The Melodramatic Public

The Melodramatic Public

Film Form and Spectatorship
in Indian Cinema
RAVI VASUDEVAN
THE MELODRAMATIC PUBLIC
Copyright © Ravi Vasudevan, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-24764-2
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
Permanent Black, Ranikhet, India.
First published in the United States in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-59042-1 ISBN 978-0-230-11812-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-11812-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vasudevan, Ravi.
The melodramatic public : film form and spectatorship in Indian
cinema / Ravi Vasudevan.
p. cm.
1. Motion pictures—India. 2. Melodrama in motion pictures. 3. Motion
pictures—Social aspects—India. I. Title.
PN1993.5.I4V375 2011
791.430954—dc22 2010039768
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075.
First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN edition: March 2011
for Amma
and in memory of
Achan
Contents
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
1 Indian Cinema Today . . . 1
. . . and Yesterday 4
2 The Thematics of Melodrama 8
3 The Shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India 10
1 The Melodramatic Public 16

II: DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIES 17
1 The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American
Theatre and Cinema 17
2 Melodrama as Generalized Mode of Cinematic
Narration 20
3 Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema 26
4 The Post-Colonial Question: Melodrama
vs Realism 28
5 Deconstructing the Universal and the National 31
II: THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA 34
6 Pre-Cinema Histories 34
7 Film Form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format 38
8 Melodramatic Interventions 42
9 ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ Articulations 46
10 Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood 56
PART I
MELODRAMATIC AND OTHER PUBLICS 65
Introduction 67
Narrative Forms and Modes of Address in Indian Cinema 67
viii Contents
2 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art
Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form 74
1 Critical Discourses in the 1950s 75
2 Popular Narrative Form 81
·· Visual Figures
Appropriations and Transformations of
82
··‘Modern’ Codes
The Street and the Dissolution of Social
86
··
Identity
Iconic Transactions
88
89
3 Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism 94
4 The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film 95
3 The Cultural Politics of Address in a ‘Transitional’

Cinema 98
1 Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses
of Transformation 102
2 Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism 105
3 The Politics of Indian Melodrama 108
4 Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame 110
··The Reconstruction of the Icon
Darshan
112
114
·Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity
5 The Political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity
118
125
4 Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian

Conflict in Popular Cinema 130
1 Community Typology and Public Form in
Popular Cinema 131
2 Phalke and the Typological Discourse of
Early Cinema 137
3 The Social Film: Community Typage/Modernity/
Psychology 141
4 The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and
Contemporary Publics 145
5 The Transcendental Location of Stellar Bodies 150
··Raj Kapoor
Nana Patekar
151
157
Contents ix
5 A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism
in the Work of Satyajit Ray 163
1 Ray’s Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism,
and a History of the Present 166
·The Modernism of the Trilogy
2 The Unfinished Agenda of History
168
181
·Charulata (1964)
3 The Contemporary
183
191
··
Aranyer Din Ratri (1969)
Jana Aranya (1975)
192
192
PART II
CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION
IN THE SUBCONTINENT: TAMILNADU
AND INDIA 199
Introduction 201
1 The Formation of a Pan-Indian Market:
Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of
Social Reform 202
2 Differentiated Territories of a Subcontinental
Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation 205
6 Voice, Space, Form: The Symbolic and Territorial

Itinerary of Mani Rathnam’s Roja (1992) 213
1 Kashmir and Tamilnadu 213
2 The Politics of Identity 219
3 Tamilness as Intractable Edifice 221
4 The Connotations of Place 223
5 The Recalibration of Popular Form 224
7 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 229

1 Plot Synopsis 229
2 Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative
Structure 231
3 The Representation of Inter-Community
Differences 233
x Contents
4 Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The Pattern
of Public Events 234
5 The Navigation of Sectarian Difference:
Community and Sexuality 245
6 Self-Alienation in the Constitution of
Decommunalized Space 251
7 Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of
Self-Sacrifice 253
8 Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama
in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram!
(Kamalahasan, 1999) 259
1 Plot Synopsis 259
2 A New History? 262
3 Publicizing an Unofficial History 266
4 Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation Marks 268
5 Reading Hindutva Masculinity 269
6 ‘Lifting the Mogul Pardha’ 271
7 Melodrama: Performativity and Expressivity 272
8 Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation 277
PART III
MELODRAMA MUTATED AND
DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN
VISTAS, AND NEW PUBLICS IN A
HISTORY OF THE PRESENT 291
Introduction 293
1 The Urban Imagination 293
2 Differentiated Film Publics 296
3 Discourses and Practices of the Cinematic
Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre
Diversification 299
9 Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative
Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 1974–2003 303
1 In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas 306
Zanjeer, Deewar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar,
Kabhi Kabhie; Tarang, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron,
Alberto Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai
Contents xi
2 Our Violent Times: the Morphology of Bodies
in Space 312
Ankur, Tezaab, Parinda, Nayakan
3 Diagnosing the Sources of Violence 318
Naseem, Zakhm, Maachis, Baazigar, Darr;
Bombay Hamara Shehar, Ram Ke Naam, War
and Peace, I Live in Behrampada
4 Intimations of Dispersal: The Poetry and Anxiety
of a Decentred World 322
Dahan, Egyarah Mile, A Season Outside, When
Four Friends Meet, Jari Mari: Of Cloth and
Other Stories
5 Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended
Seductions of Performance: The Work of
Aamir Khan 325
6 Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac
Performativity 329
10 The Contemporary Film Industry—I: The Meanings

of ‘Bollywood’ 334
1 Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the
Bombay Film Economy 339
2 Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian
Cinema 346
11 The Contemporary Film Industry—II: Textual Form,

Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies 362
1 Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch—I:
Father India and the Emergence of the
Global Nation 362
··Mothers, Communities, Nations
Fathers, Social Order, State Form
363
366
·The Symbolic Functions of the Father:
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
(Aditya Chopra, 1995) 367
·The Multicultural Father Deceased and
Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho
(Nikhil Advani, 2004) 375
xii Contents
2 Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch—II:
The Emergence of Genre Cinema 383
··Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995)
Bhoot (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003)
384
387
··
Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003)
Beyond or Within Bollywood?
389
392
Conclusion and Afterword 398

1 The Cinematic Public—I: Melodrama 398
2 The Cinematic Public—II: Cinema and Film After
the Proliferation of Copy Culture 406
Bibliography 415
Index 437
Acknowledgements
T
his book has been long in the making, and has accumulated a
very long list of debts. At the outset, I need to specially ack-
nowledge certain key institutions and people. In the 1970s
Celluloid—Delhi University’s film society—gave me a home and an
intellectual world not readily available in college. Jawaharlal Nehru
University and its Centre for Historical Studies gave me some excel-
lent teachers, fellow students, and an extraordinary sense of social con-
nection. Thomas Elsaesser has been a wonderful inspiration, a great
teacher, supportive supervisor, and a continuing influence through his
writings and discipline-shifting initiatives.
A number of universities, trusts, and academic institutions have
supported my work over the years: the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office and the University of East Anglia funded my PhD; the British
Council and the Charles Wallace Trust awarded travel grants to the UK
so I could use the British Film Institute and the Cambridge South Asia
archives. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for a fellowship at the School
of Oriental and African Studies; and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center
for Historical Studies at Princeton for a fellowship which enlivened
the final phase of writing. Rachel Dwyer at SOAS and Gyan Prakash
at Princeton have been of great support. The Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, granted me a sabbatical in
2005–6, without which this book would not have been written. I
would also like to remember the late Ravinder Kumar who had the
institutional imagination to open the doors of the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library to new types of research.
I thank the following libraries, archives, and institutions, and the
people who run them: in Pune, the National Film Archives of India,
K. Sasidharan, then director, and Mrs Joshi, its most helpful librar-
ian; the Film and Television Institute of India, Tripurari Sharan, then
Director, and Professor Suresh Chabria. Sujit Deb ‘Dada’ and Avinash
Kumar have admirably extended the library resources of the CSDS,
xiv Acknowledgements
and Moslem Quraishy and Chandan those of Sarai-CSDS. CSDS
staff, especially Jayasree Jayanthan, Himanshu Bhattacharya, Ghan-
shyam Dutt Gautam, Kunwar Singh Butola, Ramesh Singh Rawat and
many others have always been of great help.
The following colleagues invited me to deliver papers or teach cour-
ses which allowed me to rehearse and refine the arguments of this
book: Moinak Biswas, Jadavpur; Thomas Blom Hansen and Dudley
Andrew, Yale; Priya Kumar, University of Iowa; Kathryn Hansen, Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin; Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania;
Mike Shapiro and ‘Shivi’ Sivaramakrishnan, University of Washing-
ton at Seattle; Richard Allen and Nitin Govil, New York University;
Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster; Christine Gledhill, Uni-
versity of Sunderland; Ira Bhaskar and Ranjani Mazumdar, Jawaharlal
Nehru University; Dipesh Chakrabarty and Miriam Hansen, Uni-
versity of Chicago; Manjunath Pendakur, Northwestern University;
Anuradha Needham, Mike Fisher, and the Shansi Programme, Oberlin
College.
The CSDS has been remarkable for its capacity to support research
outside mainstream conventions. I am in debt to my colleagues at the
Centre and in our research programme, Sarai, for the warmth of their
friendship and for their intellectual engagement, especially Aditya
Nigam, Ravi Sundaram, Dipu Sharan, Ravikant, Jeebesh Bagchi, and
Ashish Mahajan. A special tribute to the intrepid folk who made a suc-
cess of our media city project, ‘Publics and Practices in the History of
the Present’: Bhrigupati Singh, Bhagwati Prasad, Lokesh Sharma,
Rakesh Kumar Singh, Anand Taneja, and Khadeeja Arif. I also thank
Sachin and Vikas Chaurasia for all their help. Ravikant and Sanjay
Sharma helped in translating film titles. Chapters 8, 9, 11, and the
Afterword are inspired by my work with Sarai.
Many friends have been there for me over the years: Monisha and
Rana Behal, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Pankaj Butalia, Pritham and
Venkatesh Chakravarthy, Rachel and Mike Dwyer, Kathryn Hansen,
Imtiaz Hasnain, Steve Hughes, Chitra Joshi, Suvritta Khatri, Peter
Kramer, Gail Low, Franson Davis Manjali, Mukul Mangalik, Nivedita
Menon, Prabhu Mohapatra, Anne Ninan, M.S.S. Pandian, Smrita
Gopal Singh, Brij and Kamini Tankha, Rosie Thomas, Patricia Uberoi.
Geeta Kapur has provided long-term engagement and involved me in
an exciting curation at the House of World Cultures—the basis of
Chapter 9. Jyotindra Jain has been a good friend to me and to the
Acknowledgements xv
discipline of Film Studies. Jim Cook and Ulli Sieglohr have given me
their friendship, the loan of a flat in London, and have read and com-
mented with acumen on the first chapter of the manuscript version
of this book. Moinak Biswas, Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar, S.V.
Srinivas and Madhava Prasad have all been sterling friends and com-
rades in the development of our academic field in India. Ashish Raja-
dhyaksha has been an important resource for anyone working in
the area. To him, Lawrence Liang, and Tulika Books my thanks for
first drafting the statement on fair use of images in academic books
on cinema.
I can hardly begin to thank my extended family, who have looked
after me in so many ways over the years. Sarada Valiamma, Ammayi,
Induammayi, Gokumama, my cousins Chittu, Valchi, Damu-ettan
and Kunhi, who introduced me to ‘Cell’, and Valli, with whom I share
a passion for cinema, if not the classical virtues of Kutti Krishnan. I also
remember with great fondness those who are no more, Sreekumara-
mama, Ammama, Partha-ettan and Valia Valiamma. Over the years,
my family resources came to include the Singhas. Rani, Karan, Sanjeev,
Neeta, Hema, Aunt Daya, and Kalaam have extended warmth, hospi-
tality, and friendship. Above all, Kaushaliya Masi’s love and care has
been a great boon to me. Finally, I recall with affection Eno Singha,
whose humour and refusal to fuss made him such an easy person to
relate to.
My family has always pointed out that my mother knows much
more than I do about the cinema: I and my brother Hari—another
film enthusiast and historian—would doubtless agree. We would also
probably agree that our parents allowed us to do pretty much what we
wanted, even if this sometimes left them nervous and bemused. This
book is dedicated with love to the memory of that eminently practical
man, Methil Vasudevan, who raised us in a reassuringly stable environ-
ment; and to my mother, Sreekumari, whose enthusiasm for books,
movies, music, and food has been so important to me, and whose for-
titude and courage I greatly admire.
Many, many thanks to Rukun and Anuradha, for seeing this dilat-
ory author through, and for the many lovely evenings in between.
This book would simply not have been written but for Radhika,
who did everything possible to make sure I had the mental focus,
resources, time, and space to bring it to a conclusion. She has been re-
solutely unwilling to overcome her Hollywood viewing inclinations
xvi Acknowledgements
and see as much popular Indian cinema as I would like her to. But
thanks to her I’ve been able to keep in touch with new issues emerging
in the field of history. Overall, it’s been an excellent deal for me, and
I was sorely tempted to include her in my book dedication. However,
she deserves a separate book to herself—enough motivation for me to
write at least one more to make sure she gets her due!

I duly acknowledge earlier versions of several chapters published in this
book:
Chapter 2 was in an earlier form ‘Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identi-
ties: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture’, Journal
of Arts and Ideas 23-4, 1993, 51–84, reprinted in Ravi Vasudevan, ed.,
Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Delhi, Oxford University Press,
2001, 99–121
Chapter 3 was in an earlier form ‘The Politics of Cultural Address in
a “Transitional” Cinema: A Case Study of Indian Cinema’, in Chris-
tine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds, Reinventing Film Studies,
London, Edward Arnold, 2000, 130–64
Chapter 4 was in an earlier form ‘Neither State nor Faith: The Trans-
cendental Significance of the Cinema’, in Anuradha Needham and
Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, eds,The Crisis of Secularism in India, Durham
and New Delhi, Duke University Press and Permanent Black, 2007,
239–63
Chapter 5 was in an earlier form ‘Nationhood, Authenticity and Real-
ism: The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray’,
Journal of the Moving Image 2, Calcutta, Jadavpur University, Decem-
ber, 2001, 52–76; reprinted as ‘The Double Take of Modernism in the
Work of Ray’, in Moinak Biswas, ed., Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s
Cinema, Kolkata, Seagull, 2006, 80–115
Chapter 6 was in an earlier form ‘Voice, Space, Form: Roja (Mani
Rathnam, 1992), Indian Film, and National Identity’, in Stuart Mur-
ray, ed., Not On Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nation-
alism, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1997, 153–69
Acknowledgements xvii
Chapter 7 was in an earlier form ‘Bombay and Its Public’, Journal of
Arts and Ideas 29, 1996, 45–66, reprinted in Rachel Dwyer and Chris-
topher Pinney, eds, Pleasure and the Nation, Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 2001, 186–211
Chapter 8 was in an earlier form ‘Another History Rises to the Surface:
Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan,
1999)’, Economic and Political Weekly 37 (28), 13–19 July 2002,
2917–25 and www.sarai.net/filmcity
Chapter 9 was in an earlier form ‘Selves Made Strange: Violent and
Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema’, in Indira
Chandrashekhar and Peter C. Siehl, eds, body. city: Siting Contem-
porary Culture in India, New Delhi, Tulika Books, 2003, 84–117, and
304–11
Chapter 10 was in an earlier form ‘The Meanings of “Bollywood”’,
Journal of the Moving Image 7, December 2008, 149–73

Introduction
1. Indian Cinema Today . . .
T
he international image of Indian cinema has undergone a re-
markable transformation in the very recent past. For a long
time this cinema has been the object of an international arts
discussion because of a few acclaimed directors such as Satyajit Ray,
Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak, as well as Shyam Benegal, Mani
Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Popular cinema
on the other hand has been something of a curiosity. For a long time
it was only noted perhaps for its garishness, its inordinate length,
huge investment in song-and-dance sequences, and reliance on melo-
drama. There was also an implicit, if unexplored, acknowledgement of
its wider allure. Thus there were stock references to its significance in
the former Soviet bloc, South East Asia, the Middle East, and parts of
Africa. Until recently academic attention focused on popular formats
only when these intersected with larger political phenomena, as
with the star-politicians of South India. However, the ground of public
and film-critical attention has shifted, and four areas of Indian cinema
have become visible. These are (1) its popular formats, (2) diaspora
productions which narrate Indian experience outside India, (3) a clus-
ter of international collaborations including the work of Mira Nair
and Deepa Mehta on social experience in India, and finally, (4) docu-
mentary films which surface in university, film society, film festi-
val, and sometimes art installation contexts. The Indian art film and
author cinema continues to be showcased at home and abroad, but has
become somewhat marginal both to public discussion and scholarly
engagement.
In terms of national and international public positioning, the
change appears to emerge from that bewildering transformation
which we have witnessed in the last fifteen years or so, described by the
term globalization. The earlier certitudes of nation-states and national
2 The Melodramatic Public
borders, the need to protect local economic production and cultivate
a secure market for it, appear to have receded. One driving imperat-
ive now is to circulate Indian branded commodities in international
markets, to build linkages and seek investment from Indians abroad,
and to cultivate foreign investment in domestic production, infrastruc-
ture, and markets. This has also led to the deregulation of state control
over television and, later, radio, leading to a remarkable change in what
Indian audiences could see and hear. The drive to open out a protect-
ed nation emerged in the wake of the huge debt accumulated by the
Indian economy in the 1980s. This gave the World Bank an opportu-
nity to press for the opening up of Indian markets on the premise that
this would galvanize the economy through competition, collabora-
tion, and foreign investment.1 Paralleling this development was a new
status for Indian capital and professional groups in the metropoli-
tan West, which brought Indian cinema out of its ethnically segregated
niche into a wider domain of ‘multi-culturalism’ and made it more
visible in the US and British markets.
The new purchase of the Indian popular form is also quite transpar-
ently linked to multinational drives to deploy hybrid and ‘ethnic’
forms of fashion and music to target South Asian markets for their
products. A parallel and very powerful dynamic is that of a global-
ization ‘from below’, where the manoeuvres of multinational corpo-
rations are shadowed by ‘pirate’ cultures with access to new copying
technologies. The availability of cheap compact and digital video
technology has moved film and music into informal markets. Design,
content, and the ‘original’ are subject to copying, appropriation, and
cheap retail in clothing apparel, domestic appliances, and electronic
goods. This has set up crucial contests around intellectual property,
as corporate firms seek to develop international laws, and mobilize na-
tional policing and enforcement to ward off incursions into profits
based on trademarks, copyright, and patents.2
1 Cheryl Payer, The Debt Trap: The IMF and the Third World, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1974; Kavaljit Singh, Taming Global Financial Flows: A Citizen’s Guide,
Delhi, Madhyam Books, 2000 and London, Zed Books, 2000; Cheryl Payer, Lent
and Lost: Foreign Credit and Third World Development, London, Zed Books, 1991;
Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, London, Zed
Books, 2003.
2
Ravi Sundaram, ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation’,
Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), 3 January 2004, 64–71; Rakesh Kumar, ed.,
Introduction 3
What role does the cinema have in this account of transformation?
A great deal in terms of global profile, if we take seriously the recent
bid by segments of the Indian film industry to cultivate a substantial
foreign market extending beyond the Indian diaspora. Such high-end
products are said to get over half their returns from markets outside
India, and have often consciously organized their storytelling, narrat-
ive vistas, interiors, and musical attractions to ensure that world audi-
ences are inducted in terms of geographical location and cultural
habitat into the world of Indian popular film.3 Indeed, something like
a genre has been fashioned to address this configuration; or, to be more
accurate, a sub-genre deriving from the family social film of older vint-
age. Here, the primacy of family ties and obligations becomes the basis
for the posing, processing, and resolution of problems arising from
romantic choices and social and cultural differences.4 This genre for-
mat is now deployed to accommodate identity conflicts as these are
mapped amongst Indian populations now visible in a host of new
spaces across the globe, but most spectacularly in the USA and UK,
the most significant segment of the foreign market. In turn, the Ind-
ian state and capitalist associations, such as the Federation of Indian
Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Confederation of
Indian Industry, have backed the emergence of this new film economy.
For fifty years, Indian governments had ignored the demand that
Indian film production should be recognized as an industry so it could
get subsidized loans from state-owned banks and benefit from taxation
and customs policies designed to foster indigenous industries.5 Clearly,
the goalposts have shifted, for popular cinema seems to have emerged
as a powerful vehicle for Indian identity requirements in the newly
defined global space of Indian national interests. In this avatar, it is
the lynchpin of a global commodity constellation in film, radio,
Medianagar, 1 and 2, Delhi, Sarai-CSDS, 2004–5; Sarai Filmcity Broadsheets, 1 and

2, 2001, 2004, www.sarai.net.
3 Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press and Ranikhet, Permanent Black, 2007, ch. 4: ‘The
Panoramic Interior’.
4 Patricia Uberoi, ‘The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ ’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (2), July–December 1998, 305–36.

5
The standard historical reference is still Eric Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy,
Indian Film, New York and London, Oxford University Press, 1963, rpnt 1980.
audio-visual, music, events, shows—or FRAMES, the acronym for
the annual conference set up by Indian industrialists to promote the
entertainment industry.6
. . . and Yesterday
To introduce this book I want to step back in time, to consider the
longer history of film in India, the different contexts that determined
its forms and the public discourse about it. In the foundational years
of the nation-state, the official view was that existing forms of cinema
were inadequate to the cultivation of citizenship and nation-building
projects. The unstable and murky world of film finance and the char-
acterization of the commercial film aesthetic as inauthentic and hy-
brid gave it low priority on the agenda for the nation’s art. Yet there
were contradictions in the objectives which governmental elites, an
arts intelligentsia, and a reform-minded industrial opinion outlined
as desirable for the development of Indian cinema. The government
concentrated official patronage for a modern national art on classi-
cal and folk forms in painting, sculpture, music, and the performing
arts.7 An intelligentsia promoting the development of art practices
through film societies and journals emphasized the importance of real-
ist protocols, although a modernist invocation of folk practices was
also in evidence Thus, a dedicated realist of socialist background such
as K.A. Abbas would nevertheless invoke ancient classical texts, mod-
ern literature, folktales, and exemplary life stories as comprising the
rich repertoire that screenplay writers in India could draw upon: ‘there
are the novels, the stories, the plays of our great masters from Kalidasa
to Tagore and Premchand only a very few of which have been filmed.
Strange, is it not, that foreigners should discover the grand possibilities
6 See http://www.ficci-frames.com for information about the activity of this orga-
nization, initiated in 2001.

7
The Sangeet Natak Akademi was set up by the government in 1953 to document,
preserve, and disseminate the folk and traditional performance arts; the Lalit Kala
Akademi in 1954 to promote the visual arts, including ‘paintings, sculptures, graphics,
photographs, architecture . . .’ with a special focus on tribal and folk arts (www.lalitkala.
gov.in); the Sahitya Akademi was inaugurated in 1954 to foster and co-ordinate lite-
rary activities in all the Indian languages and to promote through them the cultural
unity of India’, www.sahitya-akademi.org.
Introduction 5
of the legend of the Buddha or of the life story of Mahatma Gandhi,
and that even our Panchatantra tales should have inspired foreign and
not Indian producers.’8
However, along with classicism, folk forms, and realism, Holly-
wood cinema also emerged as a standard reference point. The Ameri-
can industry provided a model for emulation on several counts. Its
stable economic organization was a key reference point for the Film
Enquiry Committee of 1951, composed of industry spokesmen and
government officials.9 Hollywood had consolidated itself through
an integration of production, distribution, and exhibition practi-
ces, whereas Indian film producers were at the mercy of high interest
rates on loans, and on advances from distributors and exhibitors.10
Further, the committee regarded its economic efficiency as ground-
ed on a finished script that provided the basis for budgetary outlays
and shooting schedules and the saving of raw film consumption.11
The US industry had also managed to avoid state censorship by insti-
tuting a production code administration to regulate content. In the
committee’s opinion state support was essential to refashioning the
Indian industry on these lines.12 Production should be shored up by
a system of loans administered through national banks and financial
institutions.13 As for the desirability of a production code administra-
tion, the committee believed that a period of state involvement was
necessary before full autonomy could be achieved.14
For those wanting to reform the film industry, therefore, Holly-
wood provided an important reference point as an economic form
which could undertake self-censorship and integrate the script to the
economy and organization of filmmaking. Interestingly, a figure such
as Satyajit Ray, who was central to the development of an Indian art
8
K.A. Abbas, ‘The Importance and Significance of a Good Film Story—Its Power
with the Masses’, in R.M. Ray, ed., Film Seminar Report, Delhi, Sangeet Natak Aka-
demi, 1956, 245–6. Also see below, ch. 2, for the film intelligentsia’s emphasis on folk
and epic forms as well as realism
9
Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, Delhi, Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, 1951, hereafter FEC.
10 FEC, 101.
11
Ibid., 196.
12
Ibid., 194.
13 Ibid., 201–2.
14 Ibid., 194.
cinema, also upheld a model of linear causal storytelling, and for the
psychological delineation of its characters, with Hollywood as the im-
plicit model.15 While the art cinema critic and practitioner clearly
sought a realism different from that offered by Hollywood, and often
caricatured it in terms of its romance narratives and happy endings,
Hollywood provided an example of narrative integrity that countered
the distractions and excesses of popular formats. From another angle,
those concerned with Indian film’s export possibilities were wor-
ried that failure to implement the Hollywood model of storytell-
ing would limit their success in Western markets. However, they felt
that they were constrained by the particular demands of Indian film
audiences.16 Finally, there were clear traces of the way the Hollywood
model functioned in the intermittent use of continuity editing and
psychological delineation through point-of-view shots, close-ups, and
subjective acting signs in Indian films, especially of the 1950s.17
The idea of a ‘better cinema’ took shape during the course of the
1950s, when Filmfare, a periodical that urged state support for the
industry and for industrial reform, inaugurated the annual Filmfare
awards.18 The first award for best picture, decided by a public poll,
went to Bimal Roy’s neo-realist inspired Do Bigha Zameen (Two
Measures of Land; 1953) and the magazine editorial took this selection
as an index of an audience which wanted ‘pictures which, while they
entertain, have a more recognisable relation with reality’.19 Roy be-
came the icon of the better cinema in the mainstream industry: the
next year he received the Filmfare Best Director award for Parineeta,
and government certificates of merit for Biraj Bahu in the same year
and Devdas in 1955.20 A different track within the discourse of a
better cinema was initiated in 1955 when the government awarded
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road; 1955) its national
award for best film (while giving Roy’s Devdas a certificate of merit).21
While Do Bigha Zameen was inspired by neo-realism, Roy’s other
15
See below, ch. 1, pt II: ‘Thinking about Melodrama in Indian Cinema’.
16
M.A. Parthasarathy, ‘Indian in the Film Map of the World’, Indian Talkie 1931–
1956: Silver Jubilee Seminar, Bombay, Film Federation of India, 1956, 66.
17
See below, chs 2 and 3 for the deployment of Hollywood continuity codes.
18 ‘The Indian “Oscar”’, editorial, Filmfare 3 (5), 5 March 1954.
19 ‘The First Awards’, editorial, Filmfare 3 (7), 2 April 1954.
20
Bimal Roy, ‘The Third Year of State Awards’, Filmfare 5 (21), 12 October
1956, 23.
21 ‘Third Annual State Awards’, editorial, ibid.
Introduction 7
work focused on psychological and behavioural portraits in tradi-
tional family settings derived from Bengali novels. His emblematic
status then suggests a convergence between state and industrial reform
in promoting narratively integrated realist work. Suggestively, Satyajit
Ray never fully endorsed Roy’s work, perhaps because it relied so heavi-
ly on melodramatic elements. These ranged from a system of typage
evident in Do Bigha Zameen, to the deployment of a heightened pathos
and a markedly artificial studio mise-en-scène in many of his films of
family reform. Satyajit Ray himself remained the exemplary figure
of the psychological realist mode, and for his sustained use of location
shooting.
This diversity of opinion casts the question of the cultural legiti-
macy of cinema, and its viability as a vehicle of cultural citizenship,
into complicated perspective. Thus we have the priority given to clas-
sical and folk traditions, the evocation of Hollywood as a model for
economic storytelling organization, financial stability and self-censor-
ship, and an art cinema tradition that urged a more complex narrative
causality and psychological realism. At root, I would argue that the
illegitimacy of the mainstream cinema derived as much from state eco-
nomic priorities as state cultural policy. The government was being
called upon to assist substantially in stabilizing the film industry, but
this would have meant large-scale financial outlays for production and
complicated interventions in distribution and exhibition.22 Tradi-
tional arts, on the other hand, required a more limited outlay, and were
more controllable as cultural enterprise. While the ‘industrial’ validity
of the cinema remained in question, officials were nevertheless con-
cerned about the impact of this autonomous, market-driven form on
the mass audiences it congregated. So the government laid emphasis
on licensing and regulation of both space and content, as embodied in
the 1952 Cinematograph Act, and piggybacked on the cinema as
an institution of mass publicness by making it compulsory to exhibit
government-controlled newsreels and documentaries under the aegis
of the Films Division.23
22
The Film Enquiry Committee had conceived of a system of finance, based on
government, producer, and public subscription contributions that would service
industrial production as a whole. In this scheme distribution and exhibition were
not factored in. However, the recommendations were not followed up, except in a
very modest fashion, with the formation of the Film Finance Corporation which, in
practice, only financed a few films.
23 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film; Madhava Prasad, ‘The State in and
In this sense the dominant form of cinema, while public and popu-
lar, nevertheless remained illegitimate. What was it being measured
against? Without this being specified in any clear policy formulation,
the Ray model of naturalism, psychological realism, and narrative
integration provided the pertinent aspirational ideal. This itself was
part of a complex context. Moinak Biswas has complicated this hori-
zon by suggesting that the moment of Pather Panchali was part of an
intricate array of cinematic developments. He stresses the diversity of
realist practices at that conjuncture, and the importance of a new type
of melodrama. The latter was characterized by the sophistication of
its mise-en-scène of domestic interiors interlaced with psychological
orientations for the spectator.24 The bourgeois melodramas of Ben-
gali cinema did not fare much better than the popular melodramas of
Bombay when measured against the aspirational index identified with
Ray’s work, and it is only recently that they have received critical at-
tention. However, the illegitimacy of the cinema was primarily asso-
ciated with popular rather than bourgeois forms. What was at issue,
and what the melodramatic publicness of the dominant commercial
format confounded, was a certain ideal of spectatorial immersion in
the narrative world. This was the ideal generated by an emergent art
cinema public discourse available through film societies, magazines of
film criticism, and the practice of Ray after 1955.25
2. The Thematics of Melodrama

I have used the term melodrama several times now, and it is the the-
matic focus I have chosen to highlight. The subject of melodrama is
one I have returned to over the years, initially motivating my PhD
thesis about the 1950s Hindi cinema, and sustaining an interest in it
right through to the past decade or so, during which much of the re-
markable transformation in Indian cinema has taken place. Melo-
drama has arguably been one of the most debated cultural categories
of Cinema’, in Partha Chatterjee, The Wages of Freedom, Delhi, Oxford University

Press, 1997.
24 Moinak Biswas, ‘Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema’,
PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002.

