase her and reduce her to the lot of a common prostitute (whose story is less well documented), and lead her to disease, poverty and general misery (see also Chattoraj 2014). Social reformists then reawakened her art, and in the first half of the 20th century brought her to the concert stage and made her ‘respectable’. As academics woke up to the damage caused by obliging social reformers who collaborated (in a spirit of apparent rebellion) with colonial power, the devadasi’s story is a convenient emblem of an Indian nation that was apparently lost because of colonialism. This story of independent art and nobility, downtrodden by politics and then reshaped and revitalised by revolutionaries, seems pat. In fact, her story is so mythical that it negates any individuality, freedom or choice, or on the other hand, represses stories of oppression or mistreatment she might have faced in her interesting history. It glorifies ‘her’ (an emblem, not an individual) as a dancer, reminding us that, in Indian religion, sex and spirituality are connected but denies her/them any authenticity as real women. I am struck by the impossibility of referring to her story without colluding in her erasure. In similar ways, this glorifying/negation of dancers exists in popular culture, especially in Bollywood, which is film and music industry rolled into one for a large majority of Indians, and a map of cultural change and ideologies. This denial not only negates dancing women, but in fact denies female sexuality, independence from domesticating patriarchy, and female agency and autonomy (see Mies 1980). What follows are examples/genres of dancing women in Bollywood, their bodies and bodily attributes clearly demarcating their character.

Rekha: the courtesan in Umrao Jaan (1981)

In the song that introduces the courtesan Rekha (Umrao Jaan) to the brothel assembly and to the film viewing audience – ‘Dil cheez kya hai aap meri jaan …’ – she is dressed in bridal red, with a tight-fitting bodice and a flowing skirt and trousers, her quick feet, her graceful turns and delicate hand gestures inspired by the North Indian dance form Kathak, which is a rich mix of Hindu and Mughal traditions. Kathak technique is often used in courtesan and tawaif signification and mujra dance. In a classic pose, Rekha sits facing the audience, one leg crossed and the other slightly extending out, and sings: ‘Iss anjuman mein aapko aana hai barbar, deewaron dar ko gaur se pehchan lee jiye …’. She points with her inviting wave-like fingers and her eyes to her extended foot and to her ankle bells or ghungroo. She rises gracefully, walks backward, profile to audience, beckoning with her hands and eyes, breasts heaving gently to show surrender, invitation and anticipation. Rekha is a much admired leading lady,18 fascinating not only in her dusky good looks and accomplishments in dance and acting, but also her own turbulent love life. She is the ultimate Menaka, deadly in her effect on men. The underlying theme of courtesan films in Bollywood is one of sadness and loss. The courtesan is hauntingly accomplished in dance and achingly beautiful, and this seems to keep her from any chance of happiness. Rekha, bejewelled and graceful, dances with self-restraint and expresses the poignant grief of the courtesan. Her body and gestures clearly articulate that she is needed by society and yet shunned by it. She lives in veiled corners of dark city streets; she is admired by men, hated by wives, mistreated by pimps, willing to sacrifice all for a love that will always remain unrequited. The courtesan has been a popular figure in film, where her attractions give rise to a variety of pleasures in the audience. She is portrayed as a victim of men’s lust and as an object of the viewer’s pity, but also delights the audience in being the object of the male gaze as she dances for his entertainment. The combination of a beautiful actress and the opportunity for incorporating poetry, music and dance into the narrative are important, but viewers also enjoy the spectacle of the body, together with the elaborate scenery and clothing, tied to a certain nostalgia arising from the decline and disappearance of courtesan culture. (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 69) Sumita Chakravarty analyses how courtesans in Bollywood are always placed on society’s fringes, vulnerable in a male-dominated world, but are shown as women with big hearts, creating nostalgia for a lost, precolonial stately India (1993: 273). Courtesans are interestingly often deployed in Bollywood to represent the highest of feminine virtue – sacrifice of their passions for men’s and for safeguarding and upholding the norms of civil society. Rather than transgressing on societal rules and civilised customs, the courtesan gives up her own desires, sacrifices her ‘rights’ with her lover for the superior rights of his wife, his work, his social responsibilities toward family and state. Jyotika Virdi discusses courtesan subjectivity in

Bollywood and analyses how some courtesans can find redemption if rescued by domesticity and romantic love (2003: 132). The courtesan, then, is an emblem of a precolonial India. A collection of princely states made for glamour, nostalgia, the erotic arts, a love for art and music, an India not yet coloured by the colonial palette, not yet following British or European norms. An India that is present only in (imagined) memory now, not in real life. An India before British social rules, bureaucracy and respectability made it lose its colour. That India is there and not there at the same time. It can only be indulged as a loss, something that can never be recovered. Yet, it lingers and underlies everything. It is the same with the courtesan, whose image would have to be banished – but cannot be – for the respectable couple and for respectable society to survive.

Helen: the vamp par excellence in Teesri Manzil (1966) Helen’s was a household name in the 1960s and 1970s in India, and audiences admired her as a consummate dancer. Her most favoured characters were those of the vamp, the rustic belle or the ‘friend’.19 Her role in the 1966 film Teesri Manzil is a good representation of the various roles that she played in her career, as well as of the notion of ‘vamp’ in Bollywood. In this film, Helen is a nightclub dancer, deliciously mercurial and temperamental, secretly in love with the hero Shammi Kapoor, who in turn loves the leading lady Asha Parekh. Her life is emblematic of all Bollywood vamps – full to the brim with dance, drink, unrequited love, turbulent emotionality and a final redemptive hurrah, when she saves the life of the man she loves while losing her own. In the famous song ‘O haseena zulfon wali …’ Helen is dancing in a hotel restaurant to entertain the dinner guests with Shammi Kapoor as the male singer and dancer. This nightclub space is used in Bollywood to create an interesting feminine interlude and provide a not-trueto-life space for dance in the entertainer and dramatic, unsaid emotions in the hotel guests. The space created [in dance club scenes from the fifties to the seventies] is ‘unreal’, in that there are no such clubs in Bombay, but it is an idealization of trends seen in music videos and Western musicals such as Saturday Night Fever […]. In films of the 1970s the setting often has a dance floor with tables and chairs, to which the dancer will come to sing a song full of meaning understood by the cinema audience […]. The dance floor will show a few bewildered Westerners trying to look as though this is the kind of place in which they feel comfortable. It is a space in which all of society’s norms are transgressed: women wear sexy clothes, drink and dance for men’s entertainment. The sequence allows the viewer to enjoy forbidden pleasures that are subsequently often disavowed by the film’s narratives. (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 68)

In Teesri Manzil, while Asha Parekh (Sunita) in best 1960s-style wears tights, T-shirts and big hair, and twists like the best of them, there are differences in her body and Helen’s that set them apart in character and inform us which of the two has the more ‘legitimate’ life and passions. In best Bollywood fashion, their characters as well as Shammi Kapoor’s (Rocky) are archetypes.20 In this song, Helen climbs down from a distant staircase, jerking her hips wildly side to side to the music and swinging her arms up and down over her head and to her sides. While Sunita’s eyes are heavily kohled, Helen’s eyes are caked with heavy but light-coloured eyeshadow. The effect for the former, along with close camera shots of the face, is to highlight her interiority through the eyes. Sunita can show her anger, passion, grief all through her eyes and her frown, while Helen’s face is a mask adorned for her guests at the hotel. The camera takes only long and medium shots of her dancing body and ignores the expression in her eyes, which is masked in her role as entertainer and vamp, and therefore inconsequential. In ‘O haseena …’, she dances all around the restaurant, flits through veils, props, screens and other accessories, enhancing her persona as shifting and not steady like Sunita’s, unpredictable, hiding behind pomp and masquerade, unlike Sunita who displays her heart on her shirtsleeve. Sunita is too dignified and too real to be a dancer by profession, while Helen, though redeemed by her love for Rocky, is a woman ruined by her hearty appetite for sexual pleasure, drink and dance. So, while she is admired as a gorgeous dancer, Helen is always denied the role of the leading lady; her independence of body and spirit and her ‘lack of modesty’ in dress and movements keep a ‘legitimate’ interiority out of her reach in all her films. She is altogether too foreign-looking; she seems to take too much pleasure in her own body, its appetites and dance movements. She has no control over her appetites. All of these features merge to form the vamp, someone a bit too enthusiastic about dance, drink and sex.

Madhuri: One, two, three … Madhuri Dixit has been a landmark dancer-leading lady for many years. She was the first to successfully bring together the goddess, dancer, worker, wife all in one body, and it is in her roles that we first see a change towards acceptance of the female dancer. ‘Ek do teen …’ in the film Tezaab (1988) is set on a stage, where a large working class audience cheers wildly. The film is the romance between Madhuri (Mohini), a working class dancer who supports her father’s drinking habits and lifestyle, and Anil Kapoor (Munna), a college student/petty crook. This song interrupts the narration of her father’s exploitation of Mohini, allowing the audience to not dwell on exploitation of women and of the poor. While the song distances the audience from any reflection on real patriarchal violence, it allows Mohini a rebellious female space where she enjoys her freedom to dance and move her body as she pleases.

Mohini seems aware of her body only as an energetic dancing/labouring machine. In one sequence, Mohini, hair untamed, sits on the stage and in pantomime beats her head theatrically on the ground. She gets up and runs, head thrown back, arms wide, towards the audience, and then takes two Kathak chakkars (turns). While her intense love for Munna and her demand that he love her back call to mind Radha and Mira archetypes from Krishna myths, her moments of Indian classical dance in an otherwise folk – banjara (dance form from Rajasthan), dandiya, duffali and cobra – dance choreography could signify her cultured, goddess-like qualities. One of the keys to Dixit’s initial success was her combination of middle-class, girl-nextdoor persona and a sensuality, expressed through her dances, which in the past had been relegated to the vamp […]. After the success of Hum Apke Hain Kaun!, Dixit was catapulted to mage-stardom and was regarded as the foremost female star by the media and became the highest-paid actress in the film industry. (Ganti 2004: 138) An earlier example of a working girl/dancer was in the film Mera Saaya (1966), where Saira Banu performs the role of the dancer and wife in a double role. This is a good comparison and contrast for Madhuri in Tezaab, because the dancing in the former is almost exactly the same folk-style choreography as the latter, but the signification of the dancer follows a more traditional trend. Geeta and Nisha are identical twins, the first a dutiful wife, the second a dancing girl in a gang of robbers. The film allows Nisha to display dancing prowess, with associations of illicit sex and the travails of the lower classes connected with stories of loss, death and corruption. Geeta is the upright, sari-clad, domesticated wife. Madhuri brings these stereotypical dichotomies to the same body in dances that are almost legend in Bollywood lore. She is allowed to be dancer and wife, a feat that has not been available to Bollywood heroines historically. Tezaab was hugely popular with lower middle and working class audiences. Bollywood, used to walking the tightrope between its middle class audience and its rural poor, attempting to be sensitive to both, has always been aware that although the middle class audience simply because of the nature of variegated cinema halls would buy the more expensive tickets in the ‘upper stall’ or ‘balcony’, the ‘mass’ audiences, rural and urban poor as well as the lower middle classes, have in the past made up a larger percentage of the population, and their money could by no means be sneered at. In the early years of the 1990s, soon after the national ‘economic liberalisation’ budget presented in 1991 by Manmohan Singh (the then finance minister) that overturned the Congress Party’s cautious closed-door policies designed by Nehru in the 1950s, the first response from Bollywood to the cable television invasion in 1992 was to shift its attention almost entirely to the ‘mass’ audience. This film in the late 1980s

is a precursor to this trend, an indication of the shift to a working class audience, but allowing ideologies of femininity to emerge that challenged existing dichotomies. Madhuri articulated a very ‘Indian’ femininity, one that could at once negotiate with the influence of cable television and global advertising, and unpick the dichotomies set up between wives, goddesses, dancers and workers. Dance space in Bollywood, perhaps, is constructed as outside, as independent (perhaps threatening) to the male nationalist project, which, as I have shown, has its drawbacks in that it reiterates and demarcates gender stereotypes. But it may also have its advantages. The dancer’s body always already remains an outsider. Dance space remains removed from ‘real’ life, using several tactics. It is heightened in its theatricality and emotionality. It is understood as risqué, as stepping beyond what is acceptable in ‘real’ life. The dancer and dance space are removed from the state project that is male in its nature. The elements of nostalgia and adventure in dance remove it even further. This removal can function at times, as an escape rather than a confinement, because this outside space allows for experimentation and a challenge to ‘real life’ state ideologies.21 Because dance space is believed to be unreal but desired, it is possible to play with issues of sexual freedom by displaying more than what is allowed in the narrative, by donning alleged masks of ‘performance’ that, in fact, reveal very real desires, lifestyles and aspirations.

Aishwarya: item girl in ‘Kajra re …’ Aishwarya is item girl incarnate in the song ‘Kajra re …’ in the film Bunty aur Babli. Aishwarya, former Miss World, a heartthrob of many in India, set to make waves in Hollywood and global advertising, appears in this item song and has no other role in the film. This trend of big actresses appearing in one item song is recent, taking off in the new millennium. It has been customary to either have a supporting lady like Helen as the item girl, or the leading lady herself, but in ‘special’ circumstances. The song ‘Kajra re …’ remarking at kohl-lined eyes is noteworthy, in that it combines many genres of Bollywood dance, and so has the potential to rupture some existing dichotomies about femininity. Though it is set in a bar, the dancing and style of dress evoke street dancing as well as the dance moves of a courtesan. The setting in a nightclub is more that of a vamp. While genre lines have remained quite delineated over the last several decades from Madhubala’s nightclub singing in the 1950s, Meena Kumari’s courtesan role in Pakeezah in 1971, Zeenat Aman’s disco dancing in the 1980s, in recent trends in Bollywood the item song crosses genre lines in dancing, and the main theme seems to be to draw crowds rather than to maintain genre integrity. The dance seems to tangentially fit the filmic narrative or in a traditional Bollywood genre, as long as it is beautifully set, danced and displayed. In that sense, even though it is set within a Bollywood film as is most popular music in India, it is constructed more like a music video. Character

attributes that were strongly delineated in older films (e.g. good and bad woman dichotomies) are now increasingly blurred. The bodies, body movements and character attributes of dancing women and ‘wives’ have moved closer to each other, the distinctions are less severe, allowing a kind of freedom for women to choose lifestyles and bodies that are less strictly policed by ideas of good and evil. Aishwarya wears a tiny choli (blouse) with her long midriff bare and a flowing skirt down to her knees. Her dress is more evocative of a street or village dancer than that of a courtesan, in that she shows skin and her legs are bare. While her clothes signify lower class status and a gypsy life, and these traditionally come with allusions of a free sexuality, unbounded by middle class norms of behaviour, she seems more a dancer rather than a prostitute by profession – similar to Rekha’s item number in Parineeta (2005). The camera in Kajra Re has picked up music-television-style moves, in that it zeroes in on body parts, unlike older dance numbers that stay with whole or half body shots and shots of the face. The camera lingers up and down the body. Her hair, make-up, style of dress, eye contact, a subtle expressivity in the face rather than the heightened expressivity of the traditional Indian female dancer all mark her place in a more global media setting. While she becomes an export to the diaspora, a floating capitalist signifier, she is at the same time allowed a freer sexuality. Or perhaps, the body despite its confines on this commercial stage produces inferences of a sexuality that is female and strong, willing and assertive. Mulvey’s (1975) iconic gaze theory posits a female body and sexuality that is passive in its articulation and its desire to satisfy the active male gaze. It is from the viewpoint of male (both male film protagonist and audience member) longings and desire that women in the cinema are characterised and portrayed. I would like to suggest the possibility that Aishwarya’s dance number, because of its focus on female desire, attempts to play with this unidirectional gaze presented by Mulvey. The woman turns into the person that looks, seeks and chooses, while the male character awaits her pleasure. While Rekha is clear in her willingness to satisfy male longings, Ash (as she is popularly referred to by the Indian media) is more interested in quenching her own. In this song, her eyes are assertive rather than compliant, but not aggressive or manipulative; another recent trend in Bollywood women is allowing female sexuality and desire to separate from automatic allusions of exploitation. A dancer’s eyes are particularly important in Indian dancing. While the courtesan’s eyes were traditionally poignant, the vamp’s desperate or manipulative, the wife’s a transparent mirror of her true heart, new genres of dancing women have eyes that can be honest, direct and alluring all at the same time. Ash extends a lamp toward Amitabh Bachchan in invitation, looking at him, looking down at the lamp, biting her lower lip, looking up at him with one eyebrow raised in a question. The camera focuses on her bare back, with just the one string of her choli holding things together, as her hips sway side to side, the flesh on her back supple and young. I would argue that in ‘Kajra re …’ and a few rare examples of recent item songs, the subject

is the woman and not the man, despite the fact that she is performing for men. The focus in this dance sequence is on female desire. The camera focuses on her autonomy of choice and gives the prerogative of approach to her. While Aishwarya in this song might be an epitome of male dreams, it is her dreams and desires that seem the focus of the action and the spectator’s attention. Even though she is a product for popular consumption, I would argue that she also symbolises a break from chastity and suppression of desire as desirable Indian female attributes. Interestingly, the song makes no distinction between emotional and sexual desire. There are no heaving glances or sighs that suggest that she is dancing against her will or that her sexual and monetary passions might be satisfied but her heart will remain untouched. There are no shrewd glances or any that are cold or devoid of warmth.

Katrina: I can please (pleasure) myself in ‘Shiela ki jawani …’ In 2011, many of my dance students wanted to learn a routine to the song ‘Sheila ki jawani …’, one of the most popular item numbers of 2010 from the film Tees Maar Khan, directed by dance choreographer and film director Farah Khan. The film is the story of Tabrez Mirza Khan (Akshay Kumar), a conman, who is playing cat and mouse with the police while attempting to pull off a big heist, wooing a struggling actress and working in cahoots with an actor who wants to win an Oscar. ‘Sheila ki jawani …’ has all of the important features that distinguish the item number. Director Khan, along with her assistant of 18 years Geeta Kapoor, choreographed the dance ‘Sheila ki jawani …’, which, says the Indian Express, turned into one of the most viewed and downloaded YouTube Bollywood dance videos of 2010, second only to ‘Munni badnam hui …’ from the film Dabangg (2010). Khan says that when she first spoke of the item song to Katrina Kaif, who stars in the film and dances in ‘Sheila ki jawani …’, she explained that other film heroines would give an arm and a leg to dance in this item number. She wanted Kaif to look ‘sensuous and sexy’, Khan explains, and this instruction meant that Kaif went on a strict diet and exercise regime for the duration of the shoot. Khan says that Kaif would exercise at midnight, after shooting finished for the day, so that her ‘stomach and abs’ would look good the next day. The video starts with a shot of a film studio that advertises the sign ‘Blue Films Presents Sheila Ki Jawani’. There is a lecherous-looking film crew and director watching, as Anya (Kaif) starts the song draped in a pink bedsheet, sitting on a bed, beating her chest wildly, as the black-clad men that surround her – also on the bed – rock their pelvis’. Anya, contrary to appearances, sings the lyrics ‘I know you want it, but you’re never gonna get it’, both in English and Hindi. The scene shifts to the classic diamond-shape of a hip-hop video, with the lead dancer in the front, either backed up by dancers in a diamond shape – in this case, an all-male crew – or surrounded by them. Anya changes costumes several times, though the theme seems to be

predominantly sparkly bikinis, with tight-fitting sarongs or harem trousers. The dance technique has some reference to belly dancing in the hip rotations and gentle abdominal crunches. However, the most easily recognised style is global pop or generic hiphop as seen in pop music videos. Anya holds a wide-legged pose and beats her torso side to side, first in one direction, then the other, with arms elongated in front of her. Then, her chest beats in a jiggle in a step made popular by Beyonce in the ‘Oh, oh, oh’ section of the song Crazy in Love (2003). The dancing is a little softer and more come hither than Beyonce’s inyour-face, girl-power dancing, but the dance moves and placement (in terms of camera and dance crew) are very similar to Beyonce’s videos. A common Bollywood hand gesture in which the dancer places her wrists together and twirls her hands is repeated here, though placed instead of above the head, it is done in front of the body, with arms elongated. This seems at first glance to be a Bollywood-inspired step, though, again, Beyonce performs it in Sweet Dreams (2008–09), creating a forwards and backwards flow of signs. The dancing is interlaced with comedy from the leading man Tabrez, who is angry at the lascivious glances thrown at Anya by the film crew and the male dancers. While the dancing and lyrics allow Anya to perform a woman full of sexual desire and confidence, but who will ‘give it up’ – if I am allowed to be so colloquial – at her will rather than at the man’s, the narrative pulls her back into relative chastity. It does so using several strategies. The scene, after all, is a film set and not ‘real life’, suggesting that this is not Anya’s real life or character. Further, the banner reads ‘Blue Films’, a term that is used to describe soft or actual porn; so, the dancing is neither real life nor really a mainstream film. Tabrez is disgruntled by how the men on this film set treat his girlfriend, and at one point in the song he scowls and complains that the men are raping Anya with their eyes. His presence first in the audience, and then on stage and his outrage at the presence of the other men, places Anya in the realm of heroine rather than vamp or someone making a guest appearance in the film. These strategies, along with the lyrics, the comedy and the fact that Anya is doing this dance number as a way to achieve her actual dreams of becoming a legitimate actress, allow Anya to perform her desire and sexuality through her dance moves and pleasure in dancing, without threatening her inner worth or respectability as an Indian woman. The pleasure she experiences in her body and dancing manages to escape and contradict the tethers of the narrative and framing. Purna Chowdhury says about post-millennium item dances: […] they go on to give a certain metaphorical meaning to the new worldly women who are not bound by normative definitions of what it means to be an Indian (sexually submissive) female. Although male pleasure is still certainly the principal criterion, the open flaunting of sexual liberty undoubtedly determines a shift in women’s perception of their own sexuality beyond the sphere of the virtuous and the domestic.

(2011: 66) There are a few things that are interesting in this dance. One, despite the intercuts from the narrative trying to keep the woman respectable, Anya seems to escape these in her dancing. Her dancing does not seem to be confined by the contradictory demands made on her. She seems to enjoy dancing, she enjoys her body and there is the sheer joy of dancing on her face. Despite the patriarchal narrative, the dancing escapes its confines and finds its own selfdefinition, much like Anya herself. Second, when it is globally circulated, the narrative seems to disappear. It is the music and some of the moves that are circulated. My students in schools and colleges asked often to do a routine to it in class. Bollywood Brass Band (whom I have danced with) use it in their repertoire and it is danced to in clubs, both in India and in desi clubs in various diasporas. As such, the song allows for an exploration of dance and pleasure in body movements, instead of being restricted and confined by its narrative. Anya’s eyes, face, body movements – they are not fearful or confined, restricted or even reformed. Traditionally, ‘item girls’ seem to teeter on a strange tightrope. Respected, admired and loved by audiences or at least treated with a mixture of awe and trepidation in their dancing, in filmic narratives, on the other hand, they have to justify their subjectivity and lifestyle.22 While many audiences go to the cinema to admire the dance numbers, the narrative makes the dancer palatable, framing her in the guise of ‘vamp’, ‘courtesan’ or placing her in the narrative as a rupture of the filmic plot. Women who dance on the Bollywood screen today seem to bring together in their bodies elements of the dancer, vamp, courtesan and less and less of the Bollywood ‘wife’. While in postcolonial India bodily dissimilarities have been an important marker of the difference between Indian and Western women, the recent trends in consumption of cosmetics, clothes, trends, lifestyles, media, beauty and visual culture have implied that Indian women (in and out of Bollywood) adopt more global ideals of beauty. These global ideals of beauty come with associations of individuality and independence that one could argue are precious and rare commodities for Indian women attempting to assert their sexuality outside of domestic and conjugal parameters. It does need to be noted here that these trends are more visible in upper and middle class women (though increasingly less so), and more so in urban centres than in rural areas and smaller cities. The trend towards a possibly freer female bodily signification is thus implicated in global trade and tourism. Item numbers are specifically linked with music television and a trend in youth-oriented music videos, which are further intimately connected with the increase in access to global fashion trends, collaboration with hip-hop artists and a general rise in middle class and young adult salaries because of the increased presence of multinationals. In dance numbers, I argue, there is sexual agency in the blurring of previously dichotomised boundaries and genres. ‘Wife’ characters (good woman) in current day Bollywood can simply be girlfriends, can dance, wear revealing clothing, be assertive and independent and can tend

towards Menaka archetypes. Sita archetypes, especially in dress and deportment, and even in narrative and textual elements, are becoming less and less visible in Bollywood as global youth culture in collusion with capitalist consumption is becoming the audience of choice. This is not to say that ‘wife’ characters do not exist, or that stereotypes of wives and wifely attributes are over. In the same film Bunty aur Babli, the main female protagonist played by Rani Mukherjee is in fact a ‘wife’ once she marries Bunty, but she too is allowed agency in dress, dance and independent choice. Item numbers are a focus in this chapter because the trends in bodily signification that speak to more freedom in sexual choice for women occur first in dance numbers, while the narrative is slower to catch up. The growing rise in youth culture, along with its focus on youthful bodies and dance, global fashion and accessories, as well as consumer products, links dance numbers with circulation of Indian popular culture not only within India, but also in Asian countries and South Asian diasporas.

Notes 1 Deshpande (2001), in her article, analyses the revenues from Bollywood and reports that current day successful films can expect to earn almost twice as much revenue from the distribution of a film abroad (with an estimated audience of about 20 million) than in a territory like Bombay. In addition, more than local audience sales (which now only account for about 35 per cent of total revenue), music rights for a film generate huge revenues, as well as advertising rights within the film. 2 In an interview I conducted with Ken Ghosh (17 July 2005) at his office in Andheri, Mumbai, he describes that ‘skin videos’ are popular with music video directors because they require low budget sets, but generate large returns. He says, ‘[…] the almost sure fire success is the skin. Show skin, five babes in the rain, seems to work. More than audio CDs music companies sell VCDs because I think we have a big market. A lot of men are willing to buy VCDs, so that they can watch in the privacy of their own homes women cavorting in the rain, so that helps sales a lot. [And] it’s cheaper to shoot a skin video than it is to shoot a Made in India type video’. He is a successful 39-year-old music video director, who has been directing music videos for 20 years. He is the director of one of the earliest and most popular music videos in India, called Made in India. Released in the early 1990s, this video had a very elaborate swayamvar sequence (for further information on Ken Ghosh’s success as well as this particular video, see Juluri 2003: 41, 63, 96, 99 and 101). 3 According to Ganti, in 1998 film-making was finally granted the status of an industry in India, in an attempt to rescue it from the underworld. She also analyses the structure of the industry, its functioning and the production and distribution of films (2004: 51–57). 4 Refer to Munshi (2004), who describes the explosion of the make-up and toiletries industries in India at the same time as a rapid spate of young Indian women gained the Miss Universe and Miss World titles year after year in the early 1990s. 5 According to Juluri, these ‘mega’ songs offer a spectacular viewing experience (2003: 39). There are typically a large number of dancers, extravagant and very high budget sets, which act as the main pull for the audience, with a narrative

that is assembled often as an afterthought. According to Juluri, this trend began in the 1980s when the size of theatre audiences became smaller because of ‘video piracy’ and the underworld continued to finance films and raise the level of investment. Refer to Mundy for an analysis of what he calls the ‘MTV aesthetic’ (1999: 224). He describes how this aesthetic pervades many cultural products, including film, television and advertising. He analyses the relationship between MTV and the appeal of the spectacular and its construction in Hollywood cinema (1999: 224). 6 There is a recent trend of male dancers showing off their dancing skills in item numbers. While senior actors like Amitabh Bachchan and Shammi Kapoor used to dance in scenes set on stage, newer actors like John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan – who might be responsible for popularising this trend in Kaho Na Pyar Hai (2000) – and Abhishek Bachchan circulate as sexualised commodities quite in the same fashion as the female stars. While the former were present in the dance numbers as characters, the latter present themselves as bodies. 7 A postcolonial ideal of Indian masculinity drawn by Gandhi, perhaps in retaliation to the English picture of Indian men as lazy, lustful and ineffectual, recommends celibacy and self-control as the spiritual road to vitality and citizenship. Alter (2000) analyses this construction of Indian masculinity in detail, describing the history of the nationalist movement at the turn of the century in colonial India. Indian men in the cinema, especially after the wedding vows have been uttered, often turn into staid citizens, whose responsibility towards the family and duty towards the nation take precedence over sexual desire that is seen to have been tamed by marriage. This has been the picture of the Indian national citizen, and therefore of India – asexual, staid, responsible. 8 Chatterjee’s writings on the subject describe closely the social reform movements instituted for women at the peak of the colonial struggle in the late 19th century, the roles assigned to men and women in this nationalist struggle, the images of the nation established and the discourse that prevailed then and that continues in some forms now. He says: ‘[…] the specific ideological form in which we know the ‘Indian woman’ construct […] is a product of the development of a dominant middle-class culture coeval with the era of nationalism. It served to emphasise […] the new construct of ‘woman’ standing as a sign of ‘nation’, namely, the spiritual qualities of self-sacrifice, benevolence, devotion, religiosity, and so on […] the image of woman as goddess and mother served to erase her sexuality in the world outside the home’ (1999: 131). The ‘Indian’ woman as citizen of the new nation was described as an opposite to the lower class woman, the prostitute and the Western woman. 9 An apsara is an angel, in the sense that she resides in the skies, in heaven and is not a mortal creature. However, unlike the connotation of asexuality that generally goes with the word ‘angel’, a Hindu apsara is usually a beautiful woman, skilled in the arts and in erotic love. 10 For more, consult Valmiki Ramayana (trans. by Hari Prasad Shastri). 11 In the mythological epic the Ramayana, Lord Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Laxman are exiled to the forest for 14 years. When Rama calls Laxman for help one day, Laxman draws a line around the door of the house and tells Sita that she is perfectly safe as long as she stays within this boundary. Sita, to help a poor beggar, steps outside this line and is kidnapped and held captive for many years. Feminists often invoke this rekha as patriarchal dictate. Stepping outside this dictate often implies a heavy penalty. 12 Ramayana was televised for many years in the 1980s on national television at the prime slot of Sunday morning. Vishwamitra was televised in the 1990s, also on a daytime Sunday slot on national TV. 13 The Ramayana exhibition at the British Library available for view in the summer of 2008 shows a range of artists

depicting the stories of the Ramayana in various centuries. Mewar artist Manohar from the 17th century, painters from the 18th century in Rajasthan and Northern India suggest similar bodily signification for the women, as do Indian temple carvings from as early as the first century AD. 14 For more on body characteristics of mythologised figures, consult Jain’s article on Indian masculinity in calendar art that has transformed from smooth, soft, boyish images of the Lord Rama and other male mythologised figures, to muscular, hypermasculine images (Jain 2004). I look at bodily differences in visual representations between the two women based on my viewing of Sita in the television series Ramayana and Menaka in Vishwamitra, both of which were aired in the 1990s, as well as differences in pictures that can be found in popular art and sites dedicated to Indian mythology. 15 For nationalist anti-colonial trends that lead the discourse of Hindu upper class wives, their various duties and bodily attributes, see Chatterjee (1999). 16 For an analysis of the Rama janambhumni and Ayodhya controversy of the 1990s and the politicisation of the Ramayana coincidental with the telecast of various epics on national primetime television, see Rajagopal (2001). 17 Meduri (1996) analyses the nationalist and trans-nationalist discourses that reconstructed the body of the devadasi in ‘modern’ India. The devadasi was newly understood in late 19th-century India as morally corrupt, a woman whose sexuality would have to be sacrificed in order to save her ‘soul’. While her immorality was taken as an (orientalised) indication of the state of the Indian nation – corrupt, prurient, hedonistic – only her complete reform into a more ‘pure’ and ‘chaste’ state of ‘being’ would salvage the new nation state. Her re-signification into an artist as distinct from the whore paralleled the borders drawn around the middle class woman of the home (distinct not only from the whore, but also the Western woman and lower class woman), and allowed India to signify a disavowal of corruption and an adoption of moral uprightness, duty and delayed gratification. 18 Rekha brings into every role a mystique built on previous roles and her personal life, which has often been a subject of scandal. Dyer (2000) provides a useful analysis of the relationship between stars and the characters they portray, suggesting that a star will bring his or her star quality to the role. This is to varying degrees deliberately written into the script, but even when it is not, the presence of the star is enough to evoke perceptions and images of his or her personality or life or history in the mind of the audience. I would argue that the body of the star is important in this sort of placement, carrying in or creating through it, character traits, charisma, emotional content and so on. In my analysis of dances and dance genres, I am attempting to capture this relationship between star and character. Rekha, for example, with her tumultuous life, her roles as courtesan or other woman, is a great choice for teacher of the erotic arts of the Kamasutra in Nair’s Kamasutra. Her erotically charged roles are shadowed by rumours of her real-life role as ‘other woman’ in Amitabh Bachchan’s marriage with Jaya Bachchan née Bhadhuri. 19 Wikipedia appropriately describes Helen as a ‘Bollywood dancer and actress of Anglo-Burmese extraction, best known for playing vamps and vixens in Bollywood movies of the 1960s and 70s. She was famous for her flamboyant dance sequences and cabaret numbers’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_(dancer); for her life story, see also Pinto 2006). Virdi analyses the character of the vamp, with a brief look at Helen as a woman desired but not loved (2003: 168). She analyses that the vamp invites the male gaze but is condemned for eternity (2003: 169). Virdi suggests that as the scope of female sexuality became bigger in India, the figure of the vamp disappeared (2003: 170). This figure has made a comeback in item songs, but has undergone a change, in that the character may have the bodily attributes of the vamp,

but still maintains her position as leading lady, not quite as prone to condemnation. 20 Chakravarty, in her work on Indian cinema and its connections with political scenarios and state policy, discusses how Bollywood characters are mostly broad archetypes rather than psychologised individuals (1993: 200). Bollywood films often use typical scenes and interactions between protagonists that are repeated in many films. These are familiar to the audience and help construct the characters as broad archetypes. Along the same lines, Virdi suggests that Bollywood films always have at their centre (avowed or not) the ‘fictional nation’ that is fought over by archetypal forces of good and evil (2003: 32). She elaborates that characters are not well developed or very complex and the plot lines are ridden with coincidence. Characters stand in for professions, classes, castes and kinship roles (2003: 41). 21 For an analysis of song and dance sequences as interruptions to the cinematic experience that actually heighten the cinephilia experienced by the audience, see Gopalan (2002). 22 For more on audience and media responses to item girls, see Vaidya (2008) and Zariwala (2008).

References Alter, Joseph. 2000. Gandhi’s Body. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chakravarty, Sumita. 1993. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema: 1947–1987. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1999. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chattoraj, Samantha. 2014. The Devadasi System. Interactive Media Lab, University of Florida. 12 May. http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring02/Chattaraj/index2.html (accessed on 15 February 2015). Chowdhury, Purna. 2011. ‘Bollywood Babes: Body and Female Desire in the Bombay Films since the Nineties and Darr, Mohra and Aitraz: A Tropic Discourse’, in Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande (eds), Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, pp. 51–74. London: Anthem Press. Deshpande, Sudhanva. 2001. ‘The Rise of the Consumable Hero’, Himal South Asian Magazine, August. www.himalmag.com/august2001/filmrevies.html (accessed on 12 January 2007). Dwyer, Rachel and Divia Patel. 2002. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Dyer, Richard. 2000. ‘Stars and “Character”’, in Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich (eds), The Film Studies Reader, pp. 124–7. New York: Oxford University Press. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2004. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London: Routledge. Gopalan, Lalitha. 2002. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute. ‘Helen’. 2014. Wikipedia, 2 April. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_(dancer) (accessed on 15 January 2008). Jain, Kajri. 2004. ‘Muscularity and Its Ramifications’, in Sanjay Srivastava (ed.), Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia, pp. 300–41. New Delhi: Sage. Juluri, Vamsee. 2003. Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in India Music Television. New York: P. Lang. Meduri, Avanti. 1996. Woman, Nation, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi and Her Dance. New York: New York University Press.

Mies, Maria. 1980. Indian Women and Patriarchy. New Delhi: Concept Publishing.. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3): 6–18. Mundy, John. 1999. Popular Music on Screen: From the Hollywood Musical to Music Video. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Munshi, Shoma. 2004. ‘A Perfect 10: “Modern and Indian” – Representations of the Body in Beauty Pageants and the Visual Media in Contemporary India’, in James Mills and Satadru Sen (eds), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, pp. 162–82. London: Anthem Press. Pinto, Jerry. 2006. Helen: The Life and Times of an H Bomb. New Delhi: Penguin. Rajagopal, Arvind. 2001. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaidya, Ruta. 2008. ‘Item Bombs Sizzle in Bollywood’, Indiainfo. http://movies.indiainfo.com/features/item-bomb-0205.html (accessed on 15 January 2008). Valmiki.

The

Ramayana.

Trans.

Hari

Prasad

Shastri.

London:

Shanti

Sadan,

1952.

https://archive.org/details/The.Ramayana.of.Valmiki.by.Hari.Prasad.Shastri (accessed on 15 January 2008). Virdi, Jyotika. 2003. The Cinematic Imagination. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Zariwala, Shefal. 2008. ‘What Do the Item Girls of Bollywood Say?’ Bollywood Stars. www.bollywoodstars.net/category/item-girl/ (accessed on 15 January 2008)

Part III

Changes in the cityscape, changes in cinema

9 Regionalist disjuncture in bollywood Dabangg and the consumerist cinema Hrishikesh Ingle

The regionalist film The exceptional box office success of Dabangg (2010) turned the monetary tide of Bollywood, and came on the back of the rise of a new generation of film-makers and films in the space of Bombay Hindi cinema. Characterised by narratives situated in the small towns of India that incorporate their audience with a nuanced vernacular address, and negotiating with the more commercial practice of Bollywood, these films declared a modified scenario of the Hindi cinema through a regionalist thematic and space. The arrival of this new film practice significantly paralleled the emergence of a slick, glass facade, urban consumerism that has been transforming the cultural spaces of smaller cities and towns of India. In the context of popular Hindi cinema, this reformulation can be considered as a disjuncture in the generic notion of Bollywood.1 The disjuncture is more than an emergent practice, as it has come to index the shift in the everyday experience of India. The inscription of the regionalist film in the space dominated by Bollywood points to the contestations of new urbanism and the related socio-cultural changes, visible most in the sites of exhibition and circulation of cinema. It also draws attention to the differences between the big-budget Bollywood film and the regionalist film made at relatively lower costs, indicating the disparity of their underlying industrial thrusts. Apart from the visual encounter with the small town, the regionalist films seem to create a divergent cinematic experience for a segmented audience – the migrant workers – who now populate the growing urban centres of India. This emergent practice has assumed importance with Bollywood usurping regionalist representations in their elemental aspects, transforming them as commodity objects stripped of its existential essentialities. Curiously, the pivotal moment of this is captured in the popular success of Dabangg, which also announced a regionalist turn of the Bollywood film. The disjuncture of the regionalist film, therefore, enables an interesting dialectic between depictions of the vernacular and their superimposed varieties as seen in Dabangg. This dialectic leads towards theorising present day

cultural transformations as interstitial sites of the disjuncture in the Bollywood cinema, and how Dabangg transforms the regionalist film as an object for industrial commodification. Contemporary leisure experience in India, especially the cinema, has been elaborated in the context of the socio-cultural changes against the backdrop of an expanding urbanism (see Vasudevan 2003). These visible changes are attributed to the adoption of a neo-liberal economic policy, as the era of liberalisation was announced in 1991 by the Indian government. In the decade leading up to the end of the century, the expansion of a services-oriented industry, most notably the Information Technology sector, had firmed up the notion of a globalising India. The significant event for the Indian cinema in this story of globalisation was the status of an industry conferred on it by the government of India in 1998. While this capped the demands of the industry for greater access to institutional finance, it also ushered in a corporatisation of the film industry. This was also a significant extension of state policy that viewed the cinema as a dominant cultural practice and a prime candidate to attract foreign investment (see Rajadhyaksha 2003). The results of this policy decision, as elaborated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2003), became manifest in the proliferation of the notion of Bollywood as a point of identification for the non-resident Indian audience, as well as a differential to the idea of Indian cinema. The popular Hindi film, therefore, in journalistic and scholarly discussions, gradually transformed into the Bollywood film, whose commodified nature was a reflection of the liberalised economic situation. The ascendancy of Bollywood not only mirrored the turn towards a global address of films, but also in the relationship of the audience with urban leisure that was increasingly sought in the shopping malls and the multiplex. The regionalist film in Hindi that this chapter elaborates on is located in the interstices of the shifts in cultural production consequent to the changes in the post-liberalisation period. Specifically, it points to the issues of the absence of the small town in the Bollywood imaginary, its recurring presence in the depictions of the regionalist films and the underlying cultural contexts of the commodified versions of these representations, as exemplified in films such as Dabangg. The regional, as put forth here, is not merely a reflection of the small town in a vernacular address, but a divergent cultural space that embeds the contestations and conflicts of the contemporary situation. Thus, several films, such as Haasil (Tigmanshu Dhulia, 2003), Gangajal (Prakash Jha, 2003), Gulaal (Anurag Kashyap, 2009), engage with local issues in a socially predicated regional depiction, which is constitutive of a cultural experience that is distinctly outside the imaginary of the popular Bollywood. The regional in these films is more an experiential representation of small towns than mere performances of the vernacular. This chapter contends that the inscription of the regionalist imaginary in the Bollywood mode of cinema is the sign of a disjuncture in the mainstream cinema. It is further argued that this disjuncture can be probed as a dialectic of cinematic and social contestations, which also informs the transformations of the contemporary scenario. Elaborating on the cinematic small town as an aesthetic marker of the regionalist film, the chapter explores the contingencies of

the consumerist appropriation of the small-town cultural experience by Bollywood. This dialectic between a regionalist turn of the Hindi cinema and its popular consumerist form is encapsulated in the mass popularity of Dabangg.

The regional in Hindi cinema In the Hindi cinema of the 1970s and 1980s (pre-Bollywood), the regional has been depicted as a yet-to-be-modernised space and where the social contract of citizens is still tied up with a feudal legacy. The representation of regional spaces is marked by figures like the landlord/moneylender, the elderly farmer, the grocer (bania), the attractive young girl, the dacoit and so on of the small town or village. The cinema, thus, apprehends the regional as embodying traditionalism, relegating it to a temporal past. The Hindi film has assimilated various aesthetic and social tendencies so as to address a national spectator (Prasad 1998: 7). The regional – as narrative space, dialogue, vernacular differences and social realities – has therefore been presented to the nation through the assemblages of the Hindi film. At the same time, the regional cinema industries, producing films in the various regional languages, have a specific social circulation, largely as a subnational and subcultural practice.2 In the trajectory of a national Hindi cinema, therefore, the representation of the small town or village, and consequently the region, has been framed through a modernist narrative engagement. The regional is thus constructed for consumption by a national audience and not exclusively for a regional audience. The Hindi cinema’s engagement with the regional seems to highlight the relationship of the rural/small town with the modernising state, where the regional embodies an ‘intransigent political order’ (Prasad 1998: 158). In effect, the cinematic institution has tended to locate the regional in a temporal framework that foregrounds its prevenient existence. A brief discussion of some significant instances of such representations in Hindi cinema is presented towards situating the argument of its return in the Bollywood cinema of post-2000. A distinctive representation of the regional can be seen in the films of 1970s, significantly in Reshma aur Shera (Sunil Dutt, 1971), Mera Gaon Mera Desh (Raj Khosla, 1971) and Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975). Reshma aur Shera derives its regional characteristic as a legend of Rajasthan. It shows a doomed romance of Reshma (Waheeda Rehman) and Shera (Sunil Dutt) belonging to two warring clans of the Rajputs. While the plot itself presents nothing new in its prominence of a feudal conflict, the setting of Jaisalmer dominates the visual quality of the film. The first important sequence of the film, where Shera meets Reshma, is located in a village fair. In the process of tracking Reshma through the fair, the spectator is given a glimpse of its centrality to regional ritualistic aspects. The patriarchal feud between the families of Reshma and Shera

frames the rural spatiality of the film and also situates the traditional content of its narrative. The social context of enmity between two feudal families suggests the tenuous relationship of the modernising state and the regional spaces that bear a desire to enter into its order. The absence of the state’s law and its inability to address the tradition of such feuds is compensated by Shera’s desire to end the trajectory of killings. This desire is allegorically transferred in the romance of Reshma and Shera, but as a tragic realisation that the agents of change must perish in the process of transformation. Mera Gaon Mera Desh packages in a dacoit genre an address of reformation that would help institute the state’s law in rural regions of India. It can be located in the series of such films like Khotey Sikkey (Narendra Singh Bedi, 1974). The figure of the saviour of the rural moral order, in this film, has faced the law as a petty thief to return to a village. Ajit (Dharmendra) is sentenced for 6 months, and upon his release is summoned by an exserviceman (Jaswant Singh) who had been the instrument of his arrest earlier. He advocates Ajit’s rehabilitation in the rural space, extending the state’s contract with its regions. This advice is narrativised and conveyed as a call of duty (farz) to the citizen spectator. The exserviceman is here shown leading the life of a farmer in an amputee state, without his right hand. Ajit falls in the love with the village girl Anju (Asha Parekh), and is set to marry her. However, things get complicated with the arrival of the dacoit Jabbar Singh (Vinod Khanna). The dacoit kills Anju’s father to pre-empt his being a witness against one of his henchmen. Ajit becomes an instrument in eliminating the dacoits, as he helps the police apprehend them at the annual village fair. Jabbar Singh escapes, and the plot gets more complicated as he abducts Anju. Finally, Jabbar is killed by Ajit at the end of a lengthy action sequence, full of gunfights and near escapes. The dacoit films drew on the Western genre of the Hollywood cinema, while being situated in the inaccessible, traditional countryside of India. Mera Gaon Mera Desh reminds us of the several B grade films that were being made through the 1960s and 1970s. The figures of dacoits, an urbanised protagonist, and feudal social and moral order dominate the narratives. The significance of these films for a regional depiction, however, can be located in the restoration of the rule of the law in the lawless terrains of Chambal or villages of Rajasthan. In this aspect, films like Mera Gaon Mera Desh anticipate the transformation of the region towards its inclusion in the imagination of the nation. The cinematic version of these regions was predominantly constructed and viewed as embedding a traditionalist societal existence, yet to be modernised and included into the political imagination of the nation. Mera Gaon Mera Desh thus pre-imagined the lawless regional in Sholay, not just in the dacoit genre, but also significantly in the narrative parallel of urban youth becoming the instrument of the law ending an era of feudal crimes. Sholay becomes the most significant instance of the dacoit genre assembled in a narrative of what Prasad has termed as the ‘mobilisation effect’ (Prasad 1998: 158) directed towards the

reformation of the regional/rural spaces. However, apart from embedding a feudal political order that extended the state’s law in the village, Sholay is also a significant film for its immense popularity that has resonated through the decades of Hindi cinema, affirming its stature as a cult classic. Aspects of the regional are indexical in Sholay and are aggrandised through the well-crafted visual sequences, as well as the dialogue of the film. They aptly amplify and generate the underlying political structuring of the figures in the narrative. Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) is the feudal landlord and was the police officer that had arrested the dacoit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). Gabbar, however, manages to escape and avenges his arrest by killing the entire family of Thakur. While Thakur attempts to kill Gabbar in his camp, he is captured and his hands cut off by the dacoit. The figure of Thakur thus becomes the symbol of the state, whose reach has been thwarted by a double relationship of the feudal as bearer of the law and the long arm of the law being cut off. ‘The problem of the arms, as an (in)effective extension of the state, is clearly the premise of the film, which on one hand shows the social contract between the rural gentry and the state, and on the other hand demonstrates […] the vulnerability of the law in post-colonial India’ (Mukherjee 2014: 4). Veru (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) are petty thieves who have helped Thakur to fight off a dacoit raid on the train, which is carrying them to prison. Thakur traces them down and calls them to the village to help him capture Gabbar alive. The figures of Veru and Jai as modern petty criminals going to a village parallel the narratives of Mera Gaon Mera Desh and Khotey Sikkey. In Sholay, however, they have a double functionality, acting as mercenaries and the ‘arms’ of Thakur in restoring his stature as the protector of the village (Prasad 1998: 156). The figure of the dacoit Gabbar Singh became famous for his characteristic laughter and the mannerism of his dialogue. The sequence that begins with ‘Kitne admi the?’ has been one of the lines that has helped in creating the cult status of Sholay. As an encapsulation of a historical temporality, Sholay is a reference of the manner in which tendencies of a regionalist address got assimilated in a narrative prominence. The film, therefore, is significant both as reflecting the industrial mode of imagining the region and as a marker of how the region was depicted as a territory with older modes of social hierarchies. In the 1980s, the regional depictions in Hindi cinema, though extending the idea of mobilisation, suggest a transformation of the rural spaces. This takes the form of narratives that depict eliminating feudal vestiges and incorporating the region in the nationalist imagination of development. It seems that the popular Hindi film situated the feudal order of villages/small towns in the developmentalist narrative as a result of the realist aesthetic engagement that the New Indian Cinema had initiated in the 1970s.3 Films like Ankur, Nishant, Manthan and Mirch Masala engaged variously within a statist realism with the social and developmental problems of the region. The ‘developmental aesthetic’ was aimed at a passive transformation of the old feudal societal order and instituting the primacy of the welfare state (Prasad 1998).