25
The Calcutta Film Society was set up in 1947 by Ray and Chidananda Das
Gupta. A number of journals emerged in its wake, including Indian Film Review
and Indian Film Quarterly: a selection of their views is examined in ch. 2 below.
Introduction 9
in film studies over the last thirty-five years, from its first articulation
in the early 1970s. At that time critics argued that American family
melodramas and Douglas Sirk’s films functioned subversively in
relation to classical forms, a position subsequently critiqued by the
excavation of melodrama’s history in relationship to theatre, the novel,
popular spectacle, and the emergent aesthetic hierarchies of the late
nineteenth century. Established associations between melodrama and
genres of affect, focusing on issues of loss, the suffering of the innocent,
the importance of the family and the domestic sphere, and the cen-
trality of women have been extended to accounts of its relevance to a
number of different cultural contexts, mostly in relation to popular
film cultures. Thus, apart from India, we have had two collections on
Asian cinema which have argued for the importance of melodrama to
the understanding of film cultures across the continent, including
Indonesia, China, Japan, and India. Most recently, there has been a
collection of essays on South Korean ‘golden age’ melodrama of the
1950s and 1960s. In the recent past, some of the standard connota-
tions of melodrama outlined above have been substantially challenged
by a scholarship of American cinema invested in an empirical analy-
sis of how the American film trade used melodrama. Here the term
was used to refer to Manichaean thrillers, rather than domestic and
family-centred narratives. As we will see, other scholars have used this
empirical evidence to rather different ends. Instead of shifting the con-
notations of melodrama from ‘weepies’ to thrillers, scholars such as
Linda Williams argue that the prevalence of the term to describe most
genres of American cinema suggest that the mode’s Manichaean terms
were characteristic of this cinema at large and across genres. In the
process, she has challenged the existing codification of the Ameri-
can cinema as a classical cinema—and therefore of a cinema governed
by norms of balanced composition, invisible editing, and narrative
harmony in contrast with melodrama and its mode of excess. Here, we
may have come to a significant moment in which historical and film-
critical definitions stand in complicated counterpoint to each other,
resulting in a substantial unsettling of previous usages, but without a
self-evident direction resulting from the unearthing of new, or at least
hitherto unacknowledged, information.
I will deal with the problem of melodrama, and the apparent im-
passe around the history of its usage, in the first chapter of this book.
But very briefly let me indicate my own approach. I came to the term
primarily for its ability to describe and engage certain dimensions
of the popular cinema I was analysing, dimensions which conform to
the more conventional set of associations. These features included
an emphasis on loss of family, of community, and the difficulties of
achieving romantic fulfilment, and exhibited high contrivance in nar-
rative mechanisms, for example of coincidence, as if insistently locking
dramatis personae to a particular narrative universe. In this book I
place emphasis on the importance of melodrama as a public-fictional
form deriving from a recalibration of the relationship between public
and private spheres which, most scholars would agree, is central to
melodrama. The question of the public-fictional form emerges from
a narrative structure which places great weight on public functions,
including public expressivity in the co-ordination of action, speech,
and performative gesture. The material comprising this book con-
sists in the main of essays written over the past many years. They have
been arranged to suggest the changing contexts within which melo-
drama has continued to function as a formal and public mechanism—
a mechanism of address—in Indian popular cinema; but also to indi-
cate the significant changes which have characterized the history of
Indian film melodrama. Inevitably, such a thematic focus derives from
retrospection, the process of giving a name to identify the main intel-
lectual concerns which have animated a fairly diverse set of writings.
This diversity has been determined by a shifting set of concerns within
an evolving film studies agenda for India and South Asia.
3. The Shifting Agenda of Film Studies

in India
While primarily engaged with popular Hindi cinema, the present
book also refers to work coming out of Pune, Calcutta, Lahore, and
Madras, and documentary and art film practices as well. Prominent
amongst the issues I take up include questions of film form, addressing
the peculiarity of entertainment cinema in India, its combination of
narrative and performance sequences, and the way this contrasted with
other models of filmmaking, especially Hollywood cinema. My over-
all approach has been invested in thinking about how the cinema
addresses spectators by drawing upon culturally intelligible narrative
and performance codes, along with their adaptation and even outright
unsettling by inducting new features in the image and soundtrack, and
in techniques for the construction of subjectivity.
Introduction 11
This approach is part of a general ambition to understand the social
and political significance of cinema. In the Indian context, the poli-
tical frame has inevitably meant an engagement with questions of
colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial history, and has tended to be
dominated by discussions about the place of cinema in the discourses,
policies, and practices relating to questions of nationhood and citizen-
ship. The latter focus derived from the way fields such as film and cul-
tural studies developed in close association with post-colonial political
theory. This disciplinary history of the field has produced fairly intense
debates, and much of the material presented here emerges from that
context.
I would now argue that this particular entanglement between film
and political theory may have led to too quick a reading of political
structures onto filmic imaginaries and practices, rather than allowing
the political to emerge from the specificity of the cinema as a rather dis-
tinctive mode of experience in the twentieth century. I have avoided
revising the essays (except on occasion to modify awkward writing), as
they capture this overall pattern of discussion, where cinema history
has been framed through the lens of political theory. Through short
section introductions I have signposted certain conceptual problems
arising from this ‘short-circuit’ between film and politics, problems
that the articles both represent and, hopefully, problematize.
Such alterations in approach also parallel and contribute to recent
discipline shifts that highlight the question of audiences and the pub-
lic world generated around, ‘behind’, or parallel to cinema, rather than
too narrowly focus on textually specific forms of address. These worlds
include, of course, the world of reception, how people see and under-
stand movies, and the types of emotional and even bodily impact such
a cultural form cultivates. The field of reception comes into focus in
this collection in several places, including a specialist reception deriv-
ing from the intellectual film culture of an emerging art cinema pub-
lic in the 1950s (chapter 2); the more general and politically charged
public response available through newspapers and periodicals centred
on the film Bombay by Mani Rathnam (1995) in chapter 7; and an
engagement with the point of exhibition, the way in which the space
of the cinema, its formats (multiplex/cineplex) and its involvement
with other forms of consumption define its cultural functions in the
era of globalization (chapters 10 and 11).
Much of this deals with reception as it is culled from reading print
materials, but contemporary scholarly practices have highlighted
other rich possibilities, as in ethnographies of the cinema space, of
everyday practices at the cinema hall, and the life histories which
flow into film production and exhibition. Further, even in terms of
imaginative involvement with the worlds the cinema calls upon and re-
presents, film studies has started moving away from film–spectator
relationships to the vista opened by other realms of image- and sound-
based engagement. These include music and dialogue, for long staple
attractions and separable units of audience appeal relayed through
gramophone, radio shows, cassettes, and CDs, and now through the
internet; and fashion photography, costume, interior design, and ad-
vertising in terms of visual practices. Further, in an exciting initiative,
the worlds of cinema and city have opened up a complex series of inter-
secting views and spatial imaginations, drawing on set design and loca-
tion shooting, urban planning and reconstruction, photojournalism,
and urban spatial practice. To this world of reception and imaginative
engagement of film publics we may add the focus on ethnography of
the film industry, of how films are made in terms of a thickness of
description of component practices. These include finance, techni-
ques and technologies, music, choreography and acting, and all of this
both in terms of the overall film product, and as an aspect of everyday
practice in the film industry.26
This rich new range of research possibilities poses a challenge to
how we think of the meaning of cinema. My sense is that there will be
a period of recalibration, after which a series of possible theoretical
directions will emerge. While I am certainly excited by these possibili-
ties, and have drawn on this material in mapping contemporary film
cultures in the final section of this book, I should stress that my par-
ticular agenda retains film interpretation, including interpretation
of the individual film, as a crucial component of film studies. How-
ever modified, such an approach still seeks its energies from a critical
and interpretive strategy that places considerable weight on what we
can see on-screen. In crucial ways, interpretation is the form through
which the cinema has circulated in public discourse, both of an intel-
lectual and popular sort. It has also been an important way of discus-
sing the relationship of sound, image, and narrative to social, cultural,
and political imaginaries. Let me put it this way. As an object of the
26
For further exploration of these methods, see especially the Conclusion and
Afterword to this book.
Introduction 13
human sciences, film continues to require greater precisions of deline-
ation as to what its history, sociology, and economics is about; and
in turn, how film, and other audio-visual technologies, have crucial-
ly structured the nature of human social organization, perception,
and action. Such precision is crucial, but it is exactly through in-
terpretation, and the bid of interpretive activity to connect different
zones of human life, that the human sciences provide the imaginative
engagement to pursue specific explorations, and frame empirical re-
search through a more ambitious design.
To structure this selection, my introductory chapter starts with a
response to melodrama studies as the field has evolved, by plotting a
sense of transformative logics observable in a variety of contexts, in
order that scholarship reconsider the discussion even for its European
and American context. This mapping of discussion about melodrama
provides a frame with which to look at the conceptual articles which
follow in Part I. I had no hesitation devoting substantial space to the
Euro-American debate, and making an intervention in it for, though
this book is on Indian cinema, I believe it is in the nature of the cinema
as a highly dynamic cultural form that we cannot afford to analyse it
in solely national terms. Further, my personal engagement with film
as research object and cinephiliac pleasure inclines me to engage the
diversity of world cinema. In my cinephiliac imagination, these ‘other’
cinemas are mine as much as Indian cinema is mine.
The articles in Part I consider stylistic parameters of the popular
cinema, and also provisional ways of figuring the cultural and political
subjectivity solicited by the melodramatic mode of its spectator in the
context of Indian cinema. The introductory chapter offers a distance
from some of the ways of framing spectatorship, for example around
the argument that collective subjects were engaged through the melo-
dramatic mode of address. This tended to emerge from that short-
circuiting of the political and cinematic that I had referred to, where
considerable debate in political theory has problematized the idea of
the individual citizen-subject, arguing it is communities that have
been political actors and subjects in Indian history and politics. As the
reader will notice, I have now tried to control such an assertion—
whose value for Indian politics as much as for Indian cinema needs to
be reviewed, I would suggest—by drawing upon the idea of a public
form of address. This suggests a form which requires us to engage with
various digits of representation, which include social typage, social
forms, individual characterization, within the format of an encom-
passing space, that of the public which may contain all these different
registers. Chapter 4 is strategically positioned in this revision of my
argument about modes of address. It considers the way cinema has
addressed the relationship between spectatorship and community
in the context of a sociological and political imagination of caste
and religious identities. In the process, I seek to create a bridge between
earlier and later constructions by focusing the problem of imaginary
direct address and the constitution of the public as a component or
element of the fictional field.
The opening chapter and first part of the book also seek to define
melodrama more precisely in relation to the popular. I argue that melo-
drama and the popular are not coterminous, and further suggest that
the popular may be composed of other forms. I reflect here on the pos-
sibilities of non-melodramatic modes, both within the popular,
and ‘outside’ it. This is by considering melodrama’s standard ‘other’,
realism, and how it worked in the Indian context, referring to the
specific case of Satyajit Ray’s work in the Apu trilogy and the idea of
a modernist public. Later, in the final part of the book, I also consider
the independent documentary form of the 1990s as another instance
to think about melodramatic and non-melodramatic forms of repre-
sentation and address in Indian cinema.
Melodramatic publicness also provides a crucial frame within
which to consider the body of Tamil films in the 1990s which sought
to reframe our imagination of the ‘South’s’ relationship to the pan-
Indian nation. In Part II the romance of the couple appears in these
films in relation to a Tamil national form that has, since Indian
Independence, always appeared to complicate ideas of Indian nation-
hood, but now appears subject to revision. The couple in a new mod-
ernized avatar becomes a vehicle for this narration, and also highlights
issues of privacy and publicness in terms of the way characters and
situations are articulated via identities of region and community.
While melodrama thus provides the main line of investigation in
the way the articles have been selected, much of this discussion is
relayed through the shifting agenda of film studies I have outlined.
So, Part II is introduced through an engagement with the history of
film under colonial, national, and globalized formations. I consider
the issue of cinema and nationhood as it emerged around the question
Introduction 15
of the territoriality of cinema, the way film circulated in the subcon-
tinent and beyond, and as a way of understanding the specific inter-
ventions of Mani Rathnam, Kamalahasan, and others in arguing for
a changed relationship between Tamilnadu and India. Finally, in the
last section of the book I focus on the relationship between cinema and
the city.27 This has been an important thematic and representational
dimension of the cinema, involving, in the contemporary period, a
significant working over of melodramatic procedures. While we wit-
ness a certain persistence of older symbolic structures, even if this is
tied up with new ambitions—for example the manoeuvring of ‘tradi-
tional’ and family-based identifications into new globalized vistas and
subjectivities—we also witness the emergence of new articulations of
the public and the private in a new roster of genre cinema. If the city
has provided the cinematic stage for such revisions of form, it has also
been a crucial material space in which institutional changes to nego-
tiate globalization have emerged. This has involved the development
of the mall-multiplex as a new site of consumption, with a new genre
system targeting niche audiences. And it has produced digitized distri-
bution and delivery, as films circulate in informal markets through
VCDs and DVDs, and in turn become objects in a contest around in-
tellectual property. In the process, not only consumption and recep-
tion but production have undergone significant changes, with the
emergence of digitally-based economies that are singularly local in
their catchment area of personnel and audiences. At the same time the
cinema as a substantial cultural and economic institution appears to
have acquired unparalleled value for a host of other enterprises, signal-
ling a new function that is at once spectacular and glamorous, but also
dispersed across a series of practices.
27
Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City; Preben Kaars-
holm, ed., Cityflicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, Kolkata, Seagull Books,
2004.
1
I
t has now been a long while since the conventional, pejorative con-
notations of melodrama have been unsettled. In popular critical
parlance the word is still used to dismiss films for contrivance, a
reduction of the universe into simplistic moral bipolarity, and ex-
cessiveness of speech, gesture, and setting. Much of this is retailed
from a viewpoint that places value on the plausible, the realist, and the
psychological in storytelling. In European and American theatrical
and film studies the common sense use of the term has been substan-
tially challenged by a rich tradition of historical excavation and cu-
ltural analysis.
I do not want to retrace the archaeology of melodrama as it has
already been laid out in great detail. My purpose here is to understand
and situate the continued recognizability of many of the features of
an apparently archaic narrative, performative, and expressive design
in the cinema of the modern and even contemporary post-colonial
world. My exploration here is consciously pitted against a historicist
mode of reasoning in which the post-colonial world inevitably moves,
stage by stage, through the itinerary plotted by forerunners in Europe
and America.
More precisely, my concern is with a certain public dimension to
melodrama as a fictional form, in terms of how character is constituted
publicly, and the implications such a publicness has for the way film
audiences are addressed. I will consider the narrative conditions which
allow for articulation of melodrama as a dynamic, expressive vehicle
of meaning; in particular, the articulation of personalized contexts of
home, family, and other fields of primary attachment, with public
registers. In my understanding, the public field is constituted both
by formal and informal structures of power, justice, social identity, and
social mobility. In my premise this relationship provides for the expres-
sive energies of the form, and is differently calibrated and organized in
specific historical and political circumstances.
The Melodramatic Public 17
While the ultimate focus of this book is on the question of melo-
drama in the Indian context, I essay a consideration of melodramatic
forms, and the modes of criticism which have addressed them, from
a multi-sited perspective, and my analysis turns back on the debate in
Europe and America from the viewpoint offered by other experiences.
This entails an exploration of the particular articulation of public and
private domains which found the melodramatic mode, the problem of
subjectivity framed by melodrama, and the status of Hollywood in
relation to melodrama and to world cinema. Hollywood remains im-
portant to this discussion for, while Indian cinema proved remarkably
ascendant in its home market, Hollywood remained a critical reference
point for thinking about industrial models and narrative form.
I. DEBATES IN M ELODRAMA S TUDIES

1. The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American
Theatre and Cinema
The recent history of melodrama criticism and theory in Europe and
the USA has moved away from some of the assumptions about melo-
drama generated both by conventional critics emphasizing the low
status of melodrama, and by an academic-critical scholarship of the
1970s informed by feminist, radical psychoanalytical, and Brechtian
orientations. Both conventional criticism and academic-critical scho-
larship seemed to share the view that melodrama was a strongly emo-
tional narrative form centred on domestic subjects. But Brechtian
and psychoanalytical critics proceeded to interrogate family melodra-
mas as texts which foregrounded the repressions of bourgeois society
through contradictory narrative drives and expressive mise-en-scène.
Feminist criticism of the period also analysed melodrama’s avowed
appeal to female audiences to explore gendered subjectivity and wo-
men’s culture in a patriarchal society.1 Recent currents, however, have
stressed that melodrama’s historical function exceeds any such seg-
mentation of narrative worlds, their modes of engagement, and ad-
dress to audiences.
This more encompassing register was already mapped in the classic
inaugural texts of melodrama criticism. Taking the influential work of
1
The debates on melodrama in Euro-American cinema are excellently document-
ed in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and
the Woman’s Film, London, British Film Institute, 1987.
Peter Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser as a starting point, we may identi-
fy certain crucial dimensions in the exploration of melodrama as a
pervasive narrative and performative culture.2 These relate to ques-
tions of meaning, form, and style, and derive from a particular way
of addressing transformations in social, political, and cultural life in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brooks argued that melo-
drama as a form addressed the fundamental unsettling of the sacred
and of socio-political hierarchies, especially after the French Revolu-
tion. The theatrical melodrama of the period generated a mode of
excess involving an emphasis on gesture, expressionist mise-en-scène,
and a dramaturgy of coincidence and peripeteia. It also deployed a real-
ist mise-en-scène in its procedures, quite in contrast to the subsequent
hierarchy that was instituted between melodrama and realism in terms
of aesthetic value. Melodrama’s quest for truth used the real as a stage
for its metaphysical operations, deploying expressionist means to
plunge below the surface of things. In Brooks’s argument, this allowed
for the exposure of the moral occult, the realm in which spiritual values
had become obscured. Innocence and suffering framed a new world in
which the personality emerged as the crucial vehicle of ethical and ex-
periential truth. Posed here as a critical dimension in the emergence of
modern social and cultural forms, melodrama was defined by ambi-
valence, pitched at the junction between the old and the new, and
often nostalgically evoked past harmonies to resolve the travails of its
characters, even as it came to be associated with a struggle against the
old order.
If Brooks emphasized the epochal transformation of social worlds,
gestural economies, and expressionist means, Elsaesser tracked the
genealogy of the form to popular storytelling with musical accom-
paniment such as street ballads, highlighting the way music and voice
built a repetitive, up-and-down pattern to the relaying of stories, and
sometimes in dissonant counterpoint to story content. Sentimental
novels, romantic fiction, and theatrical melodrama built on this herit-
age to chart a historic transformation related to different phases of
the bourgeoisie’s anti-absolutist struggles. Elsaesser’s argument also
emphasized the question of the personality in melodrama’s tendency
to personalize public and political conflicts. This was a personality
2
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1976; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, Monogram 4, 1972,
reprinted in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 43–69.
rendered in non-psychologized ways, a figure of conventionalized
expressivity. Bourgeois stability rendered the form vacuous and escap-
ist, but it was periodically resuscitated in creative engagement with
the mapping of social conflicts at key moments, and through a vari-
ety of forms such as the novel of social criticism and ethical contest in
Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. In all of this Elsaesser’s primary
entry point was not the plot, but form and style. Melodrama de-
ployed rhythms of engagement, and rendered dialogue and spatial
features in stylized ways that composed them as scenic effects instead
of semantic units. Abrupt reversals in dramaturgical calibration would
subject ecstatic upward movements in character expectations to ver-
tiginous falls. And through narrational mechanisms of pathos and
irony, melodrama offered audiences knowledge exceeding diege-
tic characters. The sophisticated American family melodramas of
the 1940s and 1950s deployed these features with greater or lesser
self-consciousness to explore dissonances in their story worlds, gene-
rating social frameworks rather than personalized registers to under-
stand the world of the fiction, and to unravel the ideologies of family
sentiment, individual self-advancement, and consumer complacency
in post-war US life. These works in particular invited a specifically
psychoanalytic account of the way repressed feelings and narrative
undercurrents worked through condensation and displacement into
the very textures of filmic construction.
This remarkable essay provided us with a sense of historical dyna-
mics, and showed how style, form, and spectator positioning were cri-
tical to the axis of melodramatic engagement. It also implicitly charted
a process of segmentation whereby the world of the family became
the privileged sphere of melodramatic form. It placed American film
melodrama within a broader formulation—that American cinema
was defined by spectacle and drama, and channelled visceral and psy-
chic energies into different genre formats. Elsaesser differentiated male
action films from the family film, though not explicitly on the ground
of a gendered differentiation of audience address and reception.
Christine Gledhill’s wonderful mapping of the melodramatic field
built on the formulations of Brooks, Elsaesser, and theatre history to
renew links between the cinema and its prehistory in theatre and pub-
lic spectacle.3 She provided a rich description of new technologies
3
Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Home is
Where the Heart Is, 5–39.
of visualization, as in scene shifting, the importance of a culture of the
pictorial, and of performative cultures such as pantomime and acro-
batics in the sensory universe drawn on and contributed to by melo-
drama in its emphasis on gesture, iconography, and spectacle. The
world of the nineteenth century came to be pervaded by melodrama-
tic discourse relayed through church sermons, parliamentary speeches,
tabloid literature, and the popular press. And melodrama dynamically
reconstituted itself, generating new moral, visceral, and affective mean-
ing from the ground produced by realist discourse and representation.
Here, and in a sustained revision of earlier film criticism, she argued
that melodrama was a generalized mode of cinematic narration:
aesthetic, cultural, and ideological features coalesce into a modality
which organizes the disparate sensory phenomena, experiences, and
contradictions of a newly emerging secular and atomizing society
in visceral, affective and morally explanatory terms . . . the notion of
modality, like register in socio-linguistics, defines a specific mode of
aesthetic articulation adaptable across a range of genres, across de-
cades, and across national cultures. It provides the genre system with a
mechanism of ‘double articulation’, capable of generating specific and
distinctively different generic formulae in particular historical conjunc-
tures, while also providing a medium of interchange and overlap be-
tween genres.4
2. Melodrama as Generalized Mode of

Cinematic Narration
This formulation, attentive to the history of melodrama’s imbrication
in a post-sacred and modernizing society, also constituted a specifi-
cally feminist intervention. For, by arguing that melodrama was used
extensively across genres, Gledhill contested the view that it appli-
ed only to women’s film, family melodramas, and female audien-
ces. This was an association which critics had used to dismiss both
melodrama and women’s film. In a radical variant, critics who read
Brechtian inflexions and ironic forms of spectator address in fami-
ly melodramas, implicitly sidelined (the dominantly female) specta-
tors who took the address ‘straight’. One source of evidence for this
4
Christine Gledhill, ‘Rethinking Genre’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams,
eds, Reinventing Film Studies, London, Edward Arnold, 2000, 221–43 (228–9).
formulation was the trade press, in which the term was used to describe
a wide variety of genres.5 Such empirical analysis has, however, been
used to make rather different points. Steve Neale, for example, argu-
ed that melodrama or ‘meller’ was commonly used to describe thril-
lers, noted that the category ‘family melodrama’ was never used, and
that the women’s film was commonly considered drama—relying on
superior literary values—rather than melodrama. In practice, most
scholarship on melodrama has used such information to identify the
nature of the attractions associated with the form, rather than legislate
which genres should be considered melodramatic.6 Thus even Neale,
having questioned existing film studies approaches on the basis of
the print archive, goes on to consider how melodrama as thriller for-
mat can be reconciled with the practice of referring to women’s films
and family-centred dramas as melodrama--.
To my mind, the critical issue for Euro-American studies has been
to understand the historical mutation of a mode defined by high styliz-
ation, expressionist methods, moral considerations, and affective en-
gagement. Ben Singer’s research into early US cinema has shown how
melodrama was used to describe films of serial action, and plots this
within the dynamics of shock and sensation of a sensorium compos-
ed of the accelerated pace of vehicular transportation, and an urban
vista of dazzling electronic signage.7 But how, if at all, did meanings
of melodrama transmute in the wake of the normalization of such
experience? Neale highlights two terms to provide a bridge for this
transformation, that of ‘sensational melodrama’ and ‘modified melo-
drama’. ‘Sensational melodramas’ were used in theatrical parlance to
describe plays which, along with the more generalized use of spectacle,
5
‘The industry recognized this pervasive melodramatic base in its exhibition cate-
gories—western melodrama, crime melodrama, sex melodrama, backwoods
melodrama, romantic melodrama, and so on. Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’,
ibid., 35. Linda Williams echoes this observation by pointing to how archivists and
cataloguers, as represented by the AFI Catalog of Features, 1921–30, and again
in 1961–70, use melodrama extensively, referring to ‘stunt, society, mystery, rural,
action, crook, underworld, comedy and, in the later catalogue, science fiction melo-
drama.’ Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from
Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, 314, n.16.
6 Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London, Routledge, 2002.
7 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts,
New York, Columbia University Press, 2001, also notes the use of melodrama for the
action serial in the early period of American cinema.
could showcase assertive female characters involved in roles of action
and villainy. Neale speculated that such sensational forms provided a
pathway to the domestic and women’s films.8 While offering this con-
cession to feminist melodrama criticism of the earlier period, Neale
appeared to assign the original codification overriding relevance. The
thriller format, founded on a manichaean drive pitting good against
evil, remained central to his formulations and allowed the inclusion of
a large number of film genres in the melodrama rubric. To reconcile
these two trends within the historical itinerary of melodrama, he fol-
lows Michael Wood in bifurcating the mode into melodramas of ac-
tion and melodramas of passion.9
The second term, that of modified melodrama, suggests a point of
convergence amongst different bids to argue for the generalized func-
tion of melodrama in Hollywood cinema. Modifications took place in
melodrama once plays entered middle-class theatres, where the canons
of taste and aesthetic discrimination required the subordination of
sensational attractions to the protocols of narrative causality.10 We
may put alongside this formulation two more. The first is Gledhill’s
argument that the melodramatic mode continues to stage itself on
8
‘Sensation melodrama is a rather loose category, encompassing . . . plays . . . which
are essentially domestic and familial in character and setting and [others] . . . which
were marked by the spectacular staging of spectacular events—avalanches, chariot
races, train wrecks and the like. One of the things that united them, though, was . . .
“an assertive model of femininity” [including] . . . complex female “villains” . . . [and]
“vigorous heroines” . . . What this suggests is that certain strands of sensation melodrama
fed into the woman’s film while others fed into the serial queen films of the kind
discussed by Singer.’ Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 200–1.
9
Melodramas of action are the manichaean thriller format, placing secondary
emphasis on the love interest, whereas in melodramas of passion ‘the concern is not
with the external dynamic of action but with the internal traumas of passion’. Michael
Wood, ‘Melodrama and the American Cinema’, Movie 29/30, 1982, 2–38 (17),
quoted in Neale, 202.
10
See Neale, 199–201. Also: ‘melodrama did not confine itself to the popular thea-
tre, and from this circumstance arises much of the confusion . . . as to what melodrama
is and what it isn’t. It spilled over into the theatre of the middle classes . . . [and] under-
went a gradual change . . . The “heart” became the target of playwrights rather than
the nervous system, and firearms and the representation of convulsions of nature yield-
ed the center of the stage to high-voltage emotionalism, examination of soul-states,
and the observation of manners.’ David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American
Theater and Culture, 1800–1850, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1968, xv, quot-
ed in Neale, 199.
the new ground generated by the movement of realist discourse. Gled-
hill has subsequently specified this as a cultural rather than aesthetic
theorization of realism, as a verisimilitude derived from changing so-
cial consensus and contest about what is real or plausible. The second
is Linda Williams’ formulation that the conventional distribution of
pathos and action between female and male genres needs to be com-
plicated: for all genres are composed of elements of pathos and action,
and organized to facilitate a shared melodramatic movement between
the pathos of innocence oppressed and misrecognized, and the (gener-
ically varied) actions which would render virtue visible and publicly
redeemable.
I group this problem of modified melodrama, melodrama’s (cultur-
ally verisimilar) calibration to realism, and melodrama as a system for
integrating pathos and action to highlight a particular way in which
melodrama, rather than being a system of excess, increasingly appears
to acquire the status of a highly adaptable normative system. In my
reading, to remain a productive analytical category, melodrama has to
enact a large-scale gesture towards the moral domain based on its en-
gagement with a situation of victimhood.11 While both Williams and
Neale would say that the pathos of this condition is generally available
across genres, the problem is dramatized if we contrast the situations
of powerlessness in ‘action melodramas’ with those of ‘passion melo-
dramas’. To cite an action ‘melodrama’ referred to by Neale, how can
we club the hero of the action film Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988),
whose powerlessness derives from the overwhelming odds he faces in
dealing with the villains,12 with, say, the male protagonist of Written
on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1957), haunted by fears of impotence, and
11 Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 197–8.
12 Thomas Elsaesser has interpreted the possibility of various underlying symbolic
meanings in the hero’s itinerary, including the need to reassert an American, working
class, male authority in the face of challenges posed by globalization and an upwardly
mobile wife. Following the logic of exploring the spectrum of hermeneutic possibilities
offered by evolving methodologies in film studies, Elsaesser keeps his parameters of
analysis to those of classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema. If we were to expand
the parameters of interpretation, I would suggest that while noting an underlying
scenario of melodramatic subjection, the film is overwhelmingly of the manichaean
thriller format, engaging audiences through its classical and genre address. See Tho-
mas Elsaesser, ‘Classical/Post-Classical Narrative’, ch. 2 in Warren Buckland and
Thomas Elsaesser, eds, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie
Analysis, London, Edward Arnold, 2004.
the heroine of Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948),
who can only bare posthumous epistolary witness to her lover’s failure
to recognize her? The peculiar intensity of scenarios of powerlessness
provided by the last two cases seems to sit rather uncomfortably with
the fleeting and, indeed, formulaic vulnerability of the hero of many
action films. The intensity of the socially subjugated melodramatic
antagonist appears critical, and is often charged by a powerful sym-
bolic blockage. It is as if the narration solicits an intensity of the spec-
tator’s investment in the difficulty that assails those lacking power,
deprived of a voice, and assailed by doubt as to the possibilities of ethi-
cal meaning and individual and social fulfilment in the world pre-
sented to us by the fiction. Here I would make the distinction between
melodrama as manichaean thriller, and melodrama as a mode of affect-
ive engagement with individual and social subjection. While the first
allows for a fairly broad range of genres to be included under the melo-
drama rubric, including action genres, the latter brings to bear a sense
of intractable social and historical blockage and a more sustained
engagement with victimized subjectivity.13
Crucial to such a narrative architecture is a space of attachment,
most commonly the home, which acts on and is acted on by spaces
outside it, in particular the public sphere of power, justice, and a more
fluid set of identities based on social and spatial mobility. While the
space may in practice be relocated, melodrama’s ambiguous rela-
tionship to time and historical change invariably pulls protagonists
towards memories and desires attached to earlier periods and places.
It is the relationship between this space and others which generates
the particular excess and formal energy which we associate with melo-
drama. Partially echoing Gledhill’s suggestive formulation about
melodrama as modality, I would argue that such a modality works it-
self through different genres to reveal points of narrative blockage,
13
This is not to say that the action film cannot produce a sustained emphasis on
victimhood, and where it does the release into action-based solutions may be much
more complicated. In the first of the Rambo films, First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982),
mentioned by Neale alongside the Die Hard series (Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 198)
the film pursues a sustained scenario of male humiliation and culminates in a hysterical
form of action. A small-town community despises the returning war veteran as a sign
of national failure and ignominy, and as potential hoodlum: the community is no
longer a space of belonging but a vehicle of aggression. Here, Neale is right to empha-
size that ‘there is no inherent correlation between powerlessness, passivity and gender’,
but he fails to grasp the structural centrality of powerlessness and passivity in the
melodramatic mode.
rather than offer a dominant mode of narrative organization in the
American cinema. In the case of the women’s film and the family melo-
drama, the melodramatic mode comes to be coeval with genre struc-
tures which access public levels only in order to plot their implosion
within the orbit of the home. But there are significant occasions when
melodrama moves beyond the home to assume a larger figurative regis-
ter, articulating its historical vocation to draw out the affective links
between different levels of experience in public ways.
Here the question of melodrama’s calibration of sensation and af-
fect remain crucial, but the pathways identified by Neale do not auto-
matically provide an answer for how the form mutated to generically
distribute its effects. We need to think of ways of considering textual
transformations in American cinema that are alert not only to an
overall architecture of cinematic form and subjectivity, as on the model
of changes to classical Hollywood cinema, but also to track the dif-
ferent inflexions of subjectivity made available through genre.14 I would
suggest that the distribution of sense perception in narrative form
and genre needs to be considered in terms of historical transfor-
mations in the relation between the private and the public, how these
spheres continue to remain entangled, or are separated out, and the
way such changes impact upon the distribution of sense perception
within and between genres. Thus, the women’s film, melodramas not
so much of passion as inarticulate passion, often privilege the close-
up as the site of a failed or fatally deferred recognition, mobilize the
domestic interior as a space of lack but also of female companionship
and solidarity, and deploy a temporality of unfulfilment. Thus both
Neale and Williams have shown how the delay in possibilities of re-
cognition of virtue and love provides for a welling of tears in the
spectator when recognition is achieved or fatally delayed.15 Much of
these analyses devolve on a division of public and private, however
14
Here, Deleuze’s formulation that there was a crisis of the movement image in the
aftermath of the Second World War, resulting in the emergence of the affection image,
caught in the interval between perception and action, is resonant with some of the
issues posed by melodrama. Where his focus was on the emergence of neo-realism, the
question of the affection image generates suggestive ties to the powerlessness/passivity
registers of melodrama which, of course, have a longer and more popular history.
Gilles Deleuze, ‘On the Movement-image’, in Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990,
New York, Columbia University Press, 46–56.
15
Steve Neale, ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen 27 (6), November–December 1986,
6–23; Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly
44: 4, Summer 1991, 2–13.
complicated such divisions prove to be. It will be my concern to con-
sider how melodramatic form is structured in circumstances in which
the public and private are not separated out, and even when they are,
how mode of address and sensory organization seem to disavow such
separation.
3. Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema

Arguments that claim an overarching function for melodrama, espe-
cially Williams, implicitly or explicitly say that melodrama, rather
than ‘classical narrative cinema’, provides a better description of Ameri-
can cinema.16 I engage this as a conceptual debate which has ramifi-
cations for an agenda to develop a more globally defined investigation
into how discourses and formal engagements with cinema, realism,
and melodrama can be undertaken. In my reading, neither Williams
nor Gledhill, both of whom argue the case for melodrama’s more gene-
ral significance, take on board the substantial research into ‘classicism’
as a mode of production. Gledhill targets the classical realist texts as
textual forms which ‘reproduce bourgeois ideology because they im-
plicate the spectator in a single viewpoint onto a coherent, hierarchi-
cally ordered representation of the world.’17 But classical Hollywood
cinema, as presented in the work of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thomp-
son, was a mode of production, founded on a division of labour
overseen by the requirements of continuity narrative. Editing, camera
movement, lighting, and acoustic registers were organized to serve
character-centred narrative causality.18 Where the classical realist text
was primarily a discursive construct, continuity cinema was a discurs-
ive and material formation that derived from industrial organization.
Further, even in terms of textual characteristics, classical narration
highlighted a distinctive set of protocols, composed of foreshadowing,
‘dangling causes’, deadlines, overlapping actions, parallel narration, all
16
‘It is time . . . to make a bolder claim: not that melodrama is a submerged, or
embedded, tendency, or genre, within classical realism, but that it has more often itself
been the dominant form of popular moving-picture narrative, whether on the
nineteenth century stage, in twentieth century films or . . . in contemporary media
events.’ Williams, Playing the Race Card, 23.
17 Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, 19.
18 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1985.
of which serve to test and subject characters to a transformative arc.
Even if such arguments have been pressed to an excessive degree in as-
serting the continued importance of classicism, and even in genres
such as the contemporary action spectacle, Hollywood as key indus-
trial site for the production of classical cinema continues to be rele-
vant not only for what it explains locally, but how other filmmaking
countries perceived Hollywood.19 Arguably, a revisionist melodrama
criticism’s privileging of melodrama over classicism tends to make
melodrama into classical cinema.20 This is rendered through the para-
digm of modified melodrama, subordinating melodramatic effects to
narrative causality, a formulation echoed in turn by Williams’ argu-
ment that Hollywood-as-melodrama integrates pathos and action across
genres. Here, it seems to me, Williams reduces melodrama to a linear
form in her overall theorization, quite in contrast to her complex ana-
lysis of specific cultural works.21
19 For Bordwell’s most recent writings about classical cinema and its persistence,
see How Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2006.
20 Rick Altman has also argued for the importance of melodrama within classic nar-
rative cinema. However, while stressing the presence of melodramatic types of charac-
terization, forms of spectacle, and excess in Hollywood cinema, he does not finally
deny the status of classicism in defining the overall form. Rick Altman, ‘Dickens,
Griffith and Film Theory Today’, South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (2), 1989, 321–59; rpnt
in Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, Durham, Duke
University Press, 1992.
21 Williams has produced a series of insightful explorations of specific melodra-
mas of race as these traverse different textual and performative contexts, including
stage, cinema, and print cultures. Drawing on Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and narrat-
ives which contest it, she sets out a pattern of alternating Tom and anti-Tom narratives.
In the first, public empathy is solicited for the black man oppressed by the white
exploiter while its inversion sees a white American nationalism canvassed by portraying
the black as a bestial figure who threatens the virtue of the white woman. These stand
in contrast to the linearity of the overall formulation because they move amongst
the melodramatic registers of home—space of innocence and of the past—and those
of the public, the political, and the historical through complex patterns of public inter-
vention, disruption, displacement, and return. To take the example of her wonder-
ful analysis of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Williams shows how
the melodramatic space of innocence, the plantation house at Tara, is substantially
displaced by the civil war. Its very location, familial contents, and racial attributes
are subject to change, with the heroine Scarlett O’Hara taking over its relocated
site, and developing attributes derived from the labouring black housemaid and wor-
ker, and, in her resonance, inducting the features of the 1920s and 1930s flapper and
To emphasize Hollywood’s position in instituting the paradigm of
continuity cinema is not meant to suggest that classicism exhausts the
range of Hollywood’s practices, or that it is able to account for the
differentiated way Hollywood films move into the world market. I will
come back to arguments complicating Hollywood without jettisoning
the classical rubric later.
4. The Post-Colonial Question: Melodrama

vs Realism
The problems I face in these formulations about melodrama are cast
into relief when we refer to discourses about Hollywood and melo-
drama within a global cultural economy. To start addressing this
problem, let me shift into what I will refer to as a post-colonial explo-
ration. This subjects the construction of difference, whether between
societies, cultural forms, or the use of technologies, to a relationship
of power, between metropolis and colony, Western centre and colonial
margin that persisted with the emergence of nation-states after the
Second World War. Matsushiro Yoshimoto poses this as a sense of lack
which animates new nations, a sense that we are always going to be
unable to catch up with those who were the original creators of mod-
ernity. Where in other cases the colonial context was critical, in the
situation Yoshimoto analyses it was the history of Japanese militarism
and feudal forms that constituted the debilitating heritage, one whose
axis shifted with military defeat and the American occupation. This
only further complicated the situation, in that even notions of anti-
feudalism and the constitution of the liberal modern subject, avowedly
independent woman of the world into her persona. And yet there is a relentless return
and reinvocation of the space of origins, the melodramatic imagination serving up an
intractable temporal blockage, while also providing an image of harmonious (and
hierarchical) inclusiveness for a mutli-race projection of the nation on the eve of the
Second World War. Rather than linear resolution of the travails of innocence, Wil-
liams here shows how a melodramatic imaginary insistently highlights a demand for
the security of the unchanged and invariant in its accessing of modern disruptions.
Further, it also gestures to the importance of the public register, the play of national
history, war, and even new forms of public investment (from plantation economy to
lumber factory) in articulating melodrama as a form driven by visceral disruption.
There is a salutary engagement here with the public level of the architecture of melo-
dramatic forms, a feature often left inadequately explored by the priority given to the
private realm. See Williams, Playing the Race Card.
self-determining in her attributes, were contaminated by an imposed
modernity. For Yoshimoto, melodrama provided a crucial reference
point for this sense of incapacitation, as a form generating an intersec-
tion between modern and pre-modern forms in its cultural connota-
tions. In opposing melodrama, he argued, Japanese filmmakers of
the 1960s and 1970s tended to be imprisoned within mimicry of the
modern/premodern, realist vs melodramatic divide in their bid to cre-
ate a modern cinema.22 Thus, whatever the general and culturally
specific ways in which melodrama works, it does this within a geo-
political situation of power, one which has ramifications for the nature
and dynamic of cultural forms and practices.
This line of enquiry resonates with Eunsun Cho’s analysis of The
Stray Bullet (Yu Hyun-Mok, 1960), a key work of the Korean cinema.
Set in South Korea after the division of the country, the film relates a
story of a diverse group of siblings: a battle-scarred war veteran, a strug-
gling bank clerk, and a woman who takes to prostituting herself to
American soldiers. Often seen as an icon of cinematic realism, in Cho’s
analysis The Stray Bullet combines American genre conventions, frag-
mented story lines, and melodramatic techniques to frame and punc-
tuate its heightened use of a realist mise-en-scène of city spaces, bars,
teashops, tramways, streets. Cho argues that the film uses American
genres such as the heist film, common in Korean mainstream cinema
of the time, as a kind of deliberately failed mimicry that dramatizes
the situation of masculine ruin and distances itself from American
political and cultural codes. A melodramatic situation of victimhood
takes the ruined war veteran as its primary focus, displaying men, their
22 Yoshimoto’s analysis deploys the idea of melodrama to capture moments of
sudden irruptive force that break through in the narrativization of social and political
transformation, as in the manner of a flashback which suddenly presents characters in
a different historical light than otherwise available in the main narrative axis. This is
a Benjaminian history in which the past surges up at a moment of danger, the point
at which it appears threatened with the spectre of extinction. The argument otherwise
skirts substantial analysis of melodrama in Japanese cinema, and chooses to dwell on
a figure such as Ozu who, through his attention to form, is taken by Yoshimoto as
an exemplar of melodramatic deconstruction. The polemical edge of the piece also
takes us away from any concrete analysis of the melodrama/realism opposition,
something which melodrama criticism invariably complicates. Matsushiro Yoshi-
moto, ‘Melodrama, Postmodernism and Japanese Cinema’, in Wimal Dissanayake,
ed., Melodrama in Asian Cinema, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993,
101–26.
wounds, physical mutilation, and humiliation. Overwhelming fami-
ly responsibilities, low income, and a deadening office routine also
grinds down the war veteran’s diligent elder brother, the bank clerk.
Suggestively, one of the figures who appears to escape this victim scena-
rio is their sister. At first she is caught within the pathos of a love un-
fulfilled because her crippled ex-soldier boyfriend has lost all belief in
himself. She falls into prostitution for the American occupation forces,
and when her boyfriend sees her propositioning a soldier the shock of
recognition of the truth leads to his complete disappearance from the
narrative. The result is the emergence of hard-edged features in the wo-
man, perhaps signalling the supplanting of economies of lack and
of longing by a reality orientation. In a modernist intervention, the
household to which the family has been forcibly removed from the
north, is likened to a prison, shots framed to interrupt perspective by
highlighting barred surfaces, a feature given acoustic corroboration
by the recurrent wail of the demented, bedridden mother, ‘Let’s leave!’
Home is something that has been left behind, the present habita-
tion and the destinies of various family members only asserting the
impossibility of any happiness.23 Here, The Stray Bullet echoes some-
thing of the concerns of another body of work on partitioned lives, that
of the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak. He took the Partition of India
as his main subject, and inevitably turned to the effects of this division
on the dislocations of families. However, while Ghatak also drew upon
and framed realist codes through a Manichaean, melodramatic method,
he invariably turned to the sedimented, mythic resonances of charac-
ters, narrative spaces, and musical references to generate a cultural-
ly self-conscious interrogation of modern experience.24 Both of these
instances would be part of the modernist end of the post-colonial spec-
trum, posed at a distance from mainstream methods. And yet they
point to the centrality of the family melodrama that was characteristic
of mainstream popular formats.
23 Eunsun Cho, ‘The Stray Bullet and the Crisis of Korean Masculinity’, in Kath-
leen Mchugh and Nancy Abelman, eds, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender,
Genre and National Cinema, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2005, 99–116.
24
See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Bombay, Screen
Unit, 1982; Moinak Biswas, ‘Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian
Cinema’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002, ch. 6; Bhaskar Sarkar, ‘Allegories of
Partition: Nation and Partition in Indian Cinema, 1947–1977’, PhD dissertation,
California, University of Southern California, 1999, ch. 5.
How do we situate the move to make over American cinema tout
court into melodrama in relation to the differently calibrated render-
ing of melodrama in post-colonial situations? If a ‘modernist melo-
drama’ framed and distanced itself both from Hollywood and its own
mainstream, it was more common to regard Hollywood as a cinematic
form defined by some kind of transcendent universality, a marker of
how stories should be told and audiences shaped. Further, and more
complicatedly, the understanding of the post-colonial popular cinema’s
difference from Hollywood was also regarded as one of historical lag
and cultural debility, and given the name melodrama. How do we pose
one construction which argues that melodrama is the defining narra-
tive mode of Hollywood cinema against another, where melodrama
is considered locally as ‘backward’ form, and in circumstances where
Hollywood is associated with ‘Western’ colonial or former colonial
power and is often the dominant power in local film markets?
Central here is the persistence of a melodramatic engagement
which has often, if not always, been invested with ambiguities, nostal-
gic tendencies, and ‘backwardness’ in response to the ideologies, if not
the experience, of modernity. While nationalism may indeed frame
such cultural drives in colonial and ex-colonial countries, as for exam-
ple in the rejection of modern Western ‘values’ of individualism, and
the iconographies of speech, dress, and bodily disposition associated
with ‘westernized’ modernity, they cannot be reduced to such national
narratives. For example, the framing of cultural specificities, as in the
assertion of regional cultures, or deriving from specific traditions of
worship, may sidestep and even contest a national framing of cultural
heritages. Further, in terms of form, the medley of performance se-
quences and attractions that compose popular cinema emerged from
a much wider geographical provenance, as I will show in Part II.
5. Deconstructing the Universal and

the National
On the other hand, a post-colonial criticism’s tendency to argue that
universal models of modernity may function in debilitating ways may
invest too much in Hollywood’s hegemonic functions. I briefly want
to consider a deconstruction of the universal model based on the idea
of a vernacular modernity.
Miriam Hansen has used this category in a bid to complicate the
norms-grounded theorization of classical Hollywood cinema by David
Bordwell and others. While Hansen’s critique targets the eternalism of
Bordwell’s cognitive theory model of spectatorship, which assigns spec-
tators a foundational bio-mental disposition in making sense of
narrative, it is more pointedly an exercise in highlighting Hollywood
as a powerful and varied system for vernacular engagement rather than
one defined by uniformity. Here Hollywood becomes a crucial com-
ponent of modernity at large, its protean cinematic incarnation. It
provided a narrative, performative, and sensory format which could
attend to the register of the everyday, its idioms, linguistic practices,
and iconographies. And its very ability to amalgamate ‘a diversity of
competing traditions, discourses, and interests on the domestic level
may have accounted for at least some of the generalized appeal and
robustness of Hollywood products abroad . . . In other words, by forg-
ing a mass market out of an ethnically and culturally heterogene-
ous society (if often at the expense of racial others), American classical
cinema had developed an idiom, or idioms, that travelled more easily
than its national popular rivals.’25
Thus, in this account, instead of being a universal model for the abs-
traction of experience, Hollywood’s significance lay in the multitude
of specific cultural engagements it was able to generate. Hansen goes
on to argue that Hollywood was not only an example of vernacu-
lar modernity, but also of modernism, for its films embodied and pro-
vided a vantage point for reflection on a technologized sensorium
of speed, new senses of space and time, and a new orchestration of the
body in genres such as slapstick, thrillers, horror movies, sci-fi, and
weepies.
Hollywood as vernacular modernity alerts us to different nodes or
levels of film production and circuits of exhibition, mobilizing a varied
fare for different types of audiences. Such a formulation would track
Hollywood’s differentiated itinerary both domestically and on a world
scale. The patterns of cultural difference in world cinema would then
shift from the register of national differences, and ideas of difference
based on the advanced and the backward, the realist, and the melodra-
matic, into distinct circuits of film consumption. It could be argued
that Hansen’s formulation deconstructs Hollywood to the point where
she has entirely displaced arguments about its hegemonic functions in
25 Miriam Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses’, in Gledhill and Williams,
eds, Reinventing Film Studies, 332–50 (340).

world cinema culture and politics. This is clearly not her intention, for
in her formulation Hollywood remains a dominant form within the
political economy of world cinema, and, despite uneasiness, she conti-
nues to use the category classical rather than mainstream or national
to describe it. Hansen reconciles the tension by suggesting that there
were two types of Americanism observable in the reception of Holly-
wood films: ‘one referring to an economy of narration and particular
stylistic principles (classical scene dissection and continuity editing),
that is classicism in the narrower, neo-classicist sense; the other cele-
brating a new sensibility, to be found in particular genres (especially
“low” genres such as slapstick comedy, adventure serials and detective
films, with their emphasis on action and attraction, speed and thrills),
as well as in the star system and particular stars—that is, aspects of the
cinema experience that worked along with the classical paradigm but
were also in tension with it, centrifugal to its principles.’26
As I suggest in the second part of this book, we need to look to seve-
ral transnational vernaculars in considering the cinema experience
rather than privilege Hollywood as its pre-eminent form. However,
Hansen is right to stress the importance of Hollywood’s variety and
mutability, both domestically, and as it crossed into new film markets.
A remapping of Hollywood’s presence in this way would also compli-
cate the map of national and regional film cultures. In the Indian case,
Steve Hughes has analysed the importance of Hollywood action serials
in the lower film exhibition circuits in the early period.27 Even after
Indian films came to dominate their own market, Hollywood had a
differentiated presence, from the ‘quality’ studio product running in
A theatrical chains, through to the B film and action serial in the lower
film circuits. Dubbed Hollywood films, mostly of the spectacular sort
also achieved intermittent success. People involved in the distribu-
tion and exhibition of films were often indifferent to imperatives for
forming a national industry and generating a national cinema, and
were quick to exhibit foreign films if these could get them returns.28
26
Miriam Hansen, ‘Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent
Film as Vernacular Modernism’, Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn 2000, 10–22 (13).
27 Stephen Hughes, ‘The Pre-Phalke Era in South India: Reflections on the
Formation of Film Audiences’, South Indian Studies 2, 1996, 161–204; and idem,
House Full: Silent Film Genre, Exhibition and Audiences in South India’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review 43 (1), 2006, 32–62.
28 For further reflections on the circulation of Hollywood films in colonial and
post-colonial India, see my introduction to Part II, below.

On the other hand, as I have noted, state cultural officials, a reform-
oriented film industry, opinion, and an art cinema discourse saw
Hollywood as providing a particular model, both of industrial economy
and storytelling styles, one they believed local popular cinema needed
to emulate.
II. THINKING A B O U T M E L O D R A M A IN
INDIAN CINEMA
. . . once the all-important function of the cinema—e.g., move-
ment—was grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and
refinement of technique were only a matter of time. In India it would
seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern
existing in time was generally misunderstood . . . Often by a queer
process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action
with melodrama . . .—Satyajit Ray29
Satyajit Ray’s remarks on Indian popular cinema contrasted it unfavour-

ably with an understanding of cinema based on movement, and in turn
equated movement with ‘a coherent dramatic pattern existing in time’.
The statement was representative of an aesthetic stance that contrasted
the ‘universal’ to the melodramatic, a contrast which, as I have sug-
gested, has particular resonance within a discourse of national cinema
which sought to develop critiques and practices which would properly
modernize it. But how adequate is the category melodrama for des-
cribing Indian popular forms?
6. Pre-Cinema Histories
Unlike the history of theatre and cinema in Western Europe and
America, scholarship on Indian entertainment forms in the mod-
ern epoch has not as yet thrown light on the use of the term outside
the type of high cultural use employed by Ray. Film studies scholar-
ship has nevertheless used the term to describe practices seen to be
analogous to the Euro-American experience. I believe it is applicable
in this sense, but would first like to consider a more general, popular
29 Satyajit Ray, ‘What is Wrong with Indian Films?’, in Satyajit Ray, Our Films,
Their Films, Bombay, Orient Longman, 1976, 19–24 (21).
format within which melodrama appears as a significant structuring
force. Here, a significant context for the cinema in India lies in the
previous and parallel history of the theatre. While folk forms such as
nautanki, tamasha, and lavani left their impress on the cinema and its
musical sequences, I will take here the history of modern urban the-
atre as a reference point for the development of popular narrative and
performance contexts in the cinema. In Bombay, and more generi-
cally, this form was often referred to as the Parsi theatre, associated
with the initiatives of the Parsi community, an entrepreneurial group
which developed close ties with colonial enterprise. While the Parsis
were considered iconic figures of modernization in the western part
of the country, the theatre initiated by the community from the mid-
nineteenth century displayed a number of linkages with pre-modern
narrative and performance traditions. Stories were drawn from the
Persian Shahnama by Firdausi, and invariably used Gujarati as their
medium.30 The Persian dastaan tradition, an oral rather than specta-
cular form that was substantially reinvented in its movement from
Persia to Lucknow, was also an important convention drawn on by
the theatre. These produced performative types who inhabited a uni-
verse driven by a repetitive dynamic, rather than one governed by a
transformative, conflict resolving logic.31 Another important tem-
plate emerged from the hybrid forms associated with Amanat’s Indar
Sabha, written in Lucknow in 1853, perhaps under court patronage,
and using Persian romance narratives (masnavi), along with musical
conventions deriving from North Indian performance cultures in the
Brajbhasha language.32 Parsis themselves initiated the translation of
plays into Urdu and supported the emergence of Urdu playwriting to
reach a broader public both in Bombay and across the North Indian
territory. From the early twentieth century North India became im-
portant in fashioning specifically Hindi, as distinct from Hindi/Urdu,
30 Unless otherwise specified, this account of the Parsi theatre is taken from Som-
nath Gupt, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (1981), trans. Kathryn
Hansen, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2005.
31 ‘The Sorceror’s Last Tale’, Mehmood Farooqui in conversation with Shoma
Chaudhury, 4 March 2006, www.tehelka.com; also see Farooqui’s continuing research

on the form in postings to the Sarai Reader list, www.sarai.net.
32
See Kathryn Hansen’s wonderful article, ‘The Indar Sabha Phenomenon: Public
Theatre and Consumption in Greater India (1853–1956)’, in Rachel Dwyer and
Christopher Pinney, eds, Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consump-
tion of Public Culture in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001, 76–114.
plays, as in the work of playwrights such as Radheshyam Kathavachak
and Narayan Prasad Betaab.33
Critical to the attractions of the urban theatre was the mixing of
dialogue and music, and sometimes an overly operatic form that re-
layed narrative entirely through songs. The urban theatre was also
noted for its deployment of technologies to enact scenes of spectacular
transformation, with mechanical means for changing backdrops and
simulating physical situations such as the crash of ocean waves or the
threat of enveloping fire. The Parsi theatre troupes were also highly
mobile, traversing the country’s big cities and small towns, from Delhi
to Calcutta, and moving beyond the territorial land mass to Ceylon,
Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, and even England, avowedly giving rise
to comparable entertainment forms in these new cultural spaces. It was
also part of a vivid print culture, where plays were published, trans-
lated, and circulated across the subcontinent. In all this the theatre
anticipated the functions of the cinema in highlighting mechanical
wonders and traversing the country and beyond. A number of Parsi
theatre playwrights were involved as script and dialogue writers in the
cinema, and well-known Parsi theatre plays such as Indar Sabha, Laila
Majnu, and Shireen Farhad, derived from a wide arc of Persian and
Arabic folklore and musical cultures, were made as films. So too were
the traditions of Shakespeare play adaptations, an impact registered
in the features of the historical genre of Indian film, as in the work of
Sohrab Modi in the 1930s and 1940s. In terms of the economic infra-
structures of cinema too, Parsi entrepreneurs such as J.F. Madan and
the Wadia family were to prove important in setting up distribution
networks and studios in the silent and early sound periods.34
What formal features and modes of address emerge from this cluster
of influences, and how were these reformatted through modern urban
33
Language formations in the Parsi theatre have become part of the history of a
language politics which seeks to separate out Urdu, Hindi, and Gujarati in terms of
cultural lineage and creativity, rather than acknowledge their considerable overlap in
theatrical practices and audiences. For an excellent account of these differences, see
Kathryn Hansen, ‘Parsi Theater, Urdu Drama, and the Communalization of Knowledge:
A Bibliographic Essay’, The Annual of Urdu Studies 16, 2001, 43–63. For a fine ac-
count of popular narrative traditions and language formation in North India, see
Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in
Colonial North India, Ranikhet, Permanent Black, 2009.
34
Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, ‘Parsi Theatre’, in idem, eds, Encyclo-
pedia of Indian Cinema, London, British Film Institute, 1994.
theatre? In Mehmood Farooqui’s account the dastaan tradition of
nineteenth-century Lucknow was ‘about four things: Razm—warfare;
Bazm—assembly of singing, dancing and seducing; Tilism—magical
effect or artefact created by the sorcerer; and Aiyyari—chicanery, trick-
ery, disguise. The aiyyars, the tricksters, are employed by both sides.’35
He laments the demise of such forms through the interventions of
modernizing colonial cultures, but notes their continued life in the
popular cinema format, with its loose assemblage of comedy, dance
and action. However, transformations in the looser assemblage were
already observable in modern theatre. Both Hansen and Kapur em-
phasize the distinction brought to performance cultures by the intro-
duction of the proscenium stage, separating out spectators from the
performance, and, in Kapur’s argument, introducing a goal-oriented
narrative causality in the structuring of performance elements. Kapur
goes on to highlight the importance of painted backdrops in generat-
ing a sense of realism. However, in her description the backdrops were
of two types: one provided for a flattened, shorthand, and low mimetic
evocation of the reality referred to; the other one of high illusionism,
carrying the spectator’s view into a hallucinatory depth percep-
tion.36 The heightened illusionism was added to by the plethora of
special effects produced in the Parsi theatre, and referred to in its texts
and stage directions. These included both the rendering of realistic
physical dimensions of the action, such as the crash of waves, the rising
of the sun, or simulations of lightning, but also magical effects, as in
the disappearance of characters, the continued movement of figures
just beheaded, the magical transformation of a character from the one
into the many, the taking of characters to flight.37
Further, while there were intimations of the hermetic, self-referen-
tial features of modern theatre, and realist dimensions deriving from
the human portraiture of divine and mythical figures in realist paint-
ing and stage acting, ultimately the Parsi theatre appeared to reiterate
a highly iconic, frontal mode of address to its audiences that broke the
onward flow of a narratively self-enclosed fictive world. Taking a text
35
Farooqui, ‘The Sorceror’s Last Tale’.
36 Anuradha Kapur, ‘Actors Prepare’, in body.city, Delhi, Tulika Books, 2003,
118–47.
37
Anuradha Kapur, ‘The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological
Drama of the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Arts and Ideas 23-4, 1993, 85–107
(85–6), for a description of the magical effects noted in scripts.
such as Betaab’s Mahabharata, Hansen demonstrates the importance
of the direct address of ritual forms in securing an environment of aus-
piciousness for the audience. This included an inaugural invocation of
the sacred, conventions providing the performers with sacred sanc-
tions, and highly specific ritual enactments to sanctify the emergence
of new discourses. In the case of the Mahabharata, this involved a bid
to include Dalit/untouchable communities into the provenance of the
performance’s symbolic extensions of Hindu community and nation-
hood.38 These new elements in fact indicated the maintenance of a
heterogeneous narrative world, for such sequences did not contribute
to the main narrative line of the play.
Scholarship on the variety of forms, and more specifically genres,
that emerged from the Parsi theatre has as yet remained relatively un-
developed. Thus, while a certain attention has been devoted to the
emergence of the mythological genre,39 and the specific influence of
the Indar Sabha,40 there has been no detailing of historical, romance,
and social genres in the Parsi theatre. And the status of melodrama as
a form has not seriously entered the discourse of theatre studies in
India. Nevertheless, the formal analysis undertaken by Hansen and
Kapur points to an intersection with evolving formulations in the field
of film studies around the question of frontal forms of address, and the
interruption of narrative flow, both through a heightened frontality,
and through a heterogeneous stringing together of scenes. The particu-
lar interest of these formulations is that they do not assume a straight-
forward historical succession of narrative and dramaturgical forms,
as in the supplanting of frontality, the narrative integration of musi-
cal performance, or the substitution of iconic character portraiture by
realist characterization.
7. Film Form: The Heterogeneous

Popular Format
Frontal, iconic modes of characterization of the popular theatrical
format were carried forward into the cinema. We also observe the
38
Kathryn Hansen, ‘Ritual Enactments in a Hindi “Mythological”: Betaab’s
Mahabharata in Parsi Theatre’, Economic and Political Weekly 41 (48), 2–8 December
2006, 4985–91.
39 Anuradha Kapur, ‘The Representation of Gods and Heroes’; Kathryn Hansen,
‘Ritual Enactments’.
40
Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Indar Sabha Phenomenon’.
persistence of the disaggregated, heterogeneous dimensions of this
narrative form, a heterogeneity defined not only by a loose assemblage
of attractions—action, comedy, romance—but also by the sense that
the world of the fiction is not singular and may be articulated through
different sites, styles, and discursive forms, ranging from the comedic
to the socially pedagogic or allegorical. In my estimation, this range
of features constitutes the popular format, and melodrama makes a
specific intervention in this form. Before exploring what that interven-
tion was about, I would like to pay further attention to the heterogene-
ous form of the popular in cinema.
While work on Indian film genres of the earlier period are as yet too
limited to hazard generalization, I will point to certain examples from
the devotional or saint films to suggest its heterogenous features. These
films of the 1930s and 1940s narrated the travails of saintly figures,
mostly of lowly caste status who produced new languages and cultures
of worship that challenged Brahmanical control over access to the sacr-
ed. Drawing on historical figures from the pre-colonial period, their
setting was the medieval village. This was a world defined by caste hier-
archies but also by everyday labour in fields and artisanal dwellings, the
primary resource for a new sense of community that would under-
mine caste inflexibility. The films were carried by the impetus to create
a transformative compact between labouring constituencies and the
saint through his new, popular language of worship.
In these films there was a suggestive dispersal to the way the world
of the fiction was organized. Thus, in films such as the marvellous
Sant Tukaram (Fattelal and Damle, 1936) the saint, Tukaram, does not
quite register the identity of his opponent, the Brahmin Salomolo.
The film has an episodic structure, composed of a series of chal-
lenges and tests, and there are recurrent meetings between the two
opponents. Tuka never addresses Salomolo by name, nor does he ack-
nowledge familiarity with him in other ways. It is as if he does not quite
exist in the same world as Salomolo, immersed as he is in a spiritual
quest for the lord that takes him away from the world of everyday real-
ity and power. However, there is another, more significant mismatch
between worlds. Tuka certainly recognizes and registers Jijai, his wife,
at once devoted to him and hostile to his immersion in a lord who
cannot help his family through its everyday travails. Jijai inhabits her
own universe, a highly textured, tactile one, where, standing in the
mud, she lovingly washes down her buffalo. A different sensate being,
Jijai abides by her own bodily and worldly parameters to go along with
the invocation of a different divine imprimatur, the goddess Mangalai.
Even at the conclusion of the film, Tuka’s heavenly transcendence of
the earthly life does not impact on her in terms of an economy of loss
or of longing.41 As I will suggest, such an economy is important to the
way melodrama intervenes in the format of the popular assemblage.
The narrativization of the sacred is crucial to this example, and the
devotional film can be seen as a subset of early Indian popular cinema’s
investment in the genre of the mythological film. Rather than such a
focus being suggestive of a ‘pre-modern’ universe, film studies schol-
arship on mythological films of the 1910s has suggested their com-
plex relationship to modern cultural and political circumstances.
Admittedly, at one level, their popularity was used to argue for the
continued influence of spiritual values in the face of the modern colo-
nial West’s materialism. While this indigenist, anti-modernist stance
seemed strengthened by exhibition strategies calibrating the screen-
ing of films such as Phalke’s Shree Krishna Janma (1917) to the Hindu
religious calendar in Madras, Stephen Hughes has shown how bids
to capitalize on their success in the political realm, as in the efforts of
nationalist leaders such as Tilak and Annie Besant, intersected with
political debates highlighting divisions between Brahmins and non-
Brahmins in the Hindu community and the logistics of new repre-
sentational claims. Mythological narratives could also be complicated
by anachronistic references to modern-day settings and technologies,
and also to knowingly intercalated political imagery and referen-
ces, thereby rupturing any coherent reproduction of traditional
codes. Further, the essentially commercial drives to gather mass audien-
ces could give rise to a host of attractions, for example scenes of sexual
display that ran counter to orthodox sensibilities.42
If public discourse about the mythological film indicates differen-
tiated responses and the complexity of modern commodity and poli-
tical constellations in the circulation of films, then an attention to
film as a technology of perceptual transformation also complicates our
sense of the terms of cinematic address. Dissolves, superimpositions,
and stop motion filming produced miraculous changes and invited
41 For further exploration of this mode, see Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Devotional

Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice and Spectatorship in Indian Film’, in
Birgit Meyer and Stephen P. Hughes, eds, Postscripts 1.2/1.3, 2005, 237–57.
42
Stephen Hughes, ‘Mythologicals and Modernity’, 207–35.
both wonder but also the imagination of how the bringing together of
modern technologies and social subjects could facilitate the mutability
of sacred and hierarchical orders. I have suggested how in Sant Tuka-
ram it was specifically the technology of the copy that undergirded a
climactic miracle which multiplied and distributed images of the royal
personage, remaking members of the assembled public into incarna-
tions of the king.43
More generally, given the persistence of religious investments to the
development of modern technologies of visual representation, for-
mulations which counterpose modern to religious worldviews clearly
need to be questioned; and by extension Brooks’s formulation that
melodrama emerges in the wake of desacralization. Recently, Kajri
Jain, examining the history of popular print culture in early-twentieth-
century advertising,44 notes how multinational firms, targeting an
Indian market in modern consumer goods, utilized mythic imagery
and narratives to sell their product. She also notes the persistence of a
market in mythological prints used for domestic devotion and to cre-
ate auspicious environments. She uses these observations to question
Benedict Anderson’s assumptions that modern nations are founded on
an imagined community which substituted religiously inflected no-
tions of ritual time with an empty, homogenous, and secularized time.
In Anderson’s account, under conditions of print capitalism, readers
of newspapers, novels, and other forms which mobilize knowledge
of simultaneous events dispersed in space are encouraged to think of
themselves as part of large-scale communities that lie beyond face-to-
face experience. Jain’s critique is persuasive, and suggests that modern
technologies for the reproduction and circulation of images can also
provide for the reproduction of religious community. However, if the
sacred has not been displaced, this is clearly not the same sacred, for
it has been brought into the framework of a mechanically reproduced,
easily available image, as in the availability of Shivaji’s image to the sub-
jects he rules over in Sant Tukaram. Here, Jain’s work sustains another
dimension of Anderson’s formulation. For popular print culture that
takes the sacred as its subject disperses the command over language
43Vasudevan, ‘Devotional Transformation’.

44Kajri Jain, ‘New Visual Technologies in the Bazaar: Reterritorialisation of the
Sacred in Popular Print Culture’, Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, Delhi, Sarai/
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 44–57.
reposed in elites and priestly orders by unleashing the power of lay
languages and pictorial representations under the extended conditions
of circulation of print and visual capitalism.
8. Melodramatic Interventions
If we are to theorize the validity of the melodramatic mode in the
Indian case, it must be in such a way as to reformulate the terms of the
modernity within which melodrama emerges. In line with Brooks’s
formulation that melodrama throws up the personality as focus of
its investments in the wake of modern social, political, and religious
transformation, I would suggest that we need to capture a sense of
the specific types of narrative blockage and torsion within which the
drama of the personality is enacted. In the first instance, I draw up-
on a lexicon of contests around traditional, customary, and familial
affiliations as the narrative itinerary through which we can pursue
the melodramatic subject. Here the family provides one of the critical
frames, though certainly not the only one, for the exploration of per-
sonality in the organization of the narrative world; and this is obser-
vable whether this narrative world is (generically defined) by religious
authority, the sacredness of kings, or by secular power. The family so
conceived was not a privatized form but, as I will suggest, one that
needs to be thought of as entangled with public authority. Indeed, in
the reach of its command, it may constitute the very terms and limits
of publicness. The public-family form provided a narrative architec-
ture encompassing the apparently differentiated spaces of family,
society, and public-institutional life. And it is in its transformation
that we are offered a perspective on the changing ways in which melo-
drama has operated in Indian film. As the integument of the social and
political realm, the family form does not simply personalize social and
political issues. Rather, it renders the personal and political as non-
distinguishable registers of fictional organization. However, the fami-
ly may itself be displaced or drawn into other registers of attachment,
and, through the course of this book, we will observe how prim-
ary attachments reside in the register of the popular,45 and even in
the personification of nationhood as a new register of melodramatic
belonging.
45
Ch. 3 below, on the Raj Kapoor persona and the evocation of the street as the
zone of primary attachment.
If melodrama in Indian popular film constructed a subjectivity at
once personalized and public, it also addressed its audiences in crucial
ways as public rather than individuated. For, in its methods of re-
presentation, its construction and articulation of character types and
character expression, and the particular way it tied intimate circums-
tances, perceptions, and familial ties to a drama beyond the indivi-
dual, this is a species of melodrama which repeatedly highlights itself
not only as an insistently exteriorized but also public way of talking
about the human condition. This is observable in crucial, symbolically
charged passages of character conversation, where speech moves into
a register beyond the interpersonal: its idioms and pitch are designed
to invoke a larger discursive frame of reference: moral, normative, even
critical and contesting. Not only does the speech and visage pose this
as supra-individuated, it also suggests that it is aimed at an audience
beyond the one presented within the fiction. This type of character
articulation is part of the apparatus of imaginary direct address, of
which looks into the camera are only a subset. As I will suggest, mode
of character construction and expression are also crucial to the orga-
nization of body/space relationships, where the capacity of characters
to articulate the scene, and offer a perspective, very often devolves on
a particular centring of character in narrative space. This has vari-
ous formal possibilities, ranging from the single-shot set-up of early
cinema, through to the way an iconization of character takes place over
the time of a multi-shot sequence.
Melodrama is not coterminous with the heterogeneous system of
popular entertainment in Indian film, but provides a force field for
narrative navigation within its loose armature. Thus, the comedy and
musical sequences that constitute key attractions of Indian popular
cinema do not inevitably contribute to the development of the melo-
dramatic narrative. This is most markedly so of the comic sequences.
But musical sequences may also stand in relative independence from
the melodramatic shaping of the narrative, as in the manner of pre-
fabricated song and autonomously designed choreography, usually
deriving from a menu-driven necessity in the composition of cine-
matic entertainment. However, the musical sequence may also come
to be shot through with elements of melodramatic mise-en-scène and
stylization which build on the exploration of narrative blockages, as in
songs of romantic and familial separation and ‘narrational songs’ ad-
dressing the injustice visited on protagonists and performed for a
larger diegetic public.46 The excess of the popular over the melodra-
matic is indicated by the way characters acquire distinct inflections as
they move across the heterogeneous popular system. This is often
discordant, providing consistent characterization in the main story
line, while rendering ‘character’ in rather different ways in other seg-
ments.47 In some exceptional circumstances, character may be entirely
of the popular rather than the melodramatic format, entirely abandon-
ing any consistency of character identity, as for example in the case of
Shree 420 (Confidence Trickster; Raj Kapoor, 1956), a host of films
featuring Dev Anand and Kishore Kumar in the 1950s, and, in a more
contemporary register, the work of the comedian Govinda. The effect
is strange only if plotted within the logic of a homogenous diegesis.
Instead, the heterogeneity of the popular format produces character
formations not only disaggregated but also potentially unanchored.
The publicness of character derives from the idea that the subject
is constituted in and through an address to an audience. This is relayed
through ‘public’ modes of performance and mise-en-scène which the
excess acting, acting conventions, and setting impart to a character’s
narrative functions. While I have noted an escalatory dimension to
performance as the lynchpin of its publicness, we should distin-
guish highly conventional passages from those providing a release
from narrative blockages. Madhava Prasad’s understanding of the
heterogeneous mode of Indian film production argues for the way
elements such as dialogue, music, stunts, and choreography arrive
prefabricated, their meanings pre-interpreted for audiences already
knowledgeable about the semantic range of these conventions. Such
conventions include normative speech regarding family obligation,
and performance and dialogue centred on moral typages of heroism,
villainy, or seduction. However, while acute about the production
conditions under which popular cinema has operated, this formula-
tion does not attend to the particular charge that inflects key passages
and denouements that solicit affective investments of a different scale.
In my understanding, such registers emerge in a vortex of performative
46 The work of Guru Dutt stands out in this regard. See below, and ch. 1, on
Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957).

47
This is marked in the way the Raj Kapoor persona is distinguished by a happy-
go-lucky disposition in the song ‘Main Awara Hoon’ (I’m a good for nothing), and in
certain sequences of physical comedy, in sharp contrast to the dark melodramatic
characterization of the main story line in Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951).
publicness distinct from such conventions, and are formulated with a
pitch, sonorousness, and public setting which move beyond any diege-
tic addressee.48
My argument here does not aim to dissolve the possibility of inte-
riority in character construction. From the 1930s onwards, key works
of the popular cinema highlight the existential crisis of the individual,
dramatized, for example in the works of Pramathesh Barua, through
distinctively modernist passages.49 The cinema of the 1950s, which
displayed in many works the imprint of Hollywood point-of-view
techniques and continuity editing, also displayed an investment in the
burden of melodramatic subjection as it was relayed through charac-
ters caught in the vortex of social marginality and indignity. This
was so of characters fashioned by the performances of Raj Kapoor,
Guru Dutt, Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, Nargis, Nutan, and Waheeda
Rehman.50 While melodramas of social injustice featuring male
protagonists generally moved towards a public articulation, suggestive
works featuring doomed women characters show how social norms
function repressively, even when they come to be masochistically inter-
nalized and publicly embraced by women.51
Perhaps most complicated of all is a particular form of melodra-
matic construction of the song sequence fashioned by Guru Dutt.
While a song such as Yeh mahalon, yeh takhton, yeh tajon ki duniya . . .
jalaa do, jalaa do, isse fooq dalo (burn down this world of palaces,
thrones, and crowns . . .) at the climax of Pyaasa is composed as an
incendiary address to a diegetic public, Jinhe naaz hai Hind par vo
kahan hain (Where, O where are those with pride in Hindustan?) is
48 Roberta Pearson has demonstrated the transformation of performance codes
from ‘histrionic’ to ‘verisimilar’ modes in the history of nineteenth-century US thea-
tre and early cinema in Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in
the Griffith Biograph Films, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992. While these
distinctions are important, my use relies on distinctions within histrionic performance,
where a public form emerges from a narrative and stylistic unravelling of expressive
constraints, and where elements of frontality and publicness are crucial.
49
See especially Devdas (1935) and Mukti (Liberation; 1937), both by Barua.
50 Relevant works would include Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949, with Nargis),
Bandini (Bimal Roy, 1963, with Nutan), Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (Abrar Alvi, 1963,
with Meena Kumari), Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957, with Waheeda Rehman).
51
Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949) is a particularly perverse and fascinating example.
See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘You Cannot Live in Society—and Ignore It: Nationhood and
Female Modernity in Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949)’, in Patricia Uberoi, ed., Social
Reform, Sexuality and the State, Delhi, Sage, 1996, 83–108.
quite extraordinarily organized in subordinating the diegetic public
arena of its performance, the ‘red light area’, as visual and acoustic
material for the song. The song here is a register both interior to the
character, the poet Vijay, and public. The drunken poet protagonist
denounces a world where women are bought and sold in the dark lanes
and passages of the city. The prostitutes, pimps, and customers course
around, at first seeming indifferent to or unaware of his address, at best
finding his drunken demeanour amusing or irritating. However, the
impact of his denunciation is registered at the climax of the song, when
some toughs forcibly remove him from the space. But there is a myste-
rious, dis- or re-embodied dimension to the diegetic public, as the
soundtrack of the everyday world is arrested, rendered silent, or mob-
ilized as an element within the composition of the song and the
interiority of the character. The song fuses subjectivity with a public
address that subordinates and enfolds the diegetic public into its
sensory orbit, its lyrics, melody, and sound structures, with musical
strains impacting the textures of what we see.52 This is a highly person-
alized rendering of the public arena, even as its address is of a public
form deriving from the modes of the Urdu protest song fashioned
under the aegis of the radical Indian literary and theatrical movement
of the time.53 (Figs 1–2, p. 47.)
9. ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ Articulations

How can we identify the social, cultural, and indeed political sources
of the melodramatic form that provides narrative structure and mode
of address to the popular format? Popular film narratives articulate
worlds governed by a hierarchized, interdependent network of sub-
jectivity and others with mobile, escalatory features to characterization
which culminate in a publicness of address severed from oppressive
social forms. In the first form the extended family has provided a dur-
able lynchpin of the represented social world. The moral economy of
the family, the relations of paternal authority and maternal nurture,
of filial respect, duty, and emotional attachment provide one of the
52
Corey Creekmur is undertaking a suggestive reading of the melos of this scene.
‘Guru Dutt and Melodrama’, paper presented at a conference on ‘The Social and
Material Life of Indian Cinema’, New York University, April 2006.
53
Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority, Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in Colonial
and Post-colonial India, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2004.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Figs 1-2: Pyaasa, Guru Dutt, 1957, Interior and Public.

crucial reference points for how narratives are structured. And, more
broadly, the family provides a paternalist frame within which other
dramatis personae, in spaces ranging from the village through to urban
neighbourhood, and sometimes extending to the very fabric of city
life, revolve.
The family form as encompassing public universe provided the
diegetic space a key strategy for narrative orientation in the popu-
lar format. Its drives were often worked out on the basis of a repressive
paternal authority, if one sometimes represented as deformed by agents
and representatives working outside its ken, as in the case of the estate
managers and hangers-on of landed personages. Even when subject to
displacement as the main vector of the public world, the family format
often remained a crucial reference point for the processing of narrat-
ive structures, including, as I will suggest, the ways in which narrative
spaces are organized. Melodrama generates a field of narrative force
that scatters families and individuals only to bring them back together
again in a differently cadenced public format. It does this in order to
raise the stakes of narrative meaning by articulating one form of autho-
rity, that of the family, to a superordinate one, which may be the family
form itself, now revised, the state, or a new form of public-symbolic
authority.
We may here distinguish different organizations of the melodra-
matic field. One focuses on family, kin/clan, and paternalist forms,
and is defined by a horizontal plane of dramaturgy. Another articu-
lates the paternalist family and the horizon of intimate ties to a vertical
axis which brings it into destabilizing collision with a public space
which will resituate the family’s functions. This is an important dif-
ference, for in the first case the family itself is coterminous with the
public domain of the narrative world, ruled over by its patriarch. This
is akin to what Madhava Prasad refers to as the ‘feudal family romance’,
a narrative form which channels desires for modern social trans-
formation—most simply, a romance which does not have parental
sanction—in such a way that a reformed family and patriarchal elder
becomes the vehicle of reconciliation.54 Both these modes require
54
Prasad’s observations about this form are part of a specifically political reading
of its functions. He sees this as characteristic of the passive revolution in India, in which
bourgeois transformation had to work through feudal forms, part of the historic pact
between the bourgeois and feudal elites in the make-up of the ruling coalition. Such
a coalition ruled through to its dismantling in the mid-1970s, when a combination
some form of disturbance of the familial form, but the first more often
than not finally manages the disruptive energies unleashed under the
aegis of the family and the patriarchal elder, while the second requires
a superior agency to resolve the conflicts released.
Melodramatic modes may articulate a host of genres. The mainte-
nance of a disaggregated fictional universe in Sant Tukaram is not char-
acteristic of the genre of the devotional. Taking other instances, such
as Sant Dnyaneshwar (Fattelal and Damle, 1940), we will observe a
successful integration of narrative worlds. In this case the Brahmanical
household is deprived of its authority and integrated at a subordinate
level into the new public form generated by the saint’s mobilization of
the peasant community. Relatedly, the female protagonist, Manu,
attracted to the saint both as a devout worshipper but through an in-
tense romantic attachment, is, unlike Jijai, inducted as desiring subject
into the new public field generated by his authority. Manu is prohibi-
ted in her desire for Dnyaneshwar at first by her Brahman father, and
then by Dnyaneshwar’s own withdrawal from the world. Woman and
household, imaged in the figure of the desiring woman who looks out
from barred household windows at the impossible object of desire,
seal the new, subordinated status of former ritual-household authority
into Dnyaneshwar’s public. (Figs 3–4, p. 50.) What is suggestive here
is the way in which the system of typage through which characters
are represented here—from the beatific saint, the bigoted Brahmin,
through to the radiant female devotee—while continuous with conven-
tional modes of representation, is nevertheless resituated in the archi-
tecture and symbolic functions of a reformulated public space. The
domestically subordinated and constrained situation of the female
devotee/romantic indicates the way the public-symbolic transactions
of popular resistance followed by an exercise in modernizing state authoritarianism

brought about a transformation. See Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film. One does not
need to buy the political and ideological formulation to accept the insights Prasad
provides in his analysis of narrative structure. However, even within these limited
terms of engagement, in my reading such a formulation works for the 1940s, but is
substantially displaced after Independence by a new form of popular investment in the
nation-state, over earlier forms of authority. This in turn does not tell the whole story
of the 1950s cinema, a field yet to be adequately explored in terms of the diversity of
its productions. Regarding the ‘feudal’ or patriarchal joint family, I would hazard that
it continued to be significant, but as an aspect of the family social film genre, rather
than as the dominant narrative form of the popular.
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Figs 3–4: Sant Tukaram; Fattelal and Damle, 1937, Sant Dnyaneshwar,
Fattelal and Damle, 1940: Household Economies.
that move the narrative also produce new configurations of familial
space and subjectivity as a specifically disempowered niche within it.
This, then, is an instance of the vertical axis of melodrama, in which
a very specifically melodramatic modality, relating to the transforma-
tion of Brahmanical public authority into the disempowered house-
hold, is articulated in the image of the desiring female devotee.
The oeuvre of the Bombay Talkies studio of the 1930s and 1940s
by and large conforms to the logic of a publicness founded in fami-
lial authority. The displacement of family authority by a public order
superior to it is most evident in post-Independence social films.
Here the state, as vehicle for the recognition and amelioration of social
victimhood and injustice, emerges as a crucial site of action and recog-
nition. As I suggest in chapters 3 and 4, other spaces emerge too, for
example a kind of idealized public realm where the protean space of the
street, of multi-ethnic commingling and social anonymity, also func-
tions as a powerful register of attachment to distance the audience
from the inflexible dictates of a respectable society founded on the pro-
bity of lineage. What is suggestive in the dynamic of this reformulated
narrative universe is how the mother iconizes suffering, and motivates
action on the part of a son against a father, and achieves symbolic resti-
tution on the ground of the newly figured state.
So far, I have been addressing only the moral and ideological com-
ponents of the melodramatic mode as these are channelled through the
familial patterns of narrative structure. In terms of the aesthetics of
this modality, I would suggest that there is what Brooks would call an
‘expressionism’ accompanying the shifts in diegetic organization that
I have drawn attention to. In the work both of studios such as Bom-
bay Talkies, and even in the Bengali cinema, the horizontal axis of
the family narrative exhibited a fairly constrained shooting style. In
Moinak Biswas’ argument, flat lighting, the blocking of discrete spa-
ces without exploration of connective axes, and tableau shots de-
fined a ‘studio style’ of the 1940s.55 This was not uniform, and in the
work of directors such as Pramathesh Barua there were instances of
dynamic effects in camera movement, cutting rhythms, and expres-
sionist lighting in films such as Devdas (1935) and Mukti (Libera-
tion; 1937). Biswas argues that a cinematic dynamism emerged in the
1950s, in the wake of the crisis of the studio system. Several changes
55
Biswas, ‘Historical Realism’, 62–3.
were observable. Under the impact of the radical Indian People’s Thea-
tre Association’s engagement with folk culture and social realism there
was a combination of location shooting and camera movement along
with the studio style. An exploration of space through chiaroscuro
effects signposted shifts in the deployment of sets both in Bengali and
Hindi films made under the influence of the radical theatre move-
ment, and indicated a new capacity to explore the city, its social life,
and its moral ambiguities. Through the vehicle of the crime film popu-
lar in the 1950s, a new fluidity of representation was in evidence, and
a heightened engagement with the perceptual economies of city life,
so that in the work of Guru Dutt and Chetan Anand ‘Vision is not only
redirected through a play of light and darkness, it is consistently block-
ed and fragmented—car windows, railings, pillars, scaffolds impose
frames within frames, oblique vision becomes necessary, and lateral
depth is enhanced by the same token. Location shooting in the city
is extended into a textural principle of the image and a sequencing
principle between images.’56 In counterpoint to location/studio com-
binations, detailed exploration of social spaces, and the new percep-
tual dynamics of urban crime movies, the emergence of a bourgeois
melodrama in Bengal is also noted by Biswas. Bengali films, such as
those featuring the star couple Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, work-
ed on the interior through lighting, the highlighting of elements
of décor, musical motifs, point of view, and subjective acting signs.57
In terms of my formulation about the move of the cinema away from
the horizontal, hermetic family register, we could say that the Bombay
film, in its urban thriller format, shifted the terms of perception by its
move into the city, the street, and in its ultimate highlighting of the
state as transcendent point of narrative resolution. The subordination
of the familial-social network of authority was differently calibrated
in the Bengal examples Biswas draws upon. This related to the pro-
duction of a realm of interiority which, not unlike the family melodra-
mas of Hollywood, exercised pressure on the repressive co-ordinates of
the familial-public nexus. But this did not produce a new, vertical axis
and public form. Instead, it generated a privatized fantasy space where
the couple could constitute itself untrammelled by the familial form.
56 Ibid., 86.
57
Ibid., ch. 4: ‘Belonging to the Modern: Narratives of Vernacular Citizenship in
the 1950s Bengali Melodrama’; and idem, ‘Harana Sur as Melodrama Now’, in Ravi
Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, New Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 2001, 122–42.
To point to a new melodramatic architecture relating the family to
the public realm does not necessarily provide for stylistic expressive-
ness. But in several cases we may observe how this new architecture of
narrative space turned expressively on the family narrative to explore
the repressed, occulted levels of the story world. Raj Kapoor’s Awara
(1951) was a case in point. Raghunath, a reputed judge, marries Leela,
a young widow, an act of romantic desire undertaken in the face of so-
cial conventions which declare that a widow cannot remarry. A bandit,
Jagga, bent on avenging himself against the judge for what he believed
to be a wrongful verdict, abducts Leela. He discovers that she is preg-
nant, and returns her, knowing that the wife’s virtue will be question-
ed. Social pressure and psychological doubt mount on Raghunath.
The pressure comes to a pitch in a remarkable passage of melodramatic
mise-en-scène.
In a darkened, cavernous chamber the pregnant Leela, prostrate
on an ornate bed, cries out her innocence in the face of charges that
are publicly circulating about her loss of virtue. Chiaroscuro effects
abound, as winds buffet the drapes that adorn a high window. Vertical
axes build, with low angles composing the judge against a baroque ceil-
ing. The juxtaposition of shots generates perceptual disequilibrium,
shot scales, and body dispositions at considerable variance. Melodra-
matic exteriorization achieves brilliant expression, as a psychology of
dread is writ large on actor Prithviraj Kapoor’s face. As the woman’s
pleas and the man’s fearful visage alternate, the musical score swells
to evoke the pathos of the situation. The camera dollies forward to
cherubs on an ornamental clock whose plaintive eyes seem to respond
to the swelling music and the piteous nature of the characters’ plight.
(See Figs 5–6.) Suddenly, psychological ambivalence is dissolved, an
authoritarian decisiveness breaks through, and the judge casts his wife
out. The forlorn innocent trudges out through the enormous doors
of the house. The voices of the folk, embodied in a troupe of plebe-
ian singers in the street, denounces this act of injustice in the narrat-
ive idiom of the Ramayana, as the judge, now a figure of implacable,
unrelenting authority, is framed in between the vertical lines of the
window.
The household here is the fulcrum for the revelation of an occulted
space, that of the inviolable feudal order that has been repressed in the
judge’s act of individual desire, his marriage to a widow. Using the full
panoply of melodramatic effects, the film reveals this space as one
which afflicts the judge with dread and bends him to its will. From now
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Figs 5–6: Melodramatic mise-en-scène in Awara, Raj Kapoor, 1951.

the house of the judge will be the fortress of the old order, one the film
returns to again and again before, at last, the characters are arraign-
ed on a different ground. Here, in a court of law, the arena of the state,
the story of victimhood can be revealed and the judge’s guilt recog-
nized.
Awara displays systematically deployed codes of continuity editing
in certain scenes. It dispenses with these in favour of tableau shots
with minimal cutting, and scant attention to continuity at other times.
It employs melodramatic mise-en-scène of the type I have described.
It also manages a variegated entertainment format, inserting comedy
scenes, fights, and song sequences which do not always relate strongly
to the onward development of the narrative. But its melodrama-
tic drive, to show the string of injustices meted out to its main char-
acters, is sustained, and climaxes in the appropriate recognition scene
and public address. In terms of mise-en-scène, the film moves between
a studio-generated realism that evokes the everyday habitus of city
streets; but it can swiftly move into a more flamboyant register of baro-
que interiors and renders the city as an uncanny space, where demonic
forces await characters as day gives way to night and gaslit streets,
evoking practices in the urban theatre of older vintage, illuminate the
peril lurking in the shadows.
The film, and a host of other Bombay melodramas, could illustrate
Singer’s observation about the proclivity of melodrama, its multi-
plicity of plots, recourse to coincidence and reversals, sensational re-
velations, and spectacular enactments, to provide a suitable frame to
manage the dislocations and distractions, sensory overload, and drive
to spectacle that characterizes the cinema’s relationship to the history
of modern experience. In my argument, however, this loose assem-
blage is held together on the basis of a melodramatic axis of personal-
ized experience that relentlessly articulates itself in publicly expressive
ways. This is marked at the climax, when the drama of victimization
is given its full articulation in a speech made by the wronged protago-
nist that rings through the court, and declares itself part of an ensemble
of victimhood.
One of the clear objectives of the feminist critique of existing for-
mulations about Hollywood and its genre system is to recover the
melodramatic mode as an encompassing one which will disestablish
the hierarchies, between ‘male’ rationality of narrative construction
and action orientation and a ‘female’ emotionality that is caught within
a circuit of narrative stasis and emotional unfulfilment. It has been my
intention to complicate this agenda by pointing to critical differen-
ces in the spectrum of practices identified as melodramatic in different
historical contexts. My concern has been to highlight an insistently
‘unmodified melodrama’. Modification sets up a distance of the nar-
rative world from the world of the personality writ large, at best mak-
ing its registers of primary attachment into an underlying structure. In
contrast, in the typology of melodramatic forms and modalities that
I have outlined for Indian popular cinema, there is a remarkable overt-
ness, in contrast to American cinema, of narrative blockages occulting
the realm of primary attachments and functioning as obstacle to ro-
mance, social mobility, and the achievement of social recognition and
respect. Moreover it is the publicness of this cinema’s mode of address
which distinguishes it from the economies of Hollywood; specifically,
those which invite spectatorial immersion in the restraint of individu-
ated characterization, privatized interaction, and plausible, character-
centred narrative progression.
My argument here is not a historicist one, where Indian cinema
represents a backward point in the spectrum of popular cinema and
Hollywood its vanguard, with the understanding that Indian movies
will make the grade, one of these days. While industrial conditions
have historically prevented the emergence of stable economies in Bom-
bay cinema, films display an awareness of Hollywood codes of nar-
rative construction but mobilize differently calibrated scenes of ex-
cess and strongly public registers through song and ‘imaginary direct
address’. Even as the contemporary industry bids fair to acquire the
cultural legitimacy and economic stability that it has been so long de-
nied, and despite the emergence of Hollywood style genre cinema,
there is a remarkable persistence of ‘monumental’ melodrama, if
formatted to new social and political co-ordinates and commoditized
parameters, as I suggest in the last two chapters of this book.
10. Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood

Going back now to Hollywood in the wake of this sketch of the place
of melodrama in Indian and other cinemas of the world, it appears to
me that melodrama continues to signify at a number of different levels
in Hollywood’s movement between the ‘classical’ and the vernacular.
Firstly, I would suggest that symbolically defined narrative blockages
giving rise to moments of expressive force have a more general ap-
pearance in a host of American film genres, including ‘male’ genres of
action. Such melodramatic modalities invite our attention to dimen-
sions which might not govern the dominant generic focus of the story
world. To take an example at random: in Destry Rides Again (George
Marshall, 1939) James Stewart, son of the famous lawman Destry, ar-
rives to put a lawless town into order, but without using force. For
much of the film the tone ranges from a Manichaean narrative relating
the villainous designs that assail the township to the comedy arising
from the spectacle of a non-violent sheriff negotiating a gun-toting op-
position. At a crucial moment, Destry’s ally, an old man who harks
back to the mythic power of the hero’s father, is killed, an event which
recalls for Destry the death of his father in a gun battle. Expression-
ist mise-en-scène takes over, as an angled close-up on the hero reveals
the dark underside and psychic trauma which James Stewart’s folksy
countenance has covered over. The suppressed persona of the forceful
gunslinger takes over and metes out punishment to the evildoers. The
James Stewart persona was, of course, to revisit this scenario at vari-
ous points subsequently, whether to deconstruct the myth of the law
vanquishing the lawless, as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John
Ford, 1962), or in the series of Anthony Mann westerns in which
pathological features in the westerner were given free rein, and only
belatedly held in check via a morally satisfactory conclusion. In Destry
Rides Again Stewart is a victim of traumatic histories which irrupt
through a fleeting expressionism, rather than a figure of oppressed
innocence. And while the assertion of older forms of meting out justice
could be read as melodramatic in its backward temporality, it is per-
haps more usefully designated as meeting generic expectations.
If Destry’s traumatic recall of his father’s death indicates the play of
a melodramatic modality within a genre format otherwise differently
calibrated, a fuller sense of the mode is in evidence when the loss,
complication, or marginalization of home and community provide
the primary narrative engagement. Home as the space of intimate ties
and primary psychic investments is mobile in the spaces it connotes.
But arguably, in Hollywood, a special status is given to the family home
as a space of victimhood, as in the manner the woman’s film high-
lighted tales of unfulfilment and unrequited love; and also in the self-
consciously Freudian and occasionally ironic narratives referred to
by Elsaesser, narratives of home as oppressive spaces that threaten to
implode into scenically charged repositories of unrealizable demands
and desires. These appear to me to be the narrative contexts where
melodrama as delimited genre has emerged, in contrast to the way
melodramatic modality works its way into a host of genres without
determining their overall form. To accept such rubrics does not seem
to me to surrender critical space to arguments which have downgraded
the significance of melodrama as a sentimental woman’s genre. For,
such generic forms invariably work at the public/private intersection
of melodramatic concerns, and offer critical engagements with the re-
pressive functions of a gendered public authority. Such a bourgeois
melodrama has resulted from historical processes differentiating the
public from the private. But, arguably, American cinema still provides
periodic examples of large-scaled melodrama at crucial moments in
American history, in particular where substantial transitions in social
forms undergirding citizenship claims have arisen.
Here, while I am not persuaded that melodrama can be analysed in
terms of national variation, there is a case for considering the way
melodrama, its public/private architecture, and its backward looking
temporality, is mobilized to drive epically-scaled works that stage an
engagement with the reconfiguration of national imaginaries. My
hypothesis is that these emerge at critical moments in the transfor-
mation of social, cultural, and political circumstances, and are bodied
forth in key works which place the home, interpretable as a zone of
primary affective attachment, at the critical intersection of the narrat-
ive relationship between community, public life, and political struc-
tures. Thus Williams’ excellent analyses of race melodramas such as
Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) and Gone With the Wind turn
on the affective ties of family life and the securing of a home, proper-
ly refigured, against and through the vicissitudes of (racist) history.
And, as Williams points out, even in the case of TV trial reportage,
such as the race-coded star trial of O.J. Simpson, it is the violation of
the home, in the function of Simpson’s palatial home as gothic form,
which undergirds the narrative.58
The work of Frank Capra, especially Mr Smith Goes to Washington
(1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), fit the rubric of melodrama in terms
of a narrative relay urging the imprinting of the affective ties of mar-
ginalized community on the domain of public life, citizenship claims,
58
See the excellent chapters on Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and televis-
ed trials with race connotations in Williams, Playing the Race Card.
and state structures. Eric Smoodin has situated Mr Smith in a dual
context.59 It was part of a cultural landscape where the government put
forward a series of public initiatives, including the Jefferson memor-
ial, presidential fireside radio broadcasts, museum displays, and youth
mobilization to highlight America’s democratic heritage in the context
of the New Deal. Mr Smith became the object of elaborate promotions
involving theatre lobby displays with electoral booths that rendered
the act of buying film tickets analogous to the casting of votes. But,
beyond this conscious bid to bring the state’s public initiatives around
democratic heritage together with the cinema, the power of the film
arose from the way a public discourse used it to criticize the corruption
of representative government. The film draws upon the melodramatic
scenario of Smith, an idealistic and naïve senator targeted for political
destruction by a group of corrupt senior senators, and entangles this
with a narrative of psychically charged disappointment: a father subs-
titute, a revered associate of Smith’s dead father, carries out the plot
against the junior senator. The film also exhibits dimensions of melo-
drama as public fictional form, rendered through elements of ‘direct
address’. In a critical scene, Smith becomes the recipient of a transfer
of iconic value, when, broken by the plot against him, he recovers
moral strength and political faith by a visit to the Lincoln Statue
in Washington. (See Figs 7 and 8.) At the climax of the film, Smith’s
sustained passage of filibustering makes him into a vehicle for the
Fig. 7 Fig. 8
Figs 7–8: Transfer of Iconic Value in Mr Smith Goes to Washington,
Frank Capra, 1939.
59
Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity and American Film
Studies, 1930–1960, Durham, Duke University Press, 2004.
utterance of this heritage, when he enforces his rights to a hearing and
subjects the assembled senate to a reading of the constitution. This is
done in a mode of direct address, his figure elevated in the frame and
appealing both to the diegetic audience, and through the elevation of
his look, to a point beyond it, outside the frame.
Capra’s own biography of the impoverished Sicilian immigrant
who eked out a life in an Italian ghetto, and went on to make a living
through employments of borderline legality gives way to a triumphal-
ist American story about the self-made man. From engineer in-
volved in wartime weapons manufacture, he went on to a lively film
career directing war adventure, slapstick, circus comedy, and screwball
genres.60 The narrative of patriotic military endeavour, whether in
weapons manufacture, war movie production, or the subsequent war
propaganda documentary series Why We Fight, provides a spectacular
and strident route for the absorption of the struggling ethnic immi-
grant into a non-ethnically defined white nationhood. And his immer-
sion in the idealist little men, the Smiths, Deeds, and Does, makes
available to Hollywood a strategy of sublimation where the folk, the
popular, and the democratic are identified with an undifferentiated
white American identity.61
The innocence of home and small town is relayed in all its naivety
and idealism through the junior senator, and brought into collision
with the structures of state. This vertical axis of melodrama provides
the mode of narrative articulation for another national epic that I
would like to cite. This is a much more complicated example of how
home and ethnic community identities imprint the terms of national
60
For a summary of Capra’s film career, see Elliot Stein, Frank Capra, in Richard
Roud, ed., Dictionary of Cinema, vol. I, Suffolk, Nationwide Book Services, 1980,
181–8.
61
The sublimation of the ethnic subject into the white American citizen in Capra’s
film career entangles histories of cinema and war. Capra’s visceral engagement in war
technology, war genres, and, finally, war propaganda and recruitment targeting a
multi-ethnic society provides a suggestive frame for the way the populist subject of
Deeds, Smith, and John Doe is so lacking in any ethnic reference point. For a per-
haps overstated but suggestive theorization of the links between war, technologies of
visualization, attack, and the cinema, see Paul Virillio, War and Cinema: The Logistics
of Perception, London, Verso, 1989. Raymond Carney’s American Vision tries to situate
Capra in a tradition of American transcendentalism going back to the eighteenth
century, and is quite indifferent to the ethnic dimensions of the Capra biographi-
cal legend. Raymond Carney, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra, Hanover,
Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
imagination. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) takes the
ethnic universe of its Italian gangsters as its main narrative content and
plots a melodramatic movement that negotiates a historical blockage
to the emotional claims made by this world on Michael Corleone.
He is torn between identification with his father, Don Vito, and his
ideological commitment to a non-ethnically identified Americanness.
His credentials for a legitimate American identity arise from a deco-
rated wartime military service, and Don Vito himself reposes hopes in
his youngest son bringing the family into the mainstream. Michael’s
decisive shift in orientation to the protection of father, family honour,
and family home arises from a twofold encounter. When the ‘Turk’
organizes a near-fatal attack on Don Vito, Michael’s feelings for his
father are renewed as he acts to defend him; perhaps equally signi-
ficant, a corrupt white cop assaults Michael and abuses him in racist
terms. It is as if the democratic promise of political inclusiveness
offered by the submersion of ethnic into American identity in the
Second World War has unravelled, and the hard reality of ethnic subor-
dination has erupted. The traumatic affect generated by this attack
is highlighted in the noirish quality of the scene, the racist cop’s face
shadowed and towering over Michael.
The Godfather’s narrative space is governed by a resolute securing
of the world of the family and of the gangs from the legitimate public
domain and state structure. The prying eyes of the ‘legitimate’ public
is held at bay, as Sonny Corleone turns on the intrusive photographers
and FBI men who ring the marriage celebration of the film’s opening
sequence, or is only accessed through montages of newspaper head-
lines and photographs relating to the gang wars. Even the racist cop is
not properly of this public, as he works for the Corleone’s competitors.
And the climactic scenes that intercut the ornate ritual staging of the
new Godfather’s family authority with the carefully orchestrated deci-
mation of the Corleone family’s opponents unravel without any police
intervention. This abstraction of the gang world from the larger uni-
verse to which it occasionally refers has led some critics to suggest
that The Godfather uses the gangs as metaphor for the ruthlessness of
America as corporate, competitive capital.62 In this logic there is no
need to represent the space beyond, for what we see allegorically stands
for that space. The Godfather Part Two (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
62 Fredric Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, Social Text 1, Winter
1979, 130–48.
does, however, take this broader universe into consideration, whether
through the staging of federal enquiries into the Mafia, or in its evo-
cation of the Cuban revolution, at either end of the ideological spec-
trum of contemporary history. It is important to acknowledge the
significance of the Mafia family’s exclusion and self-exclusion from
both spaces. The neutralization of a witness at the federal inquiry de-
rives from Michael’s mobilization of the Sicilian past, using an older
pattern of loyalties to secure the gangster world against state incur-
sions. In the second case, Michael’s prescient evaluation of the strength
of revolutionary forces as rationale for the family’s pulling out of Cuba
suggests again the non-isomorphism of Mafia family and an American
nation which was yoked to US state intervention in Cuba and im-
mersed in the broader cultural and political articulation of the cold
war. In terms of narrative strategy, then, these films emphasize the dis-
tance of the ethnic frame of the gangster universe from the main-
stream, and reiterate at a number of points the ethnic hierarchies which
promote its exclusion from that sphere. By moving the legitimate
public realm to the margins of the narrative world, the film maintains
its main engagement as one of melodramatic alterity, where the illegiti-
mate space beyond the public realm takes centre-stage. Lacking any
outlet or possibility of reformation, the gangster family then becomes
subject to a melodramatic involution, a turning in on itself, with the
ultimate result that home is hollowed out, made empty of all contents
except that of the phantom successor and his baleful rule.
The film positions home and homeland as an ethnos whose con-
ditions of ruin are provided for by exclusion from social structures, and
the self-eviscerating momentum of a gangster genre now revised to
exclude the state from its diegesis. This is a world located outside the
big picture of the nation-state. And yet it is the big picture, a block-
buster which solicits mainstream engagement. Fredric Jameson sug-
gests that such popularity arises both from the fascination of the film’s
allegory about contemporary capitalism, and out of a nostalgia for a
familial plenitude no longer available for the atomized white major-
ity, and only visible in the ethnicized niches of American society. Argu-
ments about the relationship between Italian and unmarked white
identities suggest a more complex pattern. While referring to the
ethnic marginalization of the Italian subculture, The Godfather
nevertheless participates in a transition in the imagination of white-
ness, securing the investment of a ‘post-majoritarian’ whiteness seek-
ing outlets for an identification of whiteness in a multi-ethnic public.
This argument culminates in the way the Mafioso of The Sopranos,
for example, secure an investment in the white family while indul-
ging racist distancing from Afro-American and Latin American sub-
cultures.63
It appears to me that while such readings, inflected by a shifting
sociological imaginary, provide certain insights, they do not consider
the complex cinematic-institutional work undertaken by these films.
Thus, The Godfather emerged as a rather unusual blockbuster, perhaps
only intelligible in the political and cultural circumstances of the time.
This was a period of national crisis and introspection, in the wake
especially of the Vietnam war. In terms of film history, this was also a
period of independent cinema of directors such as Dennis Hopper,
Hank Jaglom, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, and the ‘brat pack’—
directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, and de Palma, all of whom ini-
tially composed part of a post-studio counterculture.64 Arguably, one
way of looking at The Godfather is to see it not only as an ideological
reframing of white race ideology, or as allegory about America as
capitalist society, but as a film whose form harks back to the handsome
studio productions of an era gone by, and also indexes how the cine-
matic counterculture was both reframed by and transiently impacted
the mainstream. Its melodrama of impossible yearnings for home is
blighted by home’s exclusion from the public realm, and through the
logic of genre revision which does not provide the traditional come-
uppance to the protagonist, but enshrines him in a dystopian solitude.
In the movement of this argument amongst different contexts of
melodramatic cinema, I would suggest that what we are dealing with
is not different cultural incarnations and ‘national’ variations in the
63
Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority, New York, New
York University Press, 2004; Pellegrino D’Acierno, ‘Cinema Paradiso’, in The Italian
American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and the Arts, New York, Garland, 1999,
563–690; Ruth Frankenburg, ‘The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness’, in Birgit Bran-
der Rasmussen, Eric Klineberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, eds, The Making and
Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham, Duke University Press, 2001, 72–96; Christopher
Kocela, ‘Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness’, Postmodern Culture 15 (2),
2005; Nick Browne, ed., Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ Trilogy, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2004, esp. Vira Dika, ‘The Representation of Ethnicity
in The Godfather’, 76–108.
64 For a review of the importance of this moment in reconfiguring Hollywood,
see Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, and Alexander Howarth, eds, The Last Great Ameri-
can Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Uni-
versity Press, 2004.
itinerary of melodrama, but instances of how melodrama works as
mode, modality, and genre in specific historic, political, and film in-
dustrial contexts. Quite crucially, the American instance provides us
with a certain trajectory of bourgeois cultural transformations, where
melodrama gets separated out into genre, into modality penetrating
different genre habitats, and as a mode deploying a characteristic sens-
ory collision of home and community with civil society and the struc-
tures of state.
A postcolonial cultural politics has stressed the distance between
the Euro-American path and the history of cultural forms elsewhere,
and especially in former colonial contexts. I would suggest this dif-
ference needs to be acknowledged but also interrogated. It requires to
be acknowledged because of its significance within critical discourses
and state policy formulation in countries such as India. And the differ-
ence also needs to be recognized as a structuring force of narration and
address in Indian popular film that appears to disavow the protocols
of bourgeois political and cultural segmentation of the represented
world. This particular mode of fictional articulation has displayed a
remarkable persistence in its bid to annex fictional forms to public
forms of address. As I will suggest in chapters 3 and 4, this was related
to the history of cinema in the Indian context, one of unprecedented
public congregation outside the constraints of ritual and social hier-
archies based on caste and community proscription. An illegitimate
form that flew in the face of priorities generated by state cultural offi-
cials and elite publics invested in national culture based on the classical
and folk forms and realist imperatives, the cinema provided an alter-
native public realm, if one rather different from the countercultural
connotations of that category.
And yet this particular discursive construction, and historical prac-
tice of cultural difference, also needs to be questioned or qualified. For,
in the very variety of its practices and exhibition contexts, the cinema
always offered much more in terms of variety, and, as a result, much
less than the ambitions a ‘universal’ cinema conjures up. Thus Holly-
wood could be many things as it circulated into different segments of
the world film economy. And, as I have tried to suggest, there could be
unexpected overlaps in the melodramatic articulations of Hollywood
and Indian cinema as well, drawing normally differentiated cinemas
into a comparable narrative architecture and public form.
I
Melodramatic
and Other Publics
Introduction
Narrative Form and Modes of Address