A number of films construct narratives of feudal elimination in the 1980s, and among them the significant ones are Hum Paanch (Bapu, 1980), Himmatwala (K. Raghavendra Rao, 1983) and Dacoit (Rahul Rawail, 1987). The frame of imagining the region embodying a premodern feudal order, with an ambivalent presence of the state’s law, is the dominant mode in the 1980s. However, it is supplanted by a transgression of the protagonist from a subaltern social group assuming the agency of displacing or eliminating the traditional hierarchies of these spaces. Such depictions were seen in South Indian cinema, specifically in Tamil films of Rajnikanth. In the Hindi cinema, the transgressive agency was usually associated with the good-hearted protagonist turning criminal, as in many Amitabh Bachchan films. It was hinted at in films like Sholay, where Jai falls in love with the widowed Radha (Jaya Bhaduri), or in Mera Gaon Mera Desh, where the Thakur (aristocrat) of the village accepts Ajit as his future son-in-law, even though he declares that he is an orphan and a petty thief. Around this politics, the regional assumes primacy as transgression could be successfully conveyed by a narrative construction that placed the protagonist in social and economic conditions of deprivation. Himmatwala incorporates a tendency that was more fully realised in Dabangg. I am referring to the superimposition of visual aspects from the South Indian cinema (here Telugu) on the narratives of transgression in the Hindi film. Himmatwala is set in a village where the rule of the local landlord/moneylender and aristocrat Shersingh (Amjad Khan) is the de facto law. Ravi (Jeetendra) comes back to the village as an engineer and learns that his mother Savitri (Waheeda Rehman) and sister Padma (Swaroop Sampat) are living on the outskirts of the village in a hut, working as housemaids. He also learns that his father, the village schoolteacher, was forced out of the village as a result of a plan of Shersingh. The honest schoolteacher is set up for attempting to rape a junior female teacher. As a result, Savitri has been forced to sell off everything to help Ravi’s education. Ravi, who has been appointed as the engineer to oversee the construction of a dam in the village, has constant run-ins with Shersingh and his assistant Narayandas (Kadar Khan). Shersingh becomes the chief contractor for the dam and wants Ravi to approve some false bills. The plot complicates when Padma falls in love with Shakti (Shakti Kapoor), Narayandas’s son, and insists on getting married to him. This marriage is a conspiracy to arm-twist Ravi into signing on the bills. At the same time, Shersingh’s daughter Rekha (Sridevi), who has inherited her father’s inconsiderate attitude, is reformed by Ravi and falls in love with him. Ravi and Rekha then conspire to bring Shersingh to his senses and end his feudal rule. The film situates the regional in two important aspects. The first is the extant feudal system and its disregard for the state’s law. In one of the early sequences of the film, Shersingh is shown coercing the government-appointed doctor, threatening to kill him. Similarly, there are several instances where the aristocrat decides on matters relating to the village, generating in this rural space the effect of a provincial kingdom in democratic India. Ravi, as a representative of the developmental state, has come to the village to strategise the building of

a dam. The rule of the law that Ravi seeks to be upheld in the village, and thus bring about a transformation, is thwarted in the manner in which the aristocrat twists its ambivalent nature. Thus, Shersingh, despite his near-monarchial disposition, becomes the contractor for the dam building project, indicating the state’s dependence on the erstwhile feudal class for the processes of modernising the nation. The second aspect is the construction of the village, located next to the river Godavari, as a space that functions in between two temporal conditions: one symbolised by the rule of the aristocrat and another as the site where symbols of modernity can be evolved. This depiction, though suggesting a space located in an ideological conflict, engenders a stereotype for national consumption. Thus, its singular features like the landscape and the river, or specifically local cultural practice, are elided to present a narrative foregrounding of a village/small town with a nationalist address. Himmatwala, therefore, is successful in superimposing on the Hindi film’s ideological conflicts, spectacles of song and dance sequences like Naino Mein Sapna. The elaborate backdrop of this song sequence, coupled with the eroticism in the figure of Sridevi, presents a space where South Indian visual characteristics are implanted over the feudal romance of Hindi cinema. Himmatwala thus evokes a region that exists in the temporality of the developmental state apparatus, but whose transformation into the contract with the state’s law is incomplete. In comparison to these instances of regional depictions in the Hindi cinema, its return in Dabangg has happened in a changed socio-cultural situation. The contemporary is marked by a different form of transformation of the regional small-town spaces of India. While, on the one hand, this is evident in the economic matrix where global products have reached the interior ‘markets’ of small towns, on the other hand it has also signaled a societal shift. Dabangg typifies that the small town, through the processes of capital expansion, has been incorporated into the state’s new contract: that of a neo-liberal objectification. As such, the regionalist film of the current discussion posits a historical moment not just of the sociocultural contexts of India, but also of the Hindi film industry, which has rapidly turned towards small-town markets for establishing its hegemonic form.

Divergence, disjuncture and opportunity Hindi cinema produced in the later part of 1990s, known as Bollywood, was preoccupied with foreign markets and selling of the Indian experience to the largely non-resident Indian audience. The cinematic space of Bollywood was, therefore, dominated by the ‘feel-good’ urbanised family romances. Increasingly, it also signalled a cinema being produced away from Bombay, in places such as New York and London (Prasad 2003: 2). Although the manner in which the term and the practices of Bollywood has got stabilised as a form is still contentious

– the contest being whether it is representative of Indian cinema or a brand of cinema having a specific address – its commoditised nature has intersected with all aspects of contemporary cultural production, a process that Rajadhyaksha (2003) has termed as ‘Bollywoodisation’. Bollywood, therefore, as understood through films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (K3G), Kuch Kuch Hota Hain (K2H2) and so on, is peculiarly identified in the refined and glossy version of the ‘family drama’ set in urban spaces. The post-1990s also saw a phase of rapid urbanisation, marked by satellite townships offering a realisation of the global desires of the upcoming middle class. A version of this was symbolically expressed in the shopping malls and multiplexes that had opened up by the late 1990s. This new site of urban consumerism seemed to validate the global visions that Bollywood projected. The multiplex, therefore, contributed to extending the socially secure version of Bollywood. At the same time, the changing exhibition circuit of the Hindi film created an opportunity for film-makers from small towns to address a regional audience.4 The divergence of the regionalist cinema from Bollywood was facilitated by the changes in the exhibition and distribution of films. If the multiplex ensured a decent space of socialising and leisure, it also illustrated the sharp differential between audience segments (Vishwanath 2007: 3289). Such departure towards addressing different segments of audience displaced the primacy of Bollywood as the de jure mode of cinema, perhaps reflecting the desire to ‘negotiate’ an intensifying consumerism rather than ‘resisting’ it. The economics of film exhibition is an important component, even an enabling one, suggesting a differential, a gap, in the Bollywood variety of Hindi cinema and the more recent regionalist Hindi film. The production of several films located in the cinematic small-town India cannot be dismissed merely as a trend. Rather, a series of films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (Sudhir Mishra, 2003), Maqbool (Vishal Bharadwaj, 2004), Apaharan (Prakash Jha, 2005), Manorama Six Feet Under (Navdeep Singh, 2007), Gulal (Anurag Kashyap, 2009) that locate their narratives in the North Indian vernacular emphatically underscore an assertion of a localised thematic and a concern for its representation within the matrix of mainstream cinema. In pursuing such themes, these films have ensured a vernacularised aspect of the mainstream narrative cinema. This differentiates the films on the basis of their narrative setting, landscapes, social depictions and regional version of politics, yet maintains a tangential relation to the mainstream Hindi cinema. The space that the regionalist film occupies, therefore, is neither oppositional nor alternative; it can be best described as a disjunctive space. Apart from the linguistic differential to that of the Hindi/English mix of Bollywood, the disjunctive space of the regionalist film can be approached through the internal contestations of the economics of the multiplex. The multiplex, besides a site and symbol of urbanism, is a space that visualises a spatial and temporal uniformity. In attracting the aspirational middle class, it subtly filters out and mediates to deliver a decent experience. This spatiality then excludes the populations who now dominate the fringes of India’s urbanism, consequently

underscoring the affect of affluence and security (Athique 2011: 155). As the most dominant site of film exhibition though, the multiplex has provided a completely different terrain for producers and film-makers. Its biggest asset in this context is the multiplicity of screens that showcase a variety of films of various genres and in multiple languages (Sharma 2003: 5–7). Multiplexes offer an optimum economising of the available screening facilities. Showcasing a variety of films, including Hollywood, independent, parallel and regional languages films, ensures profitability. Besides this, the sale of merchandise, eatables and gaming products conflates the entertainment experience for its patrons. For producers, distributors and exhibitors, the multiplex has assured at least minimum returns on their investments. This has also brought about a horizontal and vertical integration of businesses for producers like UTV, Reliance Big Cinemas and Viacom 18. While production companies have multiplied, distribution and exhibition has been increasingly benefitted from corporatisation (Athique 2009: 126). Many stars have started their own production companies as well as distribution houses. Interpenetrating the stabilised norms of cinema business, the economics of the multiplex is fundamentally driven by the contest between ensuring sale of tickets and satisfying multiple audience segments and their desires. As noted by Aparna Sharma: ‘the multiplex intervention… can be termed as appropriating varying audience segments to stabilise and secure its own position, establish its distinction and engage the audiences in a varying film viewing exercise’ (Sharma 2003: 2). The contestation of ensuring occupancy of the screens in a multiplex, therefore, has opened up this space for film-makers across regions to showcase their work. The regionalist film has intervened through these available spaces in the multiplex, as well as surviving single screen theatres, thus providing a varietal means of entertainment for a diverse audience. In terms of access to an audience, therefore, the regionalist film has been supported by the differential economics of the multiplex structure. This has also benefitted the floundering regional cinemas of India, bringing about resurgences in Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam and other film industries. The regionalist disjuncture to Bollywood is predicated on addressing an audience segment that has emerged as a consequence of liberalisation. This audience, situated in the metro cities as well as the upcoming urban centres such as Pune, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Lucknow and so on, is dispersed, and seeks a validation of its global desires in spaces such as the multiplex. However, in contrast to the upwardly mobile, aspirational classes, these cities have tended to dissociate the migrant worker on the basis of affluence and employment in the new economies of the services sector. The dispersal of the new inhabitants of upcoming urban centres, therefore, has been at two levels – one, from their local landscapes of small towns or villages, and two, an internal dislocation. The regionalist Hindi film seems to address this double dispersion by employing the textual strategy of a vernacular address.5 Films like Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) evoke a connection with a distanced landscape highlighting the absence of the small town in the dispersed life of urban existence. The floating population of

contemporary urbanism can, therefore, vicariously experience the regional through the structures of the mainstream cinema, thus accentuating the divergent address of the regionalist film. The economic matrix of the multiplex thus is simultaneously realised in the functional and experiential realm of audience desires, as well as an industrial dynamic of a disjuncture of film representations and modes. The discursive space of this disjuncture has facilitated a creative engagement with India’s cultural change, exploring the interstitial temporality of the ‘globalising’ and ‘globalised’ India. This context of the regionalist film has been explored as representing the two Indias, one that has modernised and already incorporated in consumerism, while the other is a modernising India coming to grips with its socio-economic transition.6 Representative of this interstitiality – an in-between-ness – the regionalist film brings out the necessity to engage with the social through the contexts of the contemporary. These contexts are primarily defined by the processes of consumerism, wherein modernity gets associated with the desires for global products and tradition is relegated to a residual spatial dimension. Small-town narratives thus come to occupy the positional equivalence of a bridge to the global, invoking the residual as a spatiality that cannot escape the onslaught of the consumerist order. The enunciations of the regionalist film are creative, in that they are informed by these changed contexts of cultural production. Thus, the narratives of films like Khosla Ka Ghosla (Dibakar Banerjee, 2006), Well Done Abba (Shyam Benegal, 2010), and Phas Gaye Re Obama (Subhash Kapoor, 2010) voice the tensions of the spatio-temporal conflicts of their rapidly transforming small towns and cities in India. In considering Dabangg as the pivotal moment for Bollywood’s turn towards a regional appropriation, one cannot ignore the agency of the regionalist film to intervene in the contemporary. As independently driven productions, the films that constitute this trajectory seem to emphasise the social circulation of cinema. In the current elaboration, I have maintained the primacy of an audience address for the regionalist film to thrive. It is, therefore, in the contingency of a social segment that is the receiver of the regionalist narratives that these films activate a performativity of the vernacular, as well as its circuits of societal relations. In producing a realm away from Bollywood’s urban family dramas, the performativity foregrounds an everydayness of the regional experience. It thus situates and distances the object of its representation, perhaps to transcend the obvious vernacular relation with its primary audience segment. The agency of these films then gets channelised in laying bare the hitherto unrepresented images of small-town India. This situating of the small town, however, can easily transgress the social treatment to become an object for consumerist reproductions. In this sense, the regionalist film becomes a potential object for Bollywood’s commodification. The agency of the films then poses an opportunity to transform nuanced, thematic and differential treatment of the small-town India into either developmentalist mediation, as in Peepli Live (Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui, 2010) or Swades (Ashutosh

Gowarikar, 2004); or as the populist spectacle film like Dabangg, that can be recycled variously. A final aspect in relation to this disjuncture is the idea of alterity. It needs to be stated that in the context of the present discussion, the regionalist film, though suggesting an alternative or altered mode of cinema, cannot be exclusively or specifically located as such. This is due to the fact that the differentiality of the regionalist film is still derived from the production practices of the mainstream Hindi cinema. Even as a potential arena for experimentation, this film practice still needs the connotations of a socio-cultural politics, either as they have been historically mediated by the New Indian Cinema or as derivative of a localised style of the mainstream cinema. The primacy of the narrative form of the Hindi cinema, therefore, is not the one that is being displaced; rather it is in the redeployment of this narrative form for a specific cinematic imagination of small-town vernacular India that disperses the idea of Bollywood cinema. I intend to interrogate two aspects of the regionalist film in the context of the above discussion: (a) the cinematic small town as an aesthetic marker of divergence within the popular Hindi cinema space; and (b) elaborate on the consequences of the disjuncture for the consumerist usurping of the regionalist film by Bollywood.

Return of the small town The regionalist film emphatically announced the return of the small town within the narrative concerns of the Hindi cinema. This cinematic small town is a contrast to the cityscapes, and evoked a temporal experience whose dynamism was brought alive by vernacular performativity. Apart from locales and the spoken vernacular, this has taken various forms, including historical explorations such as in Paan Singh Tomar (Tigmanshu Dhulia, 2010), rendering of local crime-politics nexus as depicted in Sehar (Kabir Kaushik, 2005) and engaging with the question of female agency as in Dor (Nagesh Kukunoor, 2006). The cinematic small town is a terrain that lays bare the contestations of cinema and highlights the tensions of a cultural transition. As enunciations that are absent in the Bollywood film, the function of the cinematic small town seems to be directed towards voicing the relationship of the cinema with its social contexts. The enunciations, however, cannot escape the problematic of their being objects that have been produced in the big cities, from where the film industry functions. In the trajectory of films since 2003, the small town has passed from being a characteristic of the regionalist film to being a sign for a differential treatment of the more mainstream versions of it. The return of the small town in the representational matrix of the mainstream cinema, therefore, is governed by the twin logic of addressing a dispersed audience and as a space for differentiating the object of its narratives. In what ways is this

cinematic small town able to stand on its own as constitutive of a divergent progression? And which aspects of the representations lead to consumerist objectification? By attributing the cinematic small-town instrumentality for displacing its imaginings by mainstream cinema, I am drawing attention to the understated aspect that the difference between the real and represented is the site of a cultural politics. Returning the cinematic regime towards the small town, therefore, is marked by aesthetic and symbolic gestures that lose out in the processes of consumerist appropriation. In considering how the small town is represented, it is apparent that it is not an exact replica of the Indian small cities or towns (known as Tier II and III), its approximations being more symbolic than indexical, more as a representational space of dramatic action than a documentary reality of an unexplored sociology. Since its construction is defined from far away, its real-life basis gets realised only through the nuances of speech/dialogue, dress-up and peculiarities that form the stylistic devices of its representation. The cinematic small town thus generates a spatial distinction, but due to it being just a symbolic space, it is open to modifications and replications. Another aspect of its differential characteristic lies in its symbolism being overlaid with evoking a regional identity, and bringing the non-urban experience to the big cities. Hindi cinema had seen an attempt towards this in films starring Govinda – Banarsi Babu (David Dhawan, 1997) – whose portrayals emphasised the North Indian caricature that was distinct in its performativity. But, since the 2000s, invoking the regional has been through a conscious understanding that in the big cities and globalising small towns, its social address is dampened by the global visuals of Bollywood. Its recall through multiplexes and single-screen theatres thus encapsulates a link to the shared experiences of being in the native landscapes. Its symbolic significance rests on bringing to the screen the regional landscape and its subtleties in an experiential performativity that strings together its absence in the global cities with its imaginary screen representations. This symbolism of the small town thus plays out a spectacle of the suppressed and glossed over regional-ness; at the same time, it signifies the uncertainty of its transience. The fact that the symbolic value of the small town is derived due to its being situated in a gap of its objective reality and its referent leads to it being interpreted as representing something distant and far off. The representations are, therefore, open to becoming stereotyped as objects that can be superimposed with a variety of generic structures like the romance – Ishaaqzade (Habib Faisal, 2012 – or the political thriller – Bullet Raja (Tigmanshu Dhulia, 2013). In this objectified state, the small-town recall cannot overcome the exigencies of the industry, and the agency of its representation gets limited to an expression of ideological dissatisfaction with the products of the mainstream cinema. The play of these layers and conditions of production, in essence, renders the small-town representation to being objectified for consumerist reproducibility. The difference between the referent and its actual site generates a state of exception of the cinematic small town. This explains the performative excesses of dramatic action and

flourishes of the regionalist film.7 In Gangajal, for instance, the depiction of the struggle to enforce law and order in the small town of Tezpur is detailed with grisly events that refer to the Bhalgapur blinding of undertrial prisoners;8 Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, 2012) viscerally explores the violence and politics of criminal rivalry. This state of exception though is expressive of the regionalist absence in cities on the one hand, and a creative space for displacing the primacy of the Bollywood film on the other. It simulates the small town through an aesthetic of differential treatment, recreating the discursive distance of its primary audience from the global spaces that they inhabit. The state of exception thus, apart from addressing the residual excesses of global cities, explores the in-between-ness engendered in the transformations of these cities. Its interstitial location marks the aesthetic of differential landscapes and transforms the filmic small town as a symbolic object open to discursive superimpositions. Due to the discursive context of its production, this state leads to dissolution of its exceptionality, either towards a generic notion of the small-town film or in its commodification as seen in Dabangg. The mise en scène of the cinematic small town is constituted by specific performative and visual elements. These are based in the spoken vernacular, its quirks and idiosyncratic usage. The iconic cues, such as the marketplaces, small houses and the vehicles, contribute towards completing the picture. While the iconic leads to situating the spatial dimension, the linguistic opens up this space towards an experiential exploration of the embedded small-town culture. Aiyyaa (Sachin Kundalkar, 2012) demonstrates these two aspects where the narrative of the film traverses between mediated versions of South India largely as a spectacle, while the realities of a middle class Marathi girl are depicted in an absurdist recreation of a cinematic romance. That the film constructs a mise en scène that suggestively comments on the imaginary excess of Indian cinema brings out the desire to experience the lived but glossed over aspects of urban living. The vicarious satiation of the small-town experience, of spatiality outside the urban but temporally prevenient in history, accentuates the symbolic function of the cinematic small town. It foregrounds the diversity of the regionalist film from the brand of Bollywood films. This mise en scène also manifests an affect through the spectacle of the small town, highlighting the dissolution of an older cultural order and its consequences, as being experienced by the aspirational middle class. The space depicted by this mise en scène then evokes the two temporalities of globalising and globalised that India is witness to.9

Dabangg and consumerism of the regionalist cinema The steady and growing commoditisation of the Hindi cinema is not a new phenomenon. It was announced when cable television made forays in the Indian market, predominantly piggybacking on telecasting films, first in informal networks, and then as legal entities with

broadcasting rights. The music channels and later general entertainment channels made sure films were recycled towards exploiting their value as a much consumed object, whose cultural significance rested on its prevalence in social consciousness. ‘A hyper visual culture and the endless production and recycling of media content are now a routine part of life’ (Mazumdar 2012: 836). But more than the television market, it has been the institution of Indian cinema that has furthered its agenda of commoditisation, exploiting the complex layers of the social circulation of films and its related products. This implies that the mode of production of the Hindi film is now more determined by the logic of profits, in many cases it being sold off piecemeal, in the form of various rights ranging from broadcast to the social media. The appropriation of the regionalist film practice by the commercial concerns of Bollywood, therefore, indicates how a disjunctive mode can be exploited not just for profiteering, but also towards accommodating forms of culture for a consumerist expansion of markets and audiences. Dabangg proved this true, and many films after this have attempted to replicate its success by almost making it a genre. The success of Dabangg, approached through the present discussion, emphasises that the regionalist film embeds a cultural condition of the contemporary. The film addresses this condition and then turns it into an easily digestible form that stirs the slow, sleepy small town with a spoofed up reality combining several related but independent elements from crime, vulgarity and corruption to rural poverty and compromised morality (Kumar 2013: 70). The film’s excesses though found a wide acceptance that resulted in its box office earnings and its mass popularity (Raghavendra 2011: 33). Dabangg superimposes the Bollywood mode on top of older depictions of cinematic small town, drawing attention to the departure that the regionalist film positions. In its wide popularity, the film accentuated the gap between the multiplex and the masses, between a cultural experience of neo-liberal homogeneity and the diverse and disjunctive spaces it has created. It thus brought into prominence the fact that a film practice is rooted in the small-town landscapes, though a cinematic parody is reflective of a social space that had been excluded from Bollywood. As Avijit Gosh poses: ‘When did you last see a hero in a mainstream Bollywood film drinking from a water tap, dressed in a lungiganjee?’ (2010: 1). And now, one can respond that he is to be seen in the kitschy ‘Lungi-dance’, professing love from the pedestal of a saviour, preaching gender equality, national unity and the uncanny agency of the common man. The narrative of Dabangg, while merging the ‘mobilising’ and ‘transgressive’ heroes of the 1970s and 1980s, evolves through some well-constructed events. The final effect is that of a renegotiated star persona, as a brand to address a specific audience segment. The title sequence situates the ‘transgressive self’ of the child Chulbul Pandey, where his status as the ‘foster son’ of Prajapati Pandey (Vinod Khanna) is placed. The setting of the farm in the small town and the rustic mise en scène evoke a nostalgic temporality to locate the antecedents of the police officer Chilbul. The next sequence is particularly interesting, for it is here that the

spatial aspects of the small town of Lalgunj are presented as four long shots showing the relative spread of the town, first marked by a panoramic spread of two- and three-storied houses, predominantly pale white and with sloping roofs. Second, a top shot of a cluster of red-brown shingled rooftops dotted with coconut fronds. Third of some women washing clothes at the river, and fourth of the marketplace, where a blue van is shown coming down the lane at a pace to stop abruptly at the crossroads, in front of a low building, which is the local bank. The sequence immediately picks pace with fast cuts of shots showing some goons carrying guns decidedly moving towards the bank. Clearly, this sequence introduces the ease with which banks can be robbed in small towns. If this is the state of the lawlessness that people have to endure, then the narrative posits through this sequence the necessity of a transformative agent, whose arrival, in earlier versions of Hindi cinema, usually took the form of punishment delivered by a vigilante-like hero. Here, however, we get the remarkable doubling of Chulbul Pandey, where he engages in a fight sequence in a rather comic manner. The police officer while trouncing the goons also has fun dancing to the tune of a phone ringing. The choreography of this sequence merges several elements of action films from the kung fu style of Hong Kong cinema to its South Indian variety, as observed in popular Telugu films. Moreover, the music track of the sequence carries over the bandito-style stringed accompaniment observed in the genre of Western films located in South America, especially in films like Desperado (Robert Rodriguez, 1995) or Mask of Zorro (Martin Campbell, 1998). This sequence then plays anti-climatically when Chulbul says to the thief, ‘Tumne bank loota, hamne tumhe loot liya!’ (‘You robbed the bank, I came to rob you’), and walks out carrying the bag of money. This twist of the police officer turning a bandit is legitimised by Chulbul when he calls himself ‘Robin hood Pandey’ as the back-up police personnel troop in – a reminder of the ironic portrayal in Hindi cinema where the police always arrive late. As if to emphasise this fearlessness of Chulbul Pandey, a song sequence begins, where the hero sings the praise of this figure. This is the first instance in the film where the star persona is distanced from the figure of the narrative, creating the space for the spectator to bridge the gap between the object (Chulbul) and its referent (Salman Khan). While the narrative repeatedly presents action sequences, there are some instances in the film that explicitly illustrate the objectification of the small-town aesthetic. Dabangg, however, masks this in various nuanced moments. In the song sequence Mast Mast Nain (sung by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan in the mode of a qawwali), the backdrop subtly evokes an Islamic neighbourhood. This is evident in the banner that declares ‘Rehamat Ittar va Surma’ (Perfume and Khol). Moreover, at another moment, the shopkeepers of the marketplace are shown wearing the traditional dress of the community with skullcaps. One cannot dismiss these elements as merely giving credence to the mode of the song (which inherits its music from the Sufi tradition), for they are present in the narrative for an address to a specific section of the

audience – the classes who identify Salman Khan as belonging to a particular community – with the star persona negotiating the identity politics of this construction. However, in the narrative, Chulbul Pandey belongs to the upper castes, which he declares it in the dialogue with Rajjo’s (Sonakshi Sinha) alcoholic father (Mahesh Manjrekar). This negotiation of the star, while furthering the dominance of the nationalist Bollywood cinema, is framed through the ambivalent cop figure, closely emanating from and located in the vernacular space of Lalgunj. The assimilation of the vernacular aspects in this figure becomes a farcical spectacle that, on the one hand constructs a commodified version of the small town, and on the other succeeds in rooting the Bollywood narrative back into the interiors of India. Dabangg’s spectacle is situated in contemporary (perhaps progressive) politics, and is linked to Bollywood through the star presence. By situating the star in a morally transgressed, selfprofessed vigilantism, the film extends the motif of superimposition by mapping the folkloric, heroic and iconic over a renegotiated persona of Salman Khan. Chulbul Pandey thus visually and narratively evokes an audience address, combining erstwhile figures of Hindi cinema – Sholay, with the Rajnikanth flavour of iconicity. The affect of this goes beyond focusing perceptual attention on frontal projections for an identity politics (Prasad 1998: 72–5) and into renewed terms of cinematic adulation. The star in Dabangg can be considered as a distilled caricature that reveals and revels in its ambiguous audience address, as signifying interstitial spatio-temporality – a sign of contemporary disaggregation of small-town experiences – in an unusual frontal address. The action sequences of Dabangg recreate a simplified and localised style of the bullet-time effect. This effect as Eivind Rossaak observes: ‘explores sensations and becomings in the passage in between the still and the moving’ (2006: 326). The superimposition of the digital onto the vernacular version of the star, therefore, evokes the gap between the two cultural experiences mentioned above. On the side of the affect, this star iconicity creates the conditions for its being rendered and recycled as a cult phenomenon of the small-town hero.

Conclusion The regionalist film, though standing apart from the mode and representations of Bollywood, is not really an alternative to it. Its disjunctiveness is as much based in the potentialities of the multiplex economics as its address is towards evoking the small town in spaces where it has been rendered absent. However, as the disjuncture has proven to open up a creative space for film-makers to situate the social outside of Bollywood’s global domain, it has given rise to an object that can be used in varied narratives. The connection between Bollywood and the regionalist film in Hindi in its current format exemplifies how a corporate industry can exploit the disjunctive form as a reified object of consumerism. Dabangg is now a cult film and the

historical site of the disjuncture within which it is situated is being increasingly recreated and sustained in the popular imaginary. Though not in the same mannerisms of the cult-action film, the small-town imaginary is now increasingly being sought within larger cities. Delhi, with its distinct neighbourhoods and mannerism, is one such space as seen in Fukre (2013), Vicky Donor (2013), so is Mumbai as in Shanghai (2012). Dabangg’s inscription of the smalltown imaginary within the framework of the economics of the multiplex then also announces its corporatisation. A whole economy of merchandising and online sharing of the visuals, music and performative nuances of Chulbul Pandey only emphasises the inevitable urbanisation where the small-town experience will be stereotyped as a cinematically excessive object. In conclusion, it can be stated that the disjunctive cultural experience as discovered through the regionalist turn of Bollywood is more than just a site of representation. Its visual dimension lends to a vicarious satiation of diversely felt desires and recreates the small-town space through a regionalist vernacular address. The interstitial site of the regionalist film, therefore, assumes a symbolic significance: one, as an affect for the dispersed multitudes, and two, as a creative countering of the Bollywood imaginary. Dabangg proves as a pivotal moment for the regionalist disjuncture. It emphatically announces the consumerist turn for this disjunctive practice and transforms it as an object for industrial appropriation. In turn, what Dabangg encapsulates is a cultural negotiation of Bollywood with its residual and ignored aspects. The mass acceptance of the film thus cannot be dismissed as an aberration, but a signal of how a divergent tendency, prospective of political countering, can become commodified precisely for its differential affect and address. In the years after Dabangg, a number of remakes from South Indian mainstream cinema, with similar spectacles of star derived, action narratives located in small-town India, have been made purely to exploit a latent commercialisation of the regionalist film. This is most evident in the sequel Dabangg 2, and a Telugu version of Dabangg, Gabbar Singh (Harish Shankar, 2012) with the superstar Pawan Kalyan playing the lead role. The potential of the regionalist disjuncture to enable a differential to Bollywood, therefore, has effectively become a mode of transition for the commercial, consumerist concerns of the dominant Hindi cinema. The social conditions of the regionalist disjuncture, too, have mutated in the urban way of life. The regional then has been limited to the mere localisations for Bollywood’s narratives and the regionalist disjuncture a moment of transition, devoid of its potential political valence.

Acknowledgement The suggestions provided by the anonymous reviewers have been very helpful to expand the discussions of the chapter. In the preparation of this chapter, I have received some valuable

feedback and suggestions from M. Madhava Prasad, A. Hariprasad and Binayak Bhattacharya. Comments and feedback from students of the Film Studies program at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) have also helped me in fine-tuning some aspects of this chapter.

Notes 1 A generic notion of Bollywood comes out of the indiscriminate use of the term to designate variously the Bombay cinema, Hindi cinema and Indian cinema. For a discussion of the meanings and significance of the term ‘Bollywood’, see Prasad (2003); Rajadhyaksha (2003); and Vasudevan (2008). 2 On the intersection of the film star and politics as a unique instance of subnational, regional identity, see Srinivas (2013) and Prasad (2014). For the rise of the Hindi film as a national language cinema, see Vasudevan (1995). 3 Prasad (1998) situates the aesthetic tendencies of the New Cinema of the 1970s as reflecting the strategy of developmental politics by the state. This assumes significance in the fact that a large number of regional as well as Hindi films were funded by the state in the form of the Film Finance Commission. For the idea of the emergence of parallel or alternative cinema, see Vasudev (1986). 4 In an interview with Devanshi Seth, published in The Times of India (2011), Tigmanshu Dhulia identifies the availability of a space to accommodate a regionalist desire within the urban spaces like New Delhi. 5 Akshaya Kumar has pointed out the conflicts enfolding the urban transformation of cultures in the wake of neoliberalism. As temporal shifts with contrastive pulls, his analysis aptly defines the tendencies that I am elaborating here: ‘This can indeed be understood in the sense of two conflicting notions of time––one trying to hold the self in a time slipping away, the other trying to put a turbo-engine onto the move towards a world-class future, even though it may undercut the vernacular self’ (2013: 62). 6 Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta (2007) presents this as representing ‘two Indias’ through the noir modes of Johnny Gaddar (2007) and Manorama Six Feet Under. 7 Akshaya Kumar (2013) has excellently situated the cinematic small town within the concept of ‘time warfare’ that explains the excesses of performativity in the provincial narrative representations of the North India. My concern here traces the disjuncture of such states of exceptions that on the one hand reflect a contemporary situation of urbanised India, and on the other locate this discursive space for a commodified potential, as is seen in films after Dabanng. 8 See Bhagalpur Blinding Case (2011) and Nayar (2003). 9 For an elaboration on the ‘heterogeneous temporalities’ of Indian social and political condition, see Chatterjee 2004.

References Athique, Adrian. 2011. ‘From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History’, South Asian Popular Culture, 9(2): 147–60. ———. 2009. ‘Leisure Capital in the New Economy: The Rapid Rise of the Multiplex in India’, Contemporary South Asia, 17(2): 123–40.

‘Bhagalpur

Blinding

Case’.

2011.

Centre

for

Human

Rights

and

Justice.

http://www.humanrights-

justice.com/landmark_initiative/bhagalpur_blinding_case.php (accessed on 10 October 2014). Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. ‘The Nation in Heterogeneous Time’, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, pp. 3–26. New York: Columbia University Press. Gosh, Avijit. 2010. ‘Decoding Dabangg’, The Times of India, September 18. 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. Mahadevan-Dasgupta,

Uma.

2007.

‘Two

Frontline,

Indias’,

24(23),

http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2423/stories/20071207507008500.htm Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2012. ‘Film Stardom after Liveness’, Continuum, 26(6): 833–44. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2014. ‘The Singing Cowboys: Sholay and the Significance of (Indian) Curry Westerns within PostColonial

Transformations,

Narratives’,

24,

http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/24/PDF/Mukherjee_Transformations24.pdf (accessed on 10 May 2015). Nayar,

Mandira.

Damming

2003.

the

Flow

of

Gangajal,

http://www.thehindu.com/lf/2003/09/02/stories/2003090200700200.htm (accessed on 10 October 2014). Prasad, M. Madhava. 2014. Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan Ltd. ———.

2013.

‘This

Thing

Called

Seminar,

Bollywood’,

525.

http://www.india-

seminar.com/2003/525/525%20madhava%20prasad.htm (accessed on 10 October 2014). ———. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Raghavendra, M. K. 2011. ‘A Renewal of Faith: Dabangg and Its Public’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLVI(6): 33–6. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2003. ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, InterAsia Cultural Studies, 4(1): 25–39. Rossaak, Eivind. 2006. ‘Figures of Sensation: Between Still and Moving Images’, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, pp. 321–36. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Seth, Devanshi. 2011. ‘My Film Is Not about Mayawati: Tigmanshu’, Times of India, 18 March. Sharma,

Aparna.

2003.

‘India’s

Experience

with

the

Multiplex’,

Seminar,

525.

http://www.india-

seminar.com/2003/525/525%20aparna%20sharma.htm (accessed on 10 October 2014). Srinivas, S. V. 2013. Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Vasudev, Aruna. 1986. The New Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Macmillan India. Vasudevan,

Ravi.

2008.

‘The

Meanings

of

“Bollywood”’,

Journal

of

the

Moving

Image,

7,

http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2008/the_meanings_of_bollywood.pdf. ———. 2003. ‘Cinema in Urban Space’, Seminar, 525. http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20ravi%20vasudevan.htm (accessed on 10 October 2014). ———. 1995. ‘Addressing the Spectator of a “Third World” National Cinema: The Bombay “Social” Film of the 1940s and 1950s’, Screen Winter, 36(4): 305–24. Vishwanath, Gita. 2007. ‘The Multiplex: Crowd, Audience and the Genre Film’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(32): 3289–

91, 3293–4.

10 Mourning and blood-ties Macbeth in Mumbai Moinak Biswas

Over the last two decades, since the protocols of structural adjustment took roots, popular film in India has become enmeshed with the contemporary in a way that it had never been before. It has entered the age of images that blur the familiar line between cultural and economic processes. We have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of new cinematic elements, a representational accumulation – though not always the emergence of new forms – through this period. However, one probably did not suspect that in search of form, a generic practice within Bombay cinema, thriving on capturing the new mode of urban existence on the screen, would fall back upon William Shakespeare. Vishal Bharadwaj’s Macbeth, Maqbool (2003), offers a rather startling summing up of the underworld theme developing in Bombay cinema with some persistence over a decade. It reveals how all that dynamism of survival on the street, the logic of violent justice, the exuberance of life on the brink, the elusive but profound comfort of fraternity that the underworld genre offers harbour the possibility of a tragic form in the old sense of the term. In this sense, the urban crime film, developing since Ankush (1986) and Nayakan (1987) through Parinda (1989), Angaar (1992), and Gardish (1993), and coming to full bloom in Satya (1998) has served as the ‘Chronicle’ background to Bharadwaj’s Macbeth. As an early 20thcentury commentator on Macbeth said, the author of the Elizabethan play derived ‘the tone and atmosphere of the Celtic and primitive legends of violent deeds and haunting remorse’ from the Chronicles; ‘story after story […] told him of men driven by an irresistible impulse into deeds of treachery and bloodshed but haunted when the deed was done by the spectres of conscience and superstition’ (Herbert Grierson cited in Muir 1962: xl). The Chronicles recorded the kingly lineage. One such, Holinshed’s Chronicle, was a source for Macbeth. The urban crime film has no kings of course, neither has it any lineage to record, but the kingpins are called ‘Bhais’. Does this not suggest that kinship, the classic material of tragedy, is latent here as well? Actually, there are two kinships: direct and virtual, the provisional kinship of brothers in crime. The other basis of tragic conflict, Law, is of course itself a spectre here. As long as the

Bombay film played out the cop and robber theme, this potential did not emerge; but with the underworld genre, the battle shifts on to the lawless plane, where one is forced to reflect on the origins of Law. The rules of the underworld themselves present the communal laws that modern legality is supposed to have replaced. Should we say that it has been possible to cast a set of contemporary popular preoccupations in the mould of Shakespearean tragedy, because of the perennial nature of those ‘irresistible impulses and haunting remorse’, the universal compulsion to return to the origins of law? This would leave unanswered the question of the contemporary itself, the fact that it was in the 1990s that this cinema came upon new correspondences with extra-cinematic reality. Let us remember that Macbeth slides imperceptibly from a picture of defilement of Nature (the act of treason by Macbeth and the cruelty that followed are presented as a violation of nature) into lamentation over a land. Macduff speaking to Malcolm: […] each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds As if it felt with Scotland and yell’d out Like syllable of dolour. (Act IV, Sc. III, lines 5–9) The significant moral shift for Maqbool is that one is no longer lamenting the degeneration of a legitimate order, but an order within the folds of the underworld. The Mumbai Macbeth violates the law of the criminal regime itself; there is no moral ground above ground, the outside only sends punishment, retribution in the form of the police. The country, the way of life mourned in Maqbool, is one that has fallen from this fallen state. This, one must admit, has its own poignancy. One has lost other languages of mourning. Who would now arouse interest grieving over the passing of a normative order? The highly moralistic discourse of Indian popular cinema has been forced to make serious concessions in this new genre. Moralism does not leave room for tragic apprehension of the world, for which one needs a conflict between two laws, two moralities, as Hegel would say, not a conflict between law and its absence. My intention here is not to offer an analysis of Maqbool, but to see it as a summing up of the underworld theme, to understand a generic production that is symptomatic of the postliberalisation popular forms in India. One could begin with some observations on the question of representational accumulation. The most striking aspect of the world in Satya, Company (2002) or Maqbool is the solidity of evocation of location and lifeworlds. Without a fullness of evocation, it would be impossible to thematically supplant the legitimate order. The surrealists used to say something similar: you need to make the surreal real, make it appear as the real itself. The fascination of the Bombay underworld, as it developed as a cinematic environment in the first decade of liberalisation, is its promise of approximation of reality, the startling

proximity that it seems to have to our wakeful reality of the day. Through speech, visage, specific reflexes, a whole cinematic body has been created for implantation on a range of texts. The semiotic accumulation that supports such density of representation has come from an activity wider than cinema, from a visual culture in which cinema found itself embedded in the 1990s. The new visual and sound forms have become visible across the genres, but it is the urban crime film where objects and surfaces have been processed into a special tactility. It is interesting that the country-city dualism, underlying the old moral tale, a substance characterising a film like Agneepath (1990), for example, has disappeared almost completely. We are trapped inside the city; the extended initiation in violence makes the character an expert user of the city, whose slums and lanes are choreographed into a performance of shock and survival. What does this mean in terms of film language? Primarily, there is a technical mobilisation that seeks to create a rapport between the urban sense data and the perceptual regime of the film. (In the process, technology itself often rises to the surface as performance.) The sense repertoire of the city has incorporated the explosion of commodities in the wake of liberalisation through a great semiotic saturation of objects as signs. Moreover, the invasion of commodities on the cityscape and on the extended media site has released a new flow in the image; new modes of sequencing are worked out under the aegis of this dynamism. In an earlier capitalism, the social ‘flow’ of commodities catalysed the novelistic narrative imagination. The realist, historical perception of space and time corresponded historically to the itinerary of commodities across spaces. (The new density of the image that corresponds to consumer capitalism thus reminds us once again of the origins of modern realism.) The status of the object world became essentially different as commodity production became the dominant instance of production, as exchange value of objects became prevalent over their use value.1 Hence, in many ways, the new language works through an augmentation of the classic modern modes even as it gets implicated in the current global traffic in images. Its naturalism is fundamentally different from, say, a neorealist film, where vision could flow from the sparse everyday objects to the natural horizon with relative ease. A surfeit of objects is now offered to the eye, which are countless, and therefore density itself rises to the surface rather than individual objects. The underworld, placed in this perspective, is a seemingly endless study of faces, gestures, speech and movement, built upon the modes of humdrum urban street life and subaltern living made familiar primarily through television. Think of the whole tapori repertoire or the slum idiom made visible through music videos, advertisements, reportage, comic skits. The mimetic capital – to borrow a phrase from the New Historicists – has circulated through an extended cinematic field before cinema could impose a form on it. One requires an initiation in this rhetoric to make full sense of what goes on in a film like Satya. One requires a good education in the language of consumption to follow a film like Dil Chahta Hai (2001), too. But Dil Chahta Hai chooses not to explore the city; its confident

neglect of the non-metropolitan audience is paradoxical in this sense, but is symptomatic: the young new rich is speaking among themselves here, effectively shrinking the metropolis itself into its white core. On the other hand, the extended family melodrama, synonymous since Hum Apke Hain Kaun (1994) with ‘Bollywood’, is also marked by the mimetic density we have in mind, but entirely in service of short circuiting landed property and globalised consumption. One has reason to consider it as a real estate spectacle, a figuring of property as coextensive with the nation itself. This world of goods is bound to suffer from bloodlessness, to which mourning is an unknown sentiment – witness the anaesthesia of Sanjay Leela Bhansali creations. The underworld, in its bloody pursuit of money and success, has sometimes presented an obverse of the real as property, owning up to the illegitimacy of property per se. In the process, it has also inverted the logic of family ties. The Bollywood melodrama not only fails to mourn, but also fails to acknowledge any lack whatsoever. It is possible to see in it a reversal of the project of the classic melodrama of the 1950s and 1960s. The romance with modernity in that cinema entailed generational conflict, the couple’s struggle to break free from the parental family, the fantasy of conjugal sovereignty. The current imagination of the family drama has a manic investment in erasing all ideological fissures from its domain. It is romance with patriarchy: the adventure in love is but fulfilling the mandate of the father. The most successful film from the inaugural moment of Bollywood, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), is emblematic in this regard. At an advanced stage of its dissolution, the old extended family is reinvented as the very embodiment of Indianness. The role of the diasporic imagination in this business is well known. It is of some consequence that another genre of Indian cinema, spawned alongside the family drama, drawing upon similar resources, has created the possibility of working the themes of authority, property and kinship into a less cheerful material. A source of fascination in the cinematic underworld is the criminal fraternity itself. Ramgopal Varma’s Satya presented a powerful picture of this bonding, deeply saturated as well as fragile, often ethically strong through its very withdrawal from the moral law. This affective zone, the precarious community of the killer, becomes a fertile core of performance – sharing of codes, sharing moments of near annihilation, refracting everyday communication through a highly colourful group idiom of exchange. It is interesting to follow the dissolution of actual sibling or parent-child bonding available in the earlier examples of the genre, say Parinda or Gardish, into the pure invention of a community in Satya. Often, the nexus, and not the thrill of action, becomes the affective wellspring of the film, its real lure. If the ruthless pursuit of money reveals its violent side, here it is in relation to the currency of bonding, its appeal largely deriving from a secret recognition of the impossibility of the legitimate family. This substitute family does not procreate, of course; it is bred to die. Like Scarface or Godfather, a sister or a daughter turns up sometimes as the impossible bride in the midst of the orgy of death.