in Indian Film
M
y exploration of public-cinematic form is introduced through
three articles which aim to capture and complicate a sense
of the dominant discourses about the cinema in India. Spe-
cifically, these focus on the idea of a national cinema in a ‘developing’
or ‘transitional’ world, the apparently conflicting and paradoxical rela-
tionship between cultural traditions and cultural modernity in such
national projects, and, finally, the function of discourses of realism and
melodrama in the institution of critical paradigms on these cinemas.
The critical discourses analysed in chapters 2 and 3 centre primarily
on realist and anti-realist logics, and the status of melodrama within
these formulations. The first goes back to the formation of film
societies and an art cinema enterprise in the 1940s and 1950s. Chap-
ter 2 pursues this angle, considering some of the writings of the jour-
nals emerging from the film society in the 1950s, as in pieces by
Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Das Gupta, and Kobita Sarkar, to understand
how they used the key categories of realism and melodrama. My eva-
luation of the second, anti-realist logic in chapter 3 considers the
overlapping premises between the realist critic Chidananda Das Gupta
and the anti-realist, anti-modernist Ashis Nandy, despite their being
apparently ranged against each other across the modernity/tradition
divide in their discussions of popular cinema. I then go on to consider
the most systematic attempt to transcend these kind of oppositions
in Madhava Prasad’s analysis of Indian popular cinema’s peculiar dis-
avowing relationship to discourses of modernity.
The dissection of critical discourses about the popular is followed
in these chapters by trying to understand the popular through its own
storytelling methods and narrative logics, its modes of address, and
its deployment of cultural imagery in character construction and song
sequences. Through this set of writings I engage concepts such as the
icon, and traditional idioms and protocols associated with visual and
68 Melodramatic and Other Publics
lyric practices such as darshan and the kirtan, to understand the com-
plex, hybrid dimensions of a modern cultural form such as the cinema.
For the popular brought together these local traditions of visual and
oral culture, the narratively disaggregated comic function, socially de-
fined representations and spectator address (the tableau form), and the
codes of individuated perspective (point-of-view shots and continuity
cutting in the mode of Hollywood cinema). Chapter 3 in fact argues
that Indian popular cinema was a ‘transitional’ cinema and suggests
that this might in turn explain its ability to exercise an appeal to its
domestic market that successfully saw it ward off competition from
Hollywood, and could have been the source of its attractions for cross-
over audiences in foreign markets as well, for example North and East
Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, and the Soviet Union, in the
earlier period. However, I would now say that the definition of the
‘transitional’ needs to be altered, or the category dropped altogether.
For, the way it was originally used in ‘The Politics of Cultural Address’
(chapter 3) tended to tie formal structures to sociological imagina-
ries, (e.g. the priority given to kinship ties, loyalties, and obligations
in Indian cinema) if with the rider that such transitions did not neces-
sarily have to follow the path charted by European modernity. We
probably need to fashion a different term, one which can address the
persistently heterogeneous form of the cinema in India, despite the
appearance and even institutionalization of Hollywood-style filmmak-
ing, especially in the last five years or so, as I indicate in chapter 11.
A further clarification needs to be made against the possible ten-
dency that the invocation of ‘local’ aesthetic parameters and modes
of address suggests a zone of specificity not easily discerned elsewhere.
However, my outlining of these parameters was not intended to sug-
gest a clear cultural identity opposed to other identities, or even a mod-
ern vs pre-modern culture; I even suggested that there could be a
mobility to the way ‘modern’ codes function in ‘traditional’ ways—but
often in a manner which unsettles the ‘traditional’. This complexity
remains in the context of other aesthetic parameters, as for example in
my drawing on the tradition of analysing iconic features in the evo-
cation of characters, their facial and gestural appearance, sartorial feat-
ures, and mode of oral expression. In chapter 1, I have suggested that,
rather than deriving from a strictly local habitat, such iconicity is more
generally observable, and that even comparable ‘darshanic’ features
and modes of direct address are observable in the American cinema, for
Introduction 69
example in the work of Frank Capra. All of this is not to underestimate
the local, but to suggest that even here we need a comparative, and per-
haps interconnecting, series of investigations which traverse the bound-
aries of national cinemas. In Part II, I try to outline how a regional film
history, connecting a swathe of film culture traversing North Africa
through the Middle East, North India, and on to South East Asia in-
dicates shared cultural and performative resources which tend to get
obscured by a discourse of national cinema.
My critical approach in these writings was refracted through a parti-
cular interdisciplinary moment that argued for a connection between
cultural and political structures. Specifically, the theoretical debate ar-
gued for a connection between disciplines of representation and modes
of readerly and spectatorial engagement on the one hand, and regimes
of social and political representation, of citizenship on the other. Real-
ism, and related dynamics in the sphere of literary and film art, became
the privileged aesthetic and representational reference point for pres-
criptions by governing elites and an arts intelligentsia in fashioning
policies and priorities in the arts. Academic political and cultural
theory went on to suggest that this was indeed the aesthetic realm with
which a civil social discourse and classically modelled public sphere of
rational debate and discussion found its easiest ‘fit’. In this argument,
such an idealized realm was not only relatively small in terms of its
overall representativeness, it was also potentially blinkered in un-
derstanding the deeper cultural logics and political drives which ani-
mated society.
The privileged other term for the exploration of this ‘deeper’ logic,
one which suggested a different order of cultural and political subjec-
tivity, lay in the idea, often tentatively formulated, of community. In
chapter 3 I explored this possibility through analysis of certain
passages which highlight the iconic figure, direct address, and a tableau
mode of representation which removes the spectator from any specific
character’s point of view. Such parameters of address draw upon a
narrative community when deploying conventions of visual and
musical figuration of long cultural standing (mythic figures and
allusions in the formation of characters, folk and semi-classical forms
in music, especially in the realm of devotional music). However, they
may also assert a social rather than communal point of view, in visual
fields such as the tableau otherwise unmarked by culturally specific
features.
In chapter 4 I further modify the idea of cinematic address being
divided between individuated and communal forms to argue that the
elements of direct address in Indian popular forms imagine a cinema
audience defined not as an idealized community, but as a public which
is a component of the fictional field. This formulation seeks to unset-
tle the apparent fixity of community identities and forms, and to argue
that popular film storytelling both mobilizes typages of community
identity and then complicates the security conjured by these forms of
knowledge and perception. It is my hope that the idea of the imaginary
public releases us from the division in film studies between a sociologi-
cal understanding of audience and its meaning-making proclivities,
and a textually inscribed spectator position. It creates in its very imagi-
nary location a potential meeting point between the screen, the specta-
torial public addressed by screen practices, and the mobilization of
discourses of publicness which exceed screen–spectator relations. This
publicness anchors a complex range of effects and, as I have suggested
in chapter 1, does not preclude audience engagement with heightened
states of interiority; indeed, quite novel relations may be developed be-
tween character interiority and the diegetic public, as I have suggested
in my analysis of a song sequence from Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957).
In chapter 4 I consider stardom as providing a crucial vector of pub-
lic investments in the cinema, specifically in terms of the cinematic
public’s knowledge of the star’s screen biography, both in its regular,
repeated features, and in the challenges posed by its alteration or out-
right disruption. The star personality captures a distinctive node to
think about iconicity and typage. Studies of stardom have empha-
sized the importance of the relationship between off-screen and on-
screen personalities in the development of the star institution, the way
in which the resulting play of information and perception cultivates
curiosity and investment in spectators now motivated to interpret
the relation between the fictional and the authentic. Scholars such as
Neepa Majumdar have addressed the different ways in which the insti-
tution developed in the Indian context.1 Noting the presence of the
Hollywood model of stardom in 1930s discourses about the shaping
of cinema in India, she draws attention to its selective implementation
in publicist endeavours, with a persistent obscurity in relaying off-
screen information. She relates this feature to the institutional need
1
Neepa Majumdar, Wanted! Cultured Ladies Only: Female Stardom and Cinema
in India, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Introduction 71
for respectability in the face of public discourses about the disreputable
origins of film industry folk, but also to the particular inner/outer
formulation of national imperatives theorized by Partha Chatterjee.2
Here, as with other nationalist projects, the cinema has to secure its
inner life against the threat of the world of glamour and the allure
of commodities. In a significant shift in her discernment of industry
logic, Majumdar goes on to argue that in the 1950s there was a notable
change in the relation between levels of information about the star,
with the screen itself offering a suggestive space to contemplate differ-
ent levels of the articulation of personality. Here she examines the way
the narrative function of the double is used to address a certain fraught
off-screen knowledge about stars such as Nargis.
In chapter 4 I take this suggestive argument in a slightly different
direction. I restrict focus to the screen personality, specifically as a
figure who relays significant biographical shifts as these work out in the
relation between films. This is with a view to hold, perhaps a little arti-
ficially, to the relation between the screen image and the spectator.
Here the screen personality of the star offers a series of possible in-
vestments. Positioned within these parameters, the star draws upon
the motif of the social type, but significantly enlarges it and may indeed
invest it with a certain narrating authority. At once type but standing
above other characters, s/he offers the spectator a particular condens-
ation of the social realm which orients the film public, through their
knowledge of the history of the screen personality, to a shifting set of
public concerns. Here I suggest how the Raj Kapoor character imme-
diately alerts the film public to a certain populist, even agitprop view
of the street personality as the vehicle of meditations on issues of so-
cial injustice and community bigotry. The figure is at a crucial level
produced through a desire to distance the public from investments in
a social field shot through with the claims of lineage. This was parti-
cularly important not only for an imagination of a more egalitar-
ian society, but one also unencumbered by the anxiety arising from a
scrutiny of blood ties which could compromise the ‘purity’ of ethnic
religious communities in the wake of the Partition. This chapter con-
cludes by looking at a rather different star, Nana Patekar, specifically
in relation to a certain aggressive, communally coded star personality,
and the way such identification has been subject to disruption.
2
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Chapter 4 also explores the relationship between the screen and the
spectator in terms of how the spectator is positioned in the arc of gene-
ric/historical time. I use the particular way imaginary direct address
is organized in the historical film Pukar (The Call; Sohrab Modi,
1939) to launch an enquiry into the way the film spectator is posi-
tioned in relationship to the past constructed by the genre of the hist-
orical film. Here, the courtly format of the historical genre is used to
highlight modes of address and viewer situations as these develop
inside the world of the fiction, and to suggest how this is counterpointed
to another viewing position that ultimately finds an outlet in a startl-
ing, extreme frontal close-up. This momentarily breaks the parameters
of the fiction, and sets up an address between the past configured by
the genre, and the time of the present, that of the film public.
Following my outline of issues posed by melodrama analysis, the
first part of this book draws on the idea of melodrama as a form that
engages with the ideology and experience of modernity. Its publicness
provides a particular angle of engagement on the terms of modern
subjectivity, in particular the relationship between the social and the
individual, the public and the private, the traditional and the modern.
The form refuses any simple trajectory whereby one term of engage-
ment supplants another, as in a modernizing telos, but provides a pub-
lic field in which their relationship and simultaneous embedding is the
source of spectatorial engagement. As I have suggested, the construc-
tion of the mode of address draws upon aesthetic resources and con-
ventions to provide an aura of the familiar and the recognizable, even
as it draws on new resources to complicate its rendering of the field of
subjectivity offered the spectator.
In all this, the attempt in chapter 4 is to propose an idea of the cine-
matic public that creates an asymmetry between cultural and poli-
tical structures, contra the premises that underlie chapters 2 and 3.
My aim here is to argue for a distinct autonomy for the cinematic
and cultural realms, with a view to capturing the specific types of en-
gagement which these fields mobilize. It appears to me that the ideo-
logical readings involved in building the relationship between the
political and cultural realms, while often offering highly subtle and
complex analysis of narrative strategies, perhaps veer away from the
visual, audittory, and tactile modes of filmic engagement. This is not
to do away with questions of ideology, power, and the realm of the
political, but to ask us to specify these within the distinct modes of
Introduction 73
engagement offered by the cinema, and in its specific institutional
logic. This is a specification that I believe will prompt the formation
not only of a richer sense of what the cinema offers, but a more complex
and layered understanding of the political as well.
Holding onto the idea of public address, and the asymmetry of the
cultural and political realms, I conclude the explorations of the open-
ing part of this book by invoking a very different body of practices, that
of the art cinema of Satyajit Ray. At one level Ray provides us with an
entirely different mode of cinematic engagement. Cultivated within a
sophisticated array of resources, ranging from the literary-psycho-
logical to the painterly and caricatural, he also drew upon the interna-
tional armature of the cinema. This included exposure to Hollywood,
Renoir, and French poetic realism, the Italian cinema after the Second
World War, the work of Kurosawa, and a dynamic engagement with
new currents as these emerged, as for example in a sensitive exploration
of Godard.3 In line with this range of resources and engagements,
Ray’s oeuvre provides a complex array of narrative formats, which my
essay only briefly touches on. Its inclusion here seeks to expand our
understanding of the spectrum and modes of engagement of cine-
matic publics as these are relayed through the experience of modernity.
I argue that, despite Ray’s fashioning of a cinema of narrative inte-
gration, realism, and psychological delineation—rather than simply
setting up certain ideal terms on which cinema, and cinematic realism,
makes an input into discourses of citizenship—his work undertakes
a certain modernist rupturing of an integral, self-enclosed narrative
universe, and any complacency about modernity. On occasion this
surfaces as a dramatic intervention through shifts in style, jettisoning
our view from its alignment with diegetic characters. Such stylistic
distancing also works systematically, as I indicate in my analysis of
Charulata (1964). The formal manoeuvres carving out a position for
the spectator is a way of marking a distance from the past, a gesture to
the present, and an ambiguous outlook towards a modernist telos that
would sever us from earlier states of being but for an insistence on acts
of remembering.
3
Ray’s genuine interest in new developments is indicated by the range of films he
writes about in Our Films, Their Films.
2
Shifting Codes,
Dissolving Identities: Realist Art
Cinema Criticism and Popular
Film Form
I
n the Indian context one could argue that in the 1950s high cul-
ture for the cinema existed as a series of propositions given ex-
pression only in the very restricted confines of Bengal art cinema.
Commodity forms were represented in indigenous and foreign (largely
American) commercial cinema. These forms constituted the domi-
nant culture, but the domestic commercial cinema was the main ele-
ment in this dominant formation. Critics often held Hollywood
up as a model against which the failings of the Indian cinema were
measured; and the cinema industry often drew upon Hollywood as a
model of industrial efficiency, and as a wellspring of film style. But
it was nevertheless the commercial Indian cinema which held the
unassailable position in the domestic market. This does not mean
that the commercial cinema was an entirely reified phenomenon.
As I will suggest, because of the complexity of its form and the cross-
class nature of the audiences for certain genres, the commercial
cinema constituted a significant arena for popular innovation and
creative social and political discourse. I employ the term ‘popular’ for
the way in which cultural products intervene in the imagination of
social perceptions and desires, but without clear observation of aes-
thetic codes and practices. Therefore, while dominant as a mode of
film culture, the popular was also often anathema to an arts public
otherwise seeking to cultivate institutions and aesthetic objectives in
line with a by turns realist and modernist vision.
In this chapter I want to focus on certain aspects of Hindi com-
mercial films from the 1950s to draw out the logic of the popular
Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 75
which I have outlined here. I start with how notions of the popu-
lar were produced within a critical discussion of the cinema of the
1940s and 1950s. This discussion elevated notions of realism, psycho-
logical characterization, and restrained performance and, in an un-
expected fashion, was echoed in the apologias offered by commercial
film-makers for their product. A dominant intellectual discourse
about the cinema seemed to be well in place; at the same time, I will
not call it a hegemonic discourse, as we can hardly assume that the
audience for the commercial cinema accepted its terms of reference.
Even the standard film magazines pandering to an English-reading
middle class, Filmindia and Filmfare, do not subscribe to these criteria
of judgement in a consistent way.
I will then shift to an analysis of the strategies of narrative form of
the popular cinema in this period to suggest the ways in which di-
verse systems of visual representation were brought into relationship
with each other. I argue that this phenomenon, together with a nar-
rative manipulation of characters’ social positions, offered a certain
mobility to the spectator’s imaginary identity. Finally, I will reframe
the problem of popular modes of narration in relation to questions of
melodrama, realism, and the idiosyncratic articulation of democratic,
nationalist points of view.1
1. Critical Discourses in the 1950s

My basic premise about the dominant critical discussion of the cinema
in this period was that it was related to the formation of an art cinema,
that it addressed a (potential) art cinema audience, and, in turn, was
premised on a notion of social difference. The pertinent first reference
here is to Satyajit Ray who, when introducing his essays on cinema
from the 1940s through to the 1970s, noted that the formation of the
Calcutta Film Society was related ‘willingly to the task of disseminat-
ing film culture amongst the intelligentsia’.2 In his 1948 essay on
the drawbacks of the commercial film, he noted his dissatisfaction:
1
I will not be analysing the place of performance sequences in this article, although
they are central to an understanding of the popular aspects of the commercial film. For
a preliminary attempt to evaluate their status, cf. Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Melodramatic
Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and
Performance’, Screen 30 (3), 1989, 29–50.
2
Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, ‘Introduction’, 6.
‘once the all-important function of the cinema—e.g., movement—
was grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and refinement
of technique were only a matter of time. In India it would seem that
the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existing in
time was generally misunderstood . . . Often by a queer process of
reasoning, movement was equated with action and action with melo-
drama . . .’3 Ray was therefore outlining, for a middle-class intelligent-
sia, a formal opposition between the contemporary cinema with its
external, melodramatic modes of fictional representation, and an
ideal cinema which would develop an internalized, character-oriented
‘movement’ and drama. Some thirty years later Ray implied that the
norms for such an ideal cinema had already been met in the West, des-
pite periodic discoveries and changes.4 Whatever its adequacy for ex-
plaining Ray’s own work, clearly Hollywood, or a refined version of the
Hollywood norm, was being projected in Ray’s advice that Indian
film-makers should look to the ‘strong, simple unidirectional narra-
tive’ rather than ‘convolutions of plot and counterplot’.5
I will come back to these distinctions, especially the opposition be-
tween movement and stasis, in the next section. For the moment I will
pass on to certain writings in 1957–8 of the Indian Film Quarterly
and Indian Film Review, journals of the Calcutta Film Society, which
are in a direct line of descent from Ray’s 1948 essay. Kobita Sarkar’s
‘Influences on the Indian Film’ and ‘Black and White’ develop, at a
more literary and thematic rather than aesthetic level, the discourse set
in train by Ray’s essay and the release of Pather Panchali in 1955.6
Sarkar characterizes commercial cinema in terms which have now
become familiar: as theatrical, tending towards a ‘markedly melo-
dramatic strain and exacerbation of sentiment and accumulation of
coincidence’,7 and as failing in the analysis of individual character
3 Satyajit Ray, ‘What Is Wrong With Indian Films?’, ibid., 21.

4 ‘Introduction’, ibid., 13.
5
‘What Is Wrong With Indian Films?’, ibid., 23.
6
The two essays by Kobita Sarkar appeared in, respectively, Indian Film Quarterly,
January–March 1957, 9–14, and Indian Film Review, December 1958, 6–11.
7 Kobita Sarkar, ‘Influences on the Indian Film’, 10. Marie Seton also remark-
ed that the commercial film ‘never entirely freed itself from the influence of the
theatre . . .’ ‘National Idiom in Film Technique’, in Indian Talkie, 1931–1956: Silver
Jubilee Seminar, Bombay, Film Federation of India, 1956, 58.
and psychological make-up.8 What may be called the disaggregated
features of the commercial film, performance-foregrounding song-
and-dance sequences, were criticized for being ‘infused arbitrarily in-
to most varieties of film with a fine disregard for their appositeness.’9
These criticisms were coloured by the image of a critic dealing with
an infantile culture which needed to grow up. Thus, signs of greater
character complexity in post-war cinema were welcomed as more
‘adult’,10 what she perceived to be the tedious, moralizing aspects of
film narratives were opposed to a more ‘mature’ approach;11 and act-
ing ‘styles’ were rejected as being more appropriate to a form consi-
dered the most child-oriented of entertainments: ‘even . . . our more
serious actors are frequently found cavorting in a manner more appro-
priate to the circus than the cinema.’12
A negative, pejoratively defined outline of the commercial cinema
emerges from these accounts. Its negative features are: a tendency to
stasis at the level of narrative and character development; an em-
phasis on externality, whether of action or character representa-
tion; melodramatic (florid, excessive) sentimentality; crude or naïve
plot mechanisms such as coincidence; narrative dispersion through
arbitrary performance sequences; and unrestrained and over-emotive
acting styles.
But Sarkar saw hope yet for the commercial cinema in that the-
matically at least a realist element seemed to be taking shape: ‘drama
is provided by the conflict of the individual against social and eco-
nomic encumbrance rather than by inner complexities . . . This em-
phasis . . . is not to be lightly derided, for though the preoccupation
with a larger framework might diminish the importance of the human
character, it makes for greater social realism.’13 Evidently, that realist
framework would not carry such weight with the critic unless it was
given substance at the level of mise-en-scène. The decisive historical
influence here was the International Film Festival of 1952. Sarkar
8
Kobita Sarkar, ‘Influences’, 10; and, ‘the greatest potential weakness of our
cinema is the general lack of characterization . . .’, idem, ‘Black and White’, 6.
9 Kobita Sarkar, ‘Influences’, 13.
10 Kobita Sarkar, ‘Black and White’, 6.
11
Ibid., 7.
12
Ibid., 8.
13 Sarkar, ‘Influences’, 10.
argued that a certain depiction of social reality in Indian commercial
films, whether through location shooting or the more ‘fabricated’
realism of the studio-set, reflected features of the Italian neo-realist
work exhibited at the festival.14 However, for this critic these positive
features, of realist observation and thematic engagement, were clearly
limited by melodramatic characterization and narrative. Achievement
was ultimately measured against the model of Pather Panchali, seen
to represent a ‘logical progression’ in the development of such realist
imperatives.15 The commercial cinema audience was evidently being
measured against an ideal social subjectivity. Pointing to the gross
moral oppositions and simplified conflicts of the commercial cinema,
Sarkar hazarded that ‘perhaps . . . this element . . . is dictated by the
type of audience—for unless it is sophisticated enough, it is difficult
for them to appreciate the significance and nuances of characteriza-
tion. For a less sensitive audience, this exaggerated disparity is morally
justifiable . . .’16 She went on to note that ‘till there is a radical change
of approach on the part of the audience . . . rather meaningless tur-
gidity seems to be an attendant evil.’17
I would suggest that there is a definite project under way here, in
which the commercial cinema is seen to represent a significant failure
at the level of social subjectivity. To counter this, critics and film-
makers began to take it upon themselves to formulate an alternative
order of cinema, conceptualizing a different, more sensitive, psycho-
logical, humanist and ‘adult’ order of personality. What is surprising,
however, is that these very attitudes were also apparent in the opinions
of certain commercial film-makers of the time.
In 1956, M.A. Parthasarathy, head of Gemini International, noted
of the Indian commercial film that the barriers to its achievement in
the Western market did not spring from the constraints of language
but was due to the ‘method of expression . . . not only the gestures
14 Ibid.,12.
15
Ibid., 12.
16
Sarkar, ‘Black and White’, 7.
17 Sarkar, ‘Influences’, 13. Sarkar allows the occasional flicker of doubt about
absolute standards of taste in art: ‘[The Indian film] is derided by the more sophisti-
cated largely because they have accepted more sophisticated standards of judgement.
As it is not yet possible to set any absolute values as to what constitutes good cinema,
perhaps it is rash to pass final judgement.’ ‘Influences’, 14.
and movements of our artists, but also the entire psychological ap-
proach of the construction of scenes and themes in our films.’18 Again,
Parthasarathy tied the imperative of reorienting the cinema to a rede-
fining of the character of the audience. He noted that the econo-
mic headway that would be achieved through state policies such as
planning would increase the domestic demand for films. However, in
consonance with these new developments, a new type of film would
have to be envisaged: ‘a type which is more in line with the changes in
social attitude that will go hand in hand with economic prosper-
ity. This will mean a more realistic Indian film, where the method of
telling the story is more like that of films made in the west.’19 Just
the year before, S.S. Vasan too had drawn out a connection between
the economic situation of the audiences and their viewing inclina-
tions: ‘Film artistry is, unfortunately, compelled to compromise with
the people’s standards in living and life . . . The mass audiences are
generally not so well equipped to appreciate artistic subtleties . . .
The great majority of cinema audiences tend to favour melodrama
and other easier forms of emotional expression . . . The prevalent
low standards in art are due, in a large measure, to our economic
standards.’20
There is an echo-chamber effect here, with the insensitivity of
Sarkar’s audience being reprised as the incapacity of Vasan’s audience
to ‘appreciate artistic subtleties’. Of course, the first view is an ex-
planation related to the need to change matters while Vasan’s is an
apologia for why he makes the films he does.
In Vasan’s and Parthasarathy’s accounts an economic explanation is
proffered. Once economic circumstances were altered, the citizen-
spectator would be more attuned to humanist-realist cinema; exactly
the terms of Sarkar’s definition of her ideal spectator. Although Partha-
sarathy’s exercise was also a prognosis about what would go down well
with a foreign audience accustomed to American norms, it is possible
to argue that these different views were in fact complementary and
sprang from the ideology of the domestic context: that of the Nehruvian
18 M.A. Parthasarathy, ‘India in the Film Map of the World’, Indian Talkie 1931–
1956, 66.
19
Ibid.
20
R.M. Ray, ed., Film Seminar Report, New Delhi, Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1956,
29–30.
state, with its emphasis on economic transformation and a critically
founded individualism.
These lines of convergence should not suggest that discussion of the
cinema was entirely monolithic. In this connection, one curiosity of
this period is Chidananda Das Gupta’s ‘In Defence of the Box Office’
(1958),21 an essay which tried to envisage an adjustment of the cinema
to the popular perceptions of its clientele: ‘The starting point must be
not one’s own mind, but that of the audience.’22 In trying to evaluate
audience dispositions, Das Gupta referred to the aesthetics of repre-
sentation, the ‘two-dimensional, linear quality which distinguishes
almost all forms of Indian art’ and the ‘flatness of Indian painting, its
lack of perspective’.23 In his argument, ‘The vast unlettered audience
of the East are yet a long way from acquiring the bourgeois preju-
dices . . . It is only the urban middle class which . . . will question the
distortions of the human figure in painting . . .’24 He believed this
fact left the film-maker and artist freer to experiment with form
and to rediscover his indigenous traditions.25 Finally, he also tried to
address the peculiarities of storytelling observable in the commercial
film, and the significance it gives to the performative sequence.26 The
Indian audience, he argued, was oriented to an epic tradition ‘which
you can read from anywhere to anywhere, as long as you like . . . the
Indian film audience . . . delights more in the present than in the past
or future.’27 He urged Indian film-makers to look to these traditions
of narrative and aesthetics rather than rely on ‘too many preconceived
notions derived from the form of the film as seen in the West.’28
Das Gupta was not underwriting the investment which Indian
audiences made in the contemporary commercial cinema as it existed.
He was pointing to the potential this audience held for experimenta-
tion with forms of representation and narrative. Thus, while folk
paintings of the Krishna legend were valued, the mythological film was
21
Chidananda Das Gupta, ‘In Defence of the Box Office’, Indian Film Review,
January 1958, 9–14.
22 Ibid., 10.
23
Ibid., 14.
24
Ibid., 11.
25 Ibid., 13.
26 Ibid.
27
Ibid., 14.
28
Ibid., 13.
condemned as the very worst expression of Indian cinema.29
‘Film
moghuls’, he wrote, ‘have fully sensed these traits of the audience . . . In
answer they have produced Bradshaws of entertainment, vulgar in
taste and low in level but appealing all the same to the man for whom
it is meant.’30 Ironically, even the realist mise-en-scène and thematic
content, regarded by Sarkar as signs of achievement in the commercial
film, are dismissed in Das Gupta’s analysis for derivativeness (from
the International Festival) and an essential incapacity to rise above the
more conventional cinematic entertainment.31
Although Das Gupta focused in his article on the epic and formal
qualities of popular traditions, his underlying emphasis appears to
have been on film-makers and intellectuals rather than the audience.
Indeed, the article appears to be a case of an Indian intellectual re-
discovering the traditions of his country though an abstraction, ‘the
audience’, rather than making a radical political investment in that
wider society. To suggest a pertinent contrast, the ‘Third Cinema’ also
writes of aesthetic recovery and reinvention, but relates this project to
an intense political and historical analysis of social exploitation and
resistance,32 an engagement singularly lacking in Das Gupta’s refer-
ence to the ‘unlettered’ masses of the East. Nevertheless, while his ob-
servations about aesthetic and narrative forms tend to be essentialist,
they indicate that there were other strands in the intellectual discourses
of cinema in this period.33
2. Popular Narrative Form

I want to draw upon this contemporary discussion in so far as it regis-
tered certain dissonances within a clear-cut model of the commercial
film. I consider Sarkar’s pinpointing of realism as one such complica-
tion, as also Das Gupta’s identification of aesthetic and narrative
29
Ibid., 12.
30
Ibid., 14.
31 Ibid.
32 Pines and Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema.
33
These references are quite unelaborated, and the study of Indian cinema has only
recently started investigating these issues seriously. Cf. Geeta Kapur, ‘Mythic Material
in Indian Cinema’, Journal of Arts and Ideas 14–15, 1987, 79–107; Ashish Rajadhyak-
sha, ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, ibid.,
47–78, and ‘Neo-traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India’, Framework 32–3,
1987, 20–67.
dispositions in the audience’s mental make-up. Contrary to their point
of view, I suggest that these features were not exceptions to the norm
but were part of a cultural form which was more complex than these
critics would allow.
Visual Figures
In the Bombay cinema of the 1950s the ‘social’ film, from which I take
the illustrations here, was the genre which the industry understood to
address the issue of modern life.34 Within these films, and much more
widely in the cinema of that time, a number of modes of staging and
narrating story events are in evidence. There is the iconic framing,
an organization of the image in which stable meaning is achieved,35
whether of an apparently archaic or contemporary nature. This
could range from the mythic articulations of woman, whether by
herself or in relation to a man, to mythic formations stemming from
contemporary iconography, such as Monroe in American culture or
the Raj Kapoor–Nargis emblem of romantic love emblazoned on the
R.K. banner.
Another arrangement is that of the tableau which, unlike the icon,
presumes an underlying narrative structure: ‘characters’ attitudes and
gestures, compositionally arranged for a moment, give, like an illus-
trative painting, a visual summary of the emotional situation.’36 The
tableau represents a moment caught between past and future, ‘a preg-
nant moment’, to quote Barthes.37 Both the iconic and tableau modes
are often presented frontally, at a 180° plane to the camera and seem
to verge on stasis, enclosing meaning within their frame, and ignoring
the off-screen as a site of reference, potential disturbance, and reorga-
nization.38 Perhaps this was what Ray was reacting against when he
complained of the static features of the commercial film.
34
To quote a contemporary publicity release, a social film was ‘based not on hist-
orical tales, but on life as it is lived at the present time’: Bombay Chronicle, 27 October
1951, 3.
35 I draw upon Geeta Kapur’s usage here: ‘an image into which symbolic meanings
converge and in which moreover they achieve stasis’: idem, ‘Mythic Material in Indian
Cinema’, 82.
36 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 48. Brooks here relates the tableau to
the moral aspects of melodramatic mise-en-scène.