Maqbool works the entire range of representations of bonding, the accumulated affects of the generic practice, into a majestic structure. Actual and virtual kinship, transition to new family, provisional community endowed with perennial dimensions – all these have been put into the cauldron. Jahangir/Duncan is the Muslim don. Macbeth and he were cousins in Shakespeare; here, Jahangir (‘Abbaji’ to the gang) is an adoptive father of sorts to Maqbool/Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is Abbaji’s young wife, a change that inflects the assassination with parricide. The suggested kinship between Jahangir and Maqbool is actualised through the quasi-incestuous union of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Banquo is a Hindu associate of Abbaji’s, and Malcolm, Duncan’s son in the original, is made his son. By a simple, felicitous twist, Jahangir’s daughter is given in marriage to Guddu/Malcolm. Lady Macbeth instigates Duncan’s murder in the film partly because her legitimacy as Jahangir’s wife would never be established socially – she remains a mistress performing the wife’s role. Also, the marriage between Guddu and her stepdaughter brings about the possibility of disinheritance for her. The classical motifs of tragedy are processed through melodramatic mediation (one remembers how Walter Benjamin saw a similar reformulation of classical tragedy in the discredited German baroque form of the Trauerspiel (see Benjamin 1985). The classical tragedy was often preoccupied with the myths of royal investiture. Maqbool’s accession to the throne is entirely in keeping with one’s logic of succession, the logic proper to the underworld (he is the closest aide, second-in-command). On the other hand, it is a violation of another, equally strong rule of kinship. As a modern tragedy, the film presents the royal investiture of Guddu, the Hindu son-in-law, also as an implicit violation of succession. The establishment of the Hindu Banquo’s line will bring an end to this Muslim empire. Two laws, after all, come to a clash. The witches (after Kurosawa’s masterstroke of reducing the three into one, here is another charming trick, the three as two rogue policemen, ‘Pandit’ and ‘Purohit’) forecast the establishment of Banquo’s line on the throne till the end of the world, imperium sine fine. Shakespeare’s own modern formulation of tragedy, demanding a passage from myth into history, demanding an opening of the form into the political real, removed Banquo from the conspiracy against Duncan (in the Chronicles, he was implicated). What else could he do? Banquo was after all a forefather of James I, Shakespeare’s king. In Maqbool, the passing of the empire into the hands of Jahangir’s Hindu son-in-law, who in the end makes the gesture of adopting Maqbool’s son, is deeply resonant with the whole range of generic concerns that we have been trying to locate around the underworld. The Muslim mafia is indeed a deployment of stereotype, but Maqbool reveals the genuine possibilities sometimes thrown up in the path of circulation of stereotypes. One has seen many instances of the insidious use of Muslim figures like Jahangir in recent Bombay cinema; Maqbool’s power lies in using the stereotype to free its world from any struggle with a moral opposition. The struggle is located within the world conjured up. The density of details – extending from accent, vocal inflections and

gestures to clothes, architecture, food and ritual – lends an almost moving solidity to a mode of community living. Even the surma in the eyes of Jahangir contributes to that evocation. Vital links in the plot are worked out through fleeting words and gestures. This would not be possible without the representational accumulation the film feeds off. The underworld as a counter-mapping of the city, extending from the mansion to the durgah to lanes to thoroughfares to the sea borders, comes to overlap with the nexus itself as we are taken through the exposition of the criminal enterprise. From its richly saturated independent realm, this world opens into the political web through a straightforward reference to Jahangir’s command over minority votes and his alliance with the ruling faction, with the king rather than his courtier. The latter’s offer of unsettling the state assembly he turns down violently by forcing him to chew one of his paans (betel leaf). There is conflict with the forces of law, with a good police officer who suffers at Jahangir’s hand, but the real conflict is shifted within Jahangir’s world. The sentimental and moralist treatment of the religious stereotype is largely neutralised, clearing ground for a tragic appropriation of the motif of corruption. The paanchewing don’s gruff voice betrays an inner sickness; his gait, slowed down by flab, his concupiscence – everything is marked by a sense of the decay of flesh. The creative adventure with the stereotype produces the striking innovation of the scene of drinking at Jahangir’s daughter’s wedding on the night of his murder. The don forces his devout personal bodyguard, Usman, to first display the bullet marks on his bare body, signs of his fierce loyalty to his master, and then makes him drink against his will, incapacitating him before the coming assassin. His empire is in decline; the modern kid Guddu will inherit the mantle. But before that, in the interregnum of Maqbool’s rule, a different code of the underworld will take hold, a code that Jahangir detested. He turned down the hugely lucrative deal of smuggling in substance that would be used for mayhem in the land: ‘… this is my country, where can I go leaving it?’; as Jahangir says this to his associates, the aura of the past is cast over his whole reality. This is the fascinating aspect of the hard detailing of the contemporary in the film. The new mimetic competence, an inheritance of the media, is inflected into a cinematic articulation as another time is injected into the picture, another time embodied in another code of conduct. At the generic level, Jahangir here evokes something very close to the poetic world of the Muslim Social film, which itself was always marked by nostalgia. What object is being smuggled in? The film does not name it. In this unnamed thing, the cursed Maqbool will deal, bringing the ocean to his doorstep (the Birnam wood to the High Dunsinane); the coastguard will invade his home moments before he is killed. Violence is inseparable from the flow of life just beneath the surface of legitimate social reality. The technique of thick registration of an idiom of living is drawn from a mediatic activity, where the familiar distinction between economic and cultural production is getting increasingly obliterated. Maqbool, summing up the obsessions of a genre, offers a prism of

reflection on the new economic production of images. It can do so because it has sought to deflect the mediatic effects into a cinematic form in the old sense, in the sense in which the vibrantly detailed contemporary, the flip side of the present city, can be coloured with a sense of passing into the past. One suspects, without that quality of pastness as a ‘cinematic’ take on the world, it would be impossible to cast this whole current obsession into a mould borrowed from Elizabethan tragedy.

Note 1 Fredric Jameson in his Marxism and Form argued the necessity to rethink the dialectics of form in relation to this empirical condition (1971: 391–93).

References Benjamin, Walter. 1985. The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Muir, Kenneth. 1962. ‘Introduction’, in Kenneth Muir (ed.), Macbeth by William Shakespeare, pp. xi–lxv. London: Methuen.

11 Black friday A screen history of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts Rajdeep Roy

To accept filmmakers as historians, as I have been proposing throughout this book (History on Film/Film on History), is to accept a new sort of history. The medium and its practices for constructing a past – all ensure that the historical world on film will be different from that on the page. (Rosenstone 2006: 159)

Writing the event This chapter studies a film called Black Friday (2004), directed by Anurag Kashyap, as a historical narrative of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts. The film is adapted from S. Hussain Zaidi’s book Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts (2002). On 12 March 1993, 10 bombs (3 bombs remained undetonated, and an incident of grenades being hurled at the fisherman’s colony with no casualties) exploded in Bombay, killing 217 people, injuring 713, and the loss of property was estimated to be Rs 270 million. This event is popularly known as the 1993 Bombay Blasts, or simply Bombay bombings. It is the first recorded incident of serial explosions in any major city around the world (Zaidi 2002: 15–16). Vyjayanthi Rao observes that the synchronised explosions of the bombs (1.28 pm–3.35 pm), in a north–south axis across Bombay, fused the temporal and the spatial characters of the explosions into a singular instance of ‘collective victimhood’ (Rao 2007: 568) when the city reeled under the effect of the blasts. She argues that the serial nature of the blasts signals towards a new form of urban violence at a time when Mumbai as a city is conceived as a node in the global network of cities, beyond its geopolitical entity (Rao 2007: 568). According to Rao, the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts are symbolic of the urban reorganisation of the metropolis during the 1990s in the wake of economic liberalisation of India (Rao 2007: 580). Referring to her conceptualisation of the ‘serial explosion’, this chapter considers the 1993

blasts as a singular act of violence instead of multiple explosions. Thus, it refers to the event as Bombay bombing, indicating at the process that involves strategy, planning and execution of the attack. Rao’s idea of Bombay bombing as a metaphor of the urban reorganisation of the city alludes to the change of its urban character from being a colonial city of Bombay to Mumbai, a city on the global periphery at the centre of neo-liberalism and globalisation in India since 1991. Thomas Blom Hansen explores this historical shift in the urban character of the city during the 1990s, in the context of the government’s decision to change the official name of the city from Bombay to Mumbai in 1995 (Hansen 2005: 1–6). In the present chapter, I have used Mumbai to denote the city in general, and Bombay in specific historical contexts such as the Bombay bombing. According to Paul Virilio, the failed attempt to bring down World Trade Center, New York, by a truck loaded with explosives on 26 February 1993, the Bowbazar bomb blast (15 March 1993) in Calcutta and the choice of the Stock Exchange building for the first explosion during the 1993 Bombay bombing suggest that ‘organised terrorism’, in this day and age, carry out strategic attack on economic nerve centre of a city, and generally targets global cities like New York and Mumbai. He suggests that contemporary terrorism is structurally similar to organised crime. It functions on the basis of organisations that produce, for instance, individuals as suicide bombers and close-knit groups bound by religious proselytisation to carry out insurgent activities. He argues that this kind of terrorism is dependent on the televised publicity of the event towards a political goal. The ‘telegenic quality’ of such acts of violence contributes to the symbolic and the affective dimensions of the event (Virilio 2000: 18–23). Robert Rosenstone describes the main objections of professional historians with history on screen. The historians of words complain about the compression of historical time in films, the lack of a mechanism of referencing in order to substantiate the historical accuracy of the subject being portrayed and the absence of a clear distinction between character’s memory and the objective evidence. He argues that instead of following the standard methods of studying history in words to understand history in sights and sounds, the screen history should be studied by a keen awareness of the cinematic conventions and the specificity of the medium (Rosenstone 1995: 21–30). The established history of the Bombay bombing is dependent on the revenge hypothesis that connects the blasts with the 1992–93 Hindu-Muslim riots in a cause-and-effect narrative. In popular consensus and dominant discourse, the 1993 blasts are seen as a revenge of Bombay’s Muslim minority with a deep involvement of the city’s organised crime – a symbolic act of retribution – against the anti-Muslim pogrom by the Hindu majority during the riots in Bombay that started with the demolition of Babri mosque at Ayodhya (North India) in 1992. The official discourse of the event principally rests on the testimonies of the accused – confessions extracted under questionable circumstances and highly unreliable as evidence in the court of law. Moreover, Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim, the prime

accused in the Bombay bombing case, never appeared in the court and are still absconding. The present chapter studies the film Black Friday in this historical context. Referring to Zaidi, Vicziany and Rao, I have argued that the film distinguishes the ordinary bombers, represented as young Muslim men who lost their family and livelihood in the riots, from the criminal masterminds, Memon and Ibrahim, by constructing its historical narrative of the blasts principally through the character-centric narration of Gullu, Asgar Mukadam and Badshah Khan, the three ordinary foot soldiers who were involved with the blasts to various degrees. Among them, Badshah was the central witness of the prosecution. Thus, by constructing the history of the Bombay bombing from the perspective of the ordinary bombers, Black Friday adheres to the evidence pertaining to the objective history of the event, and conforms to the revenge hypothesis of the official discourse by representing the perpetrators of the blasts also as victims of the riots. Following the observations of Virilio, about the role of television and other mass media in understanding contemporary terrorism, and the arguments of Rosenstone regarding the importance of the cinematic medium and conventions in studying reel history, this chapter illustrates how Black Friday differentiates different kinds of narratives that form the blasts’ discourse by the use of filters and the technique of colour grading. I have argued that the film’s narration through three major colour schemes not only underlines the nature of the sources in its historical construction, an act of historical referencing, but also uses the same colour grading techniques to manipulate the nature of the information to conform to the official history of the event. The chapter ends with an in-depth analysis of the opening sequence concentrating on the scene of Bombay Stock Exchange blast to explore how Black Friday creates the screen history of the Bombay bombing. In this analysis, I have explored the use of TV newsreel, voice-over narration, colour grading and the use of slow motion to recreate the blasts that shook the city one Friday afternoon in 1993.

Flashback The Srikrishna Commission Report provides the central narrative of the standard history of the 1993 blasts. According to the report, Bombay bombing is inextricably connected to two outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay during 6–12 December 1992, and 7–16 January 1993. The 1993 bombing is widely considered an act of retaliation by the Muslim-dominated organised crime syndicates of the city known as Underworld,1 to avenge the atrocities suffered by the city’s Muslim minority during riots in the hands of the Hindu majority (Zaidi 2002: 19). The riots can be seen as an anti-Muslim pogrom, a bane act symptomatic of the rise of militant Hindu nationalism in India during the 1990s, facilitated by the propagation of the Hindutva ideology.2 Dawood Ibrahim, the don in exile of the city’s largest gang known as D-company, and Mustaq Abdul Razak Memon aka Tiger Memon, who was working at the time for a

Dubai-based smuggler named Yakub Bhatti (Zaidi 2002: 34–6), are the main protagonists of this tale of revenge and retribution. Marika Vicziany contends that unlike the later acts of international terrorism in Mumbai like the 2006 explosions in commuter trains, the 1993 Bombay blasts were exclusively orchestrated by the city’s organised crime syndicates (Vicziany 2007: 59–60). Zaidi’s book is the most comprehensive written account of the event till date. In Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta also presents a chronicle of the Bombay bombing (Mehta 2006: 144–56), interspersed with his odyssey across the metropolis during the tumultuous time of the 1990s. The official history of the 1993 blasts principally rests on the evidence of 686 witnesses running over 35,000 pages, presented by the public prosecutor before a special court under Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987, in short, known as TADA. The verdict of the Bombay blasts’ case was announced in 2007 after a 13-year-long trial, finding 100 out of the 125 accused guilty of perpetrating the serial explosions (Vicziany 2007: 47, 55). Confessions of the bombers and their aides recorded in police files and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) dossiers, testimonies in court and press reports of the time provide the ‘facts’ corresponding to the mainstream history of the event. In an interview to N. Patcy, Anurag Kashyap informs that apart from Zaidi’s book, he has borrowed from other sources for the historical construction of the blasts. He visited the sites of the explosions, and went through press reports and photographs. He looked at the ‘actual’ blasts’ footage from Films Division of India and referred to the booklet Voices: From the Draconian Dungeons,3 describing police’s hard-handed tactics during the interrogations of the accused (Patcy 2007). By actual footage, he is possibly referring to the newsreel of the national television, Doordarshan. He implies that since the recordings are presumably unedited, unadulterated and ‘live’ recordings of the event, they are ‘real’, ‘true’ images, serving as ‘authentic’ historical documents. He has effectively used Voices, exposing the torment of the suspects in police custody, and Doordarshan’s reportage as an act of referencing the historical narrative of the 1993 blasts in Black Friday. In the film’s adaptation of Zaidi’s work, a notable omission is the arrest of Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt for possession of an assault rifle and ammunitions from the stock of firearms to be used in the blasts. Kashyap explains that the film is ‘about the blasts, not about peripheral issues’ (Patcy 2007). His comment reveals the narrative choices made in the film. The account of conceptualisation, planning and execution of the blasts is mainly presented through flashbacks and a flash-forward (also acting as voice-overs on occasions in the film) of the accused, who later became the prime witnesses in the Bombay bombing case. Since the confessions of the accused form the central evidence of the blasts case, this bomber-centric narration emulates the official discourse and the objective history of the 1993 Bombay bombing. Black Friday was ‘postponed’ from exhibition soon after its release in 2004 (Chopra 2007).

In the court case to issue stay order on the film, the defence lawyer argued that the film showed the accused guilty of crime before the pronouncement of the court’s verdict on the Bombay blasts’ case. He expressed concern that the film could influence public opinion about the accused and might incite fresh spate of communal violence. I would suggest that the defence’s argument is premised upon the idea that the film, by focusing its central narrative on the testimonies, attains a ‘truth value’, which has the potential to influence not only public opinion, but also may have bearing on the court’s judgement. The film was rereleased in 2007 after the announcement of the verdict.

Blasts’ story in Black Friday The title sequence begins with the chance arrest of Gullu (Manoj Goyal), one of the persons trained in Pakistan to carry out the bombing, and ends with the recreation of the first explosion in the Bombay Stock Exchange. Gullu informs the police about the imminent blasts and the active involvement of the Underworld in the event. He says that Tiger Memon is the mastermind behind the impending blasts. Police do not believe a word of it, as the serial bombing is a large-scale operation that involves extensive strategic planning and requires execution with clockwork precision. They find it impossible for the city’s gangs to realise an attack of such magnitude with the help of novices. The scene of Gullu’s arrest at the outset prepares us to witness an unprecedented event that is about to strike the city off guard. Historical narratives are generally presented in mainstream films from the perspectives of a few characters, where the title sequence often introduces the main characters of the story. Gullu’s interrogation scene not only prepares us for the blasts, but also presents the central protagonist of the narrative, Tiger Memon (Pavan Malhotra), who is the prime accused in the blasts’ case. He is immediately informed about the details of Gullu’s interrogation and orders his men to reschedule the attack from an undisclosed date to Friday, 12 March 1993, the 17th day of the auspicious month of Ramadan. We see a vivid representation of the Stock Exchange blast, ending the title sequence. The film shows other blasts by a combination of Doordarshan’s newsreel and dramatic reconstructions, with details from Zaidi’s chronicle of the city under attack. A team of Bombay police under Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) starts the investigation. The police find a deserted Maruti van near Siemen’s office in Worli that contains AK-47 assault rifles, and a scooter in another part of the city, with undetonated RDX (Research Department Explosive). They find that both the van and the scooter belong to Tiger Memon. Farther investigation reveals that Tiger has left for Dubai with his family just before the blasts. They arrest his manager named Asgar Mukadam (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). During questioning, they learn that Asgar has played a small part in the blasts. His flashback introduces us to the

perpetrators traversing the city planting bombs at strategic locations. Arrests and interrogations of bombers like Parvez (Raju Srestha) and Imtiaz (Pranay Narayan) soon follows. A police informer reports that Badshah Khan4 (Aditya Srivastava), who will later become the state witness, is possibly hiding in his native village of Rampur, somewhere in North India, with his comrade, Bashir (Asraf-ul-Haq). Camera chases Badshah evading indictment across the dusty plains of the country. He is eventually arrested from his ancestral home at Rampur. During his life as a fugitive, we see the gradual disillusionment of Badshah with the purpose of carrying out the blasts. He used to think of Bombay bombing as a spectacular exhibition of power, a sacred act of retribution to instil a sense of security among the city’s Muslim population in the aftermath of the riots. The film shows that in the course of his life on the run avoiding imprisonment, he finds the blasts to be a futile venture by which Tiger Memon misled a group of Muslim men, including him, to carry out his revenge on the city as Memon’s formal business was destroyed by the riots and his timber factory was burnt down by anonymous rioters. In a typical Indian film style, the choric song ‘bharam bhap ke/sharam tap ke/karam nap ke/bhaga re’ (vaporising illusion/overcoming shame/measuring Karma/he fled) describes his mental state, his change of heart and his appropriation within the moral order with clear binaries of good-evil, virtue-sin and sacred-profane. After the arrest, Badshah’s flashback takes us to the anti-Muslim pogrom during the Bombay riots. He informs us of the searing rage among the Muslim populace in Mumbai, who were waiting eagerly for some sort of retaliation. In a quick progression of events, the film shows his proselytisation by Tiger, the landing of RDX on the coast of Shikhadi and Pakistani army personnel training the men gathered from Muslim quarters of the city to make bombs in a camp near Islamabad. Black Friday constantly reminds us of Dawood Ibrahim by referring to conjectures, like him being forced by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), to provide logistical support for the blasts, and the popular story of Dawood receiving a parcel post from Dongri, the place in Mumbai where he spent his childhood, and started a career in crime. The parcel contained broken bangles and a letter vilifying him, demanding revenge from their favourite son for the humility suffered by the Muslims in Bombay during the riots. The explicit link of the Underworld with the bombing is established through characters like Yeda Yakub (Dibyendu Bhattacharya), responsible for the safe-keeping of the explosive, and Dawood Phanse (Gajraj Rao), the landing agent of RDX, arms and ammunitions on Indian shores. After the arrest, we see Phanse describing his meeting with Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai where he is ordered to go through with the landing. This piece of information along with the mention of Dawood Ibrahim in confessions of Usman Gani and Salim Kutta is the only evidence, however unreliable, in the Bombay bombing case that prove Dawood’s involvement in the 1993 blasts (Zaidi 2002: 261; Vicziany 2007: 54). We witness the recreation of the highly publicised suicide of Rakesh Khurana (Bobby Parvez), unable to bear the sight of police

brutality during an interrogation session with the suspects. The film sweeps through scenes such as Tiger’s brother Yakub Memon (Imtiaz Ali) returning to India to face trail, his interview on the National TV programme Newstrack, juxtaposed with TV footage of the Pakistani Foreign Affairs officer denying Indian government’s claim that the Memon family was offered asylum in Pakistan. The film also recreates the alleged telephone conversation between Dawood and one of the famous lawyers in India, Ram Jethmalani, to negotiate the terms of his return with the Indian government. He demanded complete immunity before facing court, which the government denied. Badshah’s confession rounds up the story of the blasts, bringing us back to the night before the event, we have seen earlier, from the flashback of Asgar. The film ends with the newsreel and stills of the 1992–93 riots, the burning of Tiger’s office by rioters and the reconstruction of the infamous meeting in Dubai where the conspiracy of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts allegedly originated. We witness the war cry of Tiger, urging the assembly of criminal bosses to realise a violent event of magnanimous proportion, to be performed on the grand stage of Mumbai, the nerve centre of Indian economy, so that the nation is forced to take notice. He describes the Bombay bombing as an act of retaliation and retribution in the name of honour to ensure future safety of the Muslim minority in India.

Filtered history The historical narrative of the blasts in Black Friday begins with the recreation of the explosions in the opening sequence. The film connects parts of the elaborate planning and execution of the event primarily by the interrogation scenes of Gullu, Asgar and Badshah Khan. In the Bombay bombing case, the prosecution initially presented the case as treason. The preliminary planning in Dubai, the training in Pakistan, the landing of the RDX and weapons at Shekhadi coast in India through traditional smuggling routes of the Underworld and execution of the serial explosions with clockwork precision are parts that arrange neatly to form the narrative of conspiracy, sedition and waging war against India (Zaidi 2002: 40–95). This line of argument unequivocally makes the city’s organised crime synonymous with international terrorist organisations. As a corollary, the perpetrators cease to exist as disgruntled Muslim residents of Mumbai, instead are immediately labelled as Islamic terrorists. The prosecution later dropped the charge of treason, as the defence lawyer Niteen Pradhan argued precisely against this coherent narrative. He said that instances like landing of explosives, conspiracy in Dubai and the actual blasts, which the prosecution presented as pieces to complete the jigsaw puzzle of the Bombay bombing, should be considered as separate cases. He argued that the event should be interpreted not as sedition, or war against the nation, but as a violent act directed to the ‘Hindu community’. Pradhan said that the blasts

were ‘not a terrorist attack but were an outcome of communal strife’ (Zaidi 2002: 226–7; Rao 2007: 579). Rao notes that this change in the perception of the event from a narrative of sedition to that of retaliation brings out of equation ‘the acknowledgement of either an external attack or a new combination of militant practices aimed not so much at the state as at making political statements outside the familiar language of the state’ (Rao 2007: 579). According to her, this shift in perceptions reassimilated the historical discourse of blasts within the nationalist history conceived in terms of majority and minority communities (Rao 2007: 574). Thus, the emphasis on the revenge hypothesis helped in the appropriation of the study of blasts within the broader understanding of religious conflicts and sectarian violence in South Asia signified by the 1992–93 riots. One may add that this prominence of revenge hypothesis also diverts our attention from the fact that some of the major players accused in the 1993 blasts’ case are still absconding. The story of vendetta and retribution situates the blasts within the grand narrative of the riots, allowing the identification of the Muslim minority as victims in terms of its majority Hindu Other. Thus, the accused of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts attains a dual character of perpetrator as victim, which explains the act of the 1993 Bombay bombing. Black Friday reproduces the revenge hypothesis of the official history by distinguishing the characters involved in the strategic planning and financing of the attack from those who merely executed the plan, or the ordinary bombers. It shows that foot soldiers like Badshah Khan who bombed the city, and were ultimately apprehended and convicted, are misguided by a few individuals on the top of the chain like Tiger Memon. I would argue that Black Friday placed the responsibility of the blasts solely on the characters of Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim, by denying them any agency outside the elaborate conspiracy that they allegedly planned in Dubai. As a result, the film can explore the ambiguity of the characters of ordinary bombers as both victims and perpetrators in a twin event of riots and blasts. Since the evidence of the standard history of blasts rests centrally on the confessions of the ordinary men who carried out the explosions on ground, the film choses the characters like Gullu and Asgar who were involved with the event in a minor capacity to tell the tale of the blasts. And, Badshah Khan, the state witness in the blasts’ case, becomes the central character of the film’s historical narrative. The film begins to connect the threads of the complex history of the Bombay bombing, as the investigating team under Rakesh Maria gets the first lead when they find an abandoned Maruti van near Siemens factory in Worli, and trace the clue to Tiger Memon’s apartment in Mahim. From the other inmates of the building, they learn that Tiger left for Dubai with his family just before the event. They catch hold of his manager, Asgar Muqadam, who used to supervise the accounts of Tiger’s smuggling operations. The first interrogation scene of the bombing case begins. The standard coloured shots with a yellowish tint, reminiscent of the

dusty Bombay summer, change to red monochrome as the police grill Asgar for information. In Black Friday, the interrogation scenes of the key witnesses of the Bombay bombing case, like Asgar and Badshah Khan, are shot with a red filter. Asgar’s flashback takes us to the night before the blasts. We are introduced to the bombers as they move to different parts of the city to plant the bombs. Resonating with Vicziany’s socio-economic study of the accused (Vicziany 2007: 49–54), they are represented as ordinary Muslim men employed in blue-collar jobs, some of whom having links to Underworld. The narrative of the execution of the serial explosions through Asgar’s voice-over establishes Tiger as the man behind the event and the bombers merely following his orders. Throughout the voice-over, oblique references are made about the blasts being a result of Tiger’s personal grudge on the city; for instance, Asgar informs that Tiger’s timber factory was burnt down in the riots at the fisherman’s colony where the grenade attacks were made. Asgar’s voice guides us to the different parts of Bombay, where the bombs are planted, as the film shifts to the colour scheme of red and yellow in a blue monochromatic background. We see this use of blue filter later in the film during the following scenes: the meeting of the criminal bosses to plan the attack, the meeting between Phanse and Dawood Ibrahim and the scene of combat training in Pakistan. We are introduced to these scenes by the interrogation of the state witness, Badshah Khan. The use of red and blue filters, specific colour balance for different segments of the historical narrative of the blasts, makes us aware that the colour scheme in Black Friday is not merely for graphic effect, or for indicating temporal markers like the standard use of black and white and sepia tone in a colour film to indicate past events or character’s memory. The sections of the narrative obtained from official records like the time and place of the explosions are shown through a blue filter with red and yellow as the only colours visible. This specific colour grading has been used throughout the film to indicate the part of the historical narrative, which has been obtained from the official history that can be verified as facts. So, this colour band acts as a form of referencing the film’s historical discourse. We see a similar style in the interrogation scenes. The interrogations, which eventually become part of the evidence in the bombing case, are shot in red monochrome. The police atrocities during the questioning of the accused recorded in Voices are, however, shown in coloured image balanced with a yellowish glow. Thus, the testimonials of the bombers that became official evidence are shown through red filters, and the allegations made against such coercive methods of obtaining evidence are shown in a different colour balanced mode with predominance of warm yellow. It can be argued that colour grading in Black Friday is used to separate different elements of the historical narrative of the 1993 Bombay bombing, a style hard to emulate in words. The film lays bare the sources of its historical construction, an activity essential for any critical exercise. By the use of distinct colour schemes, it at the same time disavows the politics ingrained in the choice of its sources.

Black Friday effectively uses its colour grading technique to conform to the norms of the dominant thesis of the Bombay bomb blasts. Interestingly, it uses the same blue monochrome – used in the film to underline/bracket valid historical evidence – to recreate the scenes of Phanse meeting Dawood Ibrahim at Dubai, and the infamous assembly of criminal bosses in a hotel at Dubai where the conspiracy has allegedly taken place. We know that there is no conclusive proof about their occurrences. However, these two instances, which we know mainly through speculations, are pivotal for the sustenance of the established thesis of twin events of riots and blasts. The blue filter, I would suggest, provide these conjectures authenticity. We know that both Dawood and Memon, the prime accused in the Bombay bombing case, were never tried in court, and the evidence proving their part in the event was at best circumstantial. However, without their central presence in the blasts narrative, the official account of the 1993 explosions falls flat. So, the film uses blue monochrome to present the popular story about Dawood receiving a parcel from his beloved Dongri containing broken glass bangles and a letter asking for revenge and retribution of Dawood, for his Muslim sisters who lost their honour during the riots. It is said that this humble package from his city made him stand behind the 1993 attack with all his might. Black Friday ends with footage of the 1992–93 riots in Bombay, which are believed to be the cause of the blasts. It proclaims the riots to be an anti-Muslim pogrom orchestrated by the militant Hindu political parties like Shiv Sena (Shivaji’s Army), with the help of a predominantly Hindu police force. No mainstream Hindi film before Black Friday has dared to portray the 1992–93 Bombay riots with such clarity of expression. But, in conjunction with the newsreel of the riots, it also shows the burning of Tiger’s office in the riots as he vows to punish the city for the immoral conduct of some unknown miscreants. We see both the documentary footage of the riots and an infuriated Tiger losing his business through blue filter. This style of colour grading the historical narrative, or constructing a filtered screen history of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts, not only conforms to the cause-and-effect narrative of the riots and the blasts, but it also manages to produce a linear narrative by producing villains like Tiger and Dawood and reducing the historical narrative of the blasts to a few individual stories of vendetta and retribution.

It is 1:28 pm Zaidi informs us that the police interrogations, CBI dossiers and press reports form the basic source of information about the event (Zaidi 2002: xiii–xiv). Like Vicziany (2007: 55), he believes the confessions that became the central evidence behind the indictment of the accused in the blasts’ case are questionable as historical facts. Moreover, the official record did not contain the testimonies of the prime accused – Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim. Since their

roles are pivotal to the blasts’ narrative, Zaidi had to speculate and recreate their presence in the event. No doubt, his long stint as a crime reporter helped immensely to portray the role played by Tiger and Dawood in the bombing. The pledge of historical accuracy in the introduction of the book gives an interesting insight to the construction of his historical narrative. He notes that the prosecution’s charge sheet never intend to tell ‘the entire story’. They provide information relevant to the case. He had to produce a coherent narrative out of these disparate data, cross-checked with police officials for accuracy and a stamp of truth (Zaidi 2002: xiv). Adapted from Zaidi’s book, Black Friday presents the history of the Bombay blasts through three interrogation scenes, starting with the chance arrest and interrogation of Gullu in the opening scene, from where we know about the imminent explosions, followed by the arrest of Asgar Mukadam as the police started the investigation and finally the interrogation of Badshah Khan, from where we learn about the details of the conspiracy, training in Pakistan and Tiger misleading a bunch of angry Muslim young men to execute the massacre, completing the story of the Bombay bombing. The confessions of these three characters are used either as traditional flashback/flash-forward or as voice-over to represent the layered narrative of the event. Since these confessions served as prime evidence, the character’s memory coupled as historical facts and this bomber-centric narration in Black Friday reflects the objective historical account of the event. In this final section, I analyse the title sequence and the opening scenes of Black Friday, in the light of the issues discussed in the chapter regarding the historical construction of the Bombay blasts in Black Friday. Let us recall Rosenstone’s study of history on screen, where he reminds us of studying the screen history in terms of cinematic specificity, and remember Virilio talking of the telegenic quality of modern acts of mass violence like the bomb blasts. Following their arguments, I will illustrate some of the film techniques and visual aesthetics used to represent the blasts’ history in Black Friday during the opening few minutes of the film. The title sequence begins with Gullu’s flash-forward informing us about a vicious attack being planned. We are introduced to Tiger and his gang of men who have to reschedule the serial explosions from an undisclosed date to Friday, 12 March 1993, as they learnt that Gullu has spilled the beans in front of the police. A long shot in blue monochrome shows the camera panning across Mumbai’s skyline beyond the Arabian Sea, as pigeons flutter in the sultry afternoon air. The subtitle reads: ‘Bombay, three days later….’ The shot cuts to the crowded Church Gate railway station in midlong, followed by a close-up of the station clock showing 10 minutes to 12 pm. We see an establishing shot of the Bombay Stock Exchange where the first explosion took place. The subtitle informs us that the time is 1.25 pm. The Stock Exchange will soon break for lunch. The moment of the first blast is fast approaching. In several shots, the film creates the din and bustle just before the lunch hour. We see a microcosm of the city where the cosmopolitan

dream of Bombay is about to be shattered once and for all. A collage of shots shows the iconic dubbawalas in white dress and Gandhi caps, people flocking around stall-on-wheels for pav bhaji, a food distinctive of the city’s cuisine, a sugarcane juice seller from Bihar locally known as bhaiya, easily identified by his Bhojpuri accent, and an anonymous crowd that has converged on the narrow lane of the Bombay Stock Exchange, a building that symbolises the idea of Mumbai being a city ruled by money, enterprise (dhanda) and dreams. The bell rings for lunch. The shrill sound of bell startles us in preparation for the impending spectacle. It marks an abrupt break to the flow of reel time of the title sequence that approximates real/calendrical time through explicit references to clock, and subtitle bearing the exact time of the explosion from official records. After the lunch time bell, the camera becomes self-reflexive. It expands the reel time diverging from real time, in order to produce the anticipation, the unnerving experience of the impending violence, by stretching the moment before the act, far beyond its actual duration. We see people moving in slow motion with the street noise fading into near silence. Camera moves up from the eye level and hovers over the crowd almost frozen in space. It is as if trying to hold on to the moment before the blast in a futile attempt to defer the inevitable crisis. The camera waits near the entrance of the Stock Exchange building. We hear the sound of heart beating, as we wait to witness the explosion. Suddenly, with a deafening blast, the screen covers in smoke amidst flying bodies, charred limbs, shattered glasses and an unbearable ear ringing sound. The title of the film Black Friday emerges on the screen. The scene reaching crescendo in slow motion allows the viewer to participate in the spectacle from a distance, and invites us to relive the moment from the safety of a calculated detachment. The blast scene of the Stock Exchange uses the colours red and yellow on a blue monochromatic background. This colour palette unearths the conflicting styles of historical representation in Black Friday. The film undergoes a realistic portrayal of the busy street near the Stock Exchange just before the blast until the shift in style, punctuated by the ringing bell. At the same time, the use of red and yellow, symbolic of blood and fire on a blue background, expounds a creative choice. This style is followed throughout the objective/official account of the event. The colour scheme indicates an involvement with the event beyond the confines of material reality. The colours in memoriam, one can argue, try to capture the psyche of the city which was denied any possibility of collective remembrance by the state when all physical signs of the event were effaced from the built environment almost overnight. Moreover, there has never been a public commemoration of the Bombay bombing. Still, a film has to show in order to communicate the absence. When the camera in Black Friday frames a city that has erased the signs of the violent past from its face, it has to look at that blank urban space through filters where colours attain a symbolic value. The nonintrusive camera angles produce a notion of an objective, unbiased point of view. In the scene, the film uses elements from official history like date, time and location of explosion.

It reproduces the ambiance and characters chronicled by Zaidi to recreate the time. By adhering to the elements considered facts of official history, Black Friday claims an authenticity of its portrayal. The title sequence ends with the following words: ‘the true story of the Bombay blasts’. On the other end of the spectrum, the careful design of the cosmopolitan Bombay in the reconstruction of the Stock Exchange blast, the symbolic use of colours, the self-reflexive camera in slow motion traversing through silence and non-diegetic sounds like heartbeat and the freeze frame bearing the name of the film recreate what Rao has described as that moment when the whole city was wrapped in a shroud of collective victimhood. This graphic style presents a historical understanding of the Bombay bombing that eludes the appropriation of the official written history. The film sweeps through the next nine explosions in a combination of newsreel from Doordarshan, and dramatic reconstruction of the sites produced by details taken from Zaidi’s account and archival sources. We hear the voice of Anup Upadhay reporting the blasts in Doordarshan. The film uses Upadhay’s report as a voice-over narration of the bombing. We are informed about the time and place of every detonation by his reportage and from subtitles, particularly in the recreated segments. His voice acts as a sound bridge connecting the newsreel with the dramatic reconstructions of the event. The historical representation of the explosions ends with the arrest of Asgar. Black Friday goes through the compression of the historical time recorded in Zaidi’s book by neither strictly following the chronology of the explosions, nor trying to reproduce the meticulous details of Zaidi’s description. It, however, devises an ingenious way of referencing through an audiovisual design where the newsreader Anup Upadhay’s voice serves as an authentic source (evidence) and a voice-over (technique), to tell the historical narrative of Bombay bombing. The title sequence and the opening scenes of Black Friday represent the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts through a cinematic form that emulates the official history by referencing its sources of historical construction. They, at the same time, enter through the crevices of the objective history into the psyche of the city where the memory of the blasts is preserved in some inner recess erupting at unexpected moments in the everyday urban existence in Mumbai – a memory that surfaces only when the city is hit by another such event.

Notes 1 The word ‘underworld’ is generally used to refer to the criminal underbelly of a city. In Mumbai, the emergence of powerful transnational organised crime syndicates in the 1990s, such as D-company headed by Dawood Ibrahim, gave the common noun ‘underworld’ a special significance in the context of the city. Like the Irish Mob and Mafia in the United States, Underworld acts as a proper noun in case of Mumbai. In this chapter, Underworld denotes transnational organised crime syndicates of Mumbai since 1991.

2 In Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu (1923), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar coined the term Hindutva (translated as ‘Hinduness’), which defines Indian culture as a manifestation of the Hindu values (Encyclopaedia Britannica). In the context of this chapter, I will suggest that Hindutva ideology is at the centre of violent ethnic nationalism in Mumbai during the 1990s led by the extreme right-wing political party called Shiv Sena (Shivaji’s Army). In an interesting article called ‘Hindutva and History’, Romila Thapar argues that Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva can function when Aryan as a race can be represented as indigenous to India, and the origin of the Aryan civilisation characterised by the religion of Hinduism can be established in India since time immemorial. Thus, Christianity and Islam that originated outside India can be posited as foreign, and Muslims and Christians as outsiders. Thapar illustrates the process by which historical and archaeological research have been moulded to fit the Hindutva model of history (Thapar 2000). In ‘Hinduism versus Hindutva’, Ashis Nandy presents Hindutva as an antithesis to Hinduism. He describes Hindutva as an ideology of the modern urban lower middle class, who in order to move up the class ladder invents an Indian tradition, in opposition to Hinduism as faith and Muslim as a symbol of the subaltern and the marginal Other (Nandy 1991). 3 Voices: From the Draconian Dungeons is described by Suketu Mehta as ‘a badly typed bundle of sheets’ that claimed a systematic torture of the suspects and their families by police during the interrogation of the Bombay blasts. He notes that most incidents of gruesome torture described in the booklet cannot be verified, and there are inconsistencies in the narrative. However, he believes that there is some degree of truth in the report (Mehta 2006: 195–98). There is conflicting information about the author of the booklet. In the interview to Patcy, discussed in the chapter, Kashyap mentioned the human rights lawyer P. Sebastian to be the author of Voices. The booklet was later sent to the United Nations and the press to draw attention to the state of human rights in Bombay, India. 4 For security reasons, Zaidi gave the pseudonym Badshah Khan to the central witness of the prosecution identified as ‘police witness no. 2’ (Zaidi 2002: xi). He has also used pseudonyms Justice J. N. Patel for the judge who initially heard the case, and Catherine, a girl living in the same Al-Hussaini Building where Tiger Memon lived before escaping to Dubai.

References Chopra,

Sonia.

2007.

‘Thank

God

It’s

Black

Friday!’

Mumbai

Mirror,

1

February.

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/entertainment/bollywood/Thank-God-its-Black-Friday/articleshow/15677583.cms (accessed on 8 July 2014). Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2005. Violence in Urban India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’, and the Postcolonial City. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Mehta, Suketu, 2006. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. New Delhi: Penguin. Nandy, Ashis. 1991. ‘Hinduism versus Hindutva: The Inevitability of a Confrontation’, Times of India, 19 February. https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Socissues/hindutva.html (accessed on 8 July 2014). Patcy, N. 2007. ‘We Shot Black Friday with Hidden Cameras’, Interview with Anurag Kashyap. Rediff.com, 7 February. http://www.rediff.com/movies/2007/feb/07anurag.htm (accessed on 8 July 2014). Rao, Vyjayanthi. 2007. ‘How to Read a Bomb: Scenes from Bombay’s Black Friday’, Public Culture, 19(3): 567–92.

Rosenstone, Robert R. 2006. History on Film/Film on History. London: Pearson Longman. ———. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film on Our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thapar, Romila. 2000. ‘Hindutva and History: Why Do Hindutva Ideologues Keep Flogging a Dead Horse’, Frontline, 17(20), 30 September–13 October. http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1720/17200150.htm (accessed on 8 July 2014). Vicziany, Marika. 2007. ‘Understanding the 1993 Mumbai Bombings: Madrassas and the Hierarchy of Terror’, South Asia, 30(1): 43–73. Virilio, Paul. 2000. A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zaidi, S. Hussain. 2002. Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts. New Delhi: Penguin.

12 The re-mapped dialectics of contemporary Indian cinema Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots Shaheen S. Ahmed

Director Pratibha Parmar, in an interview to Sight and Sound (1992) magazine, talks of the way in which she had implemented the female gaze in her film Khush (1991). She says, ‘[…] was a strategy of subverting the gaze, of turning the gaze around and saying we are spectators of our own images. We are the spectators we want to be’ (Datta 2000: 80). The chapter starts with this quote, as it seems apt in the context of the way new Indian contemporary cinema is mapping the role and agency of the woman on celluloid. The legacy of Indian cinema, which was strongly rooted in the imagination of the woman and nationhood, has been to an extent subverted in the ‘mainstream’ Bombay cinema pertaining to the second decade of the 21st century. Not just the agency or role that the heroine has been functioning in the last 100 years of Indian cinema history, but the way the urban cityscape has been redefined is also an important point in contemporary Hindi films. With an ambition to locate such remappings, the chapter examines two Hindi films, released within six months of each other, Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011) and Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012). Both the films have certain markers that are common to each other and yet different in their treatments. The film-makers of both the films have termed them as belonging to the thriller genre of films. They are indeed thrillers combining the space of crime, both psychological and tangible acts of crime, with a strong female protagonist driving the narrative forward. Another common marker that they both share is the way in which the urban city has been visualised in the films; Mumbai in the case of the former film and Kolkata in the case of the latter one. The way the cities have been framed has almost made themselves a character in the films. Thus, this chapter will dwell on the changing characteristics of sensibilities in the Hindi film lexicon while dealing with tropes related to the portrayal of women, the genre of contemporary multiplex films and of course the change in the way the subaltern city is mapped.

The empowered agency of the woman and the dread of the cityscape The most striking feature in both That Girl in Yellow Boots and Kahaani is the way the postmodern, postcolonial woman has been reconfigured. Homi K. Bhabha (1990) postulates that while viewing nation as a narrative puts emphasis on how the nation is articulated in language, signifiers, textuality and rhetoric, whereby it emphasises the difference between the nation state as a set of regulations, policies, institutions, organisations and national identity (see also Datta 2000: 73). Hence, in the context of the figure of the woman in the formation of the Indian nationhood, the disjunction between the preponderance of working women in public life and the emergence of a powerful moral discourse on sexual practice is indeed intriguing (see Mazumdar 2007). According to Sangeeta Datta (2000), the nationalist discourse constitutes the female body as a privileged signifier and various struggles are waged over the meaning and ownership of that body. Thus, one may perhaps concur that the nationalist rhetoric of the pre-independence years saw the production of films venerating and valorising the mother figure. This is to be formulated in the context of the nationalist discourse where the topics of gender and sexuality became areas of confrontation between nationalism and colonialism, and where the body of the woman became the site for the discourses of tradition and morality. Ranjani Mazumdar (2007) deduces on the emergence of this phenomena as a consequence of both colonial ideology and middle class nationalism’s engagement with colonialism. Thus, Mazumdar concludes that in this complicated double location, it is not surprising that the metaphor of the streetwalker as the only ‘public’ woman of the 19thcentury western city is reproduced in the cultural imagination of India’s emerging nationalist and literary elites. It is through this lens that the concept of the female flaneur emerges in the history of cinema. To have a better understanding of how the flaneuse evolved in Indian cinema, it is important to look at the genesis of this notion as it emerged in the West in the context of post-World War II art cinema. Post-war subjects for art cinema and especially for Italian neorealism were mostly the dereliction and the waste rendered by the war in Europe. The ruins, derelict buildings and deserted streets of post-war European cityscapes created what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘any-spacewhatevers’, a milieu that lent itself to disruption of the organic unities of narrative and setting, sound and vision that characterise classical cinema (Betz 2009: 37). The characters also represented a certain kind of postmodern historical subjectivity, and yet their functionality within the film’s narrative is to register a sense of loss, the loss that accompanied at the aftermath of World War II. They also have the potential within the framework of the film to secure the boundaries of a new kind of understanding and a wholly new totalitarian structure where they can also find a space for their circulation. Giuliana Bruno, in her book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (2002), says that the physicality of the street

and the social epidermis materialised into fiction as a formalised architectural aesthetic in post-war Italian neorealism. This was a movement concerned with daily urban fiction. Most neorealist works are similarly constructed and can be interpreted as city walks. These urban spaces represent the implosion of the oppositional poles of modernity and tradition, the old and the neo. These spaces are also testimony to the phenomenon of modern industrialisation, the radical shift from the countryside to the new metropolises of Europe like Rome, Paris and so on and the positioning of the subject(s) in this new post-war industrialised, cosmopolitanised Europe. Indeed, neorealism was a movement that developed the celluloid depiction of street life, exposing the living component of the production of space. Shooting on location with the city as its specific topography, it focused with precision on the urban mise en scène of the lived city (Bruno 2002: 30). This is where the trope of the modern walking woman or the female flaneur settles in this uneasy juxtaposition of modernity and tradition, while dealing with the epistemology of a new nation state or a nation state ravaged by the twin losses of war and decolonisation. The female flaneur in art cinema foregrounds the uncomfortable position she occupies vis-à-vis private and public space, narrative and spectacle, director and performer, subject and object – the modernism and postmodernism (Bruno 2002: 30). Italian neorealist films are replete with female characters that function both as the protagonist and the ‘spectacle of alienated flanerie’,1 like Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma (1962). According to Anne Friedberg, the notion of flanerie introduces the concept of the ‘mobilised’ and ‘virtual’ gaze, which are both used to comment on modern and postmodern forms of perception and the subjectivities that they engage with (1991: 420). In the context of the two films, both the lead actresses, Kalki Koechlin as Ruth in That Girl in Yellow Boots and Vidya Balan as Vidya Bagchi in Kahaani, are shown to be modern day flaneuseswhereby glimpses of a modern dystopic cosmopolis are brought to light through their engagement with the city and the everyday dangers lurking by. Sangeeta Datta posits in her essay that with the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s and the advent of satellite television, narrative cinema was rather quickly replaced by the dominant image of the cable TV. She argues that consumerism and the postmodern strategies of parody and pastiche objectify masculine ideals and serve to maintain a male hegemony of representation. In Indian mainstream cinema, we continue to see a patriarchal version of female sexuality (Datta 2000). But this is one constrict of mainstream Bollywood cinema that is seen to have been subverted in the context of the two films that the chapter analyses. Both Vidya Balan and Kalki Koechlin as Vidya Bagchi and Ruth are independent working women who are on the search for a missing male figure in their lives, a husband in the case of Vidya and a father in the case of Ruth. Spurred by remnants of past memory and nostalgia in the forms of a photograph and an ambiguous letter, the two protagonists land in Kolkata and Mumbai, respectively, from England, in order to search for the missing men aided by these instruments of the past.

Ranjani Mazumdar in her chapter titled ‘Desiring Women’, in the book Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, theorises on the complex and anxious relationship that is produced between women and the city. She writes that the sensations of both pleasure and danger evoked when the woman comes in contact with the city makes the city a dangerous place. During the industrial period, the public and the private divide intensified, which lead to the creation of tremendous anxiety about the women’s presence in the city, and thus any woman seen loitering around the streets could very easily be viewed as a prostitute. However, in Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots, the 21st-century flaneuse is not a prostitute; she is a software engineer and a masseuse who unravels the dangers that the decaying urban landscape presents. This kind of gazing at the cityscape is again different from the ones that were offered to viewers of cinema by staple mainstream Bollywood films through the song and dance sequences, whereby a global sense of travel was induced by the shooting of these songs in exotic foreign locales. The images in the song sequences evoke both untamed landscapes and industrialised modernity to create an unusual form of display, which generates visual splendour and eroticism taking the viewer on a virtual journey of ‘spatial and temporal indulgence’ (Mazumdar 2007: 108).2 Thus, as Datta says, in films made with the Non-Resident Indians or NRIs in mind, the images of consumer culture are increasingly used to negotiate between modernity and tradition, and such negotiations take place over the woman’s body. Such a kind of negotiation is also prevalent in the bodies of the two women in the two films. However, it is of a subversive type, whereby the subaltern woman can be said to have found an agency. Vidya’s heavily pregnant body is the focus of the narrative in Kahaani, while the ‘whiteness’ of Kalki is a subversion of how the ‘white female’ body from the West has generally been depicted in Hindi cinema. The ‘white female’ in That Girl in Yellow Boots is not the Westernised vamp prevalent in the Bollywood films of the 1960s and 1970s, nor is she the Indian woman who has undergone a moral decay through the idealisation of a Western code of conduct and lifestyle. Kalki in That Girl in Yellow Boots is the strong lead protagonist that Anurag Kashyap creates to engage with an increasingly decaying and dangerous city and urban life. She is that subaltern woman living in a small broken-down house in the suburbs of Mumbai and traveling to work every day in the local trains to the seedy massage parlor, who can be said to be a representative of the postmodern contemporary urban woman of India. These two films have also subverted the generic tropes of showing the interior spaces of the city. Mazumdar asserts that if consumption played a decisive role in challenging certain gendered moral codes, it also triggered a dislocation of the ‘real’ and the virtual city in the family films produced after globalisation. There is a creation of a ‘panoramic interior’, which is sanitised of the dirt and poverty of the city. There is instead a changed perceptual experience emerging out of a new kind of surface culture that is reflected by the images used for advertising, architecture, print, television and fashion (Mazumdar 2007: 110). Thus, an almost mythic vision of utopia is created through such a ‘panoramic interior’, as seen in the films of

Karan Johar like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) or Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001). Hence, elements of visual seduction and intoxication; the desire for an upmarket lifestyle became the potent spatial and temporal themes of cinema in Bollywood. As Anirudh Deshpande (2007) writes, there has been the denial of the subaltern agency persisting in this cinema wedded to the illusion of bourgeois modernisation. There was the mad rush to create a sensory experience of urban desires through commodity display and fetish in these family films. With globalisation came the surge of migration to the modern metropolitan cities like Mumbai and Kolkata. There has been an explosion in slums and spaces getting compact, as the populations in the cities are burgeoning while there is an almost choking of the cities trying to contain the flow of people. But what is different in this contemporary situation is the surge in consumption, in which, as Mazumdar explains, ‘global mobility and visual signage have introduced an expansive world of networks and connections, creating new desires and aspirations’ (Mazumdar 2007: 112). Under such conditions then, where the cityscape has become a continuous producer of urban claustrophobia, anxiety, filth, poverty, chaos and so on, the ‘panoramic interior’ becomes the escape route from such a physical reality of the city. Thus, the interior becomes the centre for pleasure, desire and eroticism (Mazumdar 2007: 115). The films in discussion have, however, altered this idealistic and utopic imagination of the interior. The interior spaces here are as much a source of anxiety and decay as is the city outside. Ravi Vasudevan’s (2002) postulation on some of the films of the 1970s, which rather than positioning us as external viewers of figures cast against a background, our look is drawn in and flows amongst objects and figures within the space-time of the fictive world can be used to understand the spatial relation that the above mentioned films have with their viewers (59–67). Both Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots have used the imaginary of the interior space to depict the psychological interior and terror of the two protagonists. The spatial dimensions of the interior space and the use of windows, walls, doors, corridors and so on help us in creating a distinction between the private and the public space, and the use of the window wall created the illusion of the outside world in the family films, whereby the intention was to establish a continuity of the interior and exterior worlds (Mazumdar 2007: 116). This continuity can be said to have extended even in Kahaani, where Vidya stares out of the window from the rundown guesthouse that she stays in and stares at the chaos of the Kolkata streets. This can be read as an extension of the chaos inside her mind as well as her continued search for her ‘missing husband’. The experience of this cinematic looking is not merely self-referential and autoerotic, as Vasudevan writes (2002: 64), but it also is an enabling of a heightened perception of reality, and which is what one encounters while observing a troubled Vidya Balan stare out of the window into the city streets. There is also a subversion of the diaspora in both Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots. According to Mazumdar, the diasporic family is important both as a reference point for a

second-generation South Asian film public in the West and as a new category in Bombay cinema (2007: 121). While locating this place of the diaspora in these two films, there is an almost complete subversion in its construct. Both the leading ladies are from the United Kingdom, and while one is of a mixed parentage living in England, the other is a professional NRI. None of them fulfill the criteria that are required of a typical family film in Bombay cinema. Kalki Koechlin, as is apparent in the film, is from a broken family where the father deserted the family years ago. Vidya Balan stays alone with her husband in London, who has now gone missing after coming to India for some work. No other personal history is evoked in Kahaani of any of the characters. This is something that is not too old a trend for contemporary Indian cinema, whereby the characters are defined by their present existence without a harking back to the past.3 The culture of consumption does not elude romance or desire in the two films, but evoke dread and despair. The mise en scène of the films conveys a sense of loneliness that the two actors are straddled with. The fear of a postmodern life is introduced in the films, where the bright glittery dreams of globalised fetishism of commodity is disrupted by the images of darkness, dystopia and utter melancholy; space becomes dreadful, and hence the closed confines of the interiors in Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots. Both the despair and dread of the films, apart from the interior spaces, also occur in the residual spaces of Kolkata and Mumbai where the discarded spaces created in the context of built structures, which are marginalised as they cannot be included in the design plan of the globalised city, becomes important markers to locate the nature of contemporary modernity. Thus, the narrow alleys of Kolkata or the abandoned house and office in Kahaani or the dumping yard near the port in Mumbai becomes key markers to locate postmodern fear and dystopia. Walter Benjamin (1999) posed ruin as opposite to the phantasmagoria of the city, whereby ruin allows us to see history not as a chain of events marked by linear time and the glory of civilisation, but as a narrative on death and catastrophe (see Mazumdar 2007: 195). The death of the terrorist at the end of Kahaani or the poetic retribution handed by Kalki Koechlin to her father at the end of That Girl in Yellow Boots signify such death and catastrophe. Postmodern life in the city has become the haunt of death and psychological or physical disaster – hence the train bombing episode in Kahaani which ultimately makes a vigilante out of Vidya Balan.

Conclusion In conclusion, a mention must be made of the avenger genre of films that has been prevalent in Hindi cinema. Datta finds this genre extremely problematic, as it induces voyeuristic

pleasures in the viewer in cinematic representations of crime against women which are generally rape scenes. She says that these revenge films retain the rule of targeting modern urban women as victims, where the ‘metaphor of the city and the criminal/psychopath lurking in the streets doubly exposes the vulnerability and the threatened or real violation of these women’ (2000: 75). There can, however, be said that a change has now persisted in this genre of films. It need not be only a physical act of sexual violence against women (as is seen in Kahaani) or a voyeuristic image of incest to be shown on the screen for the female protagonist to act as the vigilante. Though Kalki Koechlin cannot be said to be a typical case of vigilante, yet the sense of justice that she doles out to her incestuous father does speak of an emotional and psychological case of vigilantism. Though Datta fears that with globalisation the Bollywood cinema fare is threatening to obliterate alternate images and representations, with the coming of this New Age films by directors like Sujoy Ghosh and Anurag Kashyap, a new sense of agency has been bestowed on the female character. Though one can still argue that they are ultimately male directors imposing their subjectivity on the women, one cannot deny that the female is definitely more empowered in Hindi cinema than she was a decade back. To conclude, both the two films by two self-confessed cinephilic directors carries us along a rush of a sensorium specifically composed by our investment in cinema, whereby there is then a particular compact between the screen and the audience which is then channelled as our intervention into the contemporary.

Notes 1 Betz uses this term in his book. He uses the term to describe films in which women feature as the central movers of the filmic narratives that do not really move anywhere, and the main female characters of these films travel through changing landscapes and cities in varying states of crisis (38). 2 Mazumdar borrows the idea from Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament (1995: 68). 3 Mazumdar cites the example of Satya (1998) as a gang film in which the protagonists do not have a past, unlike previous films like Parinda (1989).

References Benajamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Betz, Mark. 2009. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. London: Verso. Datta, Sangeeta. 2000. ‘Globalization and Representations of Women in Indian Cinema’, Social Scientist, 28(3–4): 71–82. Deshpande, Anirudh. 2007. ‘Indian Cinema and the Bourgeois Nation State’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(50): 95–101.

Friedberg, Anne. 1991. ‘Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition’, PMLA, 106(3): 419–31. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2002. ‘The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in Contemporary Urban Action Films’, in G. Lovnik and S. Sengupta (eds), SARAI Reader 2: Cities of Everyday Life, pp. 59–67. Delhi: Sarai, CSDS, and the Society for Old & New Media.

Part IV

Other regions, other nations

13 Marking out the ‘South’ in/of Hindi cinema An approach via remakes Nikhila H.

Cinemas in India are identified and differentiated by the particular language that they speak. Thus, a primary classification of cinemas of India would be as ‘Hindi cinema’, ‘Tamil cinema’, ‘Telugu Cinema’, ‘Bengali Cinema’, ‘Bhojpuri cinema’ and so on. These terms have also become shorthand ways of referring to the particular language and region-based film industries and the territorial reach of the films to their particular audience within India. Thus, a commonsensical assumption would be that, say, Hindi films are made in Mumbai1 and have pan-India reach, while Tamil films are made in Chennai2 and circulate in the state of Tamil Nadu in India. While such a way of talking about the cinemas of India suggests a neat fit between a particular cinema, the language it predominantly speaks, the industry from which it emanates and the territory in which it circulates, in actual practice, are not so. Even today, if not entire films, at least some part of the process of making of a film is carried out in other/neighbouring industries3 to reap the economies of scale and superior technology. Besides, films also routinely cross linguistic-territorial boundaries in search of an audience. They may cross boundaries either as they are4 or by undergoing certain transformations. One kind of transformation could be by dubbing.5 For example, a Tamil or Telugu producer could sell the dubbing rights of his/her film to a satellite channel, such as Zee TV, who will dub the Tamil or Telugu film in Hindi and telecast it to a Hindi-knowing audience. Another way of seeking a different linguistic audience could be through subtitling. Today, with the availability of digitised film content and user-friendly technology, Kannada, Tamil and other Indian-language films are being subtitled in English6 and are made available in the form of DVDs or through internet channels to an English-reading audience. Yet another kind of transformation in the quest for an audience is remaking. Simply put, ‘remake’ is the effort to make a film all over again for a ‘new’ audience. Admittedly, not all remaking is to cross linguistic borders and seek a new linguistic territory and audience; in recent times, there has been a spate of remakes in Hindi of Hindi films made earlier, such as

Don (in 2006 and 1978) and Devdas (in 2002, 1955 and 1935). Also, even when a film is remade in another language, its audience certainly does not exclude those who have watched the earlier language version. The existence of different language cinemas in India always offers an enterprising producer the possibility of virtually making a ‘new’ film for a new audience at a small incremental cost. The earlier version acts as a road map for making the film anew, with the blueprint of characters, frames, story, narrative sequencing, setting, location already available from the earlier version to play around with, to retain or modify or remove in the new version. Since it has been conceptualised, visualised and executed before, besides being tried and tested in the commercial market, the remake can concentrate on what needs to be done for improving, updating or reorienting the new version for the new audience. Given the multiple language audiences in India, the volume, worth and value that a film generates, after it has ‘exhausted’ its potential with one linguistic audience, in the form of dubbing rights, TV rights, video rights, digital and new media circulation rights, remake rights, with audience in other languages may be worth quantifying and systematically studying. It seems that a film made in one language can be endlessly milked for its potential to crossover, survive and seek an afterlife in another language. Such a study of cross-industry dynamics might in itself be of interest to any Film Studies scholar, who is intent on understanding how so many film industries in India compete, cooperate, jostle and live off each other. Further, by studying remakes which involve more than just verbal transformation in aural and scriptal form, but making a film again for a new audience, it is possible to study and say something concrete about the different cinematic conventions that have come to be associated with different language cinemas in India.7 All said and done, a Hindi film and a Tamil film are not perceived to be one and the same, except for the language, by the discerning and the practiced film viewer in India.8 Given this scenario, the present article is a preliminary attempt at tracing cross-industry dynamics via the study of remakes. After a brief review of academic studies of remakes in India, I offer an overview of the traffic and transactions between the South (of India) and the Hindi film industry. Though the flows between and among the different industries are extremely complex, crisscrossing and often cyclical, for the purposes of this study, I consider only one minute strand of this transaction, between Kannada,9 one of the four major South Indian film industries, and Hindi. The dynamics between these industries have not remained the same over time; I attempt to trace the changes in the nature and directions of transactions between Kannada and Hindi cinema over three decades from the 1970s to the 2000s. Further, by taking a set of six remakes from Kannada to Hindi, I look at what has changed into Hindi/as Hindi through remaking, that is, I look for marks of spatial transcendence as well as spatial particularity in the films.

Studies of remakes in India While remake is a much discussed area of study in Film Studies in the West, there is a small but growing set of studies of remakes in Indian cinemas. For instance, an early study by Sheila J. Nayar (1997), without using the word ‘remake’, discusses ‘Indian popular cinema through western scripts’ (73), as her essay is titled, and looks particularly at the way in which Hollywood films are brought to Bollywood and resituated in the Indian context. A 2005 article by her looks at ‘Hollywood vs Bollywood’ (66), exploring the different value systems and also gives a list of recent Bollywood films adapted and inspired by Hollywood. Neelam Sidhar Wright’s (2009a) article also looks at the Bollywood remakes of Hollywood cinema to address the issue of how cinematic conventions and representations are reconfigured through such acts of cultural borrowing. Her PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Sussex (2009b) is a full-length study of over 100 Bollywood remakes and case studies of several Hindi films from 2000 to 2009, considering Bollywood cinema as an instance of an international cultural phenomenon. Another PhD dissertation on Bollywood remakes considers the process of Bollywood remaking Hollywood films as having to do with ‘anxieties stemming from concerns about cultural contamination and the blurred line of deference or defiance vis-à-vis multinational interests’ (Orfall 2009b). Orfall’s (2009a) article placing the Hindi film Maqbool based on Shakespeare’s play Macbeth in a comparative context with Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood looks at how Maqbool marshalls and juxtaposes these sources to tell a contemporary story about Mumbai. Veena Das (2003) offers a sensitive reading of gender relations in love and sociality in the Indian context by looking at the remaking of Hollywood films in Hindi cinema. If we look at remakes, as I have done in the introductory section of this chapter, as a way of seeking a new audience by making a film again, the question that follows would be who takes the initiative to secure a new audience for a film via remake. The above mentioned studies discuss the Hindi remakes as being in accordance with the conventions and practices of Bollywood, and therefore as more or less ‘typical’ Bollywood films, so that these studies can then go on to discuss these films in terms of Hollywood-Bollywood conventions, Western social values and Indian social values, tensions between globality and Indianness and so on. These studies deal most often with the Bollywood initiative to remake Hollywood films. There are, however, many instances where the initiative to remake a film comes from the producer, director or at least someone from the same industry as the antecedent version of the remake. A common example would be say the remake in Hindi of earlier Hindi films. One well-known instance of a film-maker remaking his own film at a later date is Mehboob Khan remaking his 1940 film Aurat 17 years later as the celebrated Mother India (1957). The more common practice is that someone connected in some way with the earlier version10 or someone completely new later attempts to remake an earlier film. Though there are not many

studies of this phenomenon, one study is by Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber (2010), who looks at costuming in remakes of Hindi of earlier Hindi versions, to understand the changes in costuming from earlier versions as an indicator of the way in which fashion and consumerism are shaping industry practices and urban Indian landscape. A different example of remaking across film industries would be the South Indian film industries remaking their own films into other languages – Tamil to Telugu and vice versa, Tamil to Hindi, Telugu to Hindi and so on. Here, the initiative to remake say a Tamil film into Telugu may just as well come from the Tamil film producer/director, as it might come from a Telugu producer/director to remake a Tamil film in Telugu. Also, at particular points in time, the flow might be in one direction; at others, it may be reversed. These complex transactions that happen between and among the different South Indian film industries and each of them with say Hindi cannot simply be comprehended through concepts such as intertextuality or studies of inspiration and influence of one film on another, which try to trace out textual similarities and links. My hunch is that remakes play a more constitutive role in making and sustaining as distinct the different film industries in India, and are hence worth a full-fledged study or two. At the moment, however, we have only a few studies that take into account the South Indian context of remakes in the form of articles such as by Murthy (2013), Radhakrishnan (2006), Tharakeshwar (2010) and Nikhila (2010). Murthy’s study looks at the prolific traffic between Telugu and Hindi in the form of remakes to see it as an instance of cross-cultural communication between North and South India. Radhakrishnan takes up the particular instance of the Telugu film Aithe (2003) and its Malayalam remake Wanted (2004) and tries to account for the changes in the Malayalam version in terms of the larger context of Kerala, particularly the globalising ambitions and orientations of the new middle class there. Tharakeshwar V. B., while studying how language-based identity is visualised in cinema and how it acquires territorial markers, by taking the instance of a simultaneous production of a Kannada and Telugu film – VeeraKannadiga (December 2003) and Andhrawala (January 2004), respectively – makes the important point with respect to remakes that in the Kannada remakes from Telugu, Tamil or other languages, the way in which Kannadaness is marked and its other language antecedents distanced is by inserting what he calls ‘the Kannada song’ that turns the film’s hero into an iconic representation of Kannada/Karnataka. In my earlier study of the remake sequence from Malayalam to Hindi via Kannada, Tamil/Telugu – taking the instance of Manichitrathazu (1993), its Kannada version Aapthamitra (2004), Chandramukhi(2005) in Tamil/Telugu and finally BhoolBhulaiya (2007) in Hindi – my preoccupation was to understand the constituting of gender norms in flux, as each new version problematised and resolved gender relations in its contemporary context. Here, in this chapter, I try to identify trends and directions of flows from one language cinema to another via remakes. This study tracks these flows via the remake of Kannada films into Hindi. There have been a large number of Hindi film remakes of South Indian films. The

initiative for Hindi remakes of their own films have come often from South Indian film industry, but there are also instances where it has come from the Hindi film industry which has looked southwards to remake films from South Indian languages.11 That the southern film industries have been one of largest and most prolific makers of their own versions of Hindi films must also remind us that Hindi films are not always made in Mumbai and that not all Hindi cinema is Bollywoodesque (i.e. carrying the markers of its Bollywood origin in the body of the film) in its orientation and sensibility. The section that follows would provide an indication of the ‘other regions/sources’ of Hindi cinema.

Hindi film remakes of Kannada films: overview and trends Yes, [compared to Telugu and Tamil] only a few Kannada films have been remade into Hindi because the local subject may not suit Hindi. For Hindi we need universal subject; it should appeal to Bihar, Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Antha [The End, Kannada film directed by Rajendra Singh Babu, 1981] movie was angry with the political system, and that’s why it clicked. The concept of politicians as corrupt and police taking law into their hands was a universal subject and so everyone liked it. There are some Kannada films remade but it could not go well into Hindi because of the subject belonging to Kannada nativity. (Rajendra Singh Babu, interview) If we take the quote by noted Kannada director Rajendra Singh Babu as any indication, then compared to Tamil and Telugu films, there are very few Kannada films that have been remade into Hindi. So, although Kannada cannot be taken as a typical case for the South in general, the relatively small volume of transactions offers us a limited but workable data set for the study. Also, unlike Tamil and Telugu directors in the era preceding the Linguistic Reorganization of States in 1956,12 few Kannada personnel seem to have had sustained relations with Hindi cinema, indicating that whatever connections were made with Hindi came, by and large, with the making of a distinct Kannada film industry from the late 1950s through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Also, the initiative to remake Kannada films in Hindi has come largely from the Kannada film industry. By remaking films from Kannada, were the Kannada industry personnel trying to mark their presence on the national scene? Were they trying to gain recognition for the Kannada industry and for themselves via remaking in Hindi? These are questions worth investigation and point to why the case of Kannada cinema could be taken for the study of the remaking phenomenon. Although in recent times, going by media reports, there is much effort and competition to secure the remake rights of Kannada films such as Googly (2013) and Lucia (2013), the data of

Kannada remakes to Hindi that I have collected for this study pertain to a little over three decades from the 1970s to the early 2000s.13 So, the earliest Hindi remake in my list from Kannada was released in 1974, though the first Kannada film to be remade into Hindi in my list is a film released in 1969. But the 1969 film was remade in Hindi only in 1981. The last Hindi remake from Kannada in my list was released in 2005, while the last Kannada film to be remade in Hindi in my list was released in 2003. This 2003 film was remade in 2004 in Hindi.14 In this period of a little over three decades, there are about 19 films which I have identified as Hindi remakes of Kannada films. Table 13.1 List of Kannada Films and Their Corresponding Remakes in Hindi, along with Some of the Personnel Involved in the Making of the Two Versions, and Also in Some Instances Their Tamil/Telugu Remakes

This tabular data is classified and analysed in terms of: (a) the time gap between the Kannada version and the Hindi version; (b) whether the films have gone directly from Kannada to Hindi, or whether there are intermediate versions in other South Indian languages such as Tamil and Telugu, which is the route taken by the Hindi film; (c) whether they have been remade by Bollywood (with producers, directors, crew, cast etc.) or whether they have been remade in the South with southern production houses/producers, directors, with a fair share of technical personnel from the southern film industry and (d) whether the Kannada version is credited or not in the Hindi version for the story/screenplay. Let us now take each of these one by one. a  Of the 19 remakes from Kannada to Hindi in Table 13.1, 16 remakes (about 84%) into Hindi have been made within a few months to 5 years of the release of the Kannada film. Three remakes, Jyothi, Ankhen and Jis Desh Me Ganga Rehta Hai, have come 12, 16 and 27 years, respectively, after the release of the Kannada film. Once remade in Hindi, two of these three ‘late remakes’ have seen remakes in other languages such as Telugu and Tamil, and in one instance has looped back with a remake in Kannada as well! b  Of the 19 films in my data set, most of the films are remade directly from Kannada to Hindi. Five Kannada films (about 26%) have seen remakes in Telugu and Tamil before the Hindi remake, indicating that in these instances the Kannada film’s entry to Hindi may have been via the Telugu or Tamil film. In such instances, the Kannada antecedent may be obscured or obliterated. For instance, the Wikipedia entry for the Hindi remake Shaadi No. 1 (2005) refers to it as a remake of the Telugu film Sandade Sandadi, which was released in 2002, while the Kannada version was released in 2001. The director of the Kannada film, Rajendra Singh Babu, in his interview said that the Hindi makers secured the remake rights from him, though they have not credited the earlier Kannada version in the remake. c  The remakes in Hindi till the mid-1980s are made by southern directors and mostly southern production houses and producers, and in some cases with a few members

of the cast and crew from the South, as well. In a few instances, the same producer or director who has made the Kannada film has also gone on to remake it in Hindi. However, from 1990s onwards, the producers, directors and all the other personnel involved in the remake seem to be from the Hindi film industry, that is, 1990s and after, the Hindi industry has determined and chosen what to remake from the South. Since the 1990s, the initiative to remake from Kannada to Hindi has come from Bollywood, whereas in the earlier decades, the initiative to remake the Kannada films came from the Kannada industry itself or from the South in general. Why the initiative to remake into Hindi from the Kannada film industry almost came to a halt after the 1990s is indeed something that requires further investigation. d  The crediting of the antecedent or its absence is a problematic criterion. It is not easy to say whether the absence of story/screenplay credit in the Hindi remake is because the Hindi remake has not bothered to credit the Kannada film, or simply that information on the same is not available in any of the databases or sources. Even watching the film is not much useful, as the VCD/YouTube versions (through the companies that hold the distribution rights for these versions) often edit out entire sections of the credit sequence. But if we take the previous criterion into consideration (who is the initiator of the remake), and also discussions in internet forums on Kannada films, which constantly point to the lack of acknowledgement in the recent Hindi films of their antecedent Kannada versions, we can say that the Hindi remakes of the 1990s and after are more hesitant to credit the Kannada films for story/screenplay in the credit sequence, though they might very well have secured the remake rights and rights for the story from the Kannada producer/director, or whoever holds these rights in each instance. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as for securing awards as an independent film or that they simply do not have the ethic, as director Rajendra Singh Babu whose Kannada film story is not credited in the Hindi version put it, or for many other reasons. On the other hand, when the initiative to remake came from the Kannada producer or director, there may have been fewer reasons for not acknowledging the Kannada source. Out of this data of 19 films, I now choose a subset of 6 Hindi remakes of Kannada films for closer study and analysis. These six remakes along with their corresponding Kannada antecedents will form the basis of my discussion in the next two sections of this chapter.

De-(re)territorialising for/as Hindi The following 6 Kannada films with their Hindi remakes from the data set of 19 are randomly

chosen for close comparison here. These Kannada films, which are the antecedents of the six Hindi remakes, are well-known to the Kannada film audience, with some of these Kannada films being feted with Karnataka State Film Awards.15 1  NaagaraHaavu (1972) – Zehreela Insaan (1974) 2  Shankar Guru (1978) – Mahaan (1983) 3  Naa Ninna Bidalaare (1979) – Mangalsutra (1981) 4  Chakravyuha (1983) – Inquilaab (1984) 5  Anubhava (1984) – Anubhav (1986) 6  Kothigalu saar Kothigalu (2001) – Shaadi No. 1 (2005) When the Kannada film gets remade in Hindi, it is not just a matter of changing a language, but changing a whole set of spatial markers with which the earlier film is associated. In other words, when we say ‘Kannada cinema’, it does not just refer to a language that the cinema speaks, but also a whole complex of elements that may have nothing to do with language per se, but gets tagged along to constitute a ‘linguistic identity’. Thus, for example, food, a particular style of clothing, or a particular colour, or flag or some iconic figures may just as well come to stand for Kannada or go on to define Kannadaness in cinema. Post Linguistic Reorganization of States, this Kannadaness also comes to be tagged to a particular territorial space or boundary, a ‘region’, a smaller unit within the larger ‘nation’. So, when Kannada films are remade into Hindi, one way they attempt to transcend their spatial boundaries is by trying to lose their Kannadaness or the markers of Kannada identity. The Kannada films try to lose their spatial markers in remake through the strategy of not marking space at all, keeping it vague and undefined, or by attempting to create a new space through other spatial markers. This ‘new space’ that they create through the Hindi remakes could be seen as their imagining of what a ‘Hindi space’ or a ‘national space’ or ‘India’ is/is supposed to be. Here, in this section, I will discuss these strategies adopted by the remakes along with some seven parameters, with examples from the subset of six remakes and their corresponding Kannada films. 1  References to food: In the Hindi remake, there is invariably a change with respect to the dishes and food items mentioned by the characters in the Kannada film. Thus, for instance, when the schoolmaster in Zehreela Insaan invites his young pupil home, he entices him saying that ‘Gajar Ka Halwa, desi ghee ka’ (a sweet dish made of carrots) has been made for him at home. The dish mentioned in the same scene in the corresponding Kannada film NaagaraHaavu is ‘Kaidose’ (coconut dosa). Again, in the same Hindi remake, a female lead character recalls that the hero would snatch her ‘food’ and eat it when they were at school, using a generic term food without specifying it. In the Kannada version, she recalls that he would snatch and eat the ‘Kodubale’ (a fried snack made of rice flour) when they were schoolgoing kids. In

the Hindi remake Mangalsutra, when the son is expected to arrive after completing his studies, the father asks the cook to prepare ‘Poori, Matarpaneer, Malaikofta, Pulau’ (a full-course meal of a fried puffed wheat dish to be eaten with curries, and garnished rice) for the son’s arrival; the dishes mentioned are sweets Payasa and Holige in the Kannada film, in the corresponding scene. While the food items mentioned in the Kannada films often connote the specific region within Karnataka, where the particular dish is prepared and where the mise en scène and action of that film happens, as well as indicate the caste and community of the characters, the food items mentioned in the Hindi remake are indicative of what was generally known as ‘North Indian dishes’ in the South. Food in the Hindi remake then functions to set off ‘North’ from ‘South’ rather than to set up or act as a contributor to mark the milieu or context of action of the Hindi version. 2  Costume: Costumes of male and female characters in films are often used as indicators of age, class, marital status and even as embodiments of a character’s value system. In the Hindi remake Zehreela Insaan, the schoolmaster is dressed in kurta-pyjama and a Nehru jacket, while in the Kannada film he is in a white dhoti, black coat and Mysore Turban. When the 1958 Kannada film by B. R. Panthulu School Master (1958) was remade into Hindi again as School Master in 1959, we find that the attire of the schoolmaster in the Hindi film is no different from his attire in the Kannada film. He wears a coat, turban and spectacles, and the role is also played by the same actor B. R. Panthulu in both the versions. It seems then that this way of marking linguistic change with costuming and other changes is a later development, arising from the need to mark off or distinguish the Kannada and the Hindi versions. This, to me, is an indication of how costume becomes a part of evolving different conventions of representation for different language films.  In the Kannada film Anubhava, as in other Kannada films, the young unmarried girl in a village or small town is in half sari; the female lead, a teenager, wears flowers in her hair and simple decorative jewellery over a half sari, while in the Hindi remake Anubhav the teenager is attired in a skirt and blouse without flowers in her hair or other accessories. In this instance, it seems that the female character is used to mark the difference between the two languages, a strategy that we see deployed in a number of remakes, so much so that attiring the female lead and other female characters differently becomes a prominent sign of announcing the ‘nativity’ of the film. 3  The place where the action is set: In the Hindi remake Mahaan, where Amitabh Bachchan plays a triple role and action takes place in two different cities, with frequent intercuts from one scene of action to the other, the places mentioned in dialogue where the action is said to take place are Delhi and Nepal, though there are

no distinctive frames which mark the two places as indeed the place where the action is set. In fact, they are studio sets and the place names are mentioned only in the course of dialogues. In the Hindi remake Inquilaab, though the action is said to be in the city of Bombay, quite unusually, we find that some outdoor scenes and sequences are not reshot but taken completely from the earlier Kannada film Chakravyuha. For instance, there is a bank heist scene and a scene of a boy peddling newspapers in what is recognizable as a road in Bangalore, also a voting scene, which are all taken over and inserted into the remake; but, since in the rest of the film Bombay is the setting for the action, these places too appear as Bombay in the Hindi remake! In the Hindi remake Zehreela Insaan, there is no mention of the place where the film’s main action takes place, but in the Kannada film Naagara Haavu, Chitradurga or Durga where the action is set, with the ramparts of the fort and the rocky terrain, is a character in its own right in the film. There is also a song in the film celebrating Kannadigas’ bravery through recounting the brave act of a woman who saved the day for the king by single-handedly killing Hyder Ali’s soldiers, who were trying to sneak into the fort. Other ways of marking the place in the film are through placing as part of the mise en scène the photographs of the icons of Karnataka such as Sir M. Vishweshwaraiah and literary icons such as Kuvempu and Kailasam, all of which have no equivalents in the Hindi version. The Hindi version does not have the additional function that the Kannada film has – that of evoking pride in a common Kannada/Karnataka past or tradition. 4  References to caste: In the Kannada film Kothigalu Saar, released in 2001, much humour comes from one of the three pairs of lead characters being a Brahmin with a devout and ritual-bound wife. In the Hindi version Shaadi No. 1, the invocation of caste through attire and dialogue of the characters is eschewed and the characters appear in fashionable contemporary attire. In the Kannada films, the names of the characters allude to their caste. In NaagaraHaavu, for instance, the lead character is named Ramachari (indicating that he is a Madhwa Brahmin), one of the female leads is called Alamelu and her brother is Varada (alluding to them being Iyengars). In the Hindi remake, the names become caste neutral. Also, families’ objections to the marriage of a younger family member (son or daughter) based on caste gets a communal basis in the Hindi remake. There are hardly any overt references to caste in Hindi films that belong to the genre of the socials; the axis and marker of distinction and conflict is class, rather than caste. How this codification or transformation of caste as class has happened in Hindi requires a separate study altogether. 5  Permissible partners in marriage: In South Indian films, it is quite usual for marriage to take place between matrilineal cross cousins, or uncle and niece on the matrilineal

side. In the Kannada film Naa Ninna Bidalaare, the hero is set to marry his father’s sister’s daughter, and also goes on to marry her, a marriage which has the approval of both the families. In the Hindi remake Mangalsutra, the girl whom the hero is set to marry and goes on to marry is his father’s friend’s daughter. In Anubhava, the young heroine is to marry her mother’s younger brother, while in the Hindi remake Anubhav, the young heroine is set to marry the neighbour’s nephew. This difference is probably also related to the earlier point about caste, and is indicative of the workings of caste endogamy. On screen, the workings of caste are through endogamous matches in Kannada films. Since the Hindi films eschew overt references to caste, some of these practices of caste, such as endogamy, are also absent in Hindi films. 6  Gods of Worship: Gods and devotees, too, operate within particular territories in cinema. In the horror film Na Ninna Bidalare, the hero, an atheist, is possessed by a ghost, while the wife, an ardent devotee of Raghavendra Swamy of Mantralaya, which is located in the border region between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, drives the ghost away through her prayers and invocations to Raghavendra Swamy. In the corresponding Hindi remake Mangalsutra, the wife is a devotee of god Shiva, acknowledged among the trinity of gods in the Hindu pantheon. In the 1930s and 1940s, Vittala, a god specific to Pandharapur, a place in western India, could become a god available to many other regions of India through the prolific remakes of the film in a number of Indian languages on the Saint Tukaram, a devotee of Vittala. But in the 1970s and 1980s, it appears that it is not so easy for gods, other than the recognised ones of the Hindu pantheon, to show their godly power or prowess beyond the designated territory of their devotees. 7  Other Changes: The disappearance of the crucial maidservant character, who is clever, manipulative and seeks to expose the double life being led by the three pairs of heroes to their respective wives, from the Hindi remake Shaadi No. 1, to be replaced by a stranger and outsider who calls himself a brother to the wives and helps them see their respective husbands for what they are (a role played by the star Sanjay Dutt; while in the Kannada version the role is played by a comedian and character actor Umashri), seems to work as a way of distancing the Hindi film from its southern origins. A particular language cinema elaborates itself through stock characters such as the maidservant. These characters are not easily translatable when a film is remade, as there is no such ready prototype available in the other language. A separate study is required to look at such characters (and also specific actors who specialise in playing these characters in a particular language cinema), who form a part of the milieu of a particular language cinema.

By so looking at the remakes at the surface level and the changes that are made, we can retrospectively identify what functions as a Kannada marker in the film, because more often than not, it is that marker which is sought to be erased or written over by the Hindi remake. Further, when we see the new marks ascribed to mark the remake as ‘Hindi’, what we get to see is how Hindi is constituted as ‘different from’ Kannada. In other words, the point that I am making here by what appears to be superficial observations is that, rather than assuming that there is a set of pregiven conventions that mark Hindi cinema, we see that they come to be codified as such in the process of demarcating Hindi from Kannada.

Conclusion At one level, the practice of making Hindi remakes in the South might appear as the continuation of the practices that prevailed in the early years of silent and sound cinema, where films addressing different language audiences or speaking different languages were made in certain places which emerged as multilingual centres of film-making. Thus, we know that Madras was one of such centres where films were made in multiple languages, including Hindi. So, what I am doing in the chapter, at one level, is to look at other sites of the making of Hindi cinema in the form of remakes, thus pointing to the need to acknowledge nonBollywood spatialities and conventions in/of Hindi cinema. However, that’s not all. When Kannada film industry takes up the remaking of Hindi films, it is not just following the example set by Madras earlier. At least, two additional elements have to be factored in by the time of the 1970s when Kannada films are remade into Hindi: (a) the attempts to constitute different language film industries in India post Linguistic Reorganization of States and (b) the relationship that came to be constituted between Hindi and other Indian languages/cinemas, where Hindi sought to claim the ‘Indian’ or ‘national’ identity while other Indian languages, which operated in autonomous domains earlier, now became subservient to Hindi and became marked in a ‘national-regional’ hierarchical paradigm. In this scenario, when Kannada cinema attempts to remake its films into Hindi (as do Tamil, Telugu, etc.), the attempt seems to be aimed at: (a) seeking recognition for itself and its practitioners at the ‘national’ level, (b) endorsement for itself as cinema in competition and comparison with other more accomplished South Indian cinemas, such as Tamil and Telugu and (3) appreciation and approval by a ‘national’ audience. So, in the remakes prior to the 1990s, we see the peculiar aspect of these remakes trying to make certain changes through which they think they can transcend their Kannada particularity, at the same time without entirely obliterating their Kannada antecedents. Also, in the process of changing from Kannada to Hindi, these remakes provide a sense of what ‘Hindi cinema’ looks like, or what it was thought to be by the Kannada film-maker, or

what ‘Hindi’ meant or what ‘North India’ or even ‘India’ meant from a Kannada (or South Indian) perspective. Kannada film-makers, in the period under study, do not seem to be distinguishing between any of these terms. What Bollywood may think of as Hindi cinema is not necessarily the same as what ‘Hindi cinema’ or a ‘Hindi’ audience was imagined to be by the South. So, these remakes redefine Hindi cinema in terms of the South’s conception of Hindi, also in terms of how the South saw the relationship between ‘Hindi’ and ‘India’. How this view of Hindi cinema was regarded by the Hindi audience, whether they accepted the remakes or dismissed them as ‘vulgar’, ‘replete with narrative twists and turns’, ‘melodramatic’, ‘poor production quality’ and so on, is a different matter altogether, and I am not going into how successful or how not successful these films were with the Hindi audience. All I am saying is that our academic studies of Indian cinemas, the film historiographies that we write, may look a little different if we do not see a particular language cinema as always being coterminous with its industry. Another related point that I am making in this chapter is that, instead of assuming these diverse language cinemas to be pre-existing already as fully constituted objects, we may need to see how these cinemas are constantly in the making vis-à-vis each other, and remaking seems to be a way in which one cinema is trying to define another, and in the process, also defining itself. The Indian cinemascape is undoubtedly very complex, and we need studies that help identify some cinematic conventions that come up in this process in different language cinemas, not as if they are intrinsic to a particular language but as part of a performing of identity and difference. Also, a comparison via remakes may give us a sense of the different ‘worlds’ in the Indian cinematic landscape – in the sense of the complex of values, beliefs, practices that constitute social life on-screen – as represented in the different language cinemas. It would be interesting and challenging for any Film Studies scholar to understand why such differences are performed and what they indicate about the cultural complex that is constitutive of and constituted by a language cinema vis-à-vis others in India. I cannot claim that this chapter does any or all of this. It is presented as a starting point for further study in this area.