37
Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image, Music, Text, selected
and trans. Stephen Heath, London, Fontana Paperbacks, 1982, 70.
38 As Barthes notes of the tableau, it is ‘a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined
However, the codes of American continuity cinema are also used in
the Hindi cinema of the period. These codes—the eyeline match,
point-of-view shot, ‘correct’ screen direction, match-on-action cuts39—
generate the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity and a system-
atic relation between on- and off-screen in their generation of narrative
flow. In doing this they centre and re-centre the human body for our
view, thus presenting us with a mirroring sense of our own bodily cen-
trality and coherence.40 It is this American system which has defined
ways of representing character subjectivity in a ‘universal’, almost
hegemonic sense in world cinema, and it is the absence of this which
Kobita Sarkar appeared to regret in the commercial film. In fact, these
codes are not absent, but they are unsystematically deployed and
are often combined with the other modes of visual representation I
have described.
To illustrate this combination of codes, I will describe a scene from
Mehboob Khan’s Andaz (1949). The story of the film details the trou-
bles which engulf a young upper-class woman, Neena (Nargis), when
she risks a friendship with an attractive bachelor, Dilip (Dilip Kumar),
although she is engaged to another man. The particular scene I des-
cribe relates to Neena’s birthday celebrations, and begins and ends with
a top-angled shot on her birthday cake. Neena’s friend Sheila lights the
candles on the cake; the camera cranes down, as if paralleling Neena’s
movement down the hillside steps, and we see her father looking back
at her as he moves into the foreground. The second shot goes into
a closer view of the first, dissecting it, and shows Neena joining her
father. He proceeds to introduce her to a family friend, Shanta, whom
they have not seen since the passing of Neena’s mother. The framing
of this shot shows Neena standing next to her father, and in front of
Shanta. Neena greets Shanta, moves on to greet a doctor and then an-
other woman guest. At this point there is a match-on-action cut from
edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into

nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is
promoted into essence, into light, into view . . . [it] is intellectual, it has something to
say (something moral, social) but it also says it knows how this must be done.’ Ibid.
39 For an outline of the classical system, see Kristin Thompson, ‘The Formulation
of the Classical Style, 1909–28’, in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, eds, The Clas-
sical Hollywood Cinema, 155–240.
40
Stephen Heath, ‘Narrative Space’, in idem, Questions of Cinema, London,
Macmillan, 1981, 30.
Fig. 9: Andaz, Mehboob Khan, 1949, Tableau Shot.
Neena’s movement of greeting in shot 2 to her touching this unnamed

woman’s feet in shot 3. The woman’s back remains turned to the
camera.
I suggest that shot 3 has the structure of an iconic representation.
This woman is an unidentified, unseen figure; it is her very lack of
identification which is suggestive. For the father has just mentioned
the absence of the mother, the first time any reference has been made
to her. Neena’s introduction to an anonymous woman at this very
moment can be said to reiterate and emphasize the absent figure. The
woman’s invitation that Neena sit next to her seems to be issued from
the position of the absent mother, and is like an act of nomination:
Neena is invited to enter the space of the mother.
This space is subverted by the deployment of a look away from the
absent mother, as Neena’s look is attracted to someone off-screen. The
iconic possibilities of the arrangement are then diffused. And yet, ins-
tead of the story moving directly into Neena’s conversation with Dilip,
the figure whom she has seen off-screen, the next shot, shot 4, places
them in a tableau shot that assumes portentous dimensions. In this
composition, Neena and Dilip meet in the frame’s mid-ground (Fig. 9);
the father stands to the left in the background; and Sheila begins to
move forward. The tableau-like characteristics of this repositioning
are underlined when the next shot is not bound to shot 4 through a
match-on-action cut on Sheila’s movement. For, at the beginning of
shot 5 she is already stationary, having been placed at the appropriate
position, next to Neena’s father. Sheila’s placement with the father
signals how the tableau shot functions as a form of commentary. The
arrangement of the frame bristles with contradictions. The look of the
father at the couple indicates that they enact a spectacle of transgres-
sion. In the logic of the narrative it is Sheila, standing with the father,
who should be with Dilip, while Neena should be where Sheila stands,
in the space of the absent mother. However, as the narrative requires
the temporary suspension of this illegitimate arrangement, the father’s
reprimanding look is effaced when Sheila moves towards the couple,
to stand at Neena’s left. Sheila’s presence sets up a buffer, as it were,
between Neena and Dilip, allowing the father to move away. The rest
of the sequence follows this logic, using a series of shot-reverse-shots
that ensure the couple are not isolated again. But traces of the trans-
gression remain in the final shot of the sequence when Dilip is posi-
tioned next to Neena, amidst the larger crowd, as she cuts the cake.
In this sequence there is a diegetic flow tracking Neena’s movement,
glancing off her possible iconic placement and moving on to focus her
(apparent) desire. That flow is brought to a halt with the frontal tableau
frame, in which society exercises a censuring gaze through the look of
the father. The flow is then resumed, through the shot-reverse-shot
arrangement. While this procedure makes it possible ‘to implicate
the spectator in the eye contacts of the actors . . . to include him or her
in the mental and “physical” space of the diegesis’,41 in this segment,
Sheila’s intrusion functions as a residual trace of the tableau’s social
commentary, setting up a buffer within the transgressive intimacy of
the scene.
The intrusion of the tableau is quite significant in the formulation
of the spectator’s subjectivity. While we have shared the movement and
awareness of Neena, we are suddenly asked to situate that awareness
within the space of the social code. That this is represented through an
integral narrative space rather than a dissected one—Neena’s father’s
41
Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema,
London, Scolar Press, 1979, 158.
awareness could as well have been registered through a close-up—
indicates that it is not through a play of individual subjectivities that
we are being asked to register the space of the social code, but as a
structural field with definite points of authority and notions of con-
vention. This does not prevent us from empathizing with the ‘object’
position within this field, but the address has an encompassing,
normative aspect to it which momentarily throws us out of the flow of
individual awareness.
Appropriations and Transformations
of ‘Modern’ Codes
It is my suggestion that this relay through different forms of narration
and address relays the spectator through different cognitive and perce-
ptual fields appropriate to different orderings of subjectivity—the
desiring individual, the socially normative—which functions as a
kind of balancing act. The cinema is attractive because of its constant
striving for novelty, here rendered by introducing a perceptual dyna-
mic in the relation of visuality and modern subjectivity. And yet the
challenge lies not in simply reproducing this but, as if corroborating
Sarkar at a visual level, making this configuration rub against another
one that insists on the importance of the social realm. I have argued
elsewhere that both Andaz’s narrative strategy and the elements of its
publicity campaign were oriented to generate an image of modern-
ity for the Indian audience.42 In terms of narrative strategy the film
employs Barthes’s ‘hermeneutic code’, the mechanism whereby infor-
mation is deferred in order to engage spectatorial curiosity.43 Although
there are allusions to Neena’s being involved with a man other than
Dilip, these are elliptical, placing us very much within Dilip’s field
of knowledge, and his desire for Neena. As a number of writers have
pointed out, Indian popular cinema is singularly indifferent to mecha-
nisms of suspense and surprise;44 the moral universe of the fiction, the
figuration of guilt and innocence, is always already known. The in-
duction of codes associated with American cinema into Andaz may be
seen in combination with the publicity strategy used by Liberty, the
42
See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘“You Cannot Live in Society”’.
43 RolandBarthes, S/Z, London, Jonathan Cape, 1975.
44 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles’, India International
Centre Quarterly 8 (1), 1981, 89–96; Rosie Thomas, ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and
Popularity’, Screen 26 (3–4), 1985, 116–32; Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Melodramatic
Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema’.
cinema hall which showed Andaz as its inaugural film. The exhibitors
drew attention to the modern projection equipment and elegant audi-
torium, suggesting that the viewing conditions met the standards of
an audience used to viewing Western films. The experience of seeing
Andaz was therefore meant to generate a modern self-image through
an appropriation of the symbolic social space occupied by watching
American films. And yet, at the same time, the experience would not
merely reproduce that of the American film. The film uses its woman
character to set limits to the image of modernity. Through her the nar-
rative negotiates a notion of ‘Indian’ social codes and a larger, ‘national’
identity for the spectator of the film.
The controlled mobilization of American cinematic spectatorship
into the commercial cinema is not untypical. The much maligned imi-
tativeness of the Hindi film may be seen to set up a relay of appropri-
ated and adapted narrative modes and spectatorial dispositions: as
organizing premise, as in the induction of codes of continuity and
character subjectivity; but also as attraction, in the sense that Tom
Gunning has used the term, where narrative is less significant than
an amalgam of views, sensations, and performances.45 Works of the
1950s such as Aar Paar (Guru Dutt, 1954), Taxi Driver (Chetan
Anand, 1954), and CID (Raj Khosla, 1956) deploy bank heist and
car-chase sequences, but in ways which are not properly integral to
the narrative development, nor wrought with a strong rhythm of alter-
nations.
Along with the appropriation of narrative codes and sensationalist
attractions from the American cinema, the Hindi social film also ap-
propriated elements of American genre films in structuring the
imaginary social space of its narrative. In the American film noir of
the 1940s the hero exhibits ambiguous characteristics, an ambiguity
reinforced or engendered by a duplicitous woman whose attractions
are explicitly sexual. As a result the heterosexual project of familial
reproduction is jeopardized. As Sylvia Harvey has noted, ‘the point
about film noir . . . is that it is structured around the destruction or
absence of romantic love and the family . . .’46 This repetitive narrat-
ive trajectory has been accompanied by stylistic features of a much
45 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator and the
Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8 (3–4), 1986, 63–70.
46
Sylvia Harvey, ‘Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir’, in E. Anne
Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir, London, British Film Institute, 1980, 22–34 (25).
more variable nature, from a constrained, distortive framing, to low-
key lighting and chiaroscuro effects, these strategies being oriented to
generating a sense of instability in character perception and moral
situation.47
These generic elements, which American film-viewing audiences
would have been familiar with from the 1940s, are reproduced in the
cycle of crime melodramas of the 1950s, particulary Baazi (Guru
Dutt, 1951), Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951), Aar Paar, and CID; but the
elements are restructured into a melodramatic bipolarity, the stylistic
and iconographic elements siphoned off into the world of vamp and
villain, counterpointed to the realm of morality and romantic love.
The Street and the Dissolution of

Social Identity
Nevertheless the hero’s moral attributes are in jeopardy, and it is the
narrative’s work to move him through this bipolar world before re-
covering him under the sign of virtue, an objective often publicly and
legally gained.48 For my analysis of the popular ramifications of the
commercial film narrative, what is of significance here is the way in
which this melodramatic routing complicates his social identity.49
It is the hero’s very mobility between spaces, spaces of virtue (the
‘mother’s’ domain), villainy, and respectability (the ‘father’s’ do-
main) which problematizes social identity. Often the street, the space
of physical and social mobility, is also the space of the dissolution of
social identity, or the marking out of an identity which is unstable. In
Baazi Ranjani’s villainous father espies Madan’s tryst with his daugh-
ter on the street, causing him to conspire against the hero; in Awara,
the glistening rain-drenched streets so familiar from the American film
noir are the site of the uprooted Raj’s birth, his subsequent tormented
47
For a summary of analyses of film noir in terms of narrative structure, sexual
economy, and stylistic features, see David Bordwell’s remarks in Bordwell, Staiger, and
Thompson, eds, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 76.
48 This is characteristic of the way melodrama moves between familial and public
registers: Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 31–2; and below, in the subsection
titled ‘Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism’.
49 The following analysis of relations between family and society in narrative
structure is summarized from ch. 3 in Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Errant Males and the Divided
Woman: Melodrama and Sexual Difference in the Hindi Social Film of the 1950s’,
PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1991.
encounter with street toughs, the place where the villain Jagga plants
the seeds of criminality in his mind, and the terrain on which he is in-
volved in car thefts, bank heist preparations, and murderous assaults.
The taxi-driver hero Kalu of Aar Paar is by definition associated with
this unstable space, one which draws him unwittingly into a criminal
plot. Even the respected inspector of police of CID, Shekhar, fram-
ed for a murder rap, loses all social anchorage and is precipitated into
the street.
This is a drama of downward social mobility. Most of the characters
identified here originate in respectable middle-class families. But the
upheaval in the hero’s circumstances is never so irreversible as to pre-
vent the recovery of his virtue and of the possibilities of social renewal.
Very rarely does the transformation of identity extend as far as a spe-
cifically working-class moment in the trajectory of loss. Loss and
uprooting are contained by a moral opposition between the proper
middle-class image of respected householdership and its other, the
thief, who battens on that which is not his.50 Narratives state and com-
plicate these oppositions, suggesting how a respectable position is an-
chored in illicit gain, a bigoted social exclusiveness and, repeatedly, as
a basic aspect of narrative structure, how its strictures and exclusions
articulate an oedipal contest, a problem of generational transaction
between ‘father’ and ‘son’.
Iconic Transactions
The family is the remarkable symbolic, if not literal, locus of the nar-
rative’s organization of both conflict and resolution. At its centre lies
the iconic presence of the mother, stable in her virtue and her place,
a moral orientation for her son but also a figuration of the past; for the
space of the mother must give way to the changes introduced by the
shift of authority from father to son. The family binds the son back
into its space, securing him from the perils of the social void by
restoring his name, his right to an inheritance and his social place. But
it is a transformed family, one over which he must now exercise autho-
rity. The nucleated space of this new formation often emerges under
50 Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Cultural Space of a Film Narrative: Interpreting Kismet
(Bombay Talkies, 1943)’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 28 (2), April–
June 1991, 171–85.
the benign agency of the law, suggesting a complicity between state and
personality in the development of a new society.
There is a remarkable instance of the mother’s iconic presence, the
kind of gravitational pull she exercises over the narrative’s progres-
sion, and indeed over the very process of narration, in a sequence from
Awara. Raj, who has been working for the bandit Jagga, without his
mother Leela’s knowledge, returns home. His look is arrested by sight
of his childhood friend Rita’s photograph on the wall. Feeling that the
photograph’s ‘look’ upbraids him for his moral duplicity, he turns the
photo to the wall, only to have Leela turn it over again. Raj declares that
childhood friends can never be recovered and leaves the house for an
assignation with Jagga. Leela, unpacking for Raj, is shocked to find a
gun in his case. The camera tracks in from Leela to the photograph, and
there is a dissolve which takes us to a cabaret performer dancing before
Jagga and his gang. At the end of two short sequences, that of the dance
performance witnessed by Jagga, Raj, and the gang, and that relating
to a discussion between Jagga and Raj, we return to Leela as she now
turns the photograph to the wall. (Fig. 10.)
The crucial feature of this sequence is of how the look of the female
figure is relayed between the mother and the photographic image
Fig. 10: Awara, Raj Kapoor, 1949, The Authority of Rita’s Photograph.
of Rita and how, quite unusually, this relay is used to elaborate the
sequence as a macro-sequence, one which authorizes a moral perspect-
ive on the sequences in between.
The mother is the original repository of this moral look: the Rita-
image reiterates or ‘doubles’ her function. When Raj seeks to evade the
‘look’ of the photograph, his mother prevents this. Both the mother
and the photograph’s look now focus on the hero, who abruptly leaves
the space, and their surveillance, as it were, in order to meet with the
villain at a nightclub. The mother now discovers what business Raj is
involved in, when she discovers a gun in his suitcase. We shift to
the Rita-image, which now dissolves onto that of the ‘tainted’ dan-
cer, suggesting not so much a moral contrast as the extension of the
photograph’s surveillance into another space. It is as if the image ‘looks’
and see its ‘other’, and, mirrored in that ‘other’, the figure of the male
subject who should ideally be constituted within its own moral gaze.51
The surveillance functions are corroborated when there is a comple-
tion of this circuit of looking two sequences later, when the narration
returns to the photograph, indicating that the photo-icon has partici-
pated in a remarkable macro-narration. Aligned in Raj’s perception
to a moral gaze whose scrutiny he cannot bear, the photograph’s
‘gaze’ oversees the transgressive sexual and criminal instances of
the sequences in between. Leela then turns this ‘gaze’ away from such
scenes, as if it may from now on only oversee the moral renewal of the
protagonist; and this, indeed, is how it functions throughout the rest
of the film.52
51
The apparently paradoxical phenomenon of an image which has power is quite
a common one within Hindu visual culture. Lawrence Babb has noted that whether
the gods are represented as idols in the temple or the domestic space, or in the more
pervasive phenomenon of photographs, the devotees desire the darshan (sight) of
the God or religious preceptor (guru), a sight ‘he grants to his devotees as a sign of his
favour and grace.’ Babb emphasizes that this is a question not only of the devotee seeing
but being seen; and that such a constitution of the devotional subject may afford him
not only the grace and favour of the deity, but may also empower him. Lawrence A.
Babb, ‘Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism’, Journal of Anthropological Research
37 (4), 1981, 47–64. The subordinate position of the devotee in this relation has
also been emphasized by Diana Eck: the deity ‘gives darshan’ (darshan dena), the people
‘take darshan’ (darshan lena) and so ‘seeing’ in this religious sense is not an act initiated
by the worshipper. Diana L. Eck, Seeing the Divine Image in India, Chambersburg, Pa.,
Anima Books, 1981, 5. Raj’s evasion of this visual field stems from his transgression
of its moral boundaries.
52
Vasudevan, ‘Errant Males and the Divided Woman’, 114.
Young Rita’s photograph is without depth, pure surface, a frozen
moment of the past which, ironically, also represents a future state of
grace for the protagonist. But it does not represent Rita, a figure whose
narrative functions are bound up, from her introduction into the film,
with sexuality. It represents, in fact, a time of innocence, before the ad-
vent of the oedipal contest with the father and the drives of desire and
aggression. In this invocation of a past moment in the psychic traject-
ory of the subject, there is a strong correspondence between the image
and the mother. And, indeed, the sequence plays upon the inter-
changeability of the gaze of image and mother, the latter reintroducing
its look, substituting for it, and associating her censure with its with-
drawal.53 But that authoritative moral function must be displaced, or
at least subordinated, before the onward trajectory—which is also, of
course, one of return—whereby Raj will recover his familial identity.
This is an objective in which the character Rita will be decisive. The
mother, the still centre of the narrative, must be moved, her place dis-
solved and her functions eliminated or transferred to the appropriate
figure of the heroine.
The mixture of codes, generic and sensational elements, and a nar-
rative undermining of social identity makes the social film of the
1950s an imaginary space in which a popular audience of mixed so-
cial background were offered a rather fluid system of signs, modes of
address, and social positions. Industry observers had their particular
explanation for this mixture. They believed that the ‘social’, initially
53 There is a fetishistic aspect to the photograph here, a disavowal of lack in the
psychoanalytical sense; but the lack involved or feared here is not that of the phallus,
but that of the mother. As Kaja Silverman has noted, ‘the equation of woman with lack
[is] a secondary construction, one which covers over earlier sacrifices . . . the loss of the
object is also a castration . . . the male subject is already structured by absence prior
to the moment at which he registers anatomical difference’: idem, The Acoustic Mirror:
The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis,
Indiana University Press, 1988, 14–15. In this sense the photograph in Awara bears
distinctly fetishistic features, covering over as it does a masculine lack of the maternal.
In narrational terms, too, in the opposition between photo-icon and cinematic move-
ment, the invocation of the photograph has the fetishistic aspect of denying movement,
and thereby loss, and seeking a return to stasis. As Gilles Deleuze has noted, the fetish
in this case is a ‘frozen, arrested, two-dimensional image, a photograph to which one
returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harm-
ful discoveries that result from exploration . . .’ Gilles Deleuze, Sacher-Masoch: An
Interpretation, trans. Jean McNeill, London, Faber and Faber, 1971, 28.
conceived of as a conventionally middle-class genre, had become an
omnibus form in which different social groups were being catered to
by different elements of the film. One observer noted that, whereas in
the 1930s dramatic and story values appealed to the middle and upper
middle classes, and stunts and action dramas appealed to workers, in
the 1950s ‘a new type of social realism also came to occupy the screen.
Actions, thrills, magic and stunts were introduced into the stories to
attract the masses.’54
I would like to suggest, however, that the different modes do not
necessarily correspond, by some reductionist sociological aesthetic, to
particular social segments of the audience. Aesthetically, continuity
codes mingle with, give way to, and even take over the functions of
codes more widely observable in the visual culture of society. An iconic
construction is often observable in the arrangement of the new bearer
of patriarchal authority in the story; and point-of-view structures for-
mulated in a classical Hollywood way are used to shore up this quite
‘traditional’ framing.55 Conversely, the tableau framing, while in some
sense communicating an ordered, socially coded view for the audi-
ence, does not necessarily determine their perception of the narrative
situation. In this sense, it is difficult to separate out ‘traditional’ from
‘modern’ address, or to suggest that such addresses correspond to dis-
tinct audiences. Even the sensational action sequences can hardly be
regarded as attractive only to a lower-class audience. I have argued else-
where that a masculine culture was being addressed through such ele-
ments, one not restricted by class, and perhaps contributive to a new,
more sharply differentiated sexual image for the male subject.56
However, there is a strong tendency to subordinate movement and
vision towards a stable organization of meaning, in an iconic articu-
lation. This has a parallel in the way in which the narrative reorganizes
the family so as to secure a stable position for the middle-class hero. To
my mind, this feature brings the complexities of the popular cultural
form into alignment with a certain normalizing discourse and hege-
monic closure.
54
‘The Hindi Film’, Indian Talkie 1931–1956, p. 89.
55
Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Errant Males and the Divided Woman’, especially ch. 2, in the
analysis of Devdas (Bimal Roy, 1955) and Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957); also see below,
ch. 3, ‘The Politics of Cultural Address’, for this analysis.
56
See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Glancing Off Reality: Contemporary Cinema and Mass
Culture in India’, Cinemaya 16, Summer 1992, 4–9.
3. Redefining the Popular: Melodrama

and Realism
The formal complexities of the 1950s social film had, in a sense, been
acknowledged in Kobita Sarkar’s and Chidananda Das Gupta’s pro-
nouncements on its narrative and stylistic features. But they insisted
on seeing these elements as constrained or unrealized. By subject-
ing the cinema to a certain purist criticism, they failed to grasp the
complexity of popular forms such as melodrama. Recent work shows
that, along with stereotypical, morally bipolar characters, melodra-
matic narratives have been known to deploy narration through the
awareness of a single character.57 Further, as Peter Brooks has noted,
melodrama as a form has, from the nineteenth century, been associated
with realism.58
In changing the way in which fiction organizes meaning, melo-
drama marks the transition from the prevalence of sacred and hierar-
chical notions to a post-sacred situation in which the sacred is striven
for but meaning comes increasingly to reside in the personality.59 The
terrain of the personality is a social and familial matrix in which the
reality of everyday life becomes an inevitable reference point. In the
Hindi social film such a mise-en-scène is vividly in evidence. What-
ever the degree of fabrication, the street scene of the 1940s and 1950s
is animated by the activity of newspaper hawkers, vegetable peddlers,
construction workers, mechanics, urchins and shoe-shine boys, petty
thieves, pedestrians going about their business. Vehicles—cycles,
trucks, cars, trolleys, buses, and significant places—railway stations,
cafes, the red light area, are also deployed in the semantics of the
street and of movement. Above all there is the street lamp, signifier of
both street and of night and therefore of a physical, social, and sex-
ual drive.60
But the melodramatic narrative’s invocation of the ‘real’ is merely
one level of its work. As Brooks notes, ‘melodrama uses the things and
gestures of the real world, of social life, as kinds of metaphors that
57
Rick Altman, ‘Dickens, Griffith and Film Theory Today’, The South Atlantic
Quarterly 88 (2), Spring 1989, 321–59.
58 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, ch. 1.
59 Ibid., 16.
60
The street lamp is also a recurrent, metonymic element in songbook illustrations
and movie posters of this period. The National Film Archives of India, Pune, has a
substantial collection of both.
refer us to the realm of spiritual reality and latent moral mean-
ings. Things cease to be merely themselves, gestures cease to be merely
tokens of social intercourse whose meaning is assigned by a social code;
they become the vehicles of metaphors whose tenor suggests another
kind of reality.’61
Routing itself through the ‘real’, melodrama then penetrates to
repressed features of the psychic life and into the type of family dramas
I have referred to. Certain dramaturgical features, such as that of coin-
cidence, are central to this process of making meaning, especially for
relaying the significance of the social level to the audience. For coinci-
dence insistently anchors figures who have a definite social function to
relationships of an intimate and often familial, generational order.62 In
this sense cinematic narratives address the spectator in psychic terms,
mirroring the most primal conflicts and desires and refracting all other
levels of experience through that prism.
The conceptual separation of melodrama from realism, which oc-
curred through the formation of bourgeois canons of high art in
late-nineteenth-century Europe and America,63 was echoed in the dis-
courses on popular commercial cinema of late 1940s and 1950s India.
This strand of criticism, associated with the formation of the art
cinema in Bengal, could not comprehend the peculiarities of a form
which had its own complex mechanisms of articulation. In the process
the critics contributed to an obfuscating hierarchization of culture
with which we are still contending.
4. The Popular Cultural Politics of

the Social Film
As a result of this obfuscation, perhaps we have not quite under-
stood the particular political articulation of the popular cinema of the
1950s. Nationalist discourses of that time about social justice and the
61
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 9.
62 Coincidence also has an important temporal function: ‘the apparently arbitrary
separation and coincidental reunion of characters is actually motivated by the narrative

requiring a certain time to elapse. These durations are related to the evolution of a
set of substitutable functions (whether between characters, or within a character) in
which the timing of the substitution depends on the exhaustion of one figure, and a
maturation and acquisition of lacking functions in another.’ See Vasudevan, ‘The
Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema’.
63
Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Gledhill, ed.,
Home Is Where the Heart Is, 33–6.
formation of a new personality were then routed through familiar, if
modified, cultural and narrational reference points. These were family
dramas, iconic and tableau modes of representation. I would suggest
that the cinema of that time communicated a popular democratic per-
ception which worked through some of the rationalist and egalitar-
ian approaches of the liberal-radical intelligentsia, but on its own
terms. Of popular modes of representation and thought in late medie-
val Europe, Ginzburg has suggested that they ‘recall a series of motifs
worked out by humanistically educated heretical groups’. But such
representations are original, they were not derivative from a high
rationalist culture. He thus urges that despite divergences of form
and articulation (e.g., literate/oral) he is investigating ‘a unified cul-
ture within which it was impossible to make clear-cut distinctions.’64
Mutualities of influence and features of common participation break
down simplistic notions of cultural difference and hierarchization.
When the intelligentsia started firmly associating popular forms with
‘the common people’, such stances were related to an active pro-
cess of their dissociation from forms in which they had previously par-
ticipated.65
However, once these distinctions are crystallized, it would be fool-
hardy not to pinpoint the ideological implications of the formal and
narrational distinctions which emerge between art and commercial
cinema; peculiarities which are quite central to the ways in which per-
ceptions of change find expression in popular forms. I will not go into
this at length, but both the deployment of the icon, and the narrative
transaction around generational conflict, are centrally founded on
the manipulation of woman. In particular, with rare exceptions, such
a manipulation actively divests women characters of the modern,
professional attributes which they exhibit, placing them as objects of
exchange within the generational transaction. Further, the social film
of the 1950s also tends to split the woman in terms of the figuration
of her desire. Legitimate figures are held close to patriarchal hearth and
diktat in terms of narrative space and symbolic articulation, and a
more overt sexuality is displaced to another figure.66
64 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1976, xxii–xxiii.
65
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, Maurice Temple
Smith, 1978, 27.
66 Vasudevan, ‘Errant Males and the Divided Woman’, esp. 86–9, 169–70.
Having said this, perhaps we should conclude by remembering that
the art cinema is perfectly capable of such a subordination of women
characters. This is so of the way Ray’s Ganashatru (1989), for example,
reduces the woman to ‘moral voice’ and sexually threatened figure. Of
course, psychological nuance and realist acting styles are evidently
meant to prevent such a reduction of character to narrative func-
tion. However, not only does the commercial cinema exhibit such act-
ing styles, as in the work of Nutan (for example, in Sujata, Bimal Roy,
1959; and Bandini, Bimal Roy, 1963); perhaps, as in song sequences
such as ‘Aaj sajan mohe ang laga lo’ in Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957) and
‘O, Majhi’ in Bandini, it has richer resources to express a desiring and
divided subjectivity than naturalist canons would allow for.
3
The Cultural Politics of Address