Notes 1 The earlier name of Mumbai, Bombay, became the basis for naming the film industry, in journalese, as ‘Bollywood’, a term that has now come to be used widely, including in academic discussions to refer to Hindi cinema and Hindi film industry (for an insightful discussion of the term ‘Bollywood’, see Prasad 2003). 2 Chennai, earlier known as Madras, emerged as one of the prominent centres of film-making in colonial times, making films in multiple languages, as was the case with other centres of film-making such as Calcutta (Kolkata now) and Bombay. However, in the 2–3 decades following the Linguistic Reorganization of States in 1956 in India, South Indian

languages, such as Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, sought to build their own respective film industries in their state capitals and strengthen their own language cinema vis-à-vis others’ (for a discussion of the role of cinema in forging a language-based identity post-1956, see Prasad 2014). 3 Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and other language films are often made in the various studios of Ramoji Film City located in Hyderabad; also, much of post-production work in Telugu and Kannada film industries takes place in Chennai. 4 For instance, Tamil and Telugu films are routinely screened in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka, which is predominantly a Kannada-speaking territory. The local Kannada film industry is in perpetual anxiety, as it sees itself in threat of losing its audience to these other language films 5 Dubbing involves various stages such as securing the dubbing rights from the producer of a film; translating the dialogues into the new language, adapting and timing it for recording; digitally manipulating the lip movement while dialogues are spoken on screen particularly in close-up to ensure lip-sync; hiring dubbing artists for different characters to dub in the new language; brushing the dubbed version to remove visual traces of the earlier language in verbal form in the form of signboards; translating on-screen notations of time, space and other narrative markers; changing the language of the credits and so forth. 6 Subtitling can be done offline in the sense of translating the dialogue into English, making the captions brief and reader friendly, inputting them in Notepad, timing the beginning and end of each caption and uploading them in SRT or other caption formats. Software, such as Aegisub and DivXLand Media Subtitler, is often recommended by users. Another way would be to do it online, inputting captions directly into YouTube as the video plays via YouTube’s editing tool or via Amara and so forth. 7 A groundbreaking study, not necessarily looking at remakes, but situating one language cinema and its practices among others in the context of early sound cinema in India, which attempts to historically understand what has come to be the defining features of a particular cinema in India, is Stephen Hughes’ essay ‘What Is Tamil about Tamil Cinema?’ (2010). 8 The industry term for characterising this difference between different language films in India is ‘nativity’. It is necessary to unpack this term and understand how this difference between and among the different language cinemas in India is constituted. 9 Kannada belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is the language predominantly spoken in Karnataka. Though much smaller than the neighbouring Tamil and Telugu industries in terms of the volume of films, their reach and so on, there are still over 100 Kannada films made every year. Kannada is the language that I have grown up in and the cinema that I am most familiar with. Unfortunately, it is also one of the cinemas that has received scant attention in the English academia, though there are a number of journalistic and well-documented studies of Kannada cinema in Kannada. Some of the academic writing available in English on various aspects of Kannada cinema are by Prasad (2001 and 2014); M. K. Raghavendra (2011); D. R. Nagaraj (2006); T. G. Vaidyanathan (1999); Tejaswini Niranjana (2000); Tharakeshwar V. B. (2010); and Nikhila H. (2010). 10 An interesting controversy reported in the media recently has been about the remake of Zanjeer (1973) by the producer Prakash Mehra’s son Amit Mehra in Hindi and Telugu. While Amit Mehra seems to have thought that the remake rights belong to PMP (Prakash Mehra Productions), and therefore now to him and his brothers, Javed Akthar, one of the scriptwriters of the film, claimed that the South Indian remake rights for the film belong to the Salim-Javed partnership. In this connection, what Javed Akthar says regarding the prevalent practice of remakes in the 1970s is worth quoting in

full: ‘The South Indian rights for Zanjeer were with us. Back in those days, we’d just sell our hit films to the South without determining which South Indian language it would be remade into. They would give us Rs 1 lakh or so for the rights. We had sold South Indian rights of several of our hits like Don and Yaadon Ki Baraat’ (Javed Akhtar 2013). 11 The converse, that is, Hindi films being remade into different South Indian languages, is also widespread and prolific. That requires a separate study altogether. 12 The British-ruled provinces and the princely states of the colonial period were integrated and merged to form the Indian Union at the time of Independence in 1947. The somewhat ad hoc arrangement of administrative regions as states soon led to political movements for language-based states. The demand for states on linguistic basis, which was there even in the colonial period, intensified in the 1950s, leading to the appointment first of The States Reorganization Commission in 1953, followed by the passing of the States Reorganization Act in 1956, leading to the formation of 14 states and 6 Union Territories. Linguistic homogeneity formed the basis of this new territorial reorganisation. This linguistic-based state formation was to have far-reaching implications for cinema, in the form of separate and competing film industries for different languages and territorial unities. 13 These are the decades following the Linguistic Reorganization of States in 1956 that the Kannada industry comes into its own; its film-making activity becomes more prolific; the centre of making Kannada films shifts to the capital of Karnataka, Bangalore, from Madras; and Kannada cinema during the period is also garnering national attention in the form of awards with the rise of the New Wave or Parallel Cinema movement in Kannada. 14 To put together this list, I have relied on internet databases, such as IMDB, Kannada Movies Info and Wikipedia, in addition to discussion forums of film enthusiasts, film information-related websites, Facebook groups such as Hindi Remake of Kannada Films, Hindi Remake films, South Hindi Movies and so on. In some instances, where there are claims and counterclaims about a film being a remake or a Hindi ‘original,’ I have not gone into the details of the dispute or tried to resolve it. If a viewing community that is familiar with both the films, in this case it is more likely to be the Kannada viewers (since the Hindi viewers are often oblivious of its Kannada antecedents), sees the Hindi film as a remake, then I have considered that as a remake and I have incorporated that in my list. There are those Kannada films that are themselves acknowledged remakes of Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam films, which have later been remade into Hindi. To the best of my knowledge and the sources at my command, I have not included such Kannada films which are part of a remake sequence beginning elsewhere in another language/film industry, not least because of the difficulties in tracing out the antecedent film/s, but also because my axis of comparison in this study is limited to two language films – Kannada and Hindi. It is also quite possible that the Kannada films might have seen dubbed versions in Telugu and Tamil, which might have given way later to Hindi films. Again, I am not factoring in the dubbed versions, here or elsewhere, in the study. 15 After watching each pair, sometimes the Kannada film first, followed by the Hindi remake, and sometimes vice versa, what I first noticed and noted down were the changes between the pairs in each instance, changes in plot, narrative, characters, costume, mise en scène and so on.

References

Akhtar, Javed. 2013 ‘Javed Akhtar: We Want Rs 3 Crore for Zanjeer Remake Rights’, Rediff.com, 10 April 2013. http://www.rediff.com/movies/report/we-want-three-crore-for-zanjeer-remake-rights/20130410.htm (accessed on 4 May 2014). Babu, Rajendra Singh. 2014. Interview by Nirmala M. N. in Bangalore on 21 April. Das,

Veena.

2003.

‘The

Small

Community

of

Love’,

Seminar

525

(May).

http://www.india-

seminar.com/2003/525/525%20veena%20das.htm (accessed on 4 May 2014). Hughes, Stephen. 2010. ‘What Is Tamil about Tamil Cinema?’ South Asian Popular Culture, 8(3): 213–29. 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. Nagaraj, D. R. 2006. ‘The Comic Collapse of Authority: An Essay on the Fears of the Public Spectator’, in Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy (eds), Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema, pp. 87–121. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nayar, Sheila J. 1997. ‘The Values of Fantasy: Indian Popular Cinema through Western Scripts’, Journal of Popular Culture, 31(1) (Summer): 73–90. Nikhila H. 2010. ‘Gender and the Filmic Remake’, in Sowmya Dechamma and E. Satyaprakash (eds), Cinemas of South India: Culture, Resistance, Ideology, 51–77. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 2000. ‘Reworking Masculinities: Rajkumar and the Kannada Public Sphere’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 November: 4147–50. Orfall, Blair. 2009a. ‘From Ethnographic Impulses to Apocalyptic Endings: Bharadwaj’s Maqbool and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in Comparative Context’, in Alexander C. Y. Huang (ed.), Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective. Special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 4(2) (Spring/Summer). http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/782306/display (accessed on 4 May 2014). ———. 2009b. Bollywood Retakes: Literary Adaptation and Appropriation in Contemporary Hindi Cinema. PhD diss. University of Oregon. Prasad, Madhava M. 2014. Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. ———.

2003.

‘This

Thing

Called

Bollywood’,

Seminar

525

(May).

http://www.india-

seminar.com/2003/525/525%20veena%20das.htm (accessed on 4 May 2014). ———. 2001. ‘Melodramatic Polities’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2(3): 459–66. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. 2006. ‘“Hamare Keral Mein Ek Kahavat Hai …”: Remakes in Cinema and the Burden on the “Translated Text”.’ Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies, 1. http://transtexts.revues.org/189 (accessed on 4 May 2014). Raghavendra, M. K. 2011. Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation, and the Kannada Language Film. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tharakeshwar, V. B. 2010. ‘Visualizing Kannada in the Context of Postmodernity and Postcoloniality’, in Sowmya Dechamma and E. Satyaprakash (eds), Cinemas of South India: Culture, Resistance, Ideology, pp. 158–69. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Vaidyanathan, T. G. 1999. Hours in the Dark: Essays on Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Wilkinson-Weber, Claire M. 2010. ‘A Need for Redress: Costume in Some Recent Hindi Film Remakes’, Bioscope, 1(2): 125–45. Wright, Neelam Sidhar. 2009a. ‘“Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? … Indian!” – Innovation through Imitation in the CrossCultural Bollywood Re-Make’, in Iain Robert Smith (ed.), Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation,

194–210.

Nottingham:

Scope

E-Book.

https://www.academia.edu/207383/Cultural_Borrowings_Appropriation_Reworking_Transformation (accessed on 4 May 2014). ———. 2009b. Bollywood Eclipsed: The Postmodern Aesthetics, Scholarly Appeal and Remaking of Contemporary Popular Indian Cinema. PhD diss. University of Sussex.

14 Between solidarity and the stereotype Chandni Chowk to China S. V. Srinivas

In spite of a large consumer base at home, the film industries in Asia have had serious problems in making significant inroads into international markets that are comparable to those of Hollywood. Observers have pointed out that even the Japanese entertainment industry, the largest in Asia, is largely confined to the domestic market, and it is only in the 21st century that overseas markets have become an important consideration for the industry and Japanese government alike. The South Korean film industry’s attempt to export its blockbusters (hallyu) has had limited success. Hong Kong, which had a significant international market for its films since the 1960s, has been caught in the high-volume, lowworth trap for decades now: hundreds of Hong Kong films have circulated all over Southeast Asia and South Asia, but the income generated from these markets has generally been modest. This was especially the case with the Indian market where Hong Kong films circulated in large numbers through the 1980s and 1990s but returning modest, almost negligible, revenues for the Hong Kong industry. It is possible to extend Paul Willemen’s argument about Korean cinema to suggest that the circulation of Asian film in global markets is limited, if not entirely blocked, by its being permeated with its context of production (Willemen 2002). How, then, do Asian films travel? In this chapter, I discuss a hitherto unprecedented attempt at engaging with the problem of international currency of national cinemas of Asia in the Hind film Chandni Chowk to China (2009; CC2C). I will argue that the film’s engagement with China, mediated as it is by Hong Kong cinema, is framed by its attempt to address the value question that confronts Asian films: how does cultural visibility or value translate into economic value, especially at a time when value addition is inseparably linked to expansion of markets, and thus a move beyond the comfort zone of the domestic market? I also discuss at the intellectual-political questions related to stereotypical representations of the other and solidarity building that are thrown up in this process.

The setting A discussion of film industrial and historical backdrop of CC2C is useful to understand how it sought to distinguish itself from earlier engagements of the Indian film industry with Hong Kong cinema, which is a crucial point of reference for this film. As with other parts of the world, it was the success of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973), released between 1976 and the early 1980s, which inaugurated the era of Hong Kong action films in India. Although kung fu films and action comedies comprise the bulk of imports and their economic worth negligible for the Hong Kong industry, the list of influences is indeed long and varied.1 From the 1980s, generations of stars have invoked the Hong Kong action film by performing their own stunts and simultaneously claiming to be trained in East Asian martial arts. The story of how Hong Kong films made their way into the lower rungs of the distribution and exhibition sectors in the country is a lesson in the globalisation of Asian cultural commodities. The shortcomings of equating globalisation with Westernisation or even Americanisation and the further assumption that it is all about cultural imperialism are exposed when we examine the hows and whys of Hong Kong films in India. Furthermore, the importation and circulation of Hong Kong films also anticipated the flood of cheap goods and digital technology from the East (mostly the PRC) in recent years. In the 1980s, the Indian film industry witnessed the emergence of an entirely new category of distributor who specialised in cheap films – both Indian and imported – to cater to the hundreds of ill-equipped and badly maintained cinema halls that were no longer able to attract major releases in Telugu, English or Hindi. These new distributors specialised in reruns (of Indian films), films dubbed from other Indian languages and inexpensive imported films. Film prints could be rented for as little as a few hundred rupees in this segment. At the apex of this pyramid were companies like Indo Overseas Films, among the country’s largest and most experienced importers of Hong Kong and other Asian films. Indo Overseas Films was established by an NRI who was a seafood exporter. Prior to 1984, the company distributed Hindi films. In 1984, it began to distribute films imported by the governmentowned National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), which became the canalising agency for imported films in 1980. The establishment of Indo Overseas Films was a direct consequence of the attempts made by the government of India in the 1980s to loosen the stranglehold of the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA) on the market for imported films in India. Manjunath Pendakur (1985) points out that the government of India asked MPEAA to leave the country in September 1983. The immediate reason, he states, may have had to do with government discomfort over the repatriation of the earnings of MPEAA. Till April 1985, when a new agreement was drawn up with MPEAA, the association did not have an office in India.

This was the period during which Indo Overseas Films began to distribute imported films. In 1990, when the government relaxed its import regulations, it began importing films directly with foreign exchange earned from its seafood exports. The company released a number of Jackie Chan hits in the past and Thai and Korean blockbusters more recently. NRIs were soon able to directly import films into India, without going through NFDC. According to Pendakur, between 15 and 20 companies owned by NRIs were registered in the 1980s, ‘which have brought in mostly martial arts and sexploitation films’ (1990: 241). The period coincides with the rapid growth of the Hong Kong film industry, whose export model was founded on the mass production of cheap films. In this period, an NRI could buy a Hong Kong film for a few thousand US dollars and release it in India. Hong Kong films and other cheap imports were a lifeline for small distributors who catered to the bottom rung of the exhibition ladder. The films were cheap and had a dedicated viewership, which in spite of its ignorance of the language watched them in their English versions. Circulation of these films in India was determined by local industrial and cultural practices, as we shall see below. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, promoting Hong Kong films among audiences in India was accompanied by title and other changes to the original. Remakes of Hong Kong or other Asian films in this period are rarer. The change of title and credits is a small but critical sign that films mutate in circulation. Every once in a while, films that pass the censor certification process are spliced with explicitly pornographic sequences that sometimes do not belong to the original film at all. Indeed, a significant component of the pornography exhibited on Indian screens consists of films with spliced sequences.2 Virtually any film can be rendered pornographic in this manner. To put it very simply, Hong Kong films were hugely popular but were caught in a lowvalue trap: they generated little revenue for their producers in Hong Kong and were so inexpensive that it made no sense for larger distribution companies to deal in them.

Chandni Chowk to China and the question of cultural value What happens in CC2C is quite different from any earlier engagement of the Indian film industry with its Hong Kong and mainland counterparts. CC2C is no low-budget production that makes borrows liberally and illegally from an import. As reviews of the film pointed out, this is the very first Warner Brothers production in India and the third Indian production involving a Hollywood major. As one of the reviewers of the film put it: Chandni Chowk to China is one of the most significant films to emerge from India in some time. The reasons for this are partly economic: it’s being distributed by Warner Brothers, whose execs are hoping to make inroads into the vast market for Bollywood movies across the world. The film is culturally important, too: its subject matter, albeit

candied up with many gags, pratfalls and whizzy CGI effects, is India’s relationship with China. (Sandhu 2009) CC2C had the largest release ever for a Hindi film in the United States, but had a ‘lukewarm reception’ from the media there.3 Although the producers were hoping to release the film theatrically in China, the Chinese government denied them clearance to do so.4 The film ran into trouble in Nepal, where screenings were stopped due to protests against a passing remark by a character in the film that Buddha was born in India.5 Within a week or so of the film’s release, it was declared to be a flop in India.6 Evidently, the grand plans the producers had for using Warner’s distribution network to capture the global market fell through for a variety of reasons. The significance of the entry of Hollywood needs to be viewed against the backdrop of the inability of Indian films (in all languages) to create economic value that approximates even remotely their hypervisibility in the social, political and cultural domains. In southern India, for example, film stars have established political parties and some have even been elected chief ministers of their respective states.7 Yet others, like the Kannada star Rajkumar, have kept out of electoral politics but have become cultural icons endowed with the authority to represent entire linguistic communities.8 While cinema is literally everywhere in India, the film industry has routinely reported year-on-year losses, with about 60 per cent of films produced failing to recover their production costs on average. In the words of Ashish Rajadhyaksha, the problem that the Indian film industry is confronted with is one of ‘defining culture economically’ (2003: 31) or realising economic value from an excessively visible and omnipresent film culture. In the Indian context, one of the critical issues that confront culture industries is the difficulty of translating cultural value into economic value. The Indian film industry has traditionally been the key site where this translation problem was battled by generations of industry as well as government functionaries. While cinema has been a ‘national form’ for over half a century now, the film industry has been making losses throughout its existence. A further point to note is that in spite of being highly regulated – with laws governing every aspect of its existence from minimum wages of workers to pre-censorship of films to restrictions on the number of seats in a cinema hall as well as the price of tickets – the film industry continues to be opaque. Information that would be considered fairly basic in other industries, including the number of screens, gross annual collections and so on, remained unavailable till a few years ago. This results in a situation in which established local players not only operate with far greater ease than newcomers, but also run businesses involving highly sophisticated methods that do not require the generation and processing of selfexplanatory data.

The Indian market has historically posed a problem for non-Indian film industries, as well. A Hong Kong film distribution executive told the author that her company considered the Indian market ‘just a bonus’ in comparison with other markets.9 This in spite of the large size of the market for films in general in India as well as the considerable penetration of Hong Kong films into the lower rungs of distribution and exhibition and the riotous practices of distributors in selling Hong Kong films. The situation has certainly changed in the past decade, but Hollywood alone has persisted with its attempts to tap the Indian market and has of late made considerable inroads.10 Since the 1990s, there have been attempts by domestic players to address value questions by integrating cinema into a larger culture industry, which disperses film into multiple sites of consumption but also atomises film into a range of commodities as a means of addressing the problem of value. As a result, there has been a movement away from stand-alone cinemas to multiplexes, and also the gradual downgrading of the domestic theatrical exhibition’s importance in the economics of a film. Value creation, we notice, is closely linked to movement: to new geographical locations, including exhibition spaces like multiplexes or media forms (video, optical disc, internet and mobile phone). I suggest that the central problem – which has economic as well as aesthetic manifestations – that CC2C attempts to address is one of value. The problem as well as the attempt to resolve it has exercised the Indian film industry and, more recently, other players in the culture industry. Once the problem is defined thus – as one of value – it becomes possible for us to notice the multiple parallels that the film has with Kung Fu Hustle (2004), a Hong Kong martial arts film whose production involved actors from Hong Kong, Japan, Hollywood and the PRC.

Martial arts, melodrama and textual manifestation of value It is interesting to see how the value question is textually manifested in both CC2C and Kung Fu Hustle. An exploration of this element of the films also allows us to understand better the striking parallels between them at the level of plot and structure of narrative.11 Kung Fu Hustle, like a number of earlier films featuring Stephen Chow, especially those directed by Wong Jing, is a parody of the Hong Kong martial arts films of the 1970s and 1980s as well as Hollywood hits. His oeuvre makes numerous references to action films from yesteryears, and often has a weak and cowardly petty crook masquerading as a major martial arts master or superhero. The protagonist is subject to violence and ridicule almost throughout the film, and at the very end, is rather dramatically transformed into a real hero who, it turns out, is a martial arts adept. The broad structure of the narrative as well as the manner in which the star is deployed

(both are closely related) follows a pattern that is carried over from one film to the next. Stories and settings change, while there are repetitions and parallels at the thematic level. The most significant of these is kung fu, which is in turn inextricably linked to the protagonist’s fate. His progress from ignorance to expertise in kung fu has been important for the plots of films like King of Beggars, God of Cookery, and Kung Fu Hustle. Stephen Chow’s star persona figures prominently among the films’ intertextual references. For example, in Fight Back to School (1991) he is Star Chow and in God of Cookery (1996) he plays Stephen Chow, the ‘God of Cookery’. The spectator’s acute awareness of Chow’s particular star persona is critical for the films’ narrative, which I will suggest inevitably unfolds in a predictable fashion in spite of the numerous twists and turns. Predictability is an important part of the pleasurable familiarity of the Chow vehicle. Although Kung Fu Hustle itself is an exception, in virtually all the major Chow vehicles, including Shaolin Soccer (2001), there is an older avuncular-guru figure that is inevitably played by Ng Man Tat. The character played by Ng is often crooked and cheats the gullible protagonist. Between them, the Chow and Ng characters are deployed to produce a very interesting and arguably ‘Asian’ parody of the martial arts film in which the object of parody is reclaimed by the end of the film. Shaolin kung fu eventually does come handy in meeting modern day challenges (such as, for example, winning a cooking contest or a football match). The process of parody and reclamation of the object is in evidence in Indian films of the period corresponding with Stephen Chow’s career. The point, however, is not the parallel between Hustle and CC2C at this level. What Hustle achieved was the reclamation of the martial arts film (particularly the kung fu comedy) from a global B circuit, which in spite of its phenomenal international popularity was, after all, marked by its relatively low economic worth. How has it been possible for Chow, who has more or less remained confined to the Chinese-speaking audiences of Hong Kong cinema until recently, to move into a larger market in the early 21st century? The answer to this question also helps us understand what made a project like CC2C possible. One point of entry into Chow’s movies is the frequent references to Hollywood cinema and to those parts of Hong Kong film history that have a circulation well beyond the Chinese communities across the world. For example, you do not need to be a resident of Hong Kong or Cantonese speaking to catch a reference to Bruce Lee. There are a number of contingencies that might overdetermine the success of both Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. But one interesting factor that has worked in their favour is the falling into place of a new frame of intelligibility. In part, this is a direct consequence of the incorporation of certain elements of Hong Kong film into mainstream Hollywood productions. There is also a set of referents that are now available, which have the effect of familiarising Kung Fu Hustle. It is into this intertextual field that CC2C inserts itself in order to make a tongue-in-cheek gesture towards Asianness of a particularly cinematic kind, cinematic in the sense that the

primary cultural resource from which this Asianness is woven is popular films themselves. Let me examine the film to illustrate the point. CC2C, like kung fu comedies from Jackie Chan’s early career (e.g. Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Yuen Woo-Ping 1978), is centred on the progress of the hero from a worthless, gullible cook to a martial arts expert. The film’s representational breakthrough is that it overlays this genre, which was invented in Hong Kong, with a narrative that is immediately recognised as ‘Indian’. The film’s story begins in the past, with the death of the warrior Liu Sheng who dies protecting the Great Wall from invaders. It then cuts to a remote province in modern day China where antique smuggler Hojo (Gordon Liu) oppresses the people by forcing them to excavate treasures – quite literally, mining the past – and selling it away to foreigners. The poor people of the province consult a Buddhist monk who tells them that Liu Sheng has been reborn and will liberate them from their oppressor. Framed thus as the story of a Chinese community on the lookout for their reincarnated hero, the film introduces Sidhu (Akshay Kumar), a superstitious cook in Delhi’s crowded commercial area, Chandni Chowk. Although the voice-over narrator does not say so, this is quite obviously the hero who is going to save the oppressed Chinese community. Like in the 1980s kung fu comedy, however, he is far from the hero he will eventually grow up to be. His sole expertise lies in performing menial tasks like cutting vegetables, kneading dough and so on. The casting of Akshay Kumar, one of the leading stars of Hindi cinema, in the role of cookturned-martial-arts-expert is quite clever in that the star is trained in martial arts and has spent a part of his youth working in a restaurant.12 Sidhu’s mentor and father figure Dada (Mithun Chakraborty, a star of low-budget action films in the 1980s) attempts unsuccessfully to reform him. The Chinese connection within Sidhu’s story is first introduced through the character of Chopstick (Ranvir Shorey), a conman who claims to be a master of Feng-Shastra – a fusion of the Chinese Feng Shui and Indian Vaastu Shastra – and half Chinese, too. Chopstick, like the Ng Man Tat characters in Stephen Chow’s films, lies to the gullible protagonist that Sidhu was a mosquito in his previous life and peddles him amulets to change his luck. Just as his mentor and employer Dada is giving him a thrashing, he is discovered by the two Chinese men who have set out to find Liu Sheng’s reincarnation. Chopstick deliberately mistranslates the mission ahead for Sidhu – which is to kill Hojo – and lies that he has finally become lucky. Both Sidhu and Chopstick set out for China. While he is attempting to get his visa, Sidhu encounters Sakhi (Deepika Padukone), who works for a telemarketing channel selling cheap hi-tech Chinese products. He falls in love with her after an initial misunderstanding. It turns out that Sakhi makes frequent business trips to China in the hope that she will meet her twin separated at birth. Sure enough, the twin is very much alive but has been kidnapped by the villain and grows up as Meow Meow (Deepika Padukone), a deadly assassin and key member of his gang. Their father Chiang (Roger Yuan), a former police inspector who confronted Hojo in his younger days, is thought to be dead. However, he

has merely lost his memory due to shock and is living the life of a vagrant. After many misadventures, Sidhu meets Chiang who regains his memory and is reunited with Sakhi. He becomes Sidhu’s sifu, who is a familiar figure in kung fu comedies. Sidhu undergoes a strict regime of training and gains expertise in martial arts, thereby growing into this role as the saviour of the community. In the film’s climax, he confronts and kills Hojo. The film inserts the Chandni Chowk–based protagonist into the kung fu comedy, and in the process becomes the very first instance of an Indian remake of the genre. Also notable is the integration of recognisably Indian and Hong Kong character types, such as, for example, Dada literally meaning ‘big brother’ and the sifu and the kung fu master, respectively. Likewise, there are other shared similarities such as plot devices (separated twins routine) and settings (the sifu’s home or training ground). The representational breakthrough achieved by the film is to draw on Hong Kong (and to a lesser extent, Hollywood and mainland Chinese) cinema to tell a story that involves both Indian and Chinese characters. More importantly, the film gestures towards an aestheticaffective zone that is shared by both Indian and Chinese film. Let me add a rider to my claim: the film’s representation of China is primarily mediated by Hong Kong cinema, not PRC cinema, although there are borrowings from 21st-century mainland productions by Zhang Yimou in the epic scale of representing the landscape of China. There is almost nothing we see in and of China in the film that is not a reference to an earlier film. Indeed, the film is replete with orientalist stereotypes of both China and India, which are fused together in a spectacular fashion. A striking example of the way the film refers to images from earlier films is the song ‘From Chandni Chowk to China’, dreamt by Sidhu on his flight to China. The song begins with a morphed image of the Forbidden City whose vast grounds have become mustard fields. From the late 1990s, images of mustard fields have been among the most familiar stereotypes of the western Indian state of Punjab in Hindi cinema. Furthermore, the film makes a direct reference to Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), where the empty grounds of the palace are filled with soldiers to digitally create a spectacle of imperial power. Ada Tseng (2009) points out that the song uses Zhang Yimou’s set. This mediation of China by popular cinema is notable, because the commonality that the film identifies between India and China is not at the level of cultural essentialist traits of these ‘ancient civilisations.’ The mutual discovery of the Indian and Chinese characters in the film that their stories are interlinked is analogous to the spectator’s discovery that two film-making conventions (Indian and Hong Kong) are now being juxtaposed. Once they are juxtaposed, the spectator will then realise that, like the Indian and Chinese stories of the film, there are parallels. Indeed, it becomes evident that there is only one story, whether we begin with Liu Sheng, as the film itself does, or with Sidhu. The film’s story progresses along a series of acts of recognition, and some of these are in

fact major acts of misrecognition, for example, the two Chinese villagers’ discovery that Sidhu is indeed Liu Sheng. This particular sequence is both hilarious and fascinating. Dada, upon discovering that Sidhu has once again got himself into trouble due to his superstitions, gives him a thorough beating. Dada’s kicks send Sidhu flying into the sky and, eventually, he lands at the feet of the two Chinese gentlemen who have been delegated by the villagers to find Liu Sheng’s reincarnation. The camera focuses on the sketch of the long-haired warrior Liu Sheng that the Chinese men are using to discover Sidhu, and then on the protagonist’s face with its extremely short hair, topknot and prominent black eye from Dada’s punches. There is, of course, no likeness at all! While the discovery/recognition of Chiang and Sakhi is quite straightforward, Meow Meow mistakenly believes that Chiang has killed her father and injures him after an attack. Right at the end of the film, we discover that Chopstick is not half Chinese but part African! And so on. The film suggests that the common ground for Indian and Chinese cultures is not to be found at the level of parallels between the value systems of their ancient cultures. Like the recognition of Sidhu as a reincarnation of Liu Sheng, this would be a mistake. The common ground is the history of the Hong Kong film industry’s representation of Chinese traditions on the one hand and Indian cinema’s history of consumption of and borrowings from Hong Kong cinema on the other.

After the stereotype: popular pan-Asianism? A defensible scholarly response to the film has been made by Victor A. Vincente, who notes with disappointment and some distaste, As relations have warmed and both [India and China] have emerged as potential global superpowers, the need to resolve the conflicting depictions of China in Indian cinema has become obvious. Thoroughly ensconced in the cultural superiority of India, however, Bollywood has only succeeded in creating further divisions. Billed as the first attempt to bridge the cinematic powerhouses of India and China, Nikhil Advani’s Chandni Chowk to China (2009) ultimately only showcases the naiveté and parochial worldview of India’s film-makers and composers. (2010: 313) It is not my brief to reject the claim that Indian film-makers are naïve and parochial in their worldview. The degree of their maturity does not really matter to students of cinema, because films make meaning in a context and not because of the genius of directors. My point is that, against the historical backdrop of stereotypical images of Asia (China in particular) in Indian cinema, CC2C certainly comes across as relatively mild, if somewhat offensive.

As has been noted by researchers, China has been the object of negative and stereotypical cinematic representations for decades now. Gregory D. Booth (2007) makes two important points about representation of otherness in Hindi cinema that are of relevance to our discussion. He notes that prior to independence in 1947, there is little evidence of Orientalist representation of the Asian Other in Indian cinema. Second, tensions between India and China from 1959 resulted in the change of representation of the Chinese as comic/amusing to evil and villainous in Hindi films. Coonoor Kripalani (2012) shows that the sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation in Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani stands out in contrast to the representation of the Indian Chinese community as gangsters and spies in the late 1950s Hindi films like Howrah Bridge (1958) and Prem Pujari (1970), respectively. In her detailed analysis of the film Haqeeqat (1964), Patricia Uberoi (2011) draws attention to the negative portrayal of the Chinese army and the country’s political leadership. Viewed against this history of negatives images of China, CC2C is a study in contrast. The film makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1950s Third Worldist slogan of the ‘IndoChinese Brotherhood’, which was seriously discredited after the 1962 border war with China. While the film does not refer to the Asia region beyond China, it nevertheless opens up a much larger discursive terrain that is of immense significance at the present time. This terrain I tentatively term popular pan-Asianism, using ‘popular’ not as an index of the prevalence of the notion among the common people but as the domain of cultural production and consumption that is the source of a new way of relating to Asia. I am also aware of the association between Japanese notions of pan-Asianism and the imperialist project. My location in a context that has not been shaped by the Japanese imperialist project allows me to attempt to redeploy the term ‘pan-Asianism’ in a discussion of inter-Asian cultural flows in the present time and their politics. India and China are, for a number of reasons, the best starting point for an exploration of postnational, globalised inter-Asian alliances and solidarities. CC2C was made at a time when there was a hitherto unprecedented degree of crosspollination of Indian and Asian film cultures. Moinak Biswas (2007) coined the phrase ‘new cinephilia’ to describe a critical development among Indian film buffs, who he noted were increasingly aware and invested in international cinema which they had never before encountered. Indian exhibition did not have an art house circuit, and international cinema was limited to film festivals (or circulated as pornography in low-end cinema halls). With the availability of cheap pirated copies of VCDs and DVDs of films, entire film cultures now opened up for Indian audiences and film-makers alike. Whereas Indian film-makers had always freely borrowed/copied elements from non-Indian films which they watched on VHS or digital formats, the spread of piracy resulted in the availability of a wide spectrum of films that were simply impossible to view theatrically in India. Lawrence Liang argues, The immense popularity of film makers like Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Ming-liang and Hou

Hsiao-hsien stems from their visibility in the film festival route but outside of that you have a range of films from Korea, Thailand, Japan and even Cambodia which find their way into the pirate markets. (2008: 81) The public face, or rather the film industrial manifestation of the new cinephilia, is the spurt in unofficial remakes of Asian films. Entire industries, whose films were never going to be exhibited theatrically in India, opened up for film-makers who were constantly on the lookout for new materials to incorporate into their films. From Zinda (2006), a faithful but unofficial remake of the South Korean Old Boy (2003), several dozen South Korean films have been unofficially remade by Hindi, Telugu and Tamil film industries. However, there has been a negligible presence of Korean cinema in the Indian theatrical circuit. CC2C is not a remake, but a rather more sophisticated attempt at producing an indigenous martial arts film on the lines of the Hong Kong action comedy. Unlike earlier Hindi films that were ‘about’ China, here it is not state-defined national interests that are seen to be the foundation of the complex and intimate relationships between the people of the two countries in question. On the contrary, it is the leakage of commodities that facilitate the formation of new alliances and discovery of affinities. In CC2C, intertextual references to cinema on the one hand and cheaply manufactured Chinese goods on the other serve as relays between the two countries. Hong Kong cinema as a constant referent and Chinese goods as the facilitator of story-level movement of the character Sakhi between India and China are both essentially consumed in India. From the level of consumption, the film suggests, emerges an interpretative framework and indeed the intelligence that integrates Hong Kong and Indian film-making conventions, and thereby facilitates identification of common ground between the two countries. The thoroughness with which the film combines elements of Indian and Hong Kong film – the latter referring to China – suggests that in the larger scheme of things, what really matters is the common ground that can be claimed on behalf of all three contexts and speaks to the world at large. This, I suggest, is the emerging terrain of Asia that is no longer dependent on identifying timeless inherited (‘Asian’) values. Possibilities offered by contemporary times – of globalisation and commerce in cultural commodities – allow affinities to be built. What then does the film propose be shared by India and China? The short answer to the question, which is nevertheless easily recognised by students of cinema, is melodrama. ‘Asian melodrama’ has received some critical attention (e.g. by the contributors to Wimal Dissanayake’s Melodrama and Asian Cinema [1993]), but a number of critical issues remain underexamined. The work of Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2005) suggests that melodrama remains the template against which narrative cinema works out its critical questions, whether they be related to history and modernity or nationalism in India as well as other contexts, including

Taiwan. Rajadhyaksha goes on to make an even greater claim about the significance of melodrama by arguing that it is not merely a genre but a mode of production of narrative cinema (2009: 41). Melodramatic structures, he goes on to state, are necessary to recoup the affective spillovers of narrative cinema (2009: 42). The film reiterates the efficacy of melodrama as an entry point into comparative studies of Asian cinema. The film alternates between comic and emotional excesses. The suffering of the village community at Hojo’s hands and the tragedy of Sakhi, Meow Meow and Chiang are never the object of ridicule. During the film’s climax, Sidhu confronts Hojo in the presence of the village community. The sequence is structured around an emotionally charged moment when Sidhu is brought down by the villain. He recovers after Dada’s spirit advises him to look within himself for the moves that will defeat Hojo. Like in the typical 1980s kung fu comedy, it is the most mundane acts of manual labour – vegetable chopping and dough kneading motions – that prove to be the basis of the moves that help overpower the villain. The film, therefore, ends with an invocation of the imported genre that it adopts within the melodramatic structuring that is shared by both Indian and Hong Kong film. Kung fu, as it is represented by Hong Kong cinema, has a considerable history as a resource. In martial arts films, it is seen as a cultural resource that is the only means available for the hero to either defeat the immensely powerful forces of evil or, in the works of Wong Jing and Stephen Chow, to succeed in life. Culture, then, is the means of addressing economic and political inequalities and injustices. Whether it is gambling or soccer, kung fu works. By rendering the martial arts film into an ensemble film of the Indian kind (with such set pieces as song and dance routines, fights, comic sequences, etc. that do not contribute to the progress of the story), the film extends the value question beyond its familiar framing in the Indian context. How does a cultural resource – whether this is martial arts or the film itself – become an economic resource? We can now see that both Indian and Hong Kong film confront a similar problem: whether it is the typical Hindi film or the martial arts film, the size of the customer base and the geographical spread of its constituency notwithstanding, its cultural visibility is disproportionately high in comparison to its economic worth. It is, therefore, not surprising that Stephen Chow’s work should be an important referent for this film, because he too is engaged in an attempt to extend Hong Kong films beyond the global B circuit. In the Indian context, the attempt at value addition has been termed by the film theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha as the ‘Bollywoodisation’ of Hindi cinema (2003). Bollywoodisation is the process by which film is integrated into a much larger culture industry that includes fashion, food, tourism and so forth, and is disseminated in non-celluloid formats on satellite television and the internet (see Rajadhyaksha 2003). Arguably, it is as a part of this process of value creation that Hindi cinema encountered and engaged with a prior instance of this very

attempt in the form of Stephen Chow’s recent work. In conclusion, I offer one final point about popular pan-Asianism. The failed attempt to position CC2C in the global market, and that too as a crossover film that could tap into the circuits of martial arts cinema worldwide, is crucially dependent on cultural stereotyping and the exoticisation of China. Nowhere is this clearer than the song shot in Zhang Yimou’s Forbidden City set. The film’s pan-Asianism, it is therefore possible to suggest, is centred on stereotypical representations of the Orient. Nevertheless, the affective spillovers (Rajadhyaksha’s phrase) of the melodramatic narrative make the stereotype the starting point for exploring cross-cultural affinities. Under these circumstances, the task of cultural analyses cannot be limited to the identification of the Orientalist stereotypes generated by films and the mass media. It is, perhaps, more useful to turn our attention to how the stereotype becomes a resource for affinity building in the domain of the popular where we are what we consume.

Acknowledgements This chapter is an outcome of the Asian Culture Industries project of the Culture Industries and Diversity in Asia (CIDASIA) research programme of the Centre for the Study of the Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore. While the project was supported by the Japan Foundation, New Delhi, the chapter also draws on research carried out with the support of the Sephis Programme, Amsterdam, and the InKo Centre, Chennai, and CSCS. I am grateful to the participants of the SRC Summer Symposium on ‘Orient on Orient: Images of Asia in Eurasian Countries’ (7–9 July 2010, Sapporo) for their comments on an earlier draft of the chapter.

Notes 1 I have suggested elsewhere that this influence is not only limited to film, but also includes popular print literature (Srinivas 2003). 2 Lotte Hoek’s work (2010) on cinema in Bangladesh shows that a number of features of the Indian B circuit, including the splicing of pornographic sequences into films after censor certification, are visible there as well. We may, therefore, be dealing with film industrial practices as well as cultural consumption that are prevalent across the South Asian region. 3 See http://www.zeenews.com/news499390.html. 4 See http://khabarbollywood.com/chadni-chowk-to-china-stopped-from-release-in-china.html. 5 See http://ibnlive.in.com/news/chandni-chowk-to-china-banned-in-nepal/83407–8.html. 6 According to one report on the internet: ‘Audiences hated the film so much, some people even walked out of theatres mid-way’.

The

verdict

of

the

same

report

http://specials.rediff.com/movies/2009/jan/19box.htm.

was

that

the

film

was

a

‘disaster’.

See

7 See Pandian (1992) for an examination of the career of the Tamil superstar M. G. Ramachandran, who went on to become the chief minister of Tamil Nadu. 8 Janaki Nair’s (2005) study of Bangalore city studies the involvement of Rajkumar and his innumerable fan clubs in Kannada language politics. 9 Chiu Yi Leung, Mandarin Films, interviewed by the author, 19 September 2001, Hong Kong. 10 In 2009, the gross output (i.e. aggregate revenues of all companies involved) of the entire international film industry in the Indian market was US$ 108 million. Although this appears to be substantial, it was less than 1 per cent of the takings of the Indian film industry, which were estimated to be US$ 2,709 million in that year (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2010: 4). 11 Reviewers also drew attention to other, mostly Hollywood, sources for CC2C, including Kill Bill, Kung Fu Panda and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (see Sandhu 2009). 12 One of the international reviews of the film pointed out that Akshay Kumar is a former cook and a waiter and also grew up in the Chandni Chowk area of Delhi. See http://www.villagevoice.com/2009–01–14/film/bollywood-goes-eastmdash-far-east-mdash-for-chandni-chowk-to-china/.

References Biswas, Moinak. 2007. ‘Film Studies, Film Practice and Asian Cinema: Points in Re-Connection’, Paper prepared for Asian Cinema: Towards a Research and Pedagogic Agenda. Organized by Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, 2–4 February 2007. http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2007-April/009144.html. Booth, Gregory D. 2007. ‘Musicking the other: Orientalism in the Hindi cinema’, in M. Clayton and Bennett Zon (eds), Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayal of the East, pp. 315–38. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. http://auckland.academia.edu/GregoryBooth/Papers/478969/Musiciking_the_Other_Orientalism_in_the_Hindi_Cinema (accessed on 15 July 2015). Dissanayake, Wimal, ed. 1993. Melodrama and Asian Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoek, Lotte. 2010. ‘Unstable Celluloid: Film Projection and the Cinema Audience in Bangladesh’, Bioscope, 1(1): 49–66. Kripalani, Coonoor. 2012. ‘Reading China in Popular Film – Three Points in Time: 1946, 1964 and 2009’, Asian Cinema, 23(2): 217–29. Liang, Lawrence. 2008. ‘Meet John Doe’s Order: Piracy, Temporality and the Question of Asia’, Journal of the Moving Image, 7: 67–84. http://www.jmionline.org/film_journal/jmi_07/article_04.php (accessed on 15 May 2010). Nair, Janaki. 2005. The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pandian, M. S. S. 1992. The Image Trap: M. G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics. London: Sage. Pendakur, Manjunath. 1990. ‘India’, in John A. Lent (ed.), The Asian Film Industry, pp. 229–52. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1985. ‘Dynamics of Cultural Policy Making: The US Film Industry in India’, Journal of Communication, 35(4): 52–72. PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2010. Economic Contribution of Indian Film and Television Industry. Report prepared for Motion Picture Distributors Association (India).

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2009. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2005. ‘Reconsidering Asian Melodrama: A Presentation for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’, Paper presentation. International Conference on ‘Asia’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien: Cinema, History and Culture.’ Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and Singapore History Museum, Singapore. 29–30 April. ———. 2003. ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(1): 25–39. Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2009. ‘Chandni Chowk to China: Review.’ The Telegraph (London), 16 January. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/sukhdevsandhu/4269579/Chandni-Chowk-to-China-review.html (accessed on 15 May 2009). Srinivas, S. V. 2003. ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(1): 40–62. Tseng, Ada. 2009. ‘The Reincarnation of Akshay Kumar’, Asia Pacific Arts. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp? parentid=103644 (accessed on 23 November 2010). Uberoi, Patricia. 2011. ‘China in Bollywood’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 45(4): 315–42. Vincente, Victor A. 2010. ‘Constructs of Asia in Indian Film and Film Song’, Journal of Comparative Asian Development, 9(2): 293–319. Willemen, Paul. 2002. ‘Detouring through Korean Cinema’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 3(2): 167–86.

15 The Khan Mania Universal appeal of superstar Shahrukh Khan in a post-globalised Bollywood era Sony Jalarajan Raj, Rohini Sreekumar and Fikri Jermadi

When I came to Mumbai, I wanted to own the city. Today it owns me. (Shahrukh Khan, quoted in Sheikh 2006) Bollywood, a name usually used synonymously with the Indian film industry, is regarded as the conveyer of nationness and national identity, a global entity competing to grab the share of Hollywood audience. This branding of Bollywood is done through celebrity star branding, which is the trickiest aspect of marketing films (Mehrotra 2011). After 1990, as a result of the Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation Policy (LPG Policy), significant changes began to make inroads into cinematic techniques in production, distribution and spectatorship, thanks to satellite and cable network that made available Indian films to a global audience. One of the growing trends of the entertainment explosion is the emergence of celebrity culture, a trend that existed decades before, but is redefined in the 20th century. In the past, we considered the rich industrialists, businessmen and entrepreneurs as the celebrities (Cashmore 2006), but now, as Harmon points out, celebrity culture has been ‘democratised and brought within reach of the ordinary citizen’ (2005: 100). In this quest for stardom, only a few have been successful globally, and one among them is the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, usually known as ‘SRK’ or ‘King Khan’. Even though Bollywood boasts a significant number of talented and handsome actors, the success and popularity of SRK is unsurpassed by any of them. In Bollywood, a more or less a hereditary and nepotic industry (where sons and daughters of famous actors, directors and producers dominate), the stardom of SRK is quite unusual since his father was a lawyer and mother a magistrate, having no film background or ancestry (see also Gahlot 2007). Starting with the small screen through serials like Fauji (1988), Dil Dariya (1988) and Circus (1989), he rose to the status of an actor with Deewana (1992). Celebrating his 21st year in Indian cinema, he continues as the heart-throb of millions around the world, when most of his contemporaries in the industry despite having hereditary favouritism are struggling for

recognition. As Chopra (2007) commented for the Indian as well as the non-Indian Bollywood lovers, he is even bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. This makes SRK a viable area of study not only as an actor, but also as a strategic impresario who markets himself globally. Since his global appeal and hidden branding strategies are not well explored, this chapter looks at SRK not as an Indian actor, but as a global celebrity whose image tries to cut across boundaries to surpass the Indian diaspora. A particular case study of Malaysia is considered, where SRK has not only a strong fan base, but where he enjoys the privilege of the honorary title Datuk, which is usually conferred to Malaysians only.

SRK and the spectacle for stardom One of the overwhelming results of media explosion unleashed by the new technological development is the creation of endless celebrities from politicians to culprits. Celebrities are public figures who create an aura of desirable qualities that are not easily acquired by the laymen, yet make believe that they are one among the public and are familiar (Nayar 2009). In SRK’s case, it may be said that celebrities are not born, they are created (Marshall 2002). As his own words exemplify, ‘I’m a great fantastic accident of being the right person at the right place at the right time’ (quoted in Chopra 2007), his entry into film industry coincided with the LPG Policy of India, which opened up new ventures and extended the market for Indian film industry globally. It should be noted that the era in which SRK became a star with Deewana also saw an increase in the return of audiences to the cinema halls. This was also a period when the Indian entertainment industry began to flourish, with television channels booming across the country, acting as a medium to propagate the films as well as the stars, creating a ‘media spectacle’ (Kellner 2003). SRK turned into a celebrity or an international icon not merely because of his unmatched talent, but also because of his incessant visibility through media. Thus, it could be argued that the timing of his arrival could not have been better, in identifying himself as the everyman, a fluid and open space that allowed many to relate to him, and representation of not only the Indians at home, but also the global citizens of the Indian diaspora. Rojek (2001) claims that no celebrity now acquires public recognition without the assistance of cultural intermediaries that play a crucial role in managing celebrity presence in the eyes of the public, and this status is a split between the private self and public self. Cultural intermediaries range from mere film posters to extravagant film promotions, interviews and stage shows. This split between ‘I’, the real self, and ‘Me’, the reel or public self, which Mead (1934) refers to as a human condition, is much more complex and confused in celebrity status. As SRK himself said in one of his interviews: There are three people in me: A person, an actor and a star. I try to keep as much in touch

with reality as I can. (The Outer World of Shahrukh Khan 2005) Often, the chief motive behind the struggle to achieve celebrity status is the desire to transcend the veridical self (Kellner 2003: 12). But with SRK, this split of veridical and screen self, or ‘I’ and ‘Me’, is quite complex, as SRK never resists taking his family or his mannerisms (portraying him as a chain-smoker) into the limelight, and the documentary series made on him that best exemplifies this. Directed by Nasreen Munni Kabir, consisting of two reflective parts titled The Inner World of Shahrukh Khan and The Outer World of Shahrukh Khan, the documentary portrays the private as well as the public life of the star by following him at his home, studio and stage performance, which ultimately marks him as a perfect actor, friend, father and husband. As different from other stars, SRK advances his star persona as a common man, through the faithful projection of his veridical self on-screen, not through his filmic character alone, but through the cultural intermediaries. Two factors that do come into the purview while evaluating SRK’s social appeal are his corporal identity and his off-screen persona, as well as the identity of being one among the public. When contemplating the corporal appeal of SRK, unquestionably, he will fall inferior to his co-stars like Hrithik Roshan, who embodies an envious six-pack stature with good dancing skills, or John Abraham and Arjun Rampal, with a macho physique, both having a strong background in modelling. He admitted this in many of his interviews. I am not saying my nose is ugly, I am just saying it’s not as good as Akshay’s (Kumar) … I was not the most good-looking guy when I entered the industry … [and] I certainly can’t start believing I was always the Greek god. (SRK in an interview in Outlook 2007) This, however, played into the hands of producers seeking to connect with audiences; he began to be promoted as the every man. The fact that he does not look too different to many of them enhanced the connection between him and his audience. As in the documentary The Inner/Outer World of Shahrukh Khan, he is always seen carrying a cigar, which is quite unnatural in star promotion where only positive traits are projected to create a delusive identity. Starting from Deewana to his much popular films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2001), Kal Ho Na Ho (2003) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), the character he played is that of a chocolate boy twitching with romance and family sentiments making him a boy next door. The recent movie that stirred wide criticism (because of his Muslim character, mistaken as a terrorist, undergoing severe ordeal) as well as acknowledgement for his character, Rizwan Khan, My Name is Khan (2010), tends to display his own life experience of being a Muslim after September 11. When he went to New York for the promotion of the movie, the security officials at the airport took him for secondary inspection and further interrogation since his

nomenclature contains a ‘Khan’ (Hu 2009). This incident, involving a renowned actor, did indeed generate fury from around the world, but helped to add to his popularity as well as that of the film. When asked whether the whole furor was a stunt to promote his movie, SRK replied: ‘I don’t want to sound pompous, but Shahrukh Khan doesn’t need any publicity’ (as quoted in Dore 2009). While cultivating the image of the man next door, he has nevertheless been aware of the benefits of cultivating for himself a positively masculine image, for which he has undergone vigorous training despite his physical ailments, like the back injury he sustained when he was 15 years old, for which he undergoes medication even now (see Gahlot 2007; Chopra 2007). Witnessing a rock-hard body in Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, the journalist Namrata Joshi (2007) admitted to being ‘shaken and stirred’ by the experience: ‘My jaw drops on seeing a shirtless Shahrukh Khan’. More than a duality between an actor and character, he is a dyad of ‘every man’ and an astute magnate who had comprehended the rules of the game and the ways to play it. Aestheticisation is a key factor in creating celebrity spectacle, where the ‘perception and judgment regarding beauty and desire become generalised’ (Rojek 2001: 102). Such a generalised aesthetics forgives the star of many of his flaws. It is a sort of paradox that these stars must fit into the contemporary trend, even though the trend itself is set by these stars (Nayar 2009). This implicates the need for a dynamic appeal that is most likeable and attractive among the audience. Fashion promoted by a character (as well as by the actor) becomes a brand identity like ‘Tiger Eyes by SRK’ range of perfumes. Marketing of SRK can be further illustrated with the hype and popularity of neck tags and tight T-shirts of SRK after the release of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998. This can be further elaborated by celebrity endorsements which are vital marketing components, as they are created considering and recognising the skill and talent of a particular celebrity in their respective field (see Cashmore 2006). This identification of celebrity with the product, as Nayar posits, imprints the personality of the stars to the product, shifting it from the designated area, which he terms ‘celebrification’ (82). SRK has evolved as a brand in himself, which other companies want to get associated with in order to improve their image. As stated earlier, 24-hour visibility makes a celebrity, with SRK, a brand in himself, endorsing as many as 39 brands, both national and global, spending around Rs 3.15 crores a month on television ads featuring him in 2007 (see Gahlot 2007). SRK led in celebrity endorsement in 2008 and 2011, with TAM reporting that 6 per cent of television ads featured him (Krishnamurthy 2011). His endorsement ranges from soap and shampoos to watches, suiting, soft drinks and cellphones. Four of the most prestigious of his endorsements were for OMEGA, TAG Heuer, Belmonte Suits and D’écor, where in the latter he shared the small screen with his wife Gauri. A close look at the tagline of OMEGA and TAG Heuer in their official website exemplifies this image association. This is quite amazing, as both these watch companies are staunch competitors:

Shah Rukh Khan is perhaps the brightest star within the Indian entertainment industry today. His presence on the silver screen moves audiences and sets box offices on fire, while his angelic voice and magical performances mesmerise fans the world over. Thanks to his versatility, confidence, talent and impressive screen presence, Shah Rukh Khan has starred in all kinds of roles […]. Over its 150 year history, OMEGA has established an unrivalled reputation for precision, endurance and leading-edge technology and has received the most coveted awards for aesthetics and design. (http://www.omegawatches.com) Shah Rukh Khan is an extraordinary individual who embodies TAG Heuer’s unique set of core values: innovation, prestige, performance, precision, and above all passion. (http://www.tagheuer.com) Celebrities are adored by their fans, and advertisers use these stars to capitalise on these feelings to influence the fans towards their brand (Katyal 2004). These constantly running commercials made SRK a universal star, and even if the majority of the audience has no familiarity with him in films, these ads do project him as a celebrated actor. Such is the power of SRK as a brand name that even though the Indian brand Emami’s advertisement, acted by SRK, has not been telecast outside India it has reached British consumers via YouTube (Puri 2007). McCracken offers a slightly more concrete definition for those deemed good enough to be a celebrity endorser: […] any individual who enjoys public recognition and who uses this recognition on behalf of a consumer good by appearing with it in an advertisement. (1989: 9) McCracken may have envisaged such an individual to come before the product, perhaps as a standard against which the popularity and recognition of a particular brand could be measured. However, one could argue that a reverse of that is true: that the brand(s) a celebrity endorses is a measure of how popular he or she is. This is most certainly the case in Asia, where a celebrities’ popularity is regularly measured by the number of endorsement deals that they and/or their management team is able to procure for them. In many cases, this can be considered to be a test of endurance: a celebrity’s ability to remain relevant and popular also requires him to be highly visible. Furthermore, it is a context that allows for the shifting of identification, a changing of branding for people who can now be considered as a target market, rather than remaining exclusively as a target audience. Playing on this star status, these extra-film spectacles bring forth an illusion of the star being accessible to the average man. The shift of male image from the angry young man embodied by Amitabh Bachchan or ‘Big B’ to SRK himself shows the shift of Indian man fighting for justice/nation to an Indian man connected to global networks of consumption and production (Cayle 2008). Amitabh got his angry man status through his tough character in films like

Deewar (1975) and Zanjeer (1973), which were actually released at a period when social struggle and anarchy was at its peak in India, and Amitabh represented a male macho who fought against all the odds for social justice and class differentiation. But towards 1990, India was moving towards globalisation and economic stability through its LPG policy that got reflected in the ideology of Bollywood films as well. This is evident in the ads SRK chose to work in – as a boyish, mischievous man who can appeal to a wider audience across the world, rather than the aggressive version of masculinity (Cayle 2008).

SRK as diaspora Allen (2004) opined that stardom encompasses a duality between actor and character, in which the character is the role he is enacting while actor is the star as a person. Though the actor as a person and star has been exemplified (in later subheads, it follows), SRK’s global appeal lies in the way he deftly dons the character of an NRI or a diaspora citizen underpinned by a desperate urge to reach the motherland and evoke nostalgia, that is, characters that made him a very familiar ‘face of glittering India’ (Chopra 2007: 11) internationally. Unlike the erstwhile negative portrayal of NRI or western-educated characters in Bollywood movies, like Purab Aur Paschim (1970), Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), its ‘return of the nation’ concept set the tone for a global movie that brought nationality, nostalgia, patriotism, love and family into its ambit (Mehta and Pandharipande 2010). Moreover, it began to popularise various culturedriven phenomenon, including Valentine’s Day and Karwa Chauth,1 opening up a market for ‘new cultural merchandise’ (Mehta and Pandharipande 2010: 5). Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ), the film that made SRK a romantic hero, set the record in 2009 for being continuously played for 14 years in a local Mumbai theatre, Maratha Mandir (Times of India 2009). While this film repeats the usual conservative agenda of family, courtship and marriage, it also proposes that Indian family values are portable assets that can be upheld regardless of the country of residence. Interestingly, SRK initially did not really wish to do the film, as he preferred to keep away from the clichéd romantic boy characters and focus instead on offbeat characters, such as the psychopath lover in Darr (1993) and Anjaam (1994), the revengeobsessed son in Baazigar (1993) and so forth. (see Chopra 2004). However, because of DDLJ, the face of SRK as an emblematic figure of a mostly love-struck NRI is stamped among the audience, which made his latter films of a similar theme connect well with the audience. For example, structured around a similar plot of love, marriage and family, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham unravels the story of a western-educated young man who, against the wishes of his parents, marries a middle class ‘desi’2 girl and settles in London, albeit very much abiding to Indian culture, values and norms. Similarly, Kal Ho Na Ho, a film set in New York, portrays him as a dying man (of heart disease) who wishes to spend his few remaining days by

facilitating friendships and courtship, and urging people to enjoy themselves in the present moment since ‘Tomorrow might never come’ (a song from the movie). Swades (2004) confers a different look and approach of an NRI to SRK: in this film, Khan dons the role of a NASA project manager, who after spending 12 years in the United States, returns to India in search of his grandmother.3 Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), a movie that moves away from the traditional Bollywood marriage morality, got national and international acclaim not only because of its rich cast (Shah Rukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Rani Mukherji and Preity Zinta), but also for its potentially risqué subject matter (Alter 2006). Set in New York, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna follows the lives of two married couples who come to realise that they might be happier separately than together. The stories involve foreign locations and not just for item numbers; the characters are themselves diaspora or, if desi, they move around with ease between India and the West (Desai 2007). The pattern of diasporic characters that SRK has dealt with shows not only his acceptance as the archetypal icon of a diasporic Indian among the global audience, but his own flexibility as an actor as well as an entrepreneur to make his character look genuine and appealing. Hence, his stardom is a genuine combination of him as an actor and character that is inextricably subjoined in the mind of diasporic or foreign audience.

Superstar’s cross: media business interest Dyer (1998) argues that a star’s image is produced as a result of combined public discourses media texts like promotion, publicity, films, criticisms and so on, or precisely by the very cultural industry operating under the influence of film industry. Taking the idea a bit further, this article takes the cross-media business interests of film actors, which coincides with star spectacle, as a criterion for the production of star image. Even though it forms a part of image creation and spectacle, cross-media business interest of SRK is excluded from the previous subtitle on star spectacle to dwell into the economic credential of the star. Simply describing SRK as an actor, a performer or an entertainer would not be enough to underline the immensity of his popularity and global appeal. Not content with merely artistic desires and endeavours, he is also open to admitting his love of money, or perhaps, to be more precise, the love of making money through these endeavours (Gahlot 2007). SRK’s open and unabashed willingness to take part in advertisements and commercials denotes an outward desire to make money; furthermore, however, it is a very clear indication of the path that many such performers would willingly accept or decide to position himself not just as a producer, but also as the person who is in complete power and control of filmmaking. In 1999, along with his friend and actress Juhi Chawla, SRK set up the production company Dreamz Unlimited, which later came under his single ownership in 2004 and

renamed it to Red Chillies Entertainment (Bhumika 2011). Even though movies like Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000; about media war) and Asoka (2001; based on the life of the Indian emperor Asoka, the Great) made by his production company were not commercially successful, this in turn stamped SRK as a creative director, adding to his international acclaim. The latest in his bouquet is the big-budget science-fiction movie Ra.One (2011). A major concern about the film was that the superhero genre was experimental, as SRK’s earlier success was predominantly based on romantic roles with only a few notable exceptions such as Swades and Chak De! India (2007). To overcome this anticipated backlash, the production company unleashed a publicity campaigning hitherto unseen in India. Estimated at about Rs 135 crores (Ghosh 2011), and using the latest technology, it fascinated the Bollywood audience. According to Red Chillies COO, about 14–15 studios worked on the film, including some in London, Canada, Massachusetts, South India and Mumbai (Dasgupta and Shah 2011). Ra.One consciously promoted itself not merely as a film to be seen, but a brand to be attached to and enjoyed. In this sense, he attempted to create a buzz for the film using strategies not alien to Hollywood film productions. The recent Formula One race in India saw SRK’s face emblazoned on the Force India racing cars of Paul di Resta and Adrian Sutil, mimicking the efforts by the George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon starrer Ocean’s Twelve (2004). In addition to designing the digital comics for the film, UTV India games have also been inducted into designing a video game of the film for smartphones and Facebook. Blending diplomacy with spectacle, even Russian president Dmitry Medvedev dropped by during the filming to see the stars at work in the shooting location at Mumbai, stating that ‘people of his country have been long-standing fans of Indian movies and stressed the need to cement Indo-Russian ties further by closely working in the field of cinema’ (Outlook 2010: paragraph1). To add to his off-screen business, he was part of a consortium that successfully bid for one of the eight new franchises of cricket’s Indian Premier League. While an interest in the game could certainly be detected from this act, as his ambition initially was to be a sportsperson, his decision was based more on economics. He said: Commerce and business are very important in today’s world. Cricket is commercially viable and we need to make money from this sport. (Outlook 2008) As a step towards conquering the virtual world and through them international followers, SRK stepped into Twitter verse on January 2010, naming his home page ‘@iamsrk.’ Generating over 10,000 followers within 24 hours, he managed to upgrade it to 10 lakhs within a year (Economic Times 2011). However, the success story of other big actors like Amitabh Bachchan and Salman Khan did not work with SRK, as he could not tolerate the criticism from his followers, which made him abandon it.

Subsequently, and as an alternative to the above social media, SRK ventured into Facebook by uploading the premiere of Red Chillies Entertainment–produced documentary on Mughale-Azam (1960), one of India’s legendary movies (The Indian Express 2011). It is proved without any doubt that all his ventures into cyberspace are a strategically planned promotion of himself as well as his products, and that in case of a backlash he can swiftly change the platform. There is a strategy behind using Facebook: Twitter’s microblogging/social network is much smaller than Facebook, with a reported 200 million users, and among them only half is active (Filloux 2011). Yet, for the promotion of Ra.One, as he did not want any void in the promotional activities he again ventured into Twitter in March 2011. Rubin and McHugh (1987) found that social attraction is the most important factor above physical attraction in developing a parasocial relationship, which is essential for evoking alternative companionship as well as personal identity in the creation of star image. These online platforms are the new techniques of interacting with the public with ease, where the decision is at his disposal about when, what, whom and how to communicate. Indeed, SRK made the best use of new technology to harness his new project. It is perhaps the first film in India to make use of Near Field Communications (NFC) technology by setting up Ra.One zones in liaison with Nokia around India, so that those with a Nokia smartphone can get exclusive content from the film such as images, applications, games, on-set exclusives and movie promos by just tapping their devices on Ra.One NFC tags (Rubin and McHugh 1987). It very much goes with Jenkins’s (2006) concept of convergence culture, where narrative transcends to different media platforms, shifting the audience from mere spectators to participants in making meaning from a movie. This virtual wooing is necessary for SRK whose image as a star is built up by fan communities in the lively virtual spaces across the world, like the Russian fan community worldsrk.borda.ru, whose members refer to themselves as Sharumanki (Shahrukh and Maniaki – Russian word for ‘maniacs’) (Rajagopalan 2011). These cross-businesses are the result of a deliberate mind that had already predicted the dubious future of a film star. In future, there won’t be a superstar of longevity. It will be the superstardom of monies. The description of superstardom will be according to the tangibility factor. You may not have a shelf-life of 30 years as of superstars of yore but you will have a shelf life of ‘kitna jaldi bikta hai aur kitna zyada mehnga bikta hai’ [how quickly and for how much stars sell themselves]. (SRK in Ghosh 2011) In 2007, SRK replaced Amitabh Bachchan as the host of the third season of the TV game show Kaun Banega Crorepatii, popularly known as KBC, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Gentleman 2006). As a successful and talented endorser and brand ambassador,

SRK rephrased the presentation with his own typical style of comedy and endearing naughtiness, giving it a ‘fresh and young feeling’ (Sharma 2007). If the original host Amitabh Bachchan floored the audiences with his aura, his trademark humility, his proficiency in Hindi and his warmth for the contestants, King Khan used his wit and humour––including what some viewers described as ‘PJs’, poor jokes––to engage people. (Sharma 2007) As a matter of fact, he was chosen as the anchor of two more reality/game shows: Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain?, an Indian version of the English show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and Zor Ka Jhatka: Total Wipeout based on the American game show Wipeout. For these shows, he was paid Rs 200 million, making him the highest paid star on the small screen (Ghayal 2011). Paradoxically, the host was not present for the shoot, but was virtually incorporated by chroma keying (Parker 2011). Taking cue from this act, it proved that his identity plays a key role in the branding of the self, and SRK as a brand has already imprinted his name and fame around the world as a perfect face for global Indian. While commercial properties could be accrued from the fluidity of his identity, being the everyman Indian, one should consider the different points and readings that could be made into the identity of the man behind the brand. At times, going beyond the silver screen, this branding proved difficult for SRK, a Muslim in a Hindu-majority country. As one of the owners of the Kolkata cricket team in the Indian Premier League, his decision to hire Pakistani players came under severe criticism by the leader of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, a religious social group: By favoring the inclusion of Pakistani cricketers, Shahrukh has proved that he is a Muslim first and foremost and that he will continue to support Pakistan at the cost of our own national interest. (Raina 2010) This was in clear reference to the caveat that Pakistan is the breeding ground for terrorists. The strong reaction that a mere statement could provoke highlights two things worth considering. First, it illuminates the high standing that a performer has in a country like India. Rightly believing themselves to be from an elite industry, actors and actresses are not merely performers who recite lines on the screen, rather they are also role models for the society at large. While this is not an approach unique to India (we can detect similar patterns of role modelling in countries like Korea, Japan and China, amongst many other Asian nations), the pressures become even higher in a multi-nation state like India, where the presence of many different languages, religions, and, perhaps most importantly, tribes, amongst others,

contributes to a heady mix of a divided unity. SRK is not just a role model to be looked up to; he is a public figure to be owned. It should be further looked into as the second thing to consider. While this strong sense of ownership is a convoluted one, it cannot be discarded, for it is the very fluid identity of the actor that, as discussed above, contributes to a misunderstanding at times and a wide chasm of affection and disaffection at others. Many of us would, for example, be proud of someone of our own group, our own religion, our own tribe who is successful. It is such identification with the success of such figures that the imagined tribal identities are further strengthened. This pride further enhances the sense of connection one may feel towards such figures. As such, SRK is not just seen by many as an Indian actor, he is also seen as a Muslim figure. Such attempts of cultural ownership of SRK run afoul of the conditions and the environment within which he was brought up, where his father never forced him to follow any particular religion or religious books, leaving the decision to him to choose his path (Chopra 2007). Viewed from this point, this upbringing has done much to help encourage a more moderate view, certainly in comparison with more hard-line segments of society. By all accounts, he is happily married to Gauri, his childhood sweetheart, who is a Hindu. This has further cemented his image as someone who transcends racial, social and other such boundaries. In fact, the perception of western audience about Indian religiosity or the unique Indian trait of Muslim-Hindu intermingling is best portrayed by SRK through his Hindu characters. Moreover, when he does Muslim characters, it tends to deal with the critical social issue of accreditation and trust with Muslim identity (as his characters in Chak De! India, in which he played the role of a Muslim hockey coach and in My Name Is Khan as a Muslim guy with Asperger’s disease who ventures into a journey to inform the world that he is not a terrorist). Apparently, he turned out to be one of the few symbols that can represent Indian imagery of secularism in the minds of international audience. While such open demonstrations of hatred happen on an irregular basis, we can see how it could potentially affect his professional work. The portrayal of the eponymous character in Asoka, a film also produced by him in 2001, has attracted criticism from some quarters. The fact that the character’s religion was not necessarily the central theme of the film did not hinder the feedback that he should not have acted as a Buddhist. The film itself failed to make the expected impact at the box office. A more recent example could be drawn from the cricket incident, with the organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad going as far as asking people to stay away from his films, given their belief in Pakistan’s role behind the terror attack on Mumbai (Outlook 2010b). This was early in 2010, around the time his film My Name Is Khan was being released. While that warning did not have much of a discernible impact on the film’s popularity, it highlights the tension between an actor and his religious identity in the public space. If endorsement and franchises promote SRK as a global star, he is also viewed as a paid

ballerina, a man next door or an ‘easily accessible guy’ in many wealthy weddings in India (Ghosh 2011). To that end, he has very astutely set up ventures that would supplement his own career in the entertainment industry as box office collection is rocketing in Bollywood (Khilnani 2008). Weber’s theory posits (1978) that persuasion of audience by an individual is done through their charisma, which Dyer explains is achieved through their ‘privileged position in the definition of social roles and types’ (1998: 8). Defining the role of a film star is often very tricky not only because of the whole pool of actors waiting for the chance, but also because of the way in which the actor can make his on-screen as well as off-screen persona blend so well to evoke genuineness in this social role model. With his desire for financial gains and stardom, SRK had ventured into many extra-art/filmic activities, sometimes provoking serious criticism and sometimes appraisals. In fact, Dyer (2003) posits that star image functions as a polysemy containing a multitude of meanings and affects in which some are masked. The star image of SRK is a combination of an actor, brand ambassador of a foreign country/state (Malacca of Malaysia), proprietor of a cricket team a producer and the characters he undertakes. However, these faces combine in his star image, masking the contradictions of his business choice or his mannerisms.

Datuk Shahrukh and Malaysia While SRK’s Muslim identity often conflicts with his self-perception, in Malaysia it seems to be a blessing in disguise for him. With Malaysia being a Muslim-majority country and the Indian diaspora forming about 8 per cent of the population (according to the Report by High Commission of India, Kuala Lumpur: 4), for a star like SRK it is as good as a home market. The presence of this significant mass of Indian diaspora in Malaysia, many of whom originate from migrant workers recruited to work on tea and rubber plantations in the early 1890s after the abolition of slavery, can be seen as the original impetus behind the success of many Bollywood films there (Lal 2006). In fact, three key factors can be identified behind the success and popularity of Bollywood movies in Malaysia: (1) the presence of a significant Indian diaspora; (2) limited local film industry in Malaysia and (3) Bollywood’s global appeal through its branding and marketing strategies. According to scholars like Van der Heide (2002) and Gaik Cheng (2006), Bollywood films were popular in Malaysia even before 1991, but none of the Bollywood actors have ever experienced such prominence in Malaysia. Hence, the stardom of SRK could be largely related to the global flow of Bollywood as well as the star himself. Even before the advent of Hindi channels like Zee Variasi, the first Hindi language channel to reach Malaysia (which was launched in 2006), Bollywood as well as its stars were equally familiar for Malaysians. Here, stardom of SRK is significant as this is related to the

branding of Malaysia and the promotion of the nation’s tourism, which makes his appeal very intricate and unique in Malaysia. In 2008, SRK was awarded the Darjah Mulia Seri Melaka by the Government of Malacca, which confers him the Title of Datuk, akin to the British knighthood, for indirectly promoting Malacca through six of his films (John 2008). The decision to award Khan with the Datukship was received with much criticism from across the country, with local artists and public noting that the award could have been given to a local actor or artist. Malaysian and Malaccan state authorities defended their decision saying that it earned them more publicity and tourists than sponsored advertising on any international TV channel could attract. Hence, this felicitation ‘will certainly help promote both Malaysia and Malacca’ and will ‘be the ‘bridge for more movies to be shot at the historical city’ (Malacca chief minister, as quoted in New Strait Times 2008). If for SRK it is a way to make a permanent base of fandom and honour in a foreign country, for Malaysia it is a boost for tourism from across the world, as SRK is already stamped as an international brand himself. Moreover, he was the first Datukship recipient from Malacca to don the official state Samping (a wrap-around adornment worn with the traditional dress of Malaysia) during a special investiture ceremony. Thereafter, SRK in Malaysia is always news, and he in fact has made use of this conferred status to further his appeal as a star. When Malaysian Grand Prix Formula 1 race was ongoing in the country in 2010, SRK made a surprise visit to greet the Indian Racing champion Karun Chandhok (ESPN Star.com 2010). It led to a huge publicity hike, with the Malaysian Grand Prix official website quoting: Rumours of his arrival began circling around the circuit on his impending arrival, with photographers and reporters anxiously waiting to capture the moment of his arrival at SIC. (www.malaysiangp.com) One of the main ideologies that is dominant in SRK’s case is how his religious identity works as a determining factor in the political arena of Malaysia. Conferring on him a prestigious title and making him a brand ambassador should be analysed within the framework of how he as a ‘Muslim Bollywood’ actor gave him a notable place in the political sphere. The post 9/11 public sphere in the western and American world was skeptical and paranoid about the Islamic identity, personality and religious rituals. The celebrated public figures in the Islamic world were often the representative religious leaders from the (mullahs or muftis) surah council of the respective nations or the autocratic dictators from the monarchies of the Middle East or the Arab nations. The 1995 Asian financial crisis placed the Malaysian government to make tourism their favourable sector of economy. Though the Datukship is justified as a gesture to promote Malaysia and its tourism (it is discussed in detail later in this chapter), his

religion plays a very crucial decisive factor when considering the Islamic tourism in Malaysia. Apart from the general tourism campaigns, Malaysia being an Islamic nation was gradually trying to brand the nation as ‘Halal Tourist destination’ for those who wish a religious experience (Islamic Tourism Centre Malaysia website). It was at this crucial and critical juncture the middle class Muslim or Islamic society were in search of an icon or a star from their own religion, and having a middle class identity that could be projected as the clean and common true representative of an Islamic world. In an Islamic nation like Malaysia, SRK acts as their true representative as a star entertainer, who carries an Islamic identity in name and in the upbringing. As an all-round identifiable performer, already hallmarked his stage and screen presence beyond the multicultural and multireligious boundaries of India and abroad, SRK is well received and accepted in the Malaysian soil beyond doubt or deliberations. In 2012, SRK was bestowed with yet another award in Malaysia, BrandLaureate, or being India’s foremost brand ambassador in Malaysia. During the conferring of BrandLaureate award during Mahathir bin Mohamad’s (former Malaysian prime minister) birthday, SRK made this comment, It is always a pleasure to be amongst friends and to be given so much love and motivation to do better. (Shahrukh quoted in ‘ShahRukh Given …’ 2012) He was also presented with a digital Quran during that event by Mahathir, which is enough to justify the religious favouritism. International stars like Jackie Chan and Sean Connery have shot their films, Entrapment (1999) and Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992), respectively, in Malaysia, but Shahrukh and his film One Two Ka Four became a reason for choosing him for receiving an award. In 2000, during the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, the Malaysian market was hoarded with postcards and greeting cards with the faces of SRK and Salman Khan. However, Salman Khan has failed to maintain public recognition following his first performance in Malaysia, which disillusioned the audience. In all his press conferences and public speeches, SRK enhances this connectivity by constantly using phrases like ‘Insha Allah’, which reduces the distance between him and his audience in Malaysia, creating cross-cultural appeal unachievable by any other stars. The construction of SRK as a quintessential pan-Indian hero transforms him into a special kind of celebrity (Cayla 2008), who transcends the geographical and religious borders of admiration. Building upon Bollywood’s popularity in Malaysia, SRK could be one of the best options for branding Malaysia. This not only holds the aspirations of his fans in Malaysia, but also takes the Indian fans back home to visit Malaysia. As the promotional activities often adopt unique and extreme strategies, it was not surprising when the Malacca prison welcomed the Don 2 (2011) cast and crew to shoot the movie in 2011, making it the first one to be shot inside the prison. Sinha (2011) claims that the

security measures were very stringent; for instance, the crew was ordered to enter the premises in the morning, keeping aside their cellphones and laptop, and exit together in the evening when the prisoners will ‘stand facing the wall’ (paragraph 4). Since 1997, SRK has been a regular performer in Malaysia, which became even more crucial as his responsibility has elevated to a higher status of an ambassador. In 1997, he performed in the Asha Bhosle’s Moments in Time in Malaysia, which was followed by another concert Shahrukh-Karisma: Live in Malaysia concert in 1998. In November 2002, he returned with the Fire & Flames concert in Malaysia alongside Rani Mukherjee, Saif Ali Khan and a 40-member troupe of singers and dancers, which was followed by his Temptations Reloaded show in 2014. Even though Bollywood as well as its stars are popular in Malaysia, its inception is not devoid of any criticisms or concerns. Moreover, in Malaysia, there is conflicting perceptions regarding Bollywood predominantly from two different sections of society; for the politicians or the governing body of Malaysia, Shah Rukh Khan, or precisely Bollywood, serves as a branding tool while for the religious leaders this is a threat to the Islam society. Socio-cultural and religious differences have been cited as areas of concern in regard to the exhibition of Indian films in Malaysia. Like cigarette smoking, Bollywood’s seduction is penetrating, and cannot be resisted even by the pious despite the obvious degenerative effects it brings––ustaz and ustazah (religious teachers), the fully tudung-ed lady and the goaty-bearded religious school graduate with that ‘Islamist’ smile, all were seduced. (Koya 2002) This is manifested even in the eminence of SRK in Malaysia, which was triggered with his Datukship. This made the government take a strategic middle path in many ways. As a swift move to exhibit the danger of being a fascinated Bollywood fan, TV1, the government television channel in Malaysia, telecasted a telemovie in Malay on a boy obsessed with SRK, Bollywood and its dance and song, finally regretting for being irresponsible towards his family as well as his studies (see Azz 2011). Such an approach in the telemovie reflects the ongoing hidden tensions among at least a section of population regarding the glorification of SRK in Malaysia. To add with Koya’s (2002) opinion quoted above, among a section of conservative Muslims in Malaysia, it is fact which is hardly acceptable that a man who is always in limelight as a chain-smoker becomes the role model of youth in their country. Moreover, SRK, who is a foreigner, has achieved wide fan base and acceptance in Malaysia, which was unachievable even for their legendary actor/director P. Ramlee. Overwhelmed with his stardom in Malaysia, however, SRK opened a studio in Malacca after being conferred with the title of Datuk (Indiaserver.com 2009). Impressed with SRK’s

Malaysian success, in 2010 noted Bollywood choreographer Saroj Khan opened a dance school here, providing four-month diploma courses and the opportunity to be the back dancers in films shot in Malaysia (The Star 2010).

Conclusion The journey from a layman to a celebrity or star requires the substantiation from the audience. As Dyer (2003) argues, the audience validates a star based on his on-screen appeal, as well his privileged role in the social set-up. Even when these two criteria have been well defined and adopted by stars, a major part of the downfall of this audience’s judgment will be in the way these audience construct their own text and generate their own meanings regarding the respective star text (see Nayar 2009). With the information and public sphere now going online, SRK realises the need of his presence in the virtual world to influence the audience’s construction and rereading of the star text. It is mainly because of this heterogeneous and complicated audience structure that there arises the need for a slew of strategic branding and round-the-clock availability and visibility of stars, together with a meticulous effort to be one among the layman that makes him a hero. As the article exemplifies, SRK is successful to a greater extent in evolving into a star, making himself visible 24 hours a day through different media and managing to be in the limelight in his multiple roles as actor, producer, entrepreneur and a perfect family man. As SRK seized the entire commercial and pompous awards in India like Filmfare, StarScreen awards, International Indian film Academy awards and so on, he was never recognised by the Indian government with a National Award that fetched him the title ‘Padmashree’, which is considered as the most prestigious recognition as far as an actor is concerned. As a response to this, SRK commented: I have a space in my library for a National Award. And I promise you before I finish I’ll keep one there or steal one. (quoted in Shandilya 2010) This dampening defiance from the Indian Government never served as a stifling his path in aiming high, but serves as an unquenched desire guiding him through all the ventures that is unique to him. Apparently, it is not one’s real talent in acting, but his endowment in making himself a transnational identity that makes the difference. Even though the prestigious Oscar or the National Award never honoured his talent, his popularity and appeal among the audience surpasses everyone. It is no wonder that in the Hindustan Times – MaRS Youth Survey 2012 – 15.4 per cent voted for SRK, elevating him to the top of the list (Hindustan Times 2012). If at all his period in film industry as an actor will sooner or later culminate (which he predicts), as a strategic entrepreneur he had laid plans that continue to make him a

star providing him with fame, money and status.

Notes 1 An annual one-day festival in which married women fast the whole day for the safety and longevity of their husbands. 2 Hindi word for ‘indigenous’. 3 Swades is inspired by the story of Aravinda Pillalamarri and Ravi Kuchimanchi, the NRI couple who returned to India and developed the pedal power generator to light remote, off-the-grid village schools (Rao 2004).

References Alter,

E.

2006.

‘Kabhi

Alvida

Naa

Kehna’,

Film

Journal

International,

14

January.

http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/esearch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003018512 (accessed on 4 July 2012). Azz, J. 2011. ‘Shahrukh Khan Malaysia (2011) [Malay] SDTVRip Mkv-Jie’. http://jieazzmovie.net/mkvrmvb/shahrukh-khanmalaysia-2011-malay-sdtvrip-mkv-jie/ (accessed on 12 January 2012). Bhumika,

K.

2011.

‘Sweet

Smile

of

The

Success’,

Hindu,

13

April.

Star,

October.

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2011/04/28/stories/2011042850950100.htm (accessed on 6 July 2011). Carvalho,

M.

2008.

‘Chief

Minister

Explains

Shahrukh

Khan’s

Datukship’,

The

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/10/11/nation/20081011181943&sec=nation (accessed on 12 January 2012). Cashmore, E. 2006. Celebrity Culture. London: Routledge. Cayle, J. 2008. ‘Following the Endorser’s Shadow: SRK Khan and the Creation of Cosmopolitan Indian Male’, Advertising and Society Review, 9(2). http://www.juliencayla.com/SRK.pdf (accessed on 12 January 2012). Chopra, A. 2007. The King of Bollywood; Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema. New York: Warner Books. ———. 2004. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge: The Making of a Blockbuster. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Choudahary, P. 2011. ‘Shahrukh Khan Abandons Twitter, Joins Facebook’, India Today, 21 March. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/articlePrint.jsp?aid=133007 (accessed on 12 January 2012). ‘Classics like Mughal-e-Azam

Cannot

Be

Remade,

Says

SRK’.

2011.

NDTV

(online),

25

February.

http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_story.aspx? section=Movies&Id=ENTEN20110170250&keyword=bollywood&subcatg=MOVIESINDIA&nid=87752 (accessed on 17 June 2012). Dasgupta, S. and Jigar Shah. 2011. ‘RA.One: Decoded’, Box Office India, 13 January. http://www.boxofficeindia.co.in/ra-onedecoded/ (accessed on 4 April 2012). ‘Datuk Shah Rukh Khan at the Sepang International Circuit’. 2010. Malaysian Grand Prix Website. http://www.malaysiangp.com.my/news/formula-1-datuk-shah-rukh-khan-sepang-interna (accessed on 3 February 2012). ‘DDLG

Turns

15

at

Maratha

Mandir

Today’.

2009.

Times

of

India,

20

October.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009–10–20/mumbai/28070865_1_cinema-hall-first-film-silver-jubilee (accessed on 12 October 2011). Desai,

M.

2007.

‘Bollywood

Needs

to

Change

Its

Act’,

The

Hindu,

25

November.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/11/25/stories/2007112550030100.htm (accessed on 24 January 2012). ‘Doing

Business

in

Malaysia’.

High

2009.

Commission

of

India,

Kuala

Lumpur.

http://cii.in/WebCMS/Upload/new%20final844.pdf (accessed on 17 February 2012). Dore, S. 2009. ‘Authority Run-In Is No Publicity Stunt’, Variety, 24–30 August. https://variety.com/2009/scene/marketsfestivals/authority-run-in-is-no-publicity-stunt-1118007600/ (accessed on 7 February 2012). Dyer, R. 2003. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: Routledge. ———.1998. Stars. 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute. ‘Extra

Honour

for

Shahrukh’.

The

2008.

Star,

5

December.

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?

file=/2008/12/5/nation/2726906&sec=nation (accessed on 17 January 2012). Filloux, F. 2011. ‘Does Twitter Have More Influence than Facebook?’ The Guardian, 12 January. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/07/twitter-facebook (accessed on 2 February 2013). Gahlot, D. 2007. King Khan. New Delhi: Roli Books. Gaik Cheng, K. 2006. Reclaiming Adat. Vancouver: UBC Press. Gentleman, A. 2006. ‘Letter from India: India’s Top Marketing Tool? Two Middle-Aged Bollywood Stars’, The New York Times, 7 November. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/world/asia/07iht-letter.3822369.html (accessed on 12 January 2012). Ghayal. 2011. ‘Shahrukh Khan – The Highest Paid Bollywood Actor on Small Screen in “Zor Ka Jhatka – Total Wipeout”’, Zimbio. http://www.zimbio.com/Shahrukh+Khan/articles/Zssd7hIy2Pq/Shahrukh+Khan+Highest+Paid+Bollywood+Actor (accessed on 12 January 2012). Ghosh, A. 2011. ‘It Took Me 20 years to Be an Overnight Success: Shahrukh Khan’, Times of India, 6 November. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011–11–06/special-report/30366066_1_ke-liye-shah-rukh-khan-big-stars (accessed on 12 January 2012). Harmon, K. 2005. ‘Bibliographic Review on Celebrity Culture’, The Hedgehog Review, 7(1): 98–106. ‘HT-MaRS

Youth

Survey’.

The

2012.

Hindustan

Times,

6

February.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Specials/coverage/YouthSurvey2012/RoleModels.aspx (accessed on 8 February 2012). Hu, W. 2009. ‘Bollywood Star’s Questioning at Newark Airport Is Talk of India Day’, New York Times, 16 August. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/nyregion/17india.html (accessed on 13 February 2012). Iyer,

R.

2003.

‘Yes,

Kal

Ho

Naa

Ho

Is

Worth

Watching!’

Rediff.com,

25

November.

http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/nov/25kal.htm/ (accessed on 12 January 2012). James,

R.

2009.

‘Bollywood

Star

Shah

Rukh

Khan’,

Time

Online,

18

August.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1917090,00.html (accessed on 12 June 2012). Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. John, J. G. 2008. ‘Malacca Wants More Films Shot There’, The New Strait Times, 5 December. http://my.vlex.com/vid/malacca-wants-more-films-shot-there-78995650 (accessed on 16 February 2012).

Joshi, N. 2007. ‘Films Are for Entertainment, Messages Are for the Post Office’, Outlook, 22 October. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?235838 (accessed on 13 February 2012). Kabir, N. M. 2005. The Inner and Outer Worlds of Shahrukh Khan. India: English. Kalra, N. 2011. ‘How Ra.One’s Marketing Robs Shahrukh Khan Off His Most Lovable Traits’, The Economic Times, 23 October.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011–10–23/news/30310764_1_shah-rukh-khan-traits-marketing

(accessed on 22 December 2011). Katyal,

S.

2004.

‘Impact

of

Celebrity

Endorsement

on

a

Brand’,

Chill

Breeze,

12

February.

http://www.chillibreeze.com/articles/Celebrity-endorsement.asp (accessed on 4 February 2012). Kellner, D. 2003. Media Spectacle. London: Routledge. Khilnani,

R.

2008.

‘Why

Bollywood

Actors

Are

Turning

Producers’,

IBN

Live.com.

13

January.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/why-bollywood-actors-are-turning-producers/61665–8.html (accessed on 4 February 2012). Koya,

A.

R.

2002.

‘Bollywood

in

Malaysia:

Not

Everyone

Loves

It’,

16

April.

http://www.littlespeck.com/informed/2002/CInformed-020416.htm (accessed on 2 July 2010). Krishnamurthy, J. 2011. ‘Katrina Kaif and Shahrukh Khan Lead among Celebrity Endorsers’. 22 September. http://www.campaignindia.in/Article/273655,katrina-kaif-and-shah-rukh-khan-lead-among-celebrity-endorsers.aspx (accessed on 17 January 2012). Lal, V. 2006. ‘Multiculturalism at Risk: The Indian Minority in Malaysia’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(35): 3764–5. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Diaspora/IndiansMalaysia.pdf (accessed on 15 December 2011). Marshall, P. D. 2002. ‘The Cinematic Apparatus and the Construction of the Film Celebrity’, in Graeme Turner (ed.), The Film Cultures Reader, pp. 228–39. London: Routledge. McCracken, G. 1989. ‘Who Is the Celebrity Endorser? Cultural Foundations of the Endorsement Process’, Journal of Consumer Research, 16(3): 310–21. Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘Medvedev Seeks Closer Indo-Russian Film Ties’, 2010. Outlook, 22 December. http://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx? artid=706024 (accessed on 12 January 2012). Mehrotra, S. 2011. ‘Jo Dikhta Hai Woh Bikta Hai’, Burrp, 5 October. http://know.burrp.com/arts-entertainment/jo-dikhta-haiwoh-bikta-hai/27657 (accessed on 13 January 2012). Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya and Rajeshwari Pandharipande. 2010. Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora. New York: Anthem Press. Nayar, P. K. 2009. Seeing Stars. New Delhi: Sage. Outlook.

2008.

‘Cricket

Is

Commercially

Viable:

Shahrukh

Khan’,

28

February.

http://www.outlookindia.com/news/article/cricket-is-commercially-viable-shahrukh-khan/549005 (accessed on 14 July 2014). ———. 2010b. ‘VHP Calls for Boycott of Shahrukh Khan's Film’, http://www.outlookindia.com/news/article/vhp-calls-forboycott-of-shahrukh-khans-film/674153 (accessed on 15 July 2014). Parker,

S.

2011.

‘SRK’s

a

Long-distance

Host’,

Mid-Day,

12

January.

http://www.mid-

day.com/entertainment/2011/jan/240111-Zor-Ka-Jhatka-Shah-Rukh-Khan-Argentina.htm (accessed on 4 February 2012).

Puri, N. 2007. ‘Beyond the Pale’, BBC News, 25 September. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7010885.stm (accessed on 12 February 2012). Raina,

B.

2010.

‘Constructing

Shahrukh

Khan’,

ZCommunications,

4

February.

http://www.zcommunications.org/constructing-shah-rukh-khan-by-badri-raina (accessed on 12 January 2012). Rajagopalan, S. 2011 ‘Shahrukh Khan as Media Text: Celebrity, Identity and Emotive Engagement in a Russian Online Community’, Celebrity Studies, 2(3): 263–76. Rao, V. 2004. ‘The Real Swadesis’, NRI Pulse, 14 January. http://nripulse.com/profile_RaviAravinda.htm (accessed on 4 February 2012). Rojek, C. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Rubin, R. B. and Michael P. McHugh. 1987. ‘Development of Parasocial Interaction Relationships’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 31(3): 279–92. Shandilya, A. 2010. ‘My Name Is Khan: All Set to Woo the Audience’, eZine Articles, 12 February. http://ezinearticles.com/? My-Name-is-Khan—-All-Set-to-Woo-the-Audience&id=3740780 (accessed on 17 January 2012). ‘Shah Rukh Khan’. 2010. TagHeuer Website. http://www.tagheuer.com/int-en/shah-rukh-khan#/int-en-shah-rukh-khan (accessed on12 February 2012). ‘Sharukh Khan in New York’. 2000. OMEGA Website, 14 September. http://www.omegawatches.com/news/internationalnews/international-news-detail/85?tx_ttnews%5Bpointer%5D=66 (accessed on 17 January 2012). ‘Sharukh Khan Malaysia’. 2011. http://jieazzmovie.net/mkvrmvb/shahrukh-khan-malaysia-2011-malay-sdtvrip-mkv-jie/ (accessed on 3 January 2012). Sharma,

P.

2007.

‘The

New

Shahrukh

Show

Is

The

Here’,

Hindu,

23

January.

http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/23/stories/2007012315310100.htm (accessed on 6 November 2011). Sinha,

S.

2011.

‘Shahrukh

Khan

in

Malaysian

Jail’,

Times

of

India,

2

December.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011–12–02/news-interviews/30463567_1_prison-inmates-malacca (accessed on 13 February 2012). ‘SRK

Visit

Expected

to

Boost

Tourism’.

Times

2008.

of

India,

6

December.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Indians_Abroad/SRK_visit_expected_to_boost_tourism/rssarticleshow/3799867.cms (accessed on 15 November 2011). Thakraney,

Anil.

2007.

‘SRK

Turned

Down

KBC

2’.

Times

of

India,

11

February.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2007–02–11/news-interviews/27882152_1_srk-king-khan-kbc (accessed on 13 November 2011). Tuteja,

Ankit.

2011.

‘RA.One:

Shah

Rukh’s

Tryst

with

Technology’,

IBN

Live.com,

24

October.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/raone-shah-rukhs-tryst-with-technology/196011–8–66.html (accessed on 13 January 2012). Upala,

K.

B.

2010.

‘Shahrukh

Changes

Kolkata

Knight

Riders

Colour’,

OneIndia,

8

March.

http://entertainment.oneindia.in/bollywood/news/2010/shahrukh-kkr-cheerleaders-080310.html (accessed on 12 February 2012). Van der Heide, W. 2002. Malaysian cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

16 Old wine in a new bottle Bollywood films shot in Australia after 9/11 Sanchari De and Amit Sarwal

Indian cinema/Bollywood in Australia To critically understand Australia, its place in the Asia Pacific region and the world, we need to build on universal themes and refamiliarise ourselves with Australia through film-makers’ eyes. An exploration of the cinema of both Australia and India can aid a better appreciation of Australia-India cultural links, which will eventually underline the strong links between India and Australia generated through the shared colonial history, Indian diaspora, cricket, tourism and the two governments’ strategic interest in the subcontinental region.1 It appears today that Australia has become a hot destination for leading Indian film-makers, with a successful foray of Bollywood films like Soldier (1998), Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Salaam Namaste (2005), Chak De! India (2007), Heyy Babyy (2007), Singh Is Kinng (2008) and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2014), to name a select few. Indian films now also feature regularly among the top 20 box office grossers in Australia. The recent success of Dhoom 3, earning a total of US$ 1,749,612 (Rs 9.48 crore), is a prime example. But the Australia-India cultural connection is not a product of this present age. As early as the 1940s, short films/documentaries made on development projects in India were showcased by Australian governments to generate support for various Australian aid programs, especially in the areas of farming, sheep rearing, medical research and heavy industries. Around the same time, an Australian ballet dancer and stage manager Louise Lightfoot worked with film-maker K. Subramanyam and Australia’s leading cinematographer Tom Cowan shot films in South India. As early as 1955, the High Commissioner of India to Australia, General K. M. Cariappa, screened to a full house at Capitol Theatre in Canberra a 1948 Hindi film, Chandralekha. Later, India’s noted film-maker Satyajit Ray showcased his Teen Kanya at the 1962 Melbourne Film Festival and won the Golden Boomerang Award. He came back again with his three superb creations – the 1963 film Mahanagar, 1964 film Charulata and 1977 film Shatranj Ke Khilari at Melbourne, Perth and Sydney film festivals, respectively. In the late 1960s and 1970s, an Indian film was

screened almost once every month with Greek subtitles for an audience comprising of Greeks and Indians. The 1996 Tamil film Indian (released in Hindi as Hindustani) has been credited for featuring the first appearance of Kangaroos in Indian cinema. The director of the film, Shankar, visited Australia alongside his cinematographer Jeeva and music director A. R. Rahman while looking for locations and composing tunes. They shot a duet, ‘Telephone dhun mein hasnae wali, Melbourne machali machalnae wali …’ (sung by Hari Haran and Kavita Krishnamurthy), between Kamal Haasan and Manisha Koirala in Sydney and Canberra.2 But as early as 1974, a Hindi film called Majboor showed (in the background of one scene) a poster promoting Australia as a tourist destination with the words: ‘Hop, Skip and Jump’, and the picture of an Australian icon, the Boxing Kangaroo! In recent years, more than 100 Indian films, television serials, commercials and music videos have been shot in Australia (Sarwal 2014). Today, Indian cinema has found its niche and an ever-increasing fan following that has resulted in a number of Indian/Bollywood film festivals in various major cities of Europe, South Africa, Japan and North America. In recognition of the expanding love affair between Australia and Indian film-makers, various state governments have now started their own Indian Film Festivals (such as in Melbourne and Brisbane). Also, there was definitely an Indian classics and Bollywood-inspired moment in Bazz Lhurmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001), but Australian film’s influence on Bollywood, with some strange similarities in plots, characters or inspired scenes like Dav Pech (1989), Salaam Namaste (2005) and Crocodile Dundee (1986); Khosla ka Ghosla (2006) and The Castle (1997); Road, Movie (2009) and The Picture Show Man (1977); D-Day (2013) and Let’s Get Skase (2001) to name a few, is yet to be researched.

Old wine in a new bottle: Salaam Namaste (2005) In the context of globalisation and the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, the Indian diaspora became a lucrative market for the producers of Bombay cinema. The term ‘Bollywood’ that makes its appearance in the critical discourses on Hindi popular cinema after the 1990s underlines an industrial condition. After liberalisation, the locations in India along with the foreign locale became meaningful to the diasporic audience. Now, the foreign locale, instead of remaining a romantic space for a utopian lifestyle,3 becomes an economic space where one searches for a job or money (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 59). As Makarand R. Paranjape puts it: Bollywood, which is primarily a money making business enterprise, has been quick to recognise this new market and therefore has re-packaged itself to appeal to and cash in on

it. For the first time, the overseas Indian experience is valid in its own right, without a ‘return’ to India. In the process Bollywood has become globalised, but it is also Indianizing the world. This process of not only globalizing itself but spreading images of India abroad and thereby Indianizing the globe is happening in unprecedented ways. In fact, this is how, Bollywood has been consolidating its position as the second cinema of the world. (‘Going Global’) And Bollywood becomes a means of defining the Indianness to the diaspora. In Vijay Mishra’s words, it ‘functions as something more than popular Indian cinema produced in Mumbai’ (2008: 473). The Bollywood films in the 1990s, keeping the Diaspora in mind, emphasised the longing for the motherland left behind. The image of India was invested with the logic of the ‘ideal’ space with romantic nostalgia. There are some formal shifts in the Bollywood films made in the 1990s. Bollywood’s representation of the Indian diaspora in the global context has undergone certain transformations. In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the NRIs were shown either as insignificant supporting characters or as people with negative traits, as ‘alien’ in the Indian spaces. M. Madhava Prasad (1998) shows how the new social order represented by NRI villain Navrangilal in the film Khandan (1965) gets firmly rejected by the film’s feudal structure. The image of the West that was formed through these representations was neither adorable nor appreciable. Even in the 1980s, rough angry heroes fought against these corrupted harbingers of the ‘bad west’. But in the 1990s, as Rajinder K. Dudrah (2006) argues, Bollywood took note of the NRIs as cosmopolitan in mind. Though their appearances and linguistic competence are much akin to those of the Westerners, their hearts are truly Indian. NRIs, specifically the first generation NRIs in films like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) and Pardes (1997), long for the homeland. This scenario again changes in the post-9/11 situation. Most of the characters in films like Kal Ho Na Ho (2003) or Kabhi Alvidaa na Kehna (2006) are global selves. They are indeed NRIs but they (in this case the second generation, particularly) are settled in their middle class spaces and do not long for the homeland left behind. Instead, they confront some conflicting uneasiness in their everyday situations. The US situation in this post-9/11 phase is in fact disturbing for US citizens (including NRIs). On the occasion of the first anniversary of 9/11, Wheeler Winston Dixon writes: ‘It has been an uneasy year, one that has seen the chasm between the rich and the poor widen’ (2004: 2). George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act on 26 October 2001 that made some fundamental changes to the US Legal Rights. This Act bestowed the immigration authorities with immense power to detain and deport any immigrant suspected of terrorist activities. In the light of this law, Bollywood films with diasporic people become particularly relevant in the post-9/11 context. The trend of framing ‘West’ in the history of popular Hindi Cinema of India is particularly

significant, while discussing the Bollywood exploitation of the locales of Australia. Australia becomes significantly favourite of Bollywood primarily because what Paranjape points out: […] thematically in Bombay Cinema, Australia seems to stand for a non-American or European, but nevertheless advanced Western, even white society. The question is why is such a site at all required? First off it seems to me that it reflects a long overdue acknowledgement of the inherent complexity of what constitutes the ‘west’ to the Indian mind. Bollywood, which has usually resorted to the negative stereotyping and homogenizing of the West, has last begun to show the West in more complex colors. Australia, furthermore, represents a slightly different possibility for an Indian immigrant than do, say, the United States or England. (‘Going Global’) In the post-9/11 context, when the Patriot Act was already in motion, the concept of ‘Australian Dream’ seemed more appealing and an easier to avail option than the ‘North American Dream’. The United States seems to have lost its lure with ‘racial profiling’ (especially of megastar Shah Rukh Khan) and visa problems apparently forced many producers to look for locales elsewhere. Australia also fast replaced South Africa, another lucrative destinations for film shoots, as in the 1990s South Africa was troubled by not only its apartheid past, but also a growing underworld, especially the extortion rackets and fight amongst various groups for control of business (see also Hasnain 2011). When Bollywood travels to Australia, this foreign space not only offers a safer dream that is the extension of the native dream, but also represents itself as a space where these dreams come true. This is best represented in Salaam Namaste, a 2005 romantic comedy film directed by Siddharth Anand and produced under the Yash Raj Films banner. Ambar ‘Amby’ Malhotra (Preity Zinta) rebels against her family and falls in love with the life of Melbourne where she studies to become a doctor, and to support her study she works as a radio jockey. Nikhil ‘Nick’ Arora (Saif Ali Khan), on the other hand, engages more of himself in the job profile of a chef despite being an architect. These alternative career options are emphasised over the conventional professions throughout the film. Again, in Chak De India (2007), winning of the match against and in Australia is retrieval of the lost glory both for Indian team as well as for its coach Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan). A film like Salaam Namaste is indeed an exemplar of the ‘Australian Dream’ as an alternative to the United States or the ‘Western Dream’. The entire film, though shot realistically, is essentially set in a dream world, and to perceive this dream thoroughly it is necessary to take into account the images and pro-filmic people that are marginalised or excluded to bring forth the ‘feel-good’ effect. The part-time job of Ambar would literally be a dream for an immigrant student, who in most cases ends up being a taxi driver (see ‘Loss of …’

2006). According to Adrian Athique: It is the young CEOs and rising IT professionals who are the ideal(ised) NRIs here, stirring national pride and deserving cultural citizenship, not the politically marginalised Indians of Fiji or Burma, or the taxi drivers of London or Leeds. (2005: 120) Apart from excluding the controversial social issues, the film also excludes prejudices related to premarital sex and pregnancy. More often than not, popular Hindi Films with diasporic people gives voice to those issues that are debatable within the social sphere of India. As Paranjape notes: Whether it is communalism or terrorism, social unrest or inequality, homosexuality or women’s rights, Khalistan or Babri masjid, cops or dons, it is Bombay cinema that is often the first to voice concern and depict the issue, even if it does so symbolically, elliptically or, indeed, fantastically. Similarly the problems of the Indian diaspora were not lost on Bollywood. (‘Going Global’) In Salaam Namaste, Nick persuades Ambar to move in together, where they eventually fall in love and discover that Ambar is pregnant with twins. Nick, who is not ready for marriage and family responsibilities, takes her to get an abortion, which Ambar refuses to have. After several comical and romantic scenes, Ambar is able to bring-in a change of heart in Nick, who realises that he loves her and feels ashamed about leaving her alone when Ambar needed him the most. Finally, Ambar gives birth to twins and Nick proposes to her to which she joyously agrees. In the case of Salaam Namaste, not only the live-in relationship and the altercation between domesticity and individual freedom form the central theme of the film, but also premarital pregnancy has not been shown as something tabooed. According to Paranjape, Bollywood is also a cinema of education and it performs the role of a teacher to the people at home on how the postmodern relationships develop. He observes: ‘In other words setting the film far away from home, in Australia, allows the latter to serve almost as an experimental laboratory for new social and sexual mores’ (‘Going Global’). The affluent lifestyle of Nick and Ambar or Ron and Cathy is in direct contrast with the listeners of the FM station Salaam Namaste. As Andrew Hassam suggests: In Salaam Namaste, those whose lives may not glitter, such as the housewives, the shopkeepers and the taxi drivers who comprise the radio station’s audience, inhabit the periphery of the film and it is not surprising that Australian prime ministers and

government trade, tourism and film commissions are comfortable with the Bollywood Image of Australia. (2010: 80) The theme of Salaam Namaste is very much akin to that of Kya Kehna, shot entirely in India with Preity Zinta and Saif Ali Khan in the lead roles. In Kya Kehna, the story is again about a female protagonist – an anti-abortion feminist, Priya Bakshi (Preity Zinta). Priya in the first year of college meets Rahul (Saif Ali Khan), a narcissist womaniser, who makes her pregnant. Priya convinces her parents to meet Rahul, but when they talk about marriage he leaves Priya. She is devastated, but moves on with her life and chooses to keep the child. Her bold decision prompts her family, under social pressure, to disown her and chuck her out of the house. Ostracised by her family and friends, Priya eventually gains the respect and support of her loved ones – even Rahul, who in a freak accident has lost his manhood. However, at the end, Priya decides to marry her best friend and supporter Ajay (Chandrachur Singh). In both these films, we see strong women characters. But in Salaam Namaste, although presenting the Western space as a sexually liberating one, the writer and director decide on to go with the traditional solution, that is, marrying the biological father of the child. The films manipulatively give a mixed message to its audiences. On one hand, in Kya Kehna, we get a glimpse of modern India and its bold educated woman, and on the other, in Salaam Namaste, we get a message to uphold tradition while insisting on the inevitability of changes in the social system that result in the acceptability of previously tabooed issues like live-in relationship, out-of-wedlock pregnancy and marriage with a non-Indian (see also Pessimisissimo 2011).

Bollywood after 9/11: Singh Is Kinng (2008) and Crook (2010) The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 immediately attracted huge media coverage and gave rise to controversies depending on unanswered questions and a quest for truth. The framing of 9/11 was essentially cinematic in nature. With the crashing of the plane into the south tower, the collapse of the tower, the rescue operation, the image of the debris all resembled the Hollywood catastrophic film viewing experience. The framing, repetition of the crashing of the planes, constant zooming in and zooming out of the media lenses make the event a spectacle that at once traumatises the audience. Media also played the role of conveyor of the meaning to the confused and enthralled audience and added a narrative to the event. However, the narrative was simple: the clash between the good and the evil. Paul Virilio, the French cultural theorist, in his book Ground Zero (2002), notes that a number of viewers believed the original media footage of 9/11 to be a ‘hoax’

disaster movie. Norman Mailer observed: [It’s] as if part of the Devil’s aesthetic acumen was to bring it off exactly as if we were watching the same action movie we had been looking at for years. That may be at the core of the immense impact 9/11 had on America. Our movies came off the screen and chased us down the canyons of the city. (‘I Am Not …’ 2002) The event transformed the form of media coverage and reportage. Leading US broadcast networks like ABC, CBS and NBC dropped out the commercials instantly and totally ignored the scheduled programs to stay focused only on the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Even rivalries among news networks were forgotten, and, as Brian A. Monahan comments, the hidden vertical integration of media was made visible as parent companies simulcast the feeds from their news channels to the other channels unable to cover the live event (2010: 56). The electronic news media’s transformation into around-the-clock pure news provider lasted till 15 September. Gradually, the professional and controlled mode of reporting got transformed into patriotic journalism. News anchors, reporters began to wear red, white and blue ribbons on their lapels. Logos were covered with US flags (introduced by CNN). The colour of the flag made its presence in the title of Time’s magazine. According to Silvio Waisbord, these gestures of journalism showed cultural membership of the national community. Patriotic fervour was a media strategy to subsume the doubts about the merit of journalism. This patriotism gave the media a new legitimacy ‘after decades of ranking low in public opinion polls and being lambasted by critic’ (Waisbord 2002: 208). Aftermath of 9/11 was too much for America. Wheeler Winston Dixon notes: War with Iraq seems inevitable, the dot-com crash has cost billions of dollars and thrown thousands of people out of work, pension funds have been looted, the national debt grows at an alarming rate, global warming is melting the polar ice caps, and television ‘news’ channels broadcast an unremitting stream of propaganda that makes 1984 seem tame in comparison. In short, there’s only one thing to do. Let’s go to the movies and forget all about it! (2004: 3) In the post 9/11 situation, some Hollywood films consciously avoided the pre-9/11 apocalyptic spectacles to offer a momentarily escape – Analyze That (2002), Sweet Home Alabama (2002), The Santa Clause 2 (2002), Serendipity (2001), Zoolander (2001), Men in Black II (2002), Spider-Man (2002) – by editing out the shots of World Trade Center. The films, by avoiding the memory of 9/11, saliently invoke the absence of the towers on the Ground Zero. In the post-9/11 context, the success of films like Behind Enemy Lines (2001) and Black

Hawk Down (2001) suggests that audience still receives violence in film, but the concept of cinematic terror is now quite different. For the audience who saw exploding and collapsing building and dead bodies on television screen on 11 September 2001 would be reminded of these television images while watching the consequence of the violence in the film. Jonathan Markovitz, while discussing the effect of the film Collateral Damage (2002) in the post-9/11 context, opines: The devastating effects of the September attacks probably made suspension of disbelief a much more difficult matter for an audience who knew all too well that terrorist violence has physical and emotional consequences and social and political ramifications well beyond what could be captured in a run-of-the-mill Schwarzenegger movie. Now, more than ever, audiences were likely to be acutely aware that very little about this movie ‘could be real’. (2004: 203) Similarly, Bollywood film industry started addressing the issues of 9/11, especially with reference to Indians soon after in films such as Madhoshi (2004), Hope and a Little Sugar (2006) and Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota (2006). But it was only almost after a decade with Kabir Khan’s New York (2009) that the life of South Asian diaspora in the United States, its ties back home and future of diaspora in the post-9/11 scenario were touched upon critically.4 Bollywood film industry in the post-liberalisation era establishes ties between the nation state and the diaspora. In Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (2000) words, Bollywood is like a corporatised cultural industry and it serves as mediating institution for a state that seeks to reproduce itself under the sign of globalisation. Madhuja Mukherjee, in her article ‘Photoshop Landscapes’, comments that ‘Bollywood is no longer about any plot as it were, it signifies a series of cultural products and practices’ (2011: 53). For Daya Kishan Thussu (2008), the corporatisation and targeting crossover audiences have led to the advent of a new kind of cinema – the form of which is hybrid fusing the language of Hollywood with the accent, slang and emotions of India. Bollywood in fact is a commoditised condition that has a global appeal as well as a huge global market. Warner Brother’s investments in films like Chandni Chowk to China (2009) strongly defend Bollywood’s place in global economy. It is not that the 9/11 did not peep into Bollywood films earlier. In films like Madhoshi (2004), we see the presence of the 9/11. Particularly, a good many Bollywood films in the post9/11 situation employed villains or negative Muslim characters who strongly resemble Osama Bin Laden. The representation of the character of Gulshan Grover in a short role in Anubhav Sinha’s Dus (2005) deserves a special mention in this regard. The costume and make-up of Grover’s character bring out the features of the images of Osama Bin Laden, as circulated in the post-9/11 context. Though apparently the strain of communal harmony is brought forward

in Indian popular cinema, Hindi popular films employ different strategies to define the Muslims in terms of the ‘other’. At the end of his chapter, Thussu hopes that in an era of Pentagon declaring a ‘War against Terrorism’, Indian Cinematic culture may emerge as an important corrective to the excess of Hollywood’s representation of the Islamic ‘Other’ (2008: 111). In fact, in the 2000s, a shift in the portrayal of Muslim characters can be seen. The exotic Muslims of the 1950s or the benign Muslims of the 1970s are now transformed into evil negative traitor (often Pakistani) characters who are contrasted with ‘good’ Indian Muslims. The argument of this chapter basically takes off from the idea that when Bollywood negotiates with 9/11, the films address Indian communal issues and problems through this American experience. It must be remembered that in the post 9/11 situation India faced communal disharmonies like the Godhra Train burning in 2002 and the subsequent riot in Gujarat.5 So, while focusing on the post-9/11 world for the immigrants, particularly the Muslims, Bollywood films also do address the issues related to South Asian Diaspora in the context of the recession. In the aftermath of 9/11, hostility towards Muslims grew like wildfire not only in the United States, but also in other countries like Australia. The case of Dr. Muhamed Haneef, an Indian-origin doctor in Queensland, was the strangest. In July 2007, Dr. Haneef was arrested at Brisbane Airport on suspicion of terror-related activities. He was detained under the 2005 Australian Anti-Terrorism Act, his visa was cancelled immediately and in absence of any concrete evidence asked to leave Australia voluntarily. But in December 2010, Dr. Haneef returned to Australia to fight a case against the Australian Government and seek damages for malicious prosecution, false imprisonment, defamation and emotional distress. He won the case and got a substantial amount as compensation. This hatred has also engulfed some other minorities like Sikhs, particularly with racist attacks on individuals and Gurudwaras in the United States and Australia (see also Wilson 2010).6 One incident deserves a special mention here. It concerns the film Singh Is Kinng (2008), which was marked by controversy over the portrayal of the Sikh community in Australia.7 Lakhan ‘Lucky’ Singh (Sonu Sood) is the king of the Australian underworld along with his Sikh mafia associates. Happy Singh (Akshay Kumar), a bumbling do-gooder with a knack for causing trouble, belongs to the same village as Lucky, is sent on a long trip to Australia with Rangeela (Om Puri) to bring back Lucky to Punjab to meet his ailing father and apologise for his wrongdoings. On reaching Australia, Lucky slips into a coma-like state and Happy is put in charge, as don, of his gang. Happy, then, uses his position to help people, as a true Singh does not fight for himself, but for others! Some members of the Sikh community expressed their displeasure over the portrayal of Sikhs in the movie, especially using symbols such as kirpan (blade), kesh (hair) and pag (turban) in a very light manner. The producer Vipul Shah and the actor Akshay Kumar had to apologise to the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee

and explain the definitive positive message behind the film just before the release. The main objection to the film was also the unjust portrayal of the character belonging to the Sikh community. The beard and the turban, two essential features of the Sikh identity, featured as the principal subjects in this controversy, were also the crucial features on which many members of the Sikh community were targeted during the post-9/11 racial attacks in the United States and Australia.8 We may here cite the case of Balbir Sodhi, who was attacked and shot to death because of his ‘Sikh’ identity. On 8 July 2012, the Huffington Post documented the crime against the Sikhs after 9/11. According to this report, more than 300 hate crimes could be traced in the aftermath of 9/11. Given this context, the presence of Sikh diaspora in Australia deserves to be studied more critically, as the Bollywood films set in the Australian context are important to underline the cultural relation between India and Australia (see Sarwal 2014). Mohit Suri’s Crook: It’s Good to be Bad (2010) addresses, however controversially, the very issue of racist attacks on Indians in Australia.9 The film was panned by critics as insensitively and sensationally portraying Australians as beer-guzzling blokes, promiscuous women and racist. But if Australia is a place where Indians are being attacked, how could this place be projected as a space of desire and dream? We should remember that this film was released at a time when the Indian students in Australia gathered in Melbourne Central Business District to protest against their present plight and for a better educational welfare system with the assurance of safety and security. The primary discourse that comes out of the attack against Indian student mainly centres on the racial issues. Indian media, in particular, were very vocal about the issue of racism. In 2009, a number of newspapers and news channels, including Times Now, Hindustan Times, Economic Times and NDTV, repeatedly circulated news related to the attacks against Indian students in Victoria. Most of the news underlined the racist issues, in particular. For example, Times of India (28 May 2009) published an article under the heading ‘Another Indian Student Attacked in Australia’, which then reported: ‘Singh was quoted saying that he believed that the city was a safe place to live, but was now convinced that Indian nationals are being targeted as easy prey’. Similarly, an article published in the Economic Times (28 May 2009) proclaimed ‘Australia, Land of Racism’: India on Wednesday expressed shock over the racist attack on four Indian students in Melbourne and asked Australia to take steps to prevent such incidents on Indian students. Reminding Australian authorities of their responsibility, External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna said he was appalled by the racist attack, which has left 25-year-old student, Sravan Kumar Theerthala, battling for his life. ‘I have been appalled by the attack on our students in Melbourne. Our consulate general in Melbourne has been in touch with the students affected and with the state police’, Mr

Krishna said in a statement. India’s high commissioner in Canberra, Sujata Singh, rushed to Melbourne where Theerthala, a student of automotive engineering at Cambridge International College, is battling for his life. Agency reports quoted Kumar’s friend, Sinivas Gandhi, who was also a victim of the attack, as saying that the attackers abused them and told them to go back to India. He further said the police had asked them to take care of their own security and been told that the police ‘can’t go on protecting each and everyone’. It is interesting to note the way this discourse is addressed by Australian authority and politicians. While the police was reluctant to acknowledge the racist issues involved in the attacks, the Federal Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations believed that the incidents were the case of opportunistic robbery rather than racist attacks. Apparently, Crook does not provide the audience with such ‘Australian Dreams’. Rather, the space seems to be a nightmarish one for the immigrants where they face attacks. But at the deepest level, the film addresses the extension of a different Indian dream – abolition of murders or honour killings in the name of native culture. However, this issue is highlighted quite explicitly at the end. Another interesting fact of the film is that home is also seen with hostility. If Australia is the nightmare of the immigrants, the home is not a very idyllic space either. The lead character Jay/Jai Dixit (Emraan Hashmi) is unofficially ‘deported’ or sent off to Australia as Suraj Bhardwaj with fake passport and papers by his uncle Joseph (Gulshan Grover), a police officer, only to get rid of Jay’s criminal activities, that is, selling pirated DVDs of Bollywood films. Back in India, Jay’s father was also killed in a fake encounter when the latter wanted to confess his criminal affection. At the end, this foreign space fulfils the dream of Jay’s foster uncle who believed that Jay’s inner goodness will be triumphant ultimately. Jay soon finds out that Australians are attacking some Indian shopkeepers because they are Muslim. On the contrary, Jay’s attempt to fight against his own community’s offence was hailed by people of diverse cultures in Australia.

Conclusion Although Indian popular cinema has successfully showcased a recognisably Australian landscape in the films that were shot there and its history, it also features the unique careers of Mary Evans (aka Fearless Nadia), Bob Christo, Tania Zaetta, Nicholas Brown, Tabrett Bethell, Rebecca Breeds, Kristina Akheeva, Emma Brown Garett and Charles Thomson who successfully created Bollywood’s ‘firangs’ – it has neglected their stature as Australians, that is, representatives with the characteristics of an essentially and typically Australian experience or ‘way of life’, by keeping their nationality, sometimes, a mystery for the Indian audiences.

Similarly, Pallavi Sharda, Vimala Raman, Anusha Dandekar, Maheep Sandhu and Japji Khaira’s Indian-Australian identity has been underutilised in Bollywood. This is something that Bollywood film-makers need to represent and cash on in their presence and subsequent rise on the Indian scene/screen, by making them the flag bearers of Australianness throughout the length and breadth of their cinematic presence. It is through these films, film-makers, actors/actresses and their acknowledged or unacknowledged iconic representations and contributions that the new journeys and adventures are being charted out between the two countries. However, for these icons to survive the leap of time, their stories must be told over and over again so as to be implanted in the minds of successive generations of both the countries (Sarwal and Sarwal 2011). A survey by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, ‘The India-Australia Poll 2013’, found that Indians generally have a positive perception of Australia and regard Australians as welcoming people. The survey did not mention the degree to which this image may be a result of stories of Indian diaspora, media and Bollywood, which portray Australia as a popular tourist destination full of fun sports and easy-going people. If we compare Kya Kehna with Salaam Namaste, the stark difference would be the way the bachelorette mothers are accepted in society. The bachelorette mother needed family support in Kya Kehna, as it is set in India. On the other hand, Ambar in Salaam Namaste can survive on her own as she is committed to an Australian way of life. The study of the journey between India and Australia could be more intriguing if Australia in Indian Cinema makes the essence of Australian experiences more transparent to the audience. For many Australians, Bollywood is India and India is Bollywood, and both are inscrutable! Australian literature, travel narratives and films have frequently portrayed India as a perfect hippie escape, the land of sadhus and batsmen. Bollywood has presented Australia as sexually liberating, visually romantic and fantastical land of beaches and beauties. For Indian-Australians, Bollywood films are a test of identity, as in the unfolding narrative of a film they not only connect with their roots, culture and family values, but also try to find a lost piece of their soul. There always are and will be different perceptions about Australia in India and India in Australia, but the artistic skill lies in emphasising the distinctiveness, highlighting multiple facets, telling a yarn and using cultural diplomacy in a positive way.

Notes 1 In their article ‘Aussies Go Bolly’ (2011), Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal have analysed Australian films’ – namely Holy Smoke (1999) and The Waiting City (2010) – journey to India, and eventually also traced how Australia has been exploited as a ‘lucky country’ by Indian film-makers (Sarwal and Sarwal 2011). 2 Manisha Koirala was born in Kathmandu and belongs to the high-profile Koirala family. In the late 1990s, it was also

reported that the Australian ambassador to the Kingdom of Nepal (1999–2002), Crispin Conroy, was dating Manisha. The couple even got engaged in 2000, but a year later Manisha broke the engagement for some unknown reasons (‘The Curious …’ 2013). 3 The overseas locations were used primarily for exotic romantic spectacle and holiday destinations, as initiated by Raj Kapoor in Sangam (1964) and later in films like Love in Tokyo (1966) and An Evening in Paris (1967). 4 New York, with the story of three Indian students studying at a fictional New York State University whose lives are completely changed by 9/11 and its repercussions. Apart from New York, Apoorva Lakhia’s Mission Istanbul (2008), Rensil D’Silva’s Kurbaan (2009), Karan Johar’s My Name Is Khan (2010) and Puneet Issar’s I Am Singh (2011), to name a few, have also focused on key issues related to 9/11, such as terrorism, bigotry and racial hatred. 5 On 27 February 2002, a fire inside the Sabarmati Express train near the Godhra railway station (Gujarat) killed 59 Hindu pilgrims. This event – not determined whether a case of arson or accident – triggered large-scale rioting in Muslim areas that resulted in over 1,000 casualties among the two communities. 6 In 2010 and 2011, Sikh gurdwaras (temples) were vandalised in Lynbrook and Shepparton (Victoria). These were wholly burnt down using molotov cocktails by arsonists in what is believed to be a racist attack (see also Wilson 2010). 7 The film was inspired from a 1989 Hong Kong action comedy film – Jackie Chan’s Miracles, which was also a variation of Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (1933) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961). 8 In an incident, a Sikh boy studying in Class 11 at an outer northern Christian school in Melbourne was forced to shave off his beard. The school principal apologised immediately, but this sparked an outrage among the Indian community in Australia (‘Gurdwara Attacked …’ 2011). 9 The film dealing with the racial attacks on Indian students in Australia between 2007 and 2010 was mostly shot in Australia and South Africa. Gautam Gupta, then spokesperson for the Federation of Indian Students (FISA), criticised the movie saying: ‘They have performed their research so badly, it’s shocking […]’ (‘Bollywood Blockbuster …’ 2010).

References ‘Another

Indian

Student

Attacked

in

Australia’.

2009.

Times

of

India,

28

May.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/Another-Indian-student-attacked-in-Australia/articleshow/4589199.cms (accessed on 12 May 2014). Athique, Adrian. 2005. ‘Non-Resident Cinema: Transnational Audiences for Indian Films’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wollongong. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/473/ (accessed on 12 May 2014). ‘Australia, Land of Racism’. 2009. The Economic Times, 28 May. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2009–05– 28/news/27645242_1_sourabh-sharma-sravan-kumar-theerthala-indian-students (accessed on 12 May 2014). ‘Bollywood Blockbuster Paints Melbourne as Racist’. 2010. News.com.au, 15 October. http://www.news.com.au/national/evenindians-say-new-bollywood-movie-errs-with-melbourne-violence/story-e6frfkvr-1225938939099#ixzz14x9pWOUw (accessed on 12 May 2014). Dixton, Wheeler Winston. 2004. ‘Introduction: Something Lost – Film after 9/11’, in Wheeler Winston Dixton (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11, pp. 1–27. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar. 2006. ‘Reading Popular Hindi Films in the Diaspora and the Performance of Urban Indian and Diasporic Identity’, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, pp. 65–95. New Delhi: Sage. Dwyer, Rachel and Divia Patel. 2002. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. London: Reaktion Books. ‘Gurdwara

Attacked

in

Oz,

Sikhs

Appeal

for

Security’.

Hindustan

2011.

Times,

2

June.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/gurdwara-attacked-in-oz-sikhs-appeal-for-security/article1–704897.aspx (accessed on 14 May 2014). Hasnain, Ghulam. 2011. ‘Portrait of a Don’, News Line, September 2011, http://www.hindinest.com/srajan/02948.htm (accessed on 12 May 2014). Hassam, Andrew. 2010. ‘Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism’, in Andrew Hassam and Makarand R. Paranjape (eds), Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism and Cultural Production, pp. 63–86. Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing. ‘History

of

Hate:

Crimes

against

Sikhs

since

9/11’.

2012.

The

Huffington

Post,

8

July.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/07/history-of-hate-crimes-against-sikhs-since-911_n_1751841.html (accessed on 12 May 2014). ‘India Australia Poll 2013’. 2013. Lowy Institute, 17 April. http://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/india-australia-poll2013 (accessed on 12 May 2014). ‘Loss of Another Precious Life’. 2006. Indian Voice, August. http://indianvoice.com.au/newsarticle649.aspx (accessed on 12 May 2014). Madhavan,

Lekha.

2010.

‘The

“Bollywood

Gobollywood.com,

Aliens”’,

22

June.

http://www.gobollywood.com/2010/06/bollywood-aliens.html (accessed on 12 May 2014). Mailer,

Norman.

2002.

‘I

Am

Not

for

World

Empire’,

American

Conservative,

December.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/i-am-not-for-world-empire/ (accessed on 15 May 2014). Markovitz, Jonathan. 2004. ‘Reel Terror Post 9/11’, in Wheeler W. Dixon (ed.), Film and Television after 9/11, pp. 201–25. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Mishra, Vijay. 2008. ‘Re-mapping Bollywood Cinema: A Postcolonial Case-Study’, in James Donald and Michael Renov (eds), The Sage Handbook of Film Studies, pp. 471–93. London: Sage. Monahan, Brian A. 2010. The Shock of the News Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11. New York: New York University Press. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2008. ‘Photoshop Landscapes: Digital Mediations and Bollywood Cities’, Journal of the Moving Image, 7: 50–72. http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2009/Photoshop_Landscapes.pdf (accessed on 15 May 2014). Paranjape,

Makarand

R.

‘Going

Global:

Bollywood

and

the

New

Indians

Abroad’,

Makarand.com.

http://www.makarand.com/acad/GoingGlobal.htm (accessed on 12 May 2014). Pessimisissimo. 2011. ‘Having It Both Ways: Bollywood Contradictions’, Exotic and Irrational Entertainment: Blog, 21 August. http://exoticandirrational.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/having-it-both-ways-bollywood.html (accessed on 12 May 2014). Prasad, M. Madhava. 1998. ‘The Absolute Gaze: Political Structure and Cultural Form’, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, pp. 52–87. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2000. ‘The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, in

Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam P. Kavoori (eds), Global Bollywood, pp. 17–40. New York: New York University Press. Sarwal, Amit. 2014. ‘Bollywood and Australia: Worth making a Song and Dance about’, The Conversation, 19 February. https://theconversation.com/bollywood-and-australia-worth-making-a-song-and-dance-about-23363 (accessed on 12 May 2014). Sarwal, Amit and Reema Sarwal. 2011. ‘“Aussies Go Bolly”: Australian Journeys through Indian Cinemascape’, in Auriol Weigold and Brian Stoddart (eds), India and Australia: Bridging Different Worlds, pp. 178–95. New Delhi: Readworthy. Thussu, Daya Kishan. 2008. ‘The Globalization of “Bollywood” – the Hype and Hope’, in Aswin Punathambekar and Anandam P. Kavoori (eds), Global Bollywood, pp. 97–116. New York: New York University Press. Virilio, Paul. 2002. Ground Zero. London: Verso. Waisbord, Silvio. 2002. ‘Journalism, Risk, and Patriotism’, in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (eds), Journalism after September 11, pp. 201–19. New York: Routledge. Wilson, Lauren. 2010. ‘Melbourne Sikh Temple Arson “an Attack on Religion”’, The Australian, 14 January. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/melbourne-sikh-temple-arson-an-attack-on-religion/story-e6frg6nf1225819009767 (accessed on 14 May 2014).

17 The way cinema was banished The intervention of cinema studies in India Parichay Patra

Prologue This chapter belongs to the section that deals primarily with Indian popular cinema’s association(s) and negotiation(s) with other regions and other nations, with a special focus on East and Southeast Asia. Hong Kong martial arts cinema’s adaptations/remakes in various regional industries, reception of Bollywood stars in Malaysia and Bollywood’s rising visibility in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in Australia, are some of the issues raised by other chapters in the section.1 The scholars who are arguing in favour of these negotiations have evidence to support their claim, as the pan-Asianism of Bollywood is textually manifested in a number of films. The question that I would like to ask is how this multicultural, transnational idea of a pan-Asian cinema is gaining ground in a country better known for a hugely popular and arguably self-sufficient national film industry? Has Indian popular cinema finally jumped on the bandwagon of pan-Asianism at the expense of its long-standing insularity? How does Indian cinema studies situate itself within these debates? Have the emergent transnational cinema theories contributed to these changes? In this chapter, I will look critically at the formation of film studies in India, its primary preoccupations – with the nation state, for instance – and the recent developments that have subjected it to mutations and reorientations.

History Indian cinema studies, since its inception in the late 1980s, concentrated primarily on the national popular industry and invested in the production of a conglomerate of discourses around the industry’s complex negotiations with a seemingly hostile nation state that deprived the former of an industrial status for long. Because of its investment in the post-independence state and the cinema’s aspirations and apprehensions concerning the state, its primary focus was on the various cultural constellations formed around the state and the industry. This cultural studies orientation, the reason for which can be located in the historical period which film studies found itself in, separated Indian cinema studies from film criticism popularised by the film society magazines, from textual criticism and also from a transnational approach. The turbulent decade of the 1970s was followed by a radical reappraisal of the social science disciplines in India. It was accompanied by a crisis in the English literary studies, and the literature departments across India reoriented themselves with a critical humanities/cultural studies approach. Indian film studies were considerably influenced by these changes. When we look closely at the history of cinema studies in India, the advent of the Journal of Arts and Ideas (henceforth JAI) in the 1980s (the first issue was published in 1983) seems the first watershed, the second being the publication of M. Madhava Prasad’s seminal study in

1998 (see also Prasad 1998). JAI was published from 1983 to 1998, with more than 20 articles on cinema in a 16-year period, some of which have achieved cult status in Indian cinema studies.2 There are articles on literature, theatre, iconography, visual arts and photography too, as some of the leading visual arts scholars of India contributed in it. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Arun Khopkar and Kumar Shahani were some of the frequent contributors on cinematic issues. M. Madhava Prasad, Vivek Dhareswar, S. V. Srinivas, Tejaswini Niranjana and Ravi Vasudevan joined them in the 1990s. JAI published parts of Prasad’s thesis long before its publication as a book-length study.3 They published versions of S. V. Srinivas’s pioneering work on male star, cultural politics of fan activity and the electoral politics in South India, which took another decade to be turned into a book.4 Sanjeev Prakash reviewed Aruna Vasudev and Philippe Lenglet–edited Indian Cinema Superbazaar (1983), one of the most influential instances of pre-cinema studies publication in the field. Ravi Vasudevan’s most renowned article on the studio socials of the 1950s, namely ‘Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities’, was published in 1993. The culturalist-ideological trends in the emergent cinema studies became prominent during the JAI days. Tejaswini Niranjana mentioned unequivocally in the last issue published in 1999 that their interest lies not in the critical analyses of ‘clearly demarcated filmic text’ but in seeing them as ‘structured by a particular political-historical field, by the context in which we live’ (Niranjana 1999: 4). JAI organised a week-long seminar on ‘A Critique of Contemporary Culture’ in May 1990 and several workshops thereafter. Soon, Film Studies’ disciplinary incarnation found an institutional base. Jadavpur University set up a Department of Film Studies as early as 1993. Madhava Prasad’s pioneering book saw the light of day in 1998. Ravi Vasudevan’s edited anthology – Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (2000) – followed in quick succession. With the publication of Madhava Prasad’s Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (1998), Indian cinema studies had its first systematic application of EuroAmerican film theory in the study of indigenous cinema. Prasad attempts to study the popular industry as emblematic of India’s problematic transition to a capitalist organisation of society and polity, to relocate the symptoms of the passive revolution, the ideological compromise of the Indian state in the domain of popular cinema. Prasad’s ideological history is informed by semiotic film criticism and Althusserian Marxism, and he tries to read the complex negotiations and compromise of the bourgeois state with the feudal, pre-capitalist centres of power. The modernising state and its transformative agenda adopted themselves with these pressure groups belonging to a different time. Prasad reads the symptoms of this passive revolution or, in Althusserian terms, ‘formal subsumption’ in the narratives/cultural forms of the dominant genre in the industry. Prasad terms the genre as the ‘feudal family romance’ (Prasad 1998: 3031). He tracks its trajectory through the 1950s and 1960s to the turbulent time of the 1970s, when the industry itself initiated major changes to the narrative and generic conventions. Prasad follows its curious journey to the liberalisation of Indian economy in the

1990s as the emergence of an advanced capitalist system, a real subsumption of the premodern institutions rather than a formal one, become evident and the cinema incorporates these changes. Prasad’s ideological model of history assumed a paradigmatic status in Indian cinema studies. Ravi Vasudevan located a negotiation of the same kind in the domain of cinematic forms. His work on the 1950s studio socials emphasises the simultaneous existence of contradictory modes of address,5 the editing style and other (realistic) cinematic conventions prevalent in Hollywood coexist with the melodramatic mode of narration, iconic representation of the image, tableau framing and frontal address to the spectator. The premodern, pre-cinematic forms share space with forms associated with the modern cinematic apparatus. The question that I want to raise is what does the time frame signify here? How is the institutionalisation of the discipline associated with the 1990s, the age of economic liberalisation? How can we make meaning of this complex moment of arrival? How can we juxtapose the history of the discipline with that of the industry?

The global anxiety Indian Cinema studies always cherished an obsessive fascination for the nation state, justifying the acceptability of the national cinema paradigm as the only research method available. Contestations over the preferred mode(s) of inquiry started to appear much later, and Prasad’s book is still considered as sui generis in the field, occupying all the university curricula as well as academic discussions around Indian cinema. In order to comprehend the lack/absence of certain features in this standard received paradigm, let us look at an article by Ravi Vasudevan (2008), where he tries to understand the different meaning(s) of Bollywood: A marked absence in these attempts to diagnose Bollywood […] is any substantial reference to film-form, story-telling practices […] star-economies, and even on-screen performance culture. The filmic dimension of film studies seems to have been lost in the process of trying to understand the political economy and sociology of the cinema institution. What appears from the above statement of Vasudevan is the way the culturalist turn in Indian film studies overshadowed other forms of film criticism. With the advent of film studies as a discipline, there was widespread anxiety concerning the disciplinary modes of inquiry in understanding cinema, especially from the film society/cinematheque critics. The banishment of cinema’s textual-material dimensions was possible with the intervention of cinema studies as a discipline. The sense of alienation that the film society activists and critics experienced was indeed a global experience, as the writings of Adrian Martin suggest. Associated primarily

with the cinematheque/arthouse culture and the quasi-academic film journals, Martin emerged as one of the most important film critics from Australia as well as a film studies professor. For him, film studies represents a mainstream culture as opposed to the ‘secret histories’ of the ephemeral film magazines/journals, the network that has been dispersed (see Martin 1992). What he mourns for is the demise of the ‘textual-analytical facility’, interest in film style and stylistics and the ‘detailed mise-en-scène readings of yesteryear’ (Martin 1992: 10–11). Martin discusses cultural studies and policy studies’ close associations with the institutional avatar of cinema studies, something which hinders the reading of a film text in its materiality. So, the anxiety emanates from a complex moment of arrival, a decisive culturalist turn and the overshadowing of various research methods by a preferred one that achieved hegemonic status. In India, contestations over the state reformulated these discussions, as the state has always been a major factor in the history of the industry. The industry was bestowed an industrial status in legal terms only in the 1990s. The sense of a lack of respectability that the film industry invoked for long was closely associated with the absence of these legal rights, as the latter forced film-makers to seek finance from ‘unacceptable’ quarters.6 The nation state, on the other hand, formed a state-run funding body to finance alternative/arthouse cinema. With the advent of film studies, the state was severely criticised and the cinema it used to fund was relegated to the margins.7 This process, aided by the radical reappraisal of the social science disciplines, was supplemented by significant changes in the Indian society and polity after liberalisation.

Moment of arrival The turbulent time of the 1970s was marked by the emergence of various radical leftist (primarily Maoist) groups in various places of India, and, in conflict with these groups, the Indian state unleashed a reign of terror, especially during the National Emergency of 1975– 1977. The worst kind of state violence and the emergence of various subaltern political groups were closely studied within the social science disciplines. As a result, these disciplines themselves underwent significant changes. The radical leftist youths were infamous not only for the violent armed struggles, but also for the several instances where they demolished statues of 19th- and early 20th-century social reformers, educationists and political leaders of iconic status. Statues were decapitated and vandalised; portraits were trampled upon. The list of these iconic figures included Mahatma Gandhi (hailed as the ‘Father of the Nation’), Jawaharlal Nehru (first prime minister of India), Rabindranath Tagore (the first Asian and the only Indian Nobel laureate in literature) and many others. Interestingly enough, these actions were uncalled for. The party ideologues were bewildered at first, and then they tried to justify it stating that they will build new ones of unsung leaders/martyrs of Indian freedom struggle (see Rudra 1970).

The city of Calcutta/Kolkata, the erstwhile British capital which once was the second most important city of the empire after London, houses a large number of upper middle class population known popularly as the bhadralok or the gentry. This entire population is characterised by their anglophilia, their romanticised attitude towards the British colonisers, their moderate ‘leftism’, their forceful assertion of cultural superiority over the masses, their liberal humanism and their association with the 19th-century efflorescence of Bengali literature and culture (known as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’). The cultural arrogance of the middle class Bengali city folk is actually an object of derision for the people inhabiting other parts of India. The radical leftist action of demolishing the statues of the luminaries of the past as a part of the political struggle aroused fear among this entire population. Sanjay Seth (2004), while commenting upon these incidents, has argued that this statue smashing is actually a rejection of this entire legacy of liberal humanist history, of the moderate leftist’s tendency to distinguish between the progressive/moderniser and the reactionary/traditionalist, of the infamous elitism of Bengali bhadralok, as all are part and parcel of the same history and politics. The rejection of history opened up the possibilities for the birth of a novel historywriting project, namely the subaltern studies collective. An earlier generation of historians, who immediately preceded the subalternists, has praised the ultra-leftist ‘cultural revolution’ as it inspired to critically re-evaluate the history of Bengal Renaissance. Benoy Ghosh (1971) admitted that the movement provided them with the critical acumen to embark upon such a mission and the lacunae in the existing historical material exposed the historical hoax of a Renaissance. Dipesh Chakrabarty, himself being a former insurgent turned into a subaltern historian, acknowledges the connection between the radicalism of the 1970s and the birth of subaltern studies in his Habitations of Modernity (2002). In the wake of subaltern studies and the critical reappraisal of the elitist historical accounts, what faced the ultimate challenge from Indian academia was the Indian state. Sudipta Kaviraj (2010), among others, regarded the nation state as an imaginary institution and a product of a homogenising nationalism. Keeping in league with the Naxalite questioning of the elitist characteristics of Indian modernity, the troubled 1970s was followed by the emergence of various power groups representing the marginal populace, women, the lower caste people, the religious and ethnic minorities and others. These developments culminated in the nation-wide unrest on the issue of reservation for the backward caste population in the late 1980s. As Pierre Bourdieu (1985) argues in one of his most influential essays, the emergence of the social groups presupposed the break with the traditional Marxism, with the ‘intellectualist illusion which leads one to consider theoretical class, constructed by the sociologist, as a real class, an effectively mobilised group’ (Bourdieu 1985: 195). This brand of identity politics generated various regional political groups who questioned homogenising tendencies of the federal state, and claimed to represent various factions of the

mass better than the homogenising moderate leftists and put Indian National Congress’ domination to an end. Subalternists were critically looking at these developments, and some of the major activists of these movements made their way into the subaltern studies group, contributing articles in anthologies.8 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) project of provincialising Europe critiqued the dominance of the nation state and the narratives of citizenship, which he categorised as a bourgeois legal fiction. Vivek Dhareswar (1997) was moderate enough not to take an extreme position like Chakrabarty and others, but he was concerned more with the complex interconnection between the historical present in India and the concepts like sovereignty, politics and citizenship, among others. The community and the modern nation state negotiate with each other and this process of negotiation, the transformation of the citizen-subject, Indian state’s problematic secular stance and its uneasy liaison with the various forms of identity politics are issues of interest to Dhareshwar. I will show how these concepts will lend themselves to the cinema studies scholars and will become immensely important in the discussion of cinemas of India. With these developments, the nation state, the project of modernity, nationalism, citizenship, the rights of the citizen, the civil society, moderate leftism and many other institutions came under the critical purview. Etienne Balibar’s (1991b) analysis of philosophical and historical coordinates that make possible the emergence of the citizen-subject suggests that the term ‘citizen’ comes after the ‘subject’, as men are not born ‘subjects’ (Balibar 1991b: 33–57). Balibar makes interesting propositions stating that the nation form itself has been represented as destiny; that the young nations like India create myth of origin and national continuity; that the uncritical acceptance of the nation state as the ultimate form of political institution resulted in the subordination of the individuals of all classes to the status of citizens of the nation state (Balibar 1991a: 87). These theoretical upheavals in the West had formidable influence upon the social scientists working in the various parts of South Asia. How is the 1970s Maoism relevant here at all? According to the political theorists, Maoism questions not only nationalism and the elitist project of modernisation, this localised form of Marxism questioned classical Marxism’s inability in understanding the subaltern in a semifeudal nation where they stand outside the empowering frames of modernity, outside the discursive terrain of rights and citizenship: ‘The Naxalite led struggles were one of those rare occasions in the history of Marxism in India when the grammar of this subaltern political language left its imprint not only on communist practice but also on Marxist theoretical formulations and categories […]’ (Seth 2002: 353). Before moving towards the cinematic history of the time, this detour in the domain of social sciences will help me in achieving a better understanding of the cinema studies narratives. Cinema studies in India emerged in the wake of these developments in the social sciences. The possible consequences of these developments include the all-encompassing nation state

paradigm of Indian cinema studies. As the people belonging to the social science archive continued to read the narratives, literary as well as cinematic, as embodiments of the tensions generated around the statist supremacy; this specific reading process soon assumed a normative status in Indian academia. Partha Chatterjee (2004), in his account of popular politics and the ‘political society’, reads Satinath Bhaduri’s classic Bengali novel Dhorai Charit Manas, critically considering its reworking of the Ramayana myth. Chatterjee situates it in the context of the indigenous people’s participation in the anti-colonial struggle and the subsequent betrayal that they faced from the nationalist elites. The journey of the protagonist Dhorai, unlike that of the mythical Hindu god Rama whom he is modelled upon, is not towards kingdom but to the promised goal of citizenship (Chatterjee 2004: 9–25). Susie Tharu (1998), one of the pioneering gender and cultural studies scholars in India, proposed an alternative reading of a Gujarati short story which, as I will argue, is an exact parallel of the cinema studies narrative prevalent in India. Tharu considers the classic realist text’s hegemonic presence as a normative condition imposed by the state, and shows the way in which an insurrectionary citizen/community within the plot lays bare the failure of realism as a form. These generic formations, narrative logics and the ‘perverse figures of the insurgencies’, according to her, ‘animate the terrain of democracy in our time’ (Tharu 1998: 238). Vivek Dhareswar explores this novelistic links further, as his work focuses on the way in which the biography of the nation state conflates with the (auto)biographies of the secular self, of the citizen-subject, as these diverse narratives take the structure of a bildungsroman. Modernity’s novelistic journey never ceases to exist. These arguments make their way into the cinematic scholarship, as Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in one of his most influential articles, proposed the deployment of the conceptual apparatuses such as ‘citizen’ and ‘civil society’ in the discussion of the democratic possibilities of cinema in the subcontinent. Rajadhyaksha (Rajadhyaksha 2009) shows how the cinematic form of Hollywood, which Burch categorises as the Institutional Mode of Representation (IMR), becomes the dominant and normative one and demands a certain kind of ‘reading competence’ from the spectator. The state imposes this specific cinematic realism as the only form to be supported as a part of its project of modernisation (he brands it as the NFDC realism). Rajadhyaksha concentrates upon Realism’s association with certain rights of spectatorship and upon the spectator’s transformation in the citizen-subject, who must possess certain abilities/competence to identify with the statist narrative in order to be acknowledged as a citizen. Rajadhyaksha mentions how this disciplinary constitution of the self of the spectator resulted in violence and loss of lives. The instance he posits is an immensely important one for our context, as it is about the infamous Chunduru massacre (Andhra Pradesh, 1991) where a marginalised Dalit group’s entry into the exhibition space ignited casteist violence. So, the disciplinary incarnation of cinema studies in India was inspired by the various social

science disciplines in general and subaltern studies in particular. It resulted in a critique of the nation state as well as of its narratives of development. The critique was extended beyond the political and the statist initiatives in the domain of cultural practices, including cinema, came under its purview. The paradox that emerges from these phenomena is the supposed inevitability of the national cinema paradigm as well as that of the critique of the statist intervention in the field of cinema/culture. For Rajadhyaksha (2012), the time of celluloid (1895–1990) is synonymous with that of the nation state. The Spanish-American War of 1898 that established the United States as an imperial nation coincided with the birth/early years of cinema and the end of celluloid in the 1990s with the fall of the USSR.

Rupture Madhava Prasad’s overarching paradigm has dominated Indian cinema studies for more than a decade, and successors like Jyotika Verdi and others never freed themselves from the national cinema camp. Lalitha Gopalan seems to be the sole exception whose work Cinema of Interruptions (2002) comes closest to a formal analysis of the mode of interruption in the narrative film form, and her interest lies primarily in gender. But the perceivable rupture in the framework comes only recently with two important developments. The first of these developments is the way Indian cinema scholars acknowledge the emergent transnational cinema theories and accept their applicability in Indian cinema. The most visible instance of this is the special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) in memory of Paul Willemen. In that journal, Madhava Prasad (2013) wrote on Willemen’s idea of a comparative film studies, the way Willemen (1994) used it in his work on Korean cinema and its possibilities in the Indian context. Even though Prasad defines this in terms of his model of ‘formal subsumption’, it becomes evident that his Marxist approach has accommodated these new formulations. The influence of the new Asian cinema(s) is perceivable. In another essay in the same volume, Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2013) talks about the coinages of Willemen – coinages like ‘inner speech’, ‘cinephilia’ and ‘fourth look’, with references to Indian as well as East Asian films. There are wide debates around ‘comparative film studies’, and East Asian scholars like Stephen Teo and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto have shown interest in its adoption in their respective local cinema studies schools. In the following section, I will show how these debates and the emergent transnational cinema school have more affinities than we imagine. The second of these developments is the publication of Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009). In his book, he takes the critical periods for Indian democratic system as the narrative loopholes through which he attempts to look at the cinematic developments. The sole instance of its kind (no Indian cinema scholar has published on the Indian New Wave before him) since the disciplinary incarnation of cinema studies in India, Rajadhyaksha makes an extremely

provocative argument concerning the Indian New Wave. Raising questions concerning the theoretical debates within film studies (the third cinema/cinema of hunger/imperfect cinema question, its association with and reaction against the Latin American undemocratic governments and its challenge towards the dominant theoretical paradigms, namely screen theory and apparatus theory), he acknowledges in no unclear terms that the emergence of film theory in India owes to the advent of the New Cinemas in the 1970s.9 The term that he coins to describe the birth of the new avant-garde is ‘European detour’. Rajadyaksha argues that the New Waves across the world fabricated a nation that existed at its transnational edge, a nation which he wishes to name as ‘Europe’, however controversial that might sound. Rajadhyaksha’s ‘Europe’ is ‘not a geographically defined’ one but a ‘narratively signified’ continent (2009: 220). It is, seemingly, a European detour undertaken by non-Western vanguard practices in cinema, an ‘interior detour smaller, sub-national or regional constructs within’ (Rajadhyaksha 2009: 220). Rajadhyaksha’s formulations seem to challenge the ‘ethical basis of the territorial nation’ and national cinema, because he attempts a comparison between various New Waves across the globe and their similarities in terms of being primarily state-funded movements. He has shown how the military dictatorships in various Latin American states were supportive in developing the film movements there, a situation he finds identifiable with its counterpart in India. For me, Rajadhyaksha’s transnationalist approach and interest in the New Wave marks an age of transition in Indian cinema studies.

The transnational The ruptures in the framework of national cinema school were gradually getting revealed, with the cinema studies scholars considering the nation state as a problematic. The trend began with the publication of Theorising National Cinema (2008), where Willemen dispensed of the inevitability of the national cinema paradigm along with that of the nation state. Willemen’s interest in developing a comparative film studies was substantially inspired by Franco Moretti’s ‘formula for grasping the history of novel form’s spread across the globe’ (Prasad 2013: 8), and the latter’s idea of the combination of ‘foreign form, local content and local form’ was adopted in his discussion of Korean cinema which can be extended to other non-Western cinemas.10 There was a lot of debate on Willemen’s formulations regarding the travel of capitalist modernity, its acceptance as the world order and the way it gives rise to national literature/cinema after coming in contact with local forms. For Willemen, national popular forms the central discourse, while the alternative cinemas remain as fringe discourses (see Ghosh 2011). It was some of the East Asian scholars who located the problems in Willemen. However significant his ideas of a comparative film studies is, Willemen’s model still retains the national cinema paradigm. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is skeptical about the ‘reverse ethnocentrism of the

west’ (Ghosh 2011: 52), and Stephen Teo (2007), despite acknowledging the significance of the national cinema paradigm, finds the ‘uniqueness of alternative cinema in radicalised textual systems […] in the constellation of global avant-garde as well as in local specificities’ (quoted in Ghosh 2011: 53–4). The idea of transnational cinema or world cinema11 is intimately associated with the current debates on trans-nation and its various possibilities. Its confinement within third-worldism, third cinema12 or exilic/diasporic cinema13 notwithstanding, quite a number of collections have been published on transnational cinema in the last 5–6 years. Franco Moretti’s celebrated article ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000) introduced these possibilities in the field of literature. Referring to Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, Moretti proposes his conception of ‘distant reading’ and ‘world literature’ as a system of variations, things that go against the grain of nationalist historiography and the method of ‘comparative morphology’, which he defines as the systematic study of how forms vary in space and time (Moretti 2000: 8–11). This comparative study of the formal variations across space and time gains immense importance as Anthony Guneratne (2003) and others critique national cinema for its obsession with diachronicity.14 A review of the recently published works on transnational cinema reveals the debates within. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (2006) try to define the term ‘world cinema’ as a theoretical problem as they reject essentialisation. Tracing the process of world cinema’s evolution as a concept, its situatedness in film and media studies (as world literature is situated in the English departments, often associated with postcolonialism and Third World studies), they show interest in power structures in the non-Western world. Dennison and Lim cite David Damrosch whose understanding of world literature as negotiations of cultures helps them in conceptualising world cinema. Moving beyond the frame of resistance against dominant cinema aka Hollywood and European cinema(s), they problematise the notion of travel in different domains. The multiplicity and plurality of geographical and cinematic exhibitional sites accommodate one another – the first one signifies porosity of national boundaries, the second one the international film festivals. Nation state fails to retain its demarcating inevitability; national cinema(s) transcends local sites of exhibition/consumption.15 Citing Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, they surpass the discourse of resistance in favour of notions of ‘transculturalism, transnationalism and translation’ (Dennison and Lim 2006: 6), challenging nation, ethnicity and race in the construction. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden published their collection on transnational cinema in the same year as Dennison and Lim. Ezra and Rowden (2006) defines the inability to assign fixed national identity to cinema as an offshoot of globalisation and the notion of transnationalism as a counter-hegemonic practice of the non-Hollywood film-makers. For them, an everincreasing number of film-makers exist who perceive contemporary world more as a global system than a collection of nations – ‘One of the most significant aspects of transnational

cinema as both a body of work and a critical category is the degree to which it factors Europe and the U.S. into the problematics of “world cinema”’ (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 2). Despite nationalism’s function in the ‘evolution and critical legitimation of Film Studies’, transnational cinema brings in a new era as it transcends the ‘exceptionalizing discourses’ of ‘third worldism’, provoking ‘trans-local understanding’ as Vertovec and Cohen used to put it (Ezra & Rowden 2006: 4). Andrew Higson, in his article in the Ezra and Rowden volume, Transnational Cinema, looks critically at the limiting imagination of national cinema: […] when describing a national cinema, there is a tendency to focus only on those films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community, closed off to other identities besides national identity. (Higson 2006: 18) The uncritical acceptance of transnational film-makers as explorer of national narratives in the international film festivals was problematic for Ezra-Rowden. In a more recent volume, Theorizing World Cinema (2012), Lucia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah take up the notion of world cinema for its ‘potential of further film theorizing’, which explains its potential as a critical category. Citing Durovicova and Newman’s contemporary work on world cinema, Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah try to understand the nature of the ‘international determinants’ that provoked the contemporary changes in film style. Apart from the dissolution of the national as a category for thinking cinema, their ‘polycentric approach’ to film studies recognises the presence of a conservative ‘transnationalism’ within the discipline that cherishes a historical preference for the popular, hegemonic film-making (Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah 2012: xxiv). A similar preference for the hegemonic national popular is what constitutes Indian cinema studies and the absence of alternative cinema in its critical imagination. Franco Moretti used his now-famous metaphors of trees and waves in his work on world literature – trees need geographical continuity and waves thrive on geographical discontinuity. Trees, as Moretti said, cling to the nation state. The metaphor of the waves returns with Lucia Nagib, who, citing Dudley Andrew, tries to understand film history in relation to waves. Nagib goes on to mention different waves/movements in the 1970s, whose transnational connections she tries to chart out.16 For her, world cinema is more of a method than a discipline, as it creates ‘flexible geographies’ (Nagib 2012: 34–5).

Conclusion Apart from the emergence of the transnational cinema school, a number of factors contributed to the reorientation of film studies. They include the worldwide resurgence of arthouse cinema and a renewed critical interest in the latter, the development of digital/internet form of

cinephilia and the replacement of the culturalist-historicist modes of inquiry with that of the aesthetic-philosophical,17 among others. Dialogues between film-makers and cinephiles/film critics located around the world have been initiated, both verbally and visually.18 Transnationalists are considering film style/aesthetic as an organising principle and it has emerged as a major conceptual apparatus that enables them to rewrite existing historical accounts (see Betz 2010). The search for cinema publics ‘beyond the ideological and territorial parameters of the nation’ has helped forming critical queries (Vasudevan 2010). Global histories of Indian cinema are being conceived, looking beyond the usual trajectory of reception and the Indian diaspora. Contemporary literatures devoted to the increasing mobility of East Asian cinemas to their ‘imaginary spaces’, ‘intellectual restlessness’ and ‘conceptual mobility’ coexist with these developments (Hunt and Wing-Fai 2008: 1–11). I sincerely hope that this section in the book works towards such an end, as my chapter serves as an introduction to that wider domain.

Notes 1 See S. V. Srinivas, Sony Jalarajan Raj et al., and Sanchari De and Amit Sarwal’s contributions in the volume. 2 Most of Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s important articles were published in JAI, some of which are still unavailable in anthologies. The list of these articles includes ‘The Epic Melodrama’ (1993) and ‘The Phalke Era’ (1987). 3 Madhava Prasad published articles like ‘Cinema and the Desire for Modernity’ (1993) and ‘Signs of Ideological Re-form in Two Recent Films’ (1996) in JAI. Both of them were included in his 1998 book. 4 S. V. Srinivas published articles like ‘Fans, Families and Censorship: The Alluda Majaka Controversy’ (1999) and ‘Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’ (1996) in JAI. The first one has been included, albeit in a revised form, in his 2009 book Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao. 5 By modes of address, I have meant what Noel Burch (1990) defined as Primitive Mode of Representation (PMR) and IMR in his work on early cinema. 6 The Mumbai industry has often been associated with the Mumbai underworld and the black money invested by the crime lords/mafia bosses. 7 Moinak Biswas (2010) writes: ‘Academic Film Studies began its career in India at a time when the state was about to withdraw its support to alternative cinema, a certain cultural project of post-independence modernity was coming to an end; the state’s initiatives in culture was being handed over to the market’. 8 Kancha Ilaiah, the renowned Dalit scholar, was one of the contributors to the subaltern studies volumes. See Ilaiah (1996). 9 The existence or the lack of an ‘indigenous’ film theory school in India often invites nativist criticism. See Sarwal (2006). 10 Here, Madhava Prasad is referring to Willemen’s article ‘Detouring through Korean Cinema’ (1994). 11 There are debates concerning whether both connote something similar or not. For Nagib et al. (2012), transnational cinema is often a limiting category than world cinema.

12 By the term ‘third cinema’, I mean the extensive literature that exists on the aesthetic possibility of formulating a cinema other than that of Hollywood and European arthouse. Teshome Gabriel was one of the most important scholars in this field, along with the Latin American film-makers/critics like Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (they published a now-famous manifesto), Glauber Rocha, Julio Garcia Espinosa and others. They coined terms like the ‘cinema of hunger’, ‘imperfect cinema’ and so forth. Willemen co-edited (with Jim Pines) a collection of essays on third cinema (Pines and Willemen, 1989). 13 Diaspora cinema has received substantial attention especially after globalisation. Jigna Desai (2004) and others have published on the cinemas of the Indian diaspora. 14 Guneratne’s specific context is third cinema studies. 15 A vast number of literatures on the international film festivals and their politics have been published recently. It is not confined to the Anglophone world, as French film critic Berenice Reynaud is writing extensively on the festival politics. 16 Lucia Nagib (2006) mentions the French New Wave as an obvious example and, citing Dudley Andrew, she refers to their counterparts in Britain, Japan, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and later Taiwan. She mentions the way Truffaut got the inspiration from the Tribe of the Sun film-makers of Japan and the New German cinema of the 1960s and 1970s re-elaborated elements of the Brazilian cinema novo. 17 Robert Sinnerbrink is one of the most significant precursors of this trend. 18 For dialogues between cinephiles, see Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (2003). For dialogues between film-makers, the Correspondences series conducted by the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona is significant. It includes filmed letters exchanged between Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso and Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami, among others.

References Balibar, Etienne. 1991a. ‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology’, Trans. Chris Turner, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambitious Identities, pp. 86–106. London: Verso. ———. 1991b. ‘Citizen Subject’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes after the Subject? pp. 33–57. New York: Routledge. Betz, Mark. 2010. ‘Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, pp. 31–47. New York: Oxford University Press. Biswas, Moinak. 2010. ‘Film Studies, Film Practice and Asian Cinema: Points in Re-Connection’, Scribd.com. http://www.scribd.com/doc/33220837/Moinak-Biswas-New-Cinephilia (accessed on 8 July 2014). Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, Social Science Information, 24(2): 195–220. Burch, Noël. 1990. Life to Those Shadows. London: BFI. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Dennison, Stephanie and Song Hwee Lim. 2006. ‘Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, pp. 1–15. London: Wallflower Press. Desai, Jigna. 2004. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge. Dhareswar, Vivek. 1997. ‘Caste and the Secular Self’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, 25–6: 119–26. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. 2006. ‘General Introduction: What Is Transnational Cinema?’ in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (eds), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, pp. 1–12. London: Routledge. Ghose, Benoy. 1971. ‘A Critique of Bengal Renaissance’, Frontier, September 25, np. Ghosh, Manas. 2011. ‘Alternative Cinema: Response of Indian Film Studies’, Journal of the Moving Image, 10: 51–60. Gopalan, Lalitha. 2002. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI. Guneratne, Anthony and Wimal Dissanayake. 2003. Rethinking Third Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Higson, Andrew. 2006. ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (eds), Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader, pp. 15–25. Oxford: Routledge. Hunt, Leon and Leung Wing-Fai. 2008. ‘Introduction’, in Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, pp. 1–11. London: I. B. Tauris. Ilaiah, Kancha. 1996. ‘Productive Labour, Consciousness, and History: the Dalitbahujan Alternative’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, pp. 165–200. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2010. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press. Martin, Adrian. 1992. ‘S.O.S.’, Film–Matters of Style. Special Issue of Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 5(2): 6–14. Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1: 54–68. Nagib, Lucia. 2006. ‘Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema’, in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, pp. 30–7. London: Wallflower Press. Nagib, Lucia, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah. 2012. ‘Introduction’, in Lucia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds), Theorizing World Cinema, pp. xvii–xxxii. London: I. B. Tauris. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1999. ‘Introduction’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 32–3: 3–8. Pines, Jim and Paul Willemen. 1989. Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI. Prasad, Madhava M. 2013. ‘Singular but Double-Entry: Paul Willemen’s Proposals for a Comparative Film Studies’, InterAsia Cultural Studies, 14(1): 3–13. ———. 1998. Ideology of Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2013. ‘Why Film Narratives Exist’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14(1): 62–75. ———. 2012. ‘A Theory of Cinema That Can Account for Indian Cinema’, in Lucia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds), Theorizing World Cinema, pp. 45–59. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2009. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. New Bloomington: Indiana

University Press. ———. 1993. ‘The Epic Melodrama’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 25–6: 55–70. ———. 1987. ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas 14–15: 47–78. Rosenbaum, Jonathan and Adrian Martin. 2003. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. London: BFI. Rudra, Ashok. 1970. ‘Naxalite Fireworks’, Frontier, 30 May, np. Sarwal, Amit. 2006. ‘Is There an Indian Film Theory?’, in Makarand Paranjape, Amit Sarwal and Aneeta Rajendran (eds), English Studies, Indian Perspectives, pp. 472–86. New Delhi: Mantra Books. Seth, Sanjay. 2004. ‘Smashing Statues, Dancing Sivas: Two Tales of Indian Icons’, Humanities Research, XI(1): 42–53. ———. 2002. ‘Interpreting Revolutionary Excess: The Naxalite Movement in India’, in Tani E. Barlow (ed.), New Asian Marxisms, pp. 333–57. Durham: Duke University Press. Srinivas, S. V. 2009. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Teo, Stephen. 2007. ‘Asian Cinematic Practice – Towards an Alternative Paradigm’, Paper presented at the international conference organised by the National University of Singapore, 6–7 March. Tharu, Susie. 1998. ‘Citizenship and Its Discontents’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, pp. 216–42. Delhi: Kali for Women. Vasudev, Aruna and Philippe Lenglet. 1983. Indian Cinema Superbazaar. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Vasudevan, Ravi S. 2010. ‘Geographies of the Cinematic Public: Notes on Regional, National and Global Histories of Indian Cinema’, Journal of the Moving Image, 9: 94–117. ———.

2008.

‘The

Meanings

of

“Bollywood”’,

Journal

of

the

Moving

Image,

7.

http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2008/the_meanings_of_bollywood.pdf (accessed on 17 May 2015). ———. 2000. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. ‘Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 23–4: 51–84. Vitali, Valentina and Paul Willemen. 2008. Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI. Willemen, Paul. 1994. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. London: BFI.

Index

Aadavari Matalaku Ardhale Verule 50 Aar Paar 138 Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad 34–5 Achhut Kanya 33 affective spillovers 253–4 Agneepath 185 AIPWA 36 Amar Akbar Anthony 116 Ambedkar, B. R. 32 Amrohi, Kamal 98 Anand, Chetan 38 Anand, Dev 55, 104 Andaz 62, 64 Angaar 183 Anglophone xiii, 310 Ankur 166 Ankush 183 anti-hero 67, 69 Apaharan 169 archive 44, 94, 101–2, 109, 111, 157, 210, 215, 303 Asian century xv Asianisation 6, 8 Asia-Pacific xiii, 3, 296 Asiaphilia 6, 8 Athique, Adrian 284 Australian experience 292 Australianness 292 Awaara 97, 105 Awarapan 117 Azmi, Kaifi 39 Babri 193, 284; masjid/mosque

Babu, Rajendra Singh 224, 226, 228–30 Bachchan, Amitabh 62, 76, 104, 107, 127, 137, 149, 154–5, 165–6, 226, 233, 262, 266–7 Bali, Vaijayanthimala 100 Banerjee, Dibakar 171 Bardhan, Shanti 38 Baudrillard, Jean 88–9 Bedi, Narendra Singh 164 Benjamin, Walter 6, 187, 213 Bhabha, Homi K. 208 Bhagalpur blinding case 181 Bhakta Vidur 29 Bharadwaj, Vishal 169, 183 Bharat Mata 25 Bharatnatyam 97, 100–1, 103 Bhatkhande 110 Bhattacharya, Bijan 37–8 Bilet Ferot 30 Biswas, Anil 39 Black Friday vi, xiv, 6, 191, 193, 195, 197–206 Bobby 63, 197 Bollywoodisation 8, 168, 254 Bombay merchant 12, 15–16 Bombay Talkies 33, 35, 45 Bombay Talkies 80 Boot Polish 42 Bordwell, David 75, 78 Bose, Debaki 30 Bose, Satyen 33 Bunty aur Babli 117, 137, 147, 152 Cabaret 124, 126, 155 canonical xiv censor boards 29 Chaalbaaz 99, 101 Chak De! India 265, 269, 280 Chal Pichchur Banate Hain 80, 180 Chandavarkar, Bhaskar 95, 98, 111 Chander, Krishan 38

Chandidas 33 Chandni Chowk to China vii, xv, 6, 241, 244, 249, 250, 255–6, 288 Chandra, Tanuja 5, 120–1 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra 33 Chhalia 99 Chhinnamul 39 Chopra, Prem 63, 66–7, 78 Choudhury, Salil 39 Chow, Stephen 246–8, 253–4 Chronicles 44, 183, 188; Holinshed’s chronicle 183 cinemascape 236, 295 cityscape vi, 5, 172, 185, 207–10, 212 CNN 287 colonial infrastructure 11 communal identity 22 Communist Party of India 26, 32 Company 185 corporatisation 162, 170, 179, 288 Crook 286, 290–1 culture industry 1, 7, 94, 245–6, 254 Curse of the Golden Flower 249 D’souza, Remo 5, 117, 120, 125, 128 Dabangg vi, xiv, 150, 161–3, 167–8, 171–2, 174–9, 181 dance director 5, 106, 112, 115–17, 120, 124–8, 130–1, 133–5 dance: Bollywood 5, 93, 94, 115–16, 128–30, 147, 150, 155; classical 97, 100–4, 107–8, 110, 116, 135, 146; folk x, 93, 100, 104, 129, 134, 136, 138; Holi 104; item dance numbers 5, 105, 137, 151 Datuk 258, 270–1, 272, 275–6 Davar, Shiamak 116–17, 135 Day for Night 80 Deewar 63, 68, 77, 79, 262 Deleuze, Gilles 209 Delhi Durbar 28 Descartes 81 Devadasi 139, 141–2, 155–7 Devdas 23, 33, 62, 102, 117, 135, 220 developmentalist narrative 166 Dharmedra 62

Dharti Ke Laal 38 Dhawan, Prem 39 Dhoom 2 117 Dhoop-Chhaon 95 Dhulia, Tigmanshu 163, 174, 180 diaspora ix, xii, 1–2, 6, 8, 93–4, 148, 151, 153, 156, 212, 258–9, 263–4, 270, 277, 280–2, 284, 288–90, 292, 294, 309 Digambar, Vishnu 110 Dil Chahta Hai 186, 280 Dil Se 93, 115, 135 Dil Tera Deewana 99 Dil To Pagal Hai 109, 113, 117, 121 Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge 186, 263, 282 Disco Dancer 106, 116 divergence 168–9, 172 Dixit, Madhuri 93, 116, 145 Do Bigha Zameen 42, 62 Don 63, 107, 220 Doordarshan xi, 194–6, 204 Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani 251 Dubai 77, 194–9, 201, 206 dubbing 219–20, 237 Dutt, Guru 114 Dutt, Sanjay 195, 235 Dutt, Sunil 62, 164 8 ½ 80 Enter the Dragon 242 epics 51, 155 Fellini, Federico 80 Fernandes, Longinus 5, 120–1, 125, 128 Fight Back to School 246 film society 44, 299; magazines 297 Filmfare 93, 109; Filmfare Awards 273, 116, 120, 135 Flaneuse 6, 208–10 flanerie 209; flaneur 208–9, 214 Footpath 42 formal subsumption 4, 59, 60, 298, 304

Gabbar Singh 179 Gandhi x, xii, 12, 23, 28–32, 68, 139, 154, 156, 203, 291, 300, 311 Ganesan, Sivaji 64 Gangajal 163, 174, 181 Gangs of Wasseypur 174 Ganguly, D. N. 30 Ganti, Tejaswini 68, 78, 98, 112, 118, 136, 148, 153, 156 Gardish 183, 187 genres xiv, 1, 3–4, 6, 8, 46–50, 52, 57, 59–60, 64, 73, 82, 112–13, 137–9, 142, 147, 149, 152, 155–6, 170, 185, 311; fantasy 41, 49, 54, 58, 138, 186, 239; generic stability 47; genre and Hollywood 60; genre mixing v, xiv, 4, 7, 46–7, 49–51, 53, 55, 57–9, 61; mythological 4, 20, 28–9, 33, 47–9, 515, 59–60, 97–8, 114, 139, 154; social 31, 48–9; 52–3, 55–6, 62 German Expressionism 39 Gharana ix, 94, 102, 110, 227 Ghatak, Ritwik 40 Ghosh, Nimai 39 Ghosh, Sujoy 6, 207, 214 globalisation 2, 162, 192, 211, 214, 242, 253, 257, 262, 281, 288, 307, 309; global audiences xiv; global histories 3, 8, 308, 312; globalised vii, xiii–v, 1, 7, 137, 171, 175, 186, 213, 251, 257, 282 God of Cookery 246 Gopinath 80–7 Govinda 106, 127, 173, 225 Great Bengal Famine, the 37 Gujarati v, xiv, 4, 11–20, 104, 303; Gujarati-speaking businessmen 11; Gujarati stage v, xiv, 4, 11, 15, 20 Gulaal 163 Gulzar, Rakhee 89 Gupta, Hemen 33 Guru Granth Sahib 13 Haasil 163 Harishchandra 12–8, 20–3, 27–9 Hathyar 50 Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi 169 Helen 105, 144–5, 147, 155, 157 hermeneutic 80 Hindustan Film Company 28 Hindutva 2, 47, 194, 205–6; Hindu mythological 4; Hindu nationalism 47, 157, 194 Hitchcock, Alfred 21, 66 Hollywood xiii, 1, 21, 42, 46, 48–9, 55, 59–60, 65–6, 73, 75, 78, 88, 112–14, 117–18, 134–6, 147, 153, 157, 165, 170, 221–2, 241,

244–7, 249, 255, 257, 265, 286–8, 298, 307, 309 Hong Kong xii, 6, 65, 177, 241–7, 249–50, 252–6, 293, 296 hyperreal 88–9 I Hate Luv Storys 80 Ibrahim, Dawood 77, 193, 194, 197, 199–202, 205 independence 8, 46, 48–9, 62, 82, 84, 142, 145, 152, 238, 251; post-independence 4, 42, 47, 67, 100, 297, 309; pre-independence 26, 70, 208 India Immortal 38 Indian capital 11, 32 Indian Cinema Superbazaar 297, 312 individualism 22, 27, 86 Indo Overseas Films 242–3 institutional 162, 298–9, 303 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 60, 181, 240, 256, 304, 311 interdisciplinary ix, xi–iii, 5 IPTA 4, 26, 36–42, 80, 85–86, 90 Islamic 60, 271, 288; identity 271–2; nation 272; neighbourhood 177; terrorists 198; tourism 271 Ismaili 13, 23 IT worker 50, 59 item girl vi, xiv, 137, 147, 152, 156–7 Jaagte Raho 42 Jai Santoshi Maa 53 Jameson, Fredric 86–90, 189–90 Japan 25, 241, 246, 251–2, 255, 268, 281, 310 Jatra 85 Jha, Prakash 163, 169 Jhanak Jhanak Payel Baaje 100 Jhoom Barabar Jhoom 113 Johnny Gaddar 180 Journal of Arts and Ideas 44, 61, 297, 311, 312 Kaagaz Ke Phool 82, 114 Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna 264, 275 Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham 116, 169, 260, 263 Kabir, Nasreen Munni 259 Kahaani vi, xv, 6, 201–14

Kajra Re 137, 147, 148–9 Kal Ho Na Ho 260, 263, 282 Kala Bazaar 99 Kala Pani 55, 102 Kalanaka Bhanajan 95 Kalpana 96–8, 109, 111 Kama Sutra: The Tale of Love 140 Kapoor, Raj 64, 83–4, 87, 106, 293 Kapoor, Shammi 104, 106–7, 116, 144–5, 154 Karan Arjun 89 Karz 87 Kashyap, Anurag 6, 163, 169, 174, 191, 194, 206–7, 211, 214 Kathak ix, xi, 100–4, 108, 110, 142, 146 Kathakali 97 Kaun Banega Crorepatii 267 Kesri 27 Khan, Amjad 63, 73, 76, 165, 167 Khan, Mehboob 21, 222 Khan, Saroj 116–18, 134–6, 274 Khilafat 28, 31 Kholsa Ka Ghosla 171 Khosla, Raj 164 Khotey Sikkey 164, 166 kinship 5, 51, 156, 184, 187–8 Kismet 25, 33–4, 43, 45 Kohli, Kunal 5, 120–3 Kotha 56–7, 101–2 Kuch Kuch Hota Hai 116, 169, 211, 260–1 Kumar, Dilip 62, 64, 106 Kumar, Uttam 55 kung fu 177, 242, 246–9, 253, 255 Kung Fu Hustle 246–7 Kya Kehna 285, 292 Lagaan 117 Lee, Bruce 242, 247 Liang, Lawrence 252, 256

liberalisation xiii, 1–2, 94, 109, 147, 162, 170, 185, 192, 210, 257, 281, 288, 298, 300; LPG policy 257–8, 262; privatisation and globalisation policy 257 Luck by Chance 80 Ludhianvi, Sahir 39 Madhumati 42, 103 Mahabharata 30, 51, 114, 139 Mahal 98, 276 Mailer, Norman 186 Malaysia x, 6, 258, 270–9, 296 Malini, Hema 100, 226 Manasamraksanam 43 Manoos 33 Manorama Six Feet Under 169, 180 Manthan 166 Manto, Sadat Hasan 35 Maqbool 169, 183–9, 221, 240 Maratha Mandir 263, 276 Marathi nationalist theatre 28 martial arts xiii, 6, 242–3, 246–54, 296 Marx, Karl 81 Maya Bazaar 51–6 Mehta, Suketu 194, 205 melodrama 14, 21–3, 45, 49–50, 57–61, 64–5, 76, 113, 186–7, 236, 240, 246, 253–6, 298, 309, 312; classical stage 49 Memon, Tiger 193–6, 199, 202, 206 Menaka myth 139 Mera Gaon Mera Desh 164–6 Mirch Masala 166 mise-en-scène 299 Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 117 Mitra, Shambhu 39 modernity xi, 15–20, 22, 23, 31, 37, 44, 60, 72, 80–5, 88, 168, 171, 186, 209–10, 213, 240, 253, 301–3, 306, 309–10 Mohra 99, 156 moralism 184 Mother India 21, 62, 104, 222 Motwane, Vikramaditya 117 Moulin Rouge 281 MPEAA 243

Mr India 99 MTV 131, 137, 153 Mughal-e-Azam 103, 138, 266, 275 Mujra 101–2, 142 Mukti 33 multiplex 1, 5, 7, 50, 162, 169–73, 176, 178–79, 181–2, 208, 245 Munnabhai MBBS 76 Muslim minority 192, 194, 198–9 My Name Is Khan 260, 269, 278, 293 Nabanna 37–8 Nair, Mira 140 Nala-Damayanti 15–7 Namak Halaal 99 Nandy, Ashis 34, 67, 205, 239 Natak Uttejak Mandali 17 national cinema xi, xiii, 3, 7, 27, 44–5, 182, 241, 252, 296, 299, 304–12; national popular 247, 296, 306, 308 nationalism v, xiv, 3–4, 6–8, 25–9, 33, 41, 43–5, 47, 84, 86, 111, 141, 154, 157, 181, 194, 205, 208, 253, 256, 294–5, 301–2, 307–8 Natun Yahudi 39 Naukri 42 nautanki 23 Navyug 27 Naya Daur 42, 106 Naya Sansar 33, 35, 88 Nayakan 183 NDTV xi, 275, 290 Neecha Nagar 38–9 new cinephilia 251–2, 301 new historicists 186 New Theatres 33, 41, 44 NFDC 243, 304 1993 bomb blasts vi, xiv, 191, 197, 199, 201–2, 205–6 Nishant 166 nostalgia 1, 54, 88–9, 138, 141, 143, 147, 181, 189, 263, 282 NRI 210, 212, 242–3, 261, 263–4, 275, 278, 282–4 NTR 52

Old Boy 252 Om Shanti Om 80, 87–9 Onir 5, 120–22, 132–3, 136 opium trade 11 Painter, Baburao 29–30 Pakeezah 102, 138, 148 pan-Asianism xiii, xiv–v, 3, 6, 250–1, 254, 296 Parasakthi 64 Parinda 183, 187, 214 parody 87, 90, 176, 210, 246–7 Parsi theatre 4, 12, 20, 21–3 Partition xi, 28, 37, 39, 43, 46, 68 pastiche 87–9, 210 Pather Panchali 42 Peepli Live 172 Pendakur, Manjunath 243, 256 Phalke 22, 27–9, 44, 61, 309, 312; Lanka Dahan 29; Raja Harishchandra 17, 22, 27, 29; Sri Krishna Janma 29 Phir Subah Hogi 42 playback singing 94–6, 98, 110 popular justice 4, 75–6 post–Cold War 2 post-liberalisation 2, 162, 185, 288 Prabhat studio 12, 32–3 Pran 63, 67 Prapancha Pash 21 Prasad, Badri 102, 135 PRC 242, 246, 249 Premchand, Munshi 35–6 Psycho 66 Pundalik 28 puranas 51; Puranic 4 Purulia Chhau 117 Pyaasa 114 Qawwali 177 Quit India Movement 37

Raaslila 95 Rai, Himansu 21 Rajnikant 166, 178, 227 Ray, Satyajit 42, 56, 97 Red Chillies Entertainment 265–6 regional cinemas xiii, 6, 170; Kannada films xiii, 223–5, 229–39; Telugu films 4, 50, 177, 224, 237 regionalist film 161–3, 168–79 Rehman, Waheeda 100, 164, 167, 226 remake vii, xi, xv, 4, 6, 179, 219–40, 243, 249, 252, 296 repertoire 4, 12, 13, 94, 101–2, 104–5, 108–9, 111, 151, 185, 186 representational accumulation 183, 185, 188 Reshma aur Shera 164 Rights 175, 181, 283, 300; digital and new media circulation 220; distribution 230; dubbing 219, 237; remake 224, 229–30, 238; TV 220; video 220 riots 192–4, 196–7, 199–201 Road, Movie 281 Rolland, Romain 35 romance 36, 55–60, 64–5, 99, 145, 164, 168, 174–5, 186, 213, 260, 298 Roy, Bimal 33, 39 Royal Bioscope Company 28 Roychand, Premchand 14 Sabar Upare 55–6 Sadruddin, Pir 13 Sahni, Balraj 39 Salaam Namaste 6, 280–5, 294 Sant Tukaram 32 Sathe, V. P. 39 Sathya 183–8 Satyagraha 28 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 205 Schoolmaster 57 Sehgal, Mohan 39 Sehgal, Zohra 39 self-referentiality vi, xiv, 4, 80–1, 87 self-reflexive xiii, 203–4; self-reflexivity 81–7 Sen, Salil 39 Sen, Sobha 40

Sen, Suchitra 55 serial explosion 191–2, 194, 198, 200, 202 Shah Rukh Khan vii, xv, 257, 259–60, 275–8; SRK 257–78 Shailendra 39 Shakespeare 84, 183–4, 187–8, 190, 221, 240 Shanghai 179 Shankar, Ravi 39 Shankar, Uday 96, 109–11 Shantaram, V. 12 Shanti Doot Kamgar 85 Shaolin Soccer 246–7 Shatranj Ke Khiladi 102 Shiv Sena 201, 205 Sholay 63, 69, 71–2, 76, 78, 104–5, 164–6, 178, 181 Shree 420 42 Sight and Sound 207 simulation 88–9 Singh Is Kingg 286 small town 5, 55, 161–3, 166, 168, 171–81, 232 song picturisation 94–5, 109–10 South Korean film industry 241 Southeast Asia and South Asia 241 spectacle 18, 49, 65, 73, 114–15, 118, 127, 143, 168, 172, 174–5, 178–9, 186, 203, 209, 232, 249, 258, 260, 262, 264–5, 277, 286–7, 293 spectatorial positions 34 Srikrishna Commission Report 193 stardom 65, 146, 181, 257–8, 263–4, 267, 269–70, 273 Sufi 84, 177 Sultanpuri, Majrooh 39 Swadeshi 27–8, 44 Taal 117 TADA 194 Tagore, Rabindranath 36, 300 tamasha 38 Tanvir, Habib 85 Tapori 186 tawaif 55, 126, 142

Tebhaga peasant movement 37 Teesri Kasam 100 Teesri Manzil 107, 144 terrorism 5, 192–4, 284, 288–9, 293; 9/11 terrorist attack 6 Tezaab 145–6 That Girl in Yellow Boots vi, xv, 6, 207–13 The Cinematograph Act 29 The Dirty Picture 80 The Search for Bridey Murphy 88 Thoraval, Yves 65, 67, 79 3 Idiots 76 tragu 13, 23 transnational ix, xi, xv, 3, 6, 8, 205, 294, 296–7, 305, 308; Asian transnationalisms 6; audiences 293; cinema 7, 304–9, 311; film-makers 308; identity 274; transnationalism 6, 7, 294, 307–8 Trauerspiel 187 Truffaut, Francois 80 TV newsreel 193 Udayer Pathe 33, 41 Umraao Jaan 102 underworld xii, 5, 63, 68–71, 77, 79, 135, 153, 183–9, 194–5, 197–8, 200, 205, 283, 289, 309 urban studies xiii vamp 104–6, 137, 139, 141, 144–6, 148–9, 151–2, 155, 211 Varma, Raja Ravi 15, 53 Venkatesh 50 Vertigo 66 Vicky Donor 179 Victoria Natak Mandali 17 Vidyapati 33 vigilante 177, 213–14 villain v, xiv, 4, 54, 62–8, 71–9, 104–5, 124, 181, 201, 248, 251, 253, 282, 288 Virilio, Paul 192–3, 202, 206, 286, 295 Vishwa Hindu Parishad 268–9 Walker, Johnny 108 Warner Brothers 244 Weber, Max 81

Welcome to Sajjanpur 171 Willemen, Paul 6, 26, 43, 44–5, 61, 241, 256, 304–6, 309, 311–12 World Trade Centre 286–7 World War II 32, 33, 37, 43, 208–9 Yash Raj Films 113, 121, 283 Yimou, Zhang 249, 254 Zaidi, S. Hussian 191, 193–9, 201–6 Zanjeer 67, 77, 238–9, 262