in a ‘Transitional’ Cinema
R
ecent discussions of cinema and national identity in the third
world context have tended, by and large, to cluster around the
concept of a ‘third cinema’. Here the focus has been on recover-
ing or reinventing local aesthetic and narrative traditions against the
homogenizing impulses of Hollywood in its domination over markets
and normative standards. One of the hallmarks of third cinema theory
has been its firmly unchauvinist approach to the ‘national’. In its refe-
rences to wider international aesthetic practices third cinema asserts
but problematizes the boundaries between nation and other. In the
process, it also explores the ways in which the suppressed internal oth-
ers of the nation, whether of class, sub- or counter-nationality, ethnic
group, or gender, can find a voice.1
A substantial lacuna in this project has been any sustained under-
standing of the domestic commercial cinema in the third world. This
is important because in certain countries such as India the commer-
cial film has, since the dawn of the ‘talkies’, successfully marginal-
ized Hollywood’s weight in the domestic market. This is not to claim
that it has functioned within an entirely self-referential autarchy. The
Indian popular cinema stylistically integrated aspects of the world
‘standard’, and has also been influential in certain foreign markets.
But it constitutes something like a ‘nation-space’ against the dominant
norms of Hollywood, and so ironically fulfils aspects of the role which
the avant-garde third cinema proclaims as its own.
Clearly, the difference in verbal, as opposed to narrative and cine-
matic, language cannot be the major explanation for this autonomy,
1
For a representative selection of articles, cf. Pines and Willemen, eds, Questions
of Third Cinema.
The Cultural Politics 99
for other national cinemas have succumbed to the rule of the Hollywood
film. Instead, it is in the peculiarities of the Indian commercial film
as an entertainment form that we may find the explanation for its
ascendancy over the home market. In the Indian case the theoretical
silence around the specificity of the commercial cinema is due not so
much to third cinema discourse but to the discourses and institutions
of art cinema in the 1950s which refused to seriously consider the com-
mercial film as a focus of critical discussion.
Indian commercial cinema has exerted an international presence
in countries of Indian immigration as in East Africa, Mauritius, the
Middle East, and South East Asia, but also in a significant swathe of
Northern Africa.2 Here it has often been regarded by the local intel-
ligentsia and film industry in as resentful and suspicious a way as the
Hollywood cinema in Europe.3 On the other hand there are instances
when the Bombay film’s penetration of certain markets is not viewed
as a threat. The popularity of the Hindi cinema in the former Soviet
Union is a case in point. Such phenomena make one think of a certain
arc of narrative form separate from, if overlapping at points, with the
larger hegemony exercised by Hollywood. From the description of the
cultural ‘peculiarities’ of the Bombay cinema which follows, one could
speculate whether its narrative form has a special resonance in ‘transi-
tional’ societies. The diegetic world of this cinema is primarily gov-
erned by the logic of kinship relations, and its plot driven by family
conflict. The system of dramaturgy is a melodramatic one, displaying
the characteristic ensemble of Manichaeanism, bipolarity, the privi-
leging of the moral over the psychological, and the deployment of
coincidence in plot structures. And the relationship between narrative,
performance sequence, and action spectacle is loosely structured in the
2
M.B. Billimoria, ‘Foreign Markets for Indian Films’, in Indian Talkie, 1931–
1956, 53–4. A substantial deposit of Indian films distributed by Wapar France, an
agency which catered to North African markets, is in the French film archives at Bois
D’arcy. For the importance of Indian film imports to Indonesia and Burma, cf. John
A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry, London, Christopher Helm, 1990, 202, 223; and
for patterns of Indian film exports at the end of the 1980s, M. Pendakur, ‘India’, in
ibid., 240.
3 ‘. . . none of these cinemas [from Morocco to Kuwait] is doing well . . . markets
are flooded with Rambos, Karate films, Hindu [sic] musicals and Egyptian films . . .’,
Lisbeth Malkmus, ‘The “New Egyptian Cinema”: Adapting Genre Conventions to a
New Society’, Cineaste 16 (3), 1988, 30–3 (30).
fashion of a cinema of attractions.4 In addition to these features, the
system of narration incorporates Hollywood codes of continuity edit-
ing in a fitful, unsystematic fashion, relies heavily on visual forms
such as the tableau, and inducts cultural codes of looking of a more
archaic sort.
At first glance, there would appear to be a significant echoing here
of the form of early Euro-American cinema, indicating that what ap-
peared as a fairly abbreviated moment in the history of Western cinema
has defined the long-term character of this influential cinema of
‘another world’. What is required here is a comparative account of
narrative forms in ‘transitional’ societies which might set out a different
story of the cinema than the dominant Euro-American one. However,
to talk about transition might imply that such cinemas are destined
to follow paths already set earlier. In fact, these cinemas may pose
problems which will not admit of similar solutions. The problem of
transition poses a cultural politics centred on the way local forms
reinvent themselves to establish dialogue with and assert difference
from universal models of narration and subjectivity. Recent currents
in international film study have sought to recast the opposition be-
tween local and universally hegemonic norms of narration into a
dialectical relationship. Here the specificity of particular cultural histo-
ries—European and American as much as third world—have been
constructed to understand the national and regional contexts in which
the cinema was instituted,5 how it came to assume an identity, became
4 The term comes from Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction’. There is a more
elaborate discussion of this term in relation to the Bombay cinema in section 3 below.
For reflections on other ‘attraction’-based cinemas, cf. Laleen Jayamanne, ‘Sri Lankan
Family Melodrama: A Cinema of Primitive Attractions’, Screen 33 (2), Summer 1992,
145–53; and Gerard Fouquet, ‘Of Genres and Savours in Thai Film’, Cinemaya 6,
1989–90, 4–9.
5
For example, Ginnette Vincendeau, ‘The Exception and the Rule’, Sight and
Sound 2 (8), 1994, which demonstrates that Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1939), in-
variably highlighted in the canon of world cinema by critics, should be understood
within a set of local parameters of narrative form, performance tradition (boulevard
plays), and cinematographic style (long takes and shooting in depth) that were shared
by a number of French films of the time. Other stimulating writing on the importance
of local industrial and cultural contexts includes: Ana M. Lopez, ‘Tears and Desire:
Women and Melodrama in the “Old” Mexican Cinema’, in John King, Ana M. Lopez,
and Manuel Alvarodo, eds, Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Ameri-
cas, London, British Film Institute, 1993, 67–80; Thomas Elsaesser, A Second Life:
‘ours’.6 At issue then is how traditions of identity, aesthetic form, and
cultural address are deployed for a politics of creative adaptation and
interrogation of social transformation in a colonial and post-colonial
world. To examine this process, I will take examples primarily from
the Bombay cinema, but will also refer to films from other regional
film cultures in the period from the 1930s through to the first decade
after Independence in 1947.
In exploring these issues, I want to analyse the various types of cul-
tural adaptation involved without losing sight of certain larger political
frames. For the problem of Indian popular cinema lies not only at the
interface between the local and the global in the constitution of a poli-
tics of cultural difference, but must also be seen in terms of the in-
ternal hierarchies that are involved in the constitution of a national
culture. The formation of a national market is a crucial aspect of these
multi-layered relations of domination and subordination. Bombay
became ascendant in the home market only in the 1950s. Earlier, Pune
in Maharashtra and Calcutta in Bengal were important centres of film
production, catering to the Marathi- and Bengali-speaking ‘regional’
audience as well as to the Hindi audience, the largest linguistic market
German Cinema’s First Decade, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1996; James
Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1987; Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise
and Fall of the British Costume Film, London, British Film Institute, 1994, for an
understanding of how the historical film reflected popular perceptions about British
history; Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, London, Routledge, 1993, who
notes the importance of systems of gesture and morphology in condensing social and
political consensuses through the vehicle of the star. More generally, there is the
elegant introduction on the problems and possibilities of the notion of popular cinema
in Ginnette Vincendeau and Richard Dyer, Popular European Cinema, London, Rout-
ledge, 1992. Such writing is yet to evolve substantially for the ‘third world cinema’,
as much recent writing has been centred on avant-garde ‘third cinema’ studies.
6 This agenda would also re-set the terms of an ethnographic cultural studies seek-
ing to recover the many ways audiences interpret texts. Distinctions have arisen be-
tween ethnographic cultural studies for the West and those applied to the third world.
Where the former is governed by democratic assumptions, and the possibilities of
multiple viewpoints in the construction of texts, the latter tends to be monolithic in
its characterization of the cultural basis of interpretation. But clearly, once the West
too is remade into a series of specific cultural histories, the possibility of putting the
democratic and cultural together within an ethnographic approach generates a more
universal agenda.
in the country. While these regional markets continued to exist, Bom-
bay became the main focus of national film production. This ascen-
dancy was curtailed by the emergence of important industries in
Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, producing films in Tamil,
Telugu, and Malayalam. From the 1980s these centres produced as
many and often more films than Bombay.7 There has been a certain
equivalence in the narrative form of these cinemas, but each region
contributed its distinct features to the commercial film. In the Tamil
and Telugu cases the cinema also has a strong linkage with the politics
of regional and ethnic identity. In recent times the cinemas of the
South have also made a greater effort to diversify their products than
the Bombay industry.
The domestic hegemony achieved by the commercial cinema has
had ambivalent implications for the social and political constitution
of its spectator. All of India’s cinemas were involved in constructing a
certain abstraction of national identity; by national identity I mean
here not only the pan-Indian one, but also regional constructions of
national identity. This process of abstraction suppresses other identities,
either through stereotyping or through absence. The Bombay cinema
has a special position here, because it positions other national/ethnic/
socio-religious identities in stereotypical ways under an overarching
North Indian, majoritarian Hindu identity. The stereotypes of the
‘southerner’ (or ‘Madrasi’, a term which dismissively collapses the en-
tire southern region), the Bengali, the Parsi, the Muslim, the Sikh, and
the Christian occupy subordinate positions in this universe. Bombay
crystallized as the key centre for the production of national fictions just
at the moment that the new state came into existence, so its construction
of the national narrative carries a particular force.8
1. Indian Popular Cinema Genres and

Discourses of Transformation
Arguments for cultural transformation have defined Indian cinema
from very early on in its history. The key theme in these discussions was
7
For the standard account, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film; also Manju-
nath Pendakur, ‘India’, in Lent, The Asian Film Industry, 231.
8 For reflections on the subordinating implications of Bombay’s national cinema,
see Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in

1950s’ India’, Oxford Literary Review 16, 1994, 93–124.
the social and cultural implications of film genres. In the initial phase,
Indian cinema was dominated by the mythological film, which used
Hindu myths as their major resource. Very soon other genres develop-
ed, including the social, which addressed issues of modern-day life,
the costume film, or the ‘historical’, the spectacular stunt- or action-
dominated film, and the devotional film which recounted tales of
popular saintly figures who criticized religious orthodoxy and hierarchy.
Our knowledge about the terms on which the industry addressed
spectators through genre, and the way spectators received genres, are
as yet rudimentary. Stephen Hughes’s work on exhibition practices in
early South Indian cinema argues that Hollywood and European ac-
tion serials catered to lower-class audiences.9 And a 1950s’ essay by an
industry observer noted that stunt, mythologicals, and costume films
would attract a working-class audience.10 The film industry based this
evaluation on two assumptions: firstly, that plebeian spectators would
delight in spectacle and emotion, uncluttered by ideas and social con-
tent; secondly, publicity strategies used by the industry suggest that
exhibitors believed such audiences were susceptible to a religious and
moral rhetoric. In the industry’s view, therefore, the lower-class audi-
ence was motivated by visceral or motor-oriented pleasures and moral
imperatives.
On the other hand, the film industry understood the devotional
and social films, with their emphasis on social criticism, to be the favo-
ured genres of the middle class. A running theme in social films was
the need to maintain indigenous identities against the fascination for
Western cultural behaviour. While this has become part of the arma-
ture of films devoted to contemporary society down to the present day,
a substantial vein of social films was devoted to making a critique of
Indian society and setting up an agenda for change. Recent discussions
of Tamil film of the 1930s and 1940s argue that there were repressive
and disciplinary elements to the agenda for a modern social ground-
ing of film narratives.11 The agenda here was for the social film to dis-
place the mythological, and the superstitious and irrational culture it
founded. In the 1930s a host of studios emerged which employed
9
‘The Pre-Phalke Era in South Indian Cinema’, South Indian Studies 2, 1996,
161–204.
10 All references are to ‘The Hindi Film’, Indian Talkie, 81.
11 Tamil film studies workshop, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai,
1997.
script-writers to develop reformist narrative, and an alliance emerged
in these decades between literature and cinema, with films adapting
important novels as their source material.12
However, by the 1950s the industry reformulated genre and audi-
ence appeal. After the collapse of the major studios, Bombay Talkies,
Prabhat, New Theatres, the new, speculative climate of the industry
encouraged an eye for the quick profit and therefore the drive for a
larger audience. This encouraged the induction of the sensational at-
tractions of action, spectacle, and dance into the social film, a process
explained by industry observers as a lure for the mass audience. Indus-
try observers clearly believed the genre label to be quite superficial,
and, indeed, there is something inflationary about a large number of
films released in the 1950s being called socials. The label of the ‘social’
film perhaps gave the cinematic entertainment that cobbled sensa-
tional attractions together in a slapdash way a certain legitimacy. How-
ever, arguably, the mass audiences earlier conceived of as being
attracted only by sensation and themes of moral affirmation were now
being solicited by an omnibus form which also included a rationalist
discourse as part of its ‘attractions’.13
We will observe a replaying of these discussions in more recent para-
digms of the Indian popular cinema. One of my arguments will be
that, rather than oppose different types of audience disposition on the
ground of genre and subject matter, one needs to explore how forms
of address may set up certain similar problems in constituting specta-
torial subjectivity, whether this is played out within the domain of the
mythological or the social. Especially important here is an agenda of
moving beyond the deployment in Indian cinema of a rhetoric of tra-
ditional morality and identity to a focus on how cinematic address—
12 Moinak Biswas, ‘Literature and Cinema in Bengal, 1930s–1950s’, paper presented

at seminar on ‘Reading Indian Cinema’, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur Uni-
versity, 1998.
13
The reasons for the restructuring of the ‘social’ film are complex. Artists asso-
ciated with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which had ties with the
Communist Party of India, had started working in the film industry from the 1940s.
Amongst these were the actor Balraj Sahni, the director Bimal Roy, and the script-
writer K.A. Abbas. The latter was involved in Awara (The Vagabond; Raj Kapoor,
1951), a film representative of the new drive to combine a social reform perspective
with ornate spectacle. However, the years after Independence were characterized by
a broader ideological investment in discourses of social justice associated with the
image of the new state and the personality of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
the way spectators are positioned in terms of vision, auditory address,
and narrative intelligibility—may complicate and re-work the overt
terms of narrative coherence.
2. Dominant Currents
in Contemporary Criticism
Here I want to briefly summarize some of the dominant currents in the
contemporary criticism of the Indian popular cinema and the nature
of its spectator. The dominant view is that of a tradition of film criti-
cism associated with Satyajit Ray and the Calcutta Film Society in the
1950s. This school of criticism, which has proven influential in subse-
quent mainstream film criticism, arraigned the popular cinema for its
derivativeness from the American cinema, the melodramatic externality
and stereotyping of its characters, and especially its failure to focus on
the psychology of human interaction. In these accounts the spectator
of the popular film emerges as an immature, indeed infantile, figure,
one bereft of the rationalist imperatives required for the Nehru era’s
project of national reconstruction.14
Recent analyses of the popular cinemas in the ‘non-Western’ world
have indicated that the melodramatic mode has, with various indigenous
modifications, been a characteristic form of narrative and dramaturgy
in societies undergoing the transition to modernity.15 Criticisms of
this prevalent mode have taken the particular form that I have just
specified, and have had both developmentalist and democratic com-
ponents. The implication was that, insofar as the melodramatic mode
was grounded in an anti-rationalist ethos, it would undercut the ra-
tional, critical outlook required for the development of a just, dynamic,
and independent nation.16
This premise of modern film criticism has been taken in rather
different directions. Chidananda Das Gupta emerges from this earlier
tradition, being one of the founder members of the Calcutta Film So-
ciety in 1947. But his book, The Painted Face,17 pays greater attention
14 For an exploration of this influential critical tradition, see ch. 2 above.

15 Cf. the collection of essays in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian
Cinema, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
16
For example, Mitsushiro Yoshimoto’s account of the post-war domestic criticism
of Japanese cinema, ‘Melodrama, Post-modernism and Japanese Cinema’, in Dissa-
nayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema,101–26, esp. 110–11.
17
New Delhi, Roli Books, 1990.
to the commercial cinema than realist criticism ever has. Here his
analysis develops certain insights about the narrative structure of the
popular film, but it is still dogged by assumptions which spring from
the earlier terms of reference. These relate to the belief that the
commercial film of the early period and again after the 1950s primarily
catered to a spectator who had not severed his ties with the countryside
and so had a traditional or pre-modern relationship to the image, one
which incapacitated him or her from distinguishing between image
and reality.18 Another of Das Gupta’s theses is that the pre-rationalist
spectator, en route from countryside to city in his mental outlook, was
responsive to Bombay cinema’s focus on family travails and identity,
a focus which displaces attention from the larger social domain. He
describes the spectator caught up in the psychic trauma brought about
by threatened loss of the mother and the struggle for adult identity
as adolescent and self-absorbed or ‘totalist’.19 We have echoes here of
the realist criticism of the 1950s in its reference to the spectator of
the commercial film as infantile. Following on from earlier discourses
underwriting the cinema as a vehicle of modernization, he exempts the
social-reform-oriented cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s from
this general formulation, and underwrites its attempts to transform so-
cial perception in rationalist directions.
Such a conception of the spectator ultimately has political impli-
cations. Das Gupta sees this social and psychic configuration reflecting
the gullible mentality that enabled the rise to power of the actor-poli-
ticians of the south, M.G. Ramachandran and N.T. Rama Rao.20 The
naïve spectator actually believed his screen idols to be capable of the
prowess they displayed on-screen. In Das Gupta’s view the rational
outlook required for the development of a modern nation-state is still
lacking, and the popular cinema provides us with an index of the cog-
nitive impairment of the majority of the Indian people. There is a
sociological underpinning to this argument, that the middle classes
are bearers of a rationalist discourse and the attributes of responsi-
ble citizenship, and that the popular cinema in its earlier and later
manifestations is the domain of first a pre-modern, and then a de-
cultured, lumpenized mass audience.
18 ‘Seeing is Believing’, in Das Gupta, The Painted Face, 35–44.

19
‘City and Village’ and ‘The Oedipal Hero’, ibid., 45–58 and 70–106.
20
‘The Painted Face of Indian Politics’, ibid., 199–247.
This psychological and social characterization of the popular spec-
tator is pervasive, even if it is not used to the same ends as Das Gupta.
The social psychologist Ashis Nandy, while working outside the realist
tradition, shares some of its assumptions about the psychological
address of the commercial film.21 He argues that the dominant spec-
tator of the popular cinema holds on to a notion of traditional com-
munity quite remote from the outlook of the modern middle class; as
such, this spectator is attracted to a narrative which ritually neutralizes
the discomfiting features of social change, those atomizing modern
thought patterns and practices which have to be adopted for reasons
of survival. Nandy embraces the cultural indices of a subjectivity
which is not governed by the rationalist psychology and reality-orient-
ation of a contested modernity. In this sense he valorizes that which
Das Gupta sees as a drawback.
So a psychical and sociological matrix for understanding the ad-
dress of the commercial Bombay film to its spectator, deriving in some
respects from the realist criticism of the 1950s, has been extended into
the more explicitly psychoanalytical interpretations of spectatorial dis-
positions and cognitive capacities. Ironically, these premises are shared
both by those critical of the commercial film and its spectator for their
lack of reality-orientation and those who see popular cinema resisting
modern forms of consciousness.
The most complex attempt to transcend these oppositions between
tradition and modernity in thinking about Indian cinema is the work
of Madhava Prasad, which argues that many of the dimensions identi-
fied as composing a non-modern outlook in Indian popular films are
in fact constructed under the aegis of an ideology of modernity.22 For
the rhetoric and narrative form of modernity has to produce a tradi-
tional ‘other’ in order to overcome and institute a new form of subject-
ivity. Prasad situates this cinematic project in terms of certain overarching
political and ideological formations in post-colonial India. Foremost
here is the concept of passive revolution, where a modernizing state
and its constituency in the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy has to adapt
21
All references are to Ashis Nandy, ‘An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to the Indian
Cinema’, Deep Focus 1 (1–3), December 1987, June 1988, and November 1988, 68–
72, 53–60, and 58–61, rpnt in Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud, Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1996, 196–236.
22
M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, Delhi,
Oxford University Press 1998.
its transformative agenda to the realities of pre-capitalist power. In
terms of narrative form, the political compromise at the level of the
state is represented by what Prasad calls the ‘feudal family romance’.
This form releases a series of new drives—to individual romantic ful-
filment and the formation of the couple for the nuclear family, con-
sumerist orientations, affiliations to an impersonal state form—but
ultimately subordinates them to the rule of ‘traditionally regulated
social relationships’. This regime of narrative coherence depicts landed
gentry, urban gentlemen, and representatives of the social and religious
orthodoxy as ultimately capable of fulfilling or neutralizing the energies
unleashed by new forces. In this regard, the feudal family functions as
a way both of disavowing change and, more subtly, of allowing for it
without disturbing social hierarchies. This dominant narrative form
exists over a long period in Prasad’s rendition, running from the 1940s
through to the end of the 1960s, when the ruling configuration chan-
ges and the cinematic institution is diversified under the aegis of state
support and through new developments within the film industry.
3. The Politics of Indian Melodrama

Where for Das Gupta the popular form subjects the spectator to pre-
modern perceptions, for Prasad the pre-modern is an ideological cons-
truction rather than a cognitive problem. The ideology of his ‘feudal
family romance’ echoes, but is significantly distinct from, melodrama
theory as it has evolved in the West.
For Peter Brooks, as we saw, melodrama emerged in the nineteenth
century as a form which spoke of a post-sacred universe in which the
certainties of traditional meaning and hierarchical authority had been
displaced.23 The melodramatic narrative constantly makes an effort to
recover this lost security, but meaning comes to be increasingly found-
ed in the personality. Characters take on an essential, psychic reso-
nance corresponding to family identities, and work out forbidden
conflicts and desires. In the process, the social dimension collapses
into the familial and, indeed, the family itself becomes a microcosm
of the social level.
The distinction is that the issue posed by melodrama for Prasad is
not simply one of striving to recover sacred forms and traditional
23 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

hierarchical meaning, but a deployment of this desire for a strategy of
transformation. Here, Prasad sees the imbrication of familial and so-
cial levels as political, as a register of the way pre-capitalist enclaves
function as the ideological integument under conditions of social
transformation. He compares the dominant Indian narrative form of
his construction to the aristocratic romances of early European stage
melodrama. Implicitly, the drives to alter this form are, in turn, com-
parable to the more democratic social vision of later melodrama.
Prasad’s identification of a hierarchical coding of address in popular
narrative form leads to a suggestive thesis about the informal prohibition
on the private sphere and individuated characterization in Indian
popular cinema. The argument centres on the prohibition on kissing.
Whereas conventional discourses on the cinema argue that the pro-
hibition maintains a sense of national identity against the inroads of
Western cultural behaviour, Prasad places it within the co-ordinates of
power of the dominant narrative form. He suggests that the feudal
family romance seeks to contain those romantic drives that threaten
traditional social authority with the spectre of secession. Here the kiss
marks the incipient space of privacy and the nuclear family, understood
as an infringement of the overwhelmingly public monitoring of
sexuality and subjecthood under feudal scopic regimes.
Prasad argues that the pre-emption of such types of characterization
has ramifications for the forms of knowledge and modes of performance
in popular cinema. Instead of a narrative form constructed around
enigmas, the popular cinema is governed by forms of speech and nar-
rative mechanisms deriving from the domain of the already known.24
The spectator of this cinema is then addressed through the presentation
of a pre-interpreted symbolic order in contrast to the spectator of clas-
sical realist cinema who is complicit in the conversion of the raw mate-
rial of representation into narrative meaning.
I would like to hold on to Nandy’s insight about community forms
of address in complicating the terms of this very original and systematic
thesis. Here one should consider Nandy’s invocation of tradition,
24
Several writers have anticipated this part of the argument. See Ashis Nandy, ‘The
Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles’, in Pradip Krishen, ed., Indian Popular
Cinema: Myth, Meaning and Metaphor, India International Centre Quarterly, Special
Issue, 8 (1), March 1980, 89–96; Rosie Thomas, ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and
Popularity’, Screen 26 (3–4), 1985, 116–31; and Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Melodramatic
Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema’, Screen 30 (3), 1989, 29–50.
often rendered in a way that leaves the historical coordinates of how
tradition is constituted unexamined, as a heuristic, an enabling func-
tion or stance with which to critique modern forms of political and
cultural organization.
In terms of narrative form, the popular imperative engages in a
series of transactions, both with methods and idioms marked as tradi-
tional or culturally distinctive as well as those defined as modern. Here,
I would like to consider the location of the spectator’s position around
three issues: (i) how is the ideology of the traditional constituted in
cinematic narration? (ii) what are the functions of cinematic techniques
of subjectivity in the construction of narrative space? (iii) how does the
overall attraction-based and presentational, rather than represent-
ational, field of the popular film system address the spectator? These
questions amount to an engagement with a history of the methods
of film narration, film-style, as well as a history of the relationship be-
tween screen practices and audience reception.
4. Iconicity, Frontality, and the

Tableau Frame
The question of mode of address concerns how objects and figures
are located with respect to the look of the spectator within the spatial
and temporal coordinates of scenic construction. Central here is the
aesthetics of frontality and iconicity noted for Indian films in certain
phases and genres by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Geeta Kapur.25 The
iconic mode is not used by these writers in its precise semiotic sense,
to identify a relation of resemblance, but to identify a meaningful con-
densation of image. The term has been used to situate the articulation
of the mythic within painting, theatre, and cinema, and could be con-
ceived of as cultural work which seeks to bind a multi-layered dynamic
into a unitary image. In Geeta Kapur’s definition the iconic is ‘an image
into which symbolic meanings converge and in which moreover they
achieve stasis.’26 This concept of the iconic needs to be grounded with-
in a conception of mise-en-scène, and it is here that the question of
frontal address surfaces. At one level frontality would mean placing the
25
Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era’, 14–15, rpnt in Tejaswini Niranjana, et al., eds,
Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, Calcutta, Seagull Books,
1993, 47–82; Kapur, ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’, rpnt as ‘Revelation and
Doubt: Sant Tukaram and Devi’, in ibid., 19–46.
26
Kapur, ‘Revelation and Doubt’, 23.
camera at a 180° plane to the figures and objects constitutive of filmic
space. These may display attributes of direct address, as in the look of
characters into the camera, but a frontal, direct address is relayed in
other ways, as in the way the knowledge of the spectator is drawn upon
in constructing the scene, through the stylized performance, ritual
motifs, and auditory address that arise from a host of Indian aesthetic
and performance traditions.27 This position of knowledge is not one
which relays the spectator through a hermeneutic play, the enigma of
what is to come, but through existing paradigms of narrative knowledge,
although these may be subject to reworking. In genres such as the
mythological film, the narrative process assumes audience know-
ledge of the narrative totality it refers to, so that a fragmentary, episodic
structure can be deployed. The film song displays this function of
‘frontal’ address across genres, reaching over and beyond the space of
the scene, locking the spectator into a direct auditory relay.
Frontal planes in cinematic composition are used to relay this work
of iconic condensation and also to group characters and objects in the
space of the tableau. In Peter Brooks’ formulation the tableau in melo-
drama gives the ‘spectator the opportunity to see meanings represent-
ed, emotions and moral states rendered in clear visible signs’.28 And
Barthes has noted that it is ‘a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined
edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is
banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that
it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into
view . . . [it] is intellectual, it has something to say (something moral,
social) but is also says it knows how this must be done.’29
Barthes also argues that the tableau has a temporal dimension, what
he calls the ‘pregnant moment’ caught between past and future.30 In
the course of this argument, I will show that the temporality of the
27
Kapur defines the formal category of frontality as arising from ‘the word, the
image, the design, the performative act . . . This means, for example, flat, diagrammatic
and simply contoured figures (as in Kalighat pat painting). It means a figure-ground
design, with notational perspecitve (as in the Nathdwara pictures, and the photographs
which they often utilize). It means, in dramatic terms, the repetition of motifs within
ritual “play”, as in the lila; it means a space deliberately evacuated to foreground actor-
image performance, as in the tamasha. Frontality is also established in an adaptation
of traditional acting conventions to the proscenium stage, as when stylized audience
address is mounted on an elaborate mise-en-scène, as in Parsi theatre.’ Ibid., 20.
28 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 62.
29 Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image, Music, Text, 69–78 (70).
30
Ibid.
tableau can be deployed cinematically, its shape setting the geometrical
terms of the temporal construction of the scene as it extends over a
series of shots. The tableau also displays interruptive, interventionist
functions in the flow of scenic construction. In my argument, the
function of this spatial figure is to encode a socially and communally
defined address to the spectator.
The Reconstruction of the Icon

I will illustrate the dynamic employment of the frontal, iconic mode,
and of tableau framing in a sequence from Mehboob Khan’s saga of
peasant life, Mother India (1957). This segment presents, and then
upsets, a pair of relatively stable iconic instances. The mother-in-law,
Sundar Chachi, is centred through a number of tableau shots taken
from different angles to highlight her authority in the village just after
she has staged a spectacular wedding for her son. This representation
of Sundar Chachi takes place in the courtyard of her house. The other
instance is of the newly wedded daughter-in-law, Radha, shown inside
the house, as she massages her husband’s feet. It is a classic image of the
devout Hindu wife.31
The two instances are destabilized because of the information that
the wedding has forced Sundar Chachi to mortgage the family land.
The information diminishes her standing, causing her to leave the
gathering and enter her house. Simultaneously, it also undermines
Radha’s iconic placement as submissive, devout wife. As the larger
space of the scene, the actual relationship betwen the inside and the
outside, remains unspecified, the relationship is suggested when Radha,
hearing the conversation, looks up and away towards off-screen left.
The likelihood of this positioning is further strengthened when Sundar
Chachi enters the house, and, looking in the direction of off-screen
right, confesses that she has indeed mortgaged her land. (Figs 11 and
12, p. 113.) There is the use here of a Hollywood eyeline match, where
the direction of looks cast is consistent with the convention that char-
acters separated into successive shots face each other in space. The
31
Reference may be made here to a panel from the eighteenth-century Hindu text
analysed by I. Julia Leslie in The Perfect Wife: The Orthodox Hindu Woman according
to the ‘Stridharmapaddhati’ of Tryambakayajvan, Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1989.
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Figs 11–12: Iconic Transfer in Mother India, Mehboob Khan, 1957.

women are narrativized out of their static, iconic position through
narrative processes of knowledge circulation and character movement,
and by the deployment of Hollywood codes of off-screen sound and
eye-line match.
The mobilization of Radha out of one convention of iconic repre-
sentation is completed when she assumes maternal functions extending
beyond her family, and over the domain of village community and
nation. In turn, she becomes the focal point of community norms, and
her gaze acquires punitive functions in delineating the limits of per-
missible action. A process of the narrative dispersal of one iconic figure
is thus finally brought to a close by instituting a new iconic figure to
ground subjectivity. Central here is a particular reinscription in the
cinema of a discourse of the image and the look in indigenous con-
ventions.
Darshan
I refer here to darshan, the power exercised by the authoritative image
in Hindu religious culture. In this practice, the devotee is permitted to
behold the image of the deity, and is privileged and benefited by this
permission, in contrast to a concept of looking that assigns power to
the beholder by reducing the image to an object of the look.32 Darshan
has a wider purchase, being invoked in discourses of social and poli-
tical authority as well. In a certain rendering of the category of darshan
as an authoritarian form, social status derives from the degree of access
which social groups and individuals have to a central icon of authority,
whether of kingship, divine authority, or the extended patriarchal
family and its representatives.33 This eligibility then rests on very hier-
archically coded criteria of social rank. There is a task here of iden-
tifying how the darshanic locates characters and is responded to by
them within cinematic narration. One hypothesis would be that an
authoritative figure, symbol or space (temple, landlord’s house, court
of law), is mobilized to order the place of characters within a scene
and over the time of the narrative. But if such a diegetic instance is
located, it is not necessary that characters abide by the positions they
32 For ‘darshan’, see Babb, ‘Glancing’, and Eck, Seeing the Divine Image.
33 Madhava Prasad uses the concept in this fashion, to outline the way narrative
relations are organized in the ‘feudal family romance’. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi
Film, ch. 3.
are assigned by it, nor that filmic techniques subordinate the spectator
to the sway of darshanic authority.
Indeed, to assume otherwise could lead to the conclusion that the
cinema is merely the vehicle of an archaic way of inscribing power on
the visual field. Instead of seeing the discourse of darshan framing cine-
matic narration, we need to think of darshan as being enframed and
reconstructed by it. Here, the localized deployment of filmic techniques
in the micro-narration of a scene—editing, shot-distance, and angle,
camera movement, lighting, sound elements—alert us to how characters
and spectators are being cinematically positioned in relation to the
darshanic. The darshanic is not static, and generates new sources of
authority from it, and in ways not entirely comprehensible in terms of
established conventions. Thus, while much of the moral authority of
Radha in Mother India derives from the preservation of her chastity,
and thereby the assertion of her devotion to her absent husband, this
patriarchal rhetoric is condensed along with other features, including
a solidarity with other women, and an insistence on the maintenance
of community norms.
The cinematic process of iconic reconstruction may in fact deploy
and subordinate modern methods of subject construction modelled
on Hollywood narration. By convention, the continuity system, and
especially its point-of-view editing, is associated with the drives and
perception of individuated characters. However, it is quite common in
popular Hindi cinema to observe the yoking of such views to the bearer
of darshanic authority. But the emergence of such enshrining views is
tied to the dynamic of reconstruction, and is mobilized to the end of
a patriarchal transformation.
To suggest the transactional basis on which popular cinema inducts
those methods of narration marked as modern, I will cite an example
from Devdas (Bimal Roy, 1955), a film based on a well-known Bengali
novel by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. Devdas, the son of a powerful
landed family, is prohibited from marrying the girl he desires, Parvati,
because of status differences. He is a classic renouncer figure of the type
favoured in Indian storytelling, a figure who is unable or refuses to con-
form to the demands of society, and wastes away in the contemplation
of that which he could never gain. I want to refer to a scene which emp-
loys continuity conventions to the highly ‘traditional’ end of deifying
the male as object of desire. The sequence deals with Devdas’ visit to
Parvati’s house, and indicates a strategy of narration whereby Parvati’s
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Figs 13 and 14: Devdas, Bimal Roy, 1995, Parvati and Devdas.
point of view is used to underline the desirability and the authority
exercised by Devdas’ image. In this sequence, Parvati returns to her
house to find her grandmother and mother discussing Devdas’ arrival
from the city, and the fact that he has not yet called upon them. Dev-
das, off-screen, calls from outside the door. From this moment, Parva-
ti’s auditory and visual attention dominates the narration. Before we
can see Devdas entering the house, we withdraw with Parvati to her
room upstairs, and listen to the conversation taking place below along
with her. Devdas announces that he will go to see Parvati himself. In
anticipation of Devdas’ arrival Parvati hurriedly starts lighting a diya
(devotional lamp), and the melody of a kirtan (traditional devotional
song expressing Radha’s longing for Krishna) is played. We hear the
sound of Devdas’ footfalls on the stairs, and Parvati’s anxiety to light
the lamp before Devdas enters her room is caught by a suspenseful in-
tercutting between her lighting of the lamp and shots of the empty
doorway. The door-frame in this sequence suggests the shrine in which
the divine idol is housed. Devdas’ entry is shown in a highly deifying
way; first his feet are shown in the doorway, followed by a cut to the
lighted lamp. Finally his face is revealed. There follows a cut to Parvati,
suggesting that this is the order through which she has seen Devdas’
arrival. As she looks at him, conch shells, the traditional accompaniment
to the act of worship, are sounded. The future husband as deity, object
of the worshipful gaze, is established by the narration’s deployment
of Parvati’s point of view. Her lighting of the devotional lamp and
the extra-diegetic sound of the kirtan and conch shells underline
the devotional nature of the woman’s relationship to the male image.
(Figs 13–14, p. 116.)
Here we see how the cinema reinscribes darshan, locating it with-
in a new figure, that of the emergent if ultimately ineffectual patri-
archal figure of Devdas, who cannot be assimilated to the reigning
feudal order. It does this in such a way as to both enable and limit the
conditions of subjectivity. For, while the film mobilizes point-of-view
codes to represent the subjectivity of the woman, this is done in such
a way as to constrain the field of her look by focusing the beloved with-
in a discourse of divinity. This setting of certain limiting coordinates
for the woman’s look also significantly institutes a division between
the incipient formation of a new domesticity and the wider exter-
nal world: Devdas’ enshrinement in the doorway converts the public
space beyond the door into his domain, restricting the woman to
domestic space.
Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity

A more complicated version of this pattern of looking is observable in
Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (Craving; 1957), a film which refers to—but in
many ways controverts—the narrative of Devdas. In the pertinent
scene, the poet-hero Vijay refers to the prostitute, Gulab, as his wife in
order to protect her from a policeman who is pursuing her. The pros-
titute is unaccustomed to such a respectful address, especially one sug-
gestive of intimate ties to a man she loves, and is thrown into a sensual
haze. Vijay ascends a stairway to the terrace of a building where he will
pass the night. Gulab sees a troupe of devotional folk-singers perform-
ing a Vaishnavite song, ‘Aaj sajan mohe ang laga lo’ (Take me in your
arms today, O beloved) and follows Vijay up the stairs. The scene is
structured by Gulab’s desire for Vijay, expressed in the song, and these
relations of desire are simultaneously relations of distance, as the wo-
man follows, looks at, and almost touches the man she loves (who is
entirely unaware of all this), but finally withdraws and flees as she be-
lieves herself unworthy of him.
The relation between devotional voice, devotee, and object of de-
votion determines the space of this scene, providing the coordinates
for the extension and constraining of space. The relationship between
characters is not one of the iconic frontality of traditional worship. The
desired one is not framed in this way, for continuity codes dominate
the scenic construction. Even in the scene I have cited from Devdas,
continuity codes construct space and it is a shot-reverse-shot relationship
which defines the ultimate moment of looking. The spectator is of-
fered a rather complicated position. If we think of the male icon as a
‘traditional’ marker of authority and desire which anchors the view of
the female devotee, as in Devdas, then the scene conforms to the logic
of darshan.
However, within the bhakti or devotional tradition, while the fe-
male devotee’s energy is channelled directly into the worship of the
deity, without the mediation of the priest, the Lord still remains a
remote figure. The devotional act thus becomes a somewhat excessive
one, concentrating greater attention on the devotee than the devotional
object, and this is only underlined in the maintenance of Gulab’s
distance from Vijay, and his failure to see her. This rather complicat-
ed structure of spectatorship needs to be framed within the address
relayed by the devotional voice.34 The space assigned this voice emer-
ges from Gulab’s look off-screen, but it remains autonomous, never
sharing her space. The narration periodically cuts back to the singer
and cutting and camera movement closely follow the rhythms of the
song. The soundtrack maintains a steady pitch to the singing, irrespective
of how far the action moves away from the singer’s (imaginary) space,
and places it thereby at an extra-diegetic location.35 (Figs 15–17,
pp. 120–1.) The relatively stable articulation of these three points in
the narrative construction—devotional voice, desiring woman, and
her object—efects a dynamic, temporal deployment to the essentially
spatial category of the tableau. The result for the spectator is neither
the subordination of subjectivity to darshanic authority, whose circuit
is left incomplete by withholding Vijay’s authorizing darshanic look,
nor the unmediated identification with the desiring woman, but a
framing of these elements of scenic composition within the narrative
community solicited by the kirtan. Here the audience is invited to par-
ticipate in a culturally familiar idiom that reinvents itself by providing
a supportive frame to the cultivation of new techniques for the repre-
sentation of an individuated feminine subjectivity. However, the sup-
portive frame of narrative community, while inducting a new view
through the deployment of modern perceptual codes cannot, it would
seem, abjure the anchorage given by the authoritative object. In this
instance, where the darshanic circuit is not completed, the woman
ultimately lies outside the sanction provided by the man returning
her look. Later, however, the darshanic circuit is completed, institut-
ing a new paternalist form in the conclusion of the film. Gulab’s view
enshrines Vijay, as travelling point-of-view shots punctuate her run-
ning down towards the beloved as he appears at the doorway of her
34
Kumkum Sangari has noted the following effects of the female devotional voice:
‘The orthodox triadic relation between wife, husband and god is broken. The wife no
longer gets her salvation through her “godlike” husband . . . Bhakti offers direct sal-
vation. The intermediary position now belongs not to the human husband or the
Brahmin priest but to the female devotional voice. This voice, obsessed with the
relationships between men and women, continues to negotiate the triadic relation-
ship—it simultaneously transgresses and reformulates patriarchal ideologies.’ Kumkum
Sangari, ‘Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti’, Economic and Political
Weekly, Part One, 25 (27), 7 July 1990, 1464–74, and Part Two, 25 (28), 14 July 1990,
1537–51.
35 I owe this observation to Jim Cook.
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Figs 15, 16, and 17: Pyaasa, Guru Dutt, 1957, ‘Keertan and female subjecti-
vity’.
dwelling, and his return of her look acknowledges her eligibility to

reside within the orbit of his gaze.
How the cinema deploys these discourses of visual and auditory
authority, how it hierarchizes them into its levels of narration, is the
issue at stake: who authorizes a view, locates a figure in narrative space,
who speaks, who sees, who listens. Where these relations are organized
to highlight the compact between the narrating instance and the
spectator’s attention, the place of the third look of the character is
subordinated to the spectator’s knowledge that it is s/he who looks
and listens. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha has argued, in such instances the
concept of a third look codified by the requirements of an integral
continuity narration emerges as a transaction between narrator and
spectator, and does not acquire a decisive autonomy.36 The discourse
of narrative community is one such instance. But, in terms of Barthes’
36
Rajadhyaksha, ‘Who’s Looking? Viewership and Democracy in Indian Cinema’,
in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.
analysis of the tableau, narration may deploy an interventionist, intel-
lectual rather than emotive, use of this spatial figure, suggesting a dis-
tancing perspective rather than a shaping of spectatorial subjectivity
into identification with characters. Thus, we may observe the emergence
of a space in which the main characters are composed separate from the
flow of character-grounded narrative awareness and development.
The narration places us in a position superior to that of all the charac-
ters, and we are alerted to how different character attitudes are framed
within normative and hierarchical social discourses. This address does
not, I would argue, ask us to accept the norm, but highlights the in-
evitability of a social frame to meaning.
I have suggested how this works in Andaz (Style; Mehboob Khan,
1949).37 However, while these community grounded and socially
coded modes of direct address constitute a fundamental aspect of cine-
matic narration for the popular cinema, the character-driven codes of
subjectivity and narration associated with Hollywood may stand quite
independently of such an address, inducting another set of subjectivities
or storytelling conventions into the architecture of filmic narrative. I
have suggested how Andaz drew upon Hollywood narrative conven-
tions in order to highlight the enigmatic dimensions of its female
character’s desires, and especially the conventions of hallucinations
and dream to define her in terms of an ambivalent psychology and a
transgressive if involuntary sexuality. Such conventions were drawn
upon to be contained and disavowed. A nationalist modernizing im-
perative had to symbolically contain those ideologically fraught aspects
of modernity that derived from transformations in the social position
and subjectivity of women. The result was a fascinatingly perverse and
incoherent text, one whose ideological drives are complicated by the
subjectivities it draws upon.38
I would suggest that these examples indicate that for the popular
Indian cinema the categories of public and private, and of feudal and
modern scopic regimes may not adequately comprehend the subjectivity
offered the spectator, and that this would in turn have implications for
the culture of citizenship. The rupturing of an integral, self-referen-
tial narrative space via direct address suggests a circuit of imaginary
37
See ch. 2 above.
38
Vasudevan, ‘“You Cannot Live in Society”’, in Uberoi, ed., Sexuality, Social
Reform and the State, 83–108.
communication, indeed, a making of audience into imaginary com-
munity. The authorizing voice of narrative community is not fixed,
however. To complicate Prasad’s insight, while speech may be pre-
interpreted in the sense that characters do not speak in the register of
everyday, naturalist conversation, but are vehicles of existing language
systems, cinematic narration subjects these to a reconstitution which
enables an inventive, dynamic address to contemporary issues. As I
have suggested, the solicitation of the cinema audience into a fami-
liar community of meaning via direct address may afford a certain
movement, an outlining of new forms of subjectivity on the grid of the
culturally recognizable. We have seen how this works in terms of a
transgressive rendering of romance. An overt political address, bear-
ing directly on questions of citizenship and state legitimacy, also
emerges in new languages of direct address. The development of a new
linguistic nationalist community in the direct address of the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam-influenced Tamil cinema would be an obvious
example.39 In fact, Indian popular cinema has, throughout its hist-
ory, deployed such modes of address to constitute imaginary political
communities, around issues of social reform and nationalist mobil-
ization. Here, direct address may argue for change on somewhat dif-
ferent grounds than the protocols of narrative continuity, realism, and
individual characterization.
Community authorization then rests alongside and complicates
‘feudal’ and ‘modern’ ways of organizing narrative. Song sequences
deployed from a host of musical traditions have often worked in this
way, and in cases such as the one I have cited from Pyaasa, have as-
sumed the role of a narrational authority external to the main story.
This is enacted by a source other than any of the fictional characters,
and sometimes in a space separated out from theirs. In this sense the
narrational song can be identified with the properties of extra-diegetic
music. They both inhabit a location outside the fiction and shape
a cultural space for the representation of characters. We are both in-
side and outside the story, tied at one moment to the seamless flow of
a character-based narration from within, in the next attuned to a cul-
turally familiar stance from without.
Not only does this narrating instance function to outline new types
39
See M.S.S. Pandian, ‘Parashakthi: The Life and Times of a DMK Film’, rpnt in
Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 65–98.
of subjectivity that in a sense emerge from within the community of
meaning; it may be deployed to offer a critical view on narrative deve-
lopment. In Awara the judge, Raghunath, expels his wife, Leela, on
suspicion of bearing another man’s child. The event is framed through
a song critically invoking the mythical King Rama’s expulsion of his
wife Sita, and performed by a troupe located separately from the main
action. The critical stance offered by the song renders the iconic figure
of the judge as an oppressive one, subjecting the darshanic to censure.40
The comic, deriving from earlier theatrical traditions of the vidu-
shak, also left his mark as one of the staple figures of the commercial
cinema.41 Here he sometimes plays the role of a narrator external to
the main narrative and is often engaged in a relationship of direct
address to the audience. There is a certain didacticism involved in his
functions, but this is a didacticism gone wrong, relaying authoritarian
discourses voiced elsewhere through a figure entirely lacking the sta-
tus and integrity carried by a darshanic rendering of such discourses.
For example, in Andaz, V.H. Desai, as the charlatan and freeload-
ing Professor Dharmadas Devdas Trivedi or DDT (the assigning of a
Brahmin name to the comic sends up the pretensions and parasitical
features of upper-caste status claims), is a spokesman and even a nar-
rative agent of what he claims to be authentic indigenous attitudes to
marriage. Such attitudes are similar to those voiced by the film’s patri-
archal figure and his delegates, but when the comic is made their
vehicle they are subjected to a lampooning idiom. In a more common-
place function, it is the very absurdity of the comic figure, quite obvi-
ously opposed to the larger-than-life attraction of the hero, which
invites a less flattering point of identification for the audience, and
thereby a certain narratorial distance towards the story. Further, in the
very superfluousness of his functions, we could say that the comic was
the spokesman within the story for a different order of storytelling,
one which celebrates the disaggregative relationship to narrative and,
indeed, makes coherent meaning within the world of the narrative a
problematic agenda.
40 For a more detailed account, see Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Sexuality and the Film
Apparatus: Continuity, Non-continuity and Discontinuity in Bombay Cinema’, in

Mary E. John and Janaki Nair, eds, A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of
Modern India, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1998, 192–215.
41 For an account of narrators and comics in traditional and folk theatrical form,
see M.L. Varadpande, Traditions of Indian Theatre, New Delhi, Abhinav Publica-
tions, 1978, 84–5.
This would imply that, instead of only looking to the overall work
of ideology that ‘officially’ organizes the text, perhaps one should also
attend to the fissiparous qualities of cinematic form to focus on the
importance of non-continuity in evaluating the narrative worlds of-
fered the spectator. In terms of sensory experience, non-continuity
would suggest a characteristic modern culture of distraction, where the
spectator’s world is governed by a multiplicity of focuses and not by a
carefully calibrated, goal-oriented channelling of her investment in the
narrative process. At issue here is the subjectivity arising from the deve-
lopment of this particular type of cinematic modernity.
5. The Political Terms

of Spectatorial Subjectivity
The terms of cinematic narration I have sketched here are rather dif-
ferent from the notions of spectatorship which have emerged from that
model of the successful commodity cinema, Hollywood. Historians
and theoreticians of the American cinema have underlined the impor-
tance of continuity editing in binding or suturing the spectator into
the space of the fiction. The undercutting of direct address and the
binding of the spectator into a hermetic universe on-screen heightens
the individual psychic address and sidelines the space of the auditorium
as a social and collective viewing space. This very rich historiography
and textual analysis, excellently synthesized in works by Miriam Han-
sen and Thomas Elsaesser,42 speaks of the fraught process through
which American cinema’s bourgeois address came into being. This
work describes how social and ethnic peculiarities were addressed in
the relation between early cinema and its viewers. The sites of filmic
performance were institutions such as the vaudeville, in which the one-
and two-reel film was one in a series of ‘acts’ on the programme; all of
these items, including films, tended to solicit audience interest by re-
ferring to the ethnic particularities of the audience. The process by
which the cinema took over and came to develop its own entertainment
space was a process of the formation of a national market in which
the spectator had to be addressed in the broadest, non-ethnic, socially
universal terms. Of course, what was actually happening was that a
42
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991; Adam Barker and Thomas Elsaes-
ser, Early Cinema: Space–Frame–Narrative, London, British Film Institute, 1990.
dominant white Anglo-Saxon norm came to be projected as universal.
Along with this process there developed the guidelines for the cons-
truction of a universal spectator placed not in the auditorium but as
an imaginary figure enmeshed in the very process of narration.
The mixed address of the Hindi cinema, along with the spaces
which open up within the commercial film, the song-and-dance se-
quences and comic skits, might suggest a rather different relationship
of reception. Indeed, it recalls the notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’,
the term developed by Gunning to theorize the appeal of early Euro-
American cinema.43 In contrast to the Hollywood mode of continuity
cinema or narrative integration, Gunning argues that early cinema was
exhibitionist. The character’s look into the camera indicated an indif-
ference to the realist illusion that the story tells itself. The films dis-
played a greater interest in relaying a series of views and sensations to
their audience rather than following a linear narrative logic. These
elements were to be increasingly transcended in the Hollywood cine-
ma’s abstraction of the spectator as individuated consumer of its self-
enclosed fictional world. In the process, the audience, earlier understood
to be composed of workers and immigrants, was ‘civilized’ into appre-
ciating the bourgeois virtues of a logical, cause-and-effect driven and
character-based narrative development.44
However, something rather more complicated is happening here.
For the direct address of popular Indian cinema, while certainly in-
viting immersion in fragmentary ocular sensation and exhibitionist
performance, does more than this by founding elaborate scenic cons-
truction. The address, whether voiced directly by characters or relayed
through song ensures a mediated relationship to processes of identi-
fication. At one level, this form of spectatorial subjectivity can deny the
atomizing modernity associated with the construction of individuation
and a privatized sphere for the couple. The comedian, for example,
often disrupts a scenic construction that verges on an intimate mo-
ment or kiss, and thereby brings the couple back within the purview
of a public view, but one which entirely lacks the disciplinary drives of
an authoritarian gaze. Instead, the intervention could be said to draw
the couple away from a hermetic space and back into a more expansive
communitas. On the other hand, this non-atomistic form of spec-
tatorship may also be harnessed to cultivate an aesthetic of the private.
43
Gunning, ‘A Cinema of Attractions’.
44 Hansen, Babel and Babylon, chs 1 and 2.
This constitutes a narration of desire in which the relationship be-
tween zones of intimacy and socio-political arrangements need not
follow a model of opposition and separation of public and private
experience. As I have suggested, narrative communities, both relayed
and produced afresh by the cinema, may provide sanction to privatized
story-telling codes such as character point of view.
One needs to think this through in terms of the relationship be-
tween socially symbolic narrative forms and their political resonances.
I would suggest that fictional processes parallel, interrogate, and ques-
tion the authoritative functions communities have exercised under the
colonial and post-colonial Indian states. While espousing the standard
repertoire of democratic principles—civil liberties, universal suffrage—
the nationalist movement also mobilized people in terms of community
appeals, and this inevitably left its stamp on state and civil institutions
after Independence. Governments have regarded the rights of minority
groups over their civil and familial laws, such as those of the Muslim
community, as an area to be regarded with caution, apprehending that
arguments for universal codes would take on an oppressive dimension.
This has often meant the state shoring up the most retrograde patri-
archal community authority in the field of women’s rights to property
and maintenance.45 And the historical backwardness of ritually lower
groups in the Hindu hierarchy—lower castes, and those outside the
caste hierarchy—have given rise to state policies of affirmative legislation
on their behalf. The assertion of the rights of such groups in government
service and educational institutions have generated multi-community
strategies in larger political formations, as well as distinct political par-
ties catering to particular swathes of the socially deprived.
While one democratic agenda urges the state to disperse such forms
of community authority in favour of individual rights, others have
tended to problematize the characteristic institutions of modern demo-
cracy, emphasizing the unequal, assymetric terms on which modern
forms of political and cultural representation have been instituted.
Such theoretical work has argued that modern civil society, the domain
45
For an outline of the complexity of these issues, see Nivedita Menon, ‘State/
Gender/Community: Citizenship in Contemporary India’, Economic and Political
Weekly 30 (5), 31 January 1998, PE 3–PE10. For a historical account showing that the
boundaries of state law and personal law were not immutable, see Archana Parashar,
Women and Family Law Reform in India, New Delhi, Sage, 1993; for the mixture of
codes in colonial criminal law, see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and
Justice in Early Colonial India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998.
of freely associating individuals who contract to generate institutions
of representation, is not the uncomplicated vehicle of democratic poli-
tics. The individualist dispositions and educational and cultural capital
associated with such representational politics is, in operative terms, the
preserve of a relatively small segment of society. This argument does
not so much invalidate these forms of representation, and the types of
rights to freedom of expression and civil liberty which they have
developed, but suggests that digits of representation of a more collect-
ive order need to be developed for strategies of social change and
gender justice. The category of community has thus become central,
even when contesting oppressive community practices. In this paradigm,
rather than entirely vacate the discourse of community in favour of
that of the individual citizen, other dissenting traditions of community
need to be mobilized to develop a consensus for change.46
In terms of how this broader frame impinges on cultural practices,
I would suggest that rather than regard the pre-modern or the tradi-
tional merely as a repressive construction engaged in by the state and
ruling elites we need to see it as a source of creativity, where traditions
are reinvented in accord with the dynamics of social and political
transformation. In this context, I would like to draw attention to how
the cinema deploys traditions such as darshan to enable the redefinition
of collective rather than individual identity. As I have pointed out, bhakti
constituted a form of worship which sought to circumvent the tradi-
tional mediation of the divine by the priest. As represented in saintly
devotional figures of low-caste origin, the bhakt or devotee was dedi-
cated to the worship of the deity through popular language rather
than sacred texts monopolized by a priestly class. The establishment
of direct links between worshipper and the sacred thus subverted
ritual hierarchies and afforded a new sense of self. The devotional
genre of the 1930s and 1940s is a case in point: critiquing brahmanical
46 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Democracy and Development in India’, in Amiya Bagchi, ed.,
Democracy and Development, London, St Martin’s Press, 1995, 92–130; and ‘Dilem-
mas of Democratic Development in India’, in Adrian Leftwich, ed., Democracy and
Development: Theory and Practice, Oxford, Polity Press, 1996, 114–38; Partha
Chatterjee, ‘Beyond the Nation? Or Within?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30
(1–2), 4–11 January 1997, 30–4; and Partha Chatterjee, ‘Community in the East’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 33 (6), 7 February 1998, 277–82; Veena Das,
‘Communities as Political Actors: The Question of Cultural Rights’, in Veena Das,
Critical Events, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996, 84–117.
orthodoxy, films such as Sant Tukaram (Fatehlal and Damle, Marathi,
1937), have the reformist saint of the seventeenth century invoking the
deity to provide an alternative vision of social conditions and political
self-determination for the character/spectator. In a key sequence of the
film, the saint, Tukaram, is involved in expounding a discourse of duty
to the Maratha king Shivaji, and this extends into a more general ad-
dress, as the film frames Tukaram in relation to other segments of
the general public who have assembled in the shrine of Tukaram’s
deity, Pandurang. Tukaram’s discourse of duty is designed to persuade
Shivaji not to abjure his kingly role for a life of devotion, and it would
appear to have conservative dimensions, fixing people to the roles
they are assigned. But Tukaram’s message emphasizes that all will
find their path to the divine, and the film then goes on to replay this
message of ultimate, transcendent equality in terms of an earthly
political equivalent. Shivaji’s enemies, taking advantage of his absorp-
tion in the religious dialogue, descend on the shrine, and at this point
Tukaram appeals to Pandurang to save his devotee. Cuts from Tukaram
to Pandurang ultimately culminate in a series of phantom images of
Shivaji being released from the deity and coming to repose in the as-
sembled public; wherever the invaders look, they see Shivaji, but when
they grasp the figure, he turns into a startled member of the public.
This dissemination of kingship amongst the public, an image of popu-
lar sovereignty that undermines political hierarchy, is rendered through
a transfer of looks: the spectator looks at the saint, who beseeches the
deity, who then looks back, releasing images of the king which trans-
form the identity of characters and spectators. In this instance the
transfer is effected via a cinematic materialization of the miraculous.47
But redefinitions of subjecthood through image practices are more
widely observable across genres. Indeed, one may observe a plurality
of cinematically constructed darshanic motifs within a film, setting up
a conflicting political forcefield of images and image-constituencies.
47 See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice

and Spectatorship in Indian Film’, in Hughes and Meyer, eds, Postscripts 1.2/1.3,
2005, 237–57.
4
Neither State Nor Faith:

Mediating Sectarian Conflict in
Popular Cinema
S ecularist discourses critically turn on ideas of tolerance and trans-

cendence. Tolerance presumes bounded identities, and assigns
an ontological determination to otherness in the way social cog-
nition is organized. Transcendence, on the other hand, projects a
space beyond the bounded identity. Often, in political prescriptions,
a modernizing imperative insists on the centrality of the state to such
projects of transcendence. This could be by evacuating religion from
the terrain of the state, or by insisting that the state be equidistant from
all religious communities and practices.1 On the other hand, a certain
strand of criticism insists that the state itself, and modernizing impe-
ratives more generally, are the main culprit in the crystallization of
community differences and antagonism. Writers such as Ashis Nandy
have argued that secularism is the ideological support of moderniza-
tion.2 Modern governmentality and secularist discourse tend to fix
religion or religious identity, through censuses, by asserting exclusive-
ness of national identities, and by subordinating porous forms of belief
and religious practice. Rather than state, it is faith, and the refusal to
abide by the hard identities induced by secularism, which provides the
resources for tolerance.
1For an overview of the debate, see Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics,
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998.
2
Ashis Nandy, ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, Seminar 314, October 1985,
14–24.
Neither State Nor Faith 131
1. Community Typology and Public Form

in Popular Cinema
Indeed, we will find that the state is often startlingly marginalized in
popular narrative discourses about the relationship within and amongst
communities. Storytelling seizes on other energies, and assigns the so-
cial realm a significant autonomy and authority. What are the sour-
ces of transcendence within this determinant of social space? Does
such transcendence have something to do with the renewal of or re-
covery of faith? My suggestion is that while faith may be invoked, it
does not remain unchanged; and it is certainly not the only source of
transcendent mediation. Here, not only transcendence, but what trans-
cendence mediates is critical. How are social and religious differences
described within popular narratives?
Central to popular narratives is a description of society as a typology
of groups, rendered in terms of the typical characteristics and icono-
graphic components that compose community. Systems of typology
date from the work of Company painters and a wider body of photo-
graphic interventions in the late nineteenth century. A significant
strand of this output is aligned with the colonial state’s drive to know
and identify its population. These media were used to ethnographi-
cally freeze community essence through physiognomy, dress, work
practices, and behavioural dispositions.3 When we come to narrative
forms such as the Indian popular cinema, there is a more dynamic de-
mand on the deployment of the type as it is opened to the processes of
temporality and diegetic interaction. In turn, there is also the posit-
ing of a non-typological mode of representation, vested in the drive to
psychologize and formulate the idea of character as opposed to the
type. However, we will observe that there are complicated transactions
between these two apparently opposed categories.
The cinema introduces a new dimension to these dynamics. As a
cultural institution, it introduces a specific relationship, that of spec-
tatorship, into the narrative process. This relates to the question of a
visual and auditory address that places new demands on the human
sensorium. The cinema generates a new form of imaginary investment,
where the images and sounds it presents refer to people and objects
3
See Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs,
London, Reaktion Books, 1997.
which are not there; only their shadow, their trace, is present on the
screen. This screen is a thing out there, in front of us, but it is also
the internal screen where the sequencing of images and sounds im-
pacts on us. Film theorists such as Christian Metz have analysed this
distinctiveness of the cinematic signifier, and how it impinges on the
spectator in a psychically intimate fashion.4 In both the colonial and
post-colonial contexts, it was notable how much anxiety was attached
to the potential power of cinematic narratives, especially those deriv-
ed from local mythologies with a suspected allegorical power.5 Often,
such panics have also taken the form of a rationalist critique of the
superstitions of a traditional society.6 If we accept Metz’s argument,
the spectator is not part of the scene generated on the screen. Physically
removed from that scene, s/he regards the screen as a mirror to another
space reflected in it, where the shadows of that other space flit before
her eyes, inviting a distanced immersion in its inherently fictive, be-
cause dematerialized, space. The mythological focus so beloved of
early cinema thus unravels not as a space of spectatorial submission,
but exactly of a staging and allegorical window onto another world.
In this account, the spectator primarily identifies with the appa-
ratus itself and, braided to the camera’s look, becomes an all-seeing
figure. This notion of a transcendent viewing position needs to be
complicated. Laura Mulvey described three types of looking: the first
that of the camera, the second that of the spectator at the screen, the
4 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia
Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti, London, Macmillan,
1982.
5 This is observable in discussions documented in the Indian Cinematograph
Committee in 1928. See Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, Calcutta,

Government of India, Central Publications Branch, 1928; also Ashish Rajadhyaksha,
‘A Viewer’s View’, in Suresh Chabria, ed., Light of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema 1912–
1934, Pune, National Film Archives of India, 1994, 25–40
6 This was most marked in the response of an artistic intelligentsia who argued for
the development of a realist aesthetic. These arguments date to the 1930s: for exam-
ple, Dhruba Gupta, Biren Das Sharma, and Samik Bandyopadhyaya, eds, Indian
Cinema: Contemporary Perceptions from the 1930s, Jamshedpur, Celluloid Chapter,
1993; and the debate on Tamil cinema involving the literary figure Kalki, available in
Tamil Cinema, Chennai, Madras Institute of Development Studies, 1997. For a more
recent reiteration of this rationalist critique of the ‘pre-modern’ sensibility of the
popular cinema, see Das Gupta, The Painted Face.
third the look between characters in the fiction.7 In the study of clas-
sical Hollywood cinema, emphasis has been placed on how this iden-
tification with oneself or with the apparatus has been significantly dis-
placed onto identification with characters (the third look). Techniques
of editing and scene construction have fashioned the world generated
by cinematic fictions as self-enclosed. Through techniques such as
the eyeline match, point-of-view shots, shot-reverse shots, the viewer’s
attention is focused on character interaction. It is as if the world has
a coherent self-referential dimension, with the spectator’s view be-
ing mobilized, voyeuristically, into this world, and distributed over a
number of characters and spaces. A fetishistic disavowal (I know,
but . . .) captures the spectator’s relationship to the screen world.
While the spectator knows that the on-screen world is manufactured,
that figures aren’t really there, s/he suspends this knowledge in favour
of the immersive pull of the cinematic fiction. In recent debates, the
intra-referential dimensions of Hollywood narration have been histori-
cized. Research has been undertaken into an early cinema history
which had not yet developed the codes of the third look.8 And there
has also been the exploration of a host of other contexts, ranging from
an avant-gardist address, to even populist forms, which highlighted a
system of direct address from screen to spectator.9
Debates in Indian film studies parallel such a complication of the
Hollywood paradigm, and have argued that such a design has not
been characteristic or, at least, not systematically applied.10 Rather
than develop a virtual world on screen, Indian popular cinema recur-
rently breaks the seamlessness and self-referentiality of the fiction. This
is done through a pronounced register of frontality, with the scene shot
at a 180° angle to the characters or objects, rather than through obli-
que framing. The latter suggests a look into the world of the fiction,
7
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, 3, Autumn
1975.
8 Barker and Elsaesser, eds, Early Cinema.
9
For the US cinema, such a system of direct address is perhaps best demonstrated
by the work of Frank Capra in the 1930s and 1940s, in films such as Mr Deeds Goes
to Town (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1943). See
my analysis of this work in the Introduction, above.
10
See Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era’; Kapur, ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’;
Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film; Biswas, ‘Historical Realism’; and ch. 3 above.
the former a breaking of its cordons, as if addressing a world beyond
the fiction. This may be summarized in the notion of direct address,
where characters look directly into the camera, as if addressing the
audience rather than another character in the fiction. Such a refusal or
indifference to norms developed as cinematic standard in Hollywood
is compounded by a heightened emphasis on the declamatory and
the typological in speech and dress. The figure, in dress and verbal
articulation, articulates itself as condensing the already known. This
is counterposed to a characterology in process, constituted through
character interaction and situation, and on the grid of psychological
development.
I would like to hold on to the idea of a transcendent position as
a condition generally posited for the cinematic apparatus and view-
ing situation. However, my focus here is not on the all-seeing eye, but
rather on the ontology of dematerialization. In Metz’s account, the
dematerialization refers to what we see, the thing not being there. But,
to look at the phenomenon in a different way, if the object viewed is
not there, then the viewer is not here, either. We acquire a demateri-
alized aspect, the eye and the ear disembodied, or rather, entering into
a compact, our sensorium becoming part of the imaginary domain
rendered through the cinema. The nature of this imaginary articula-
tion varies, as we have observed in the distinctions within the history
of American cinema, and in the distinctiveness of other cinematic
traditions such as emerged in India. Such forms of imaginary arti-
culation are not entirely separable, and we may observe changes even
within the body of a single film. But the point here is the particu-
lar impact rendered by the mutual dematerialization of image and
audience.
On the ground of this observation, could we argue that the cinema
provides a different locus through which to think of sources for the
outline of a transcendental subject? The cinema as industrial form and
mass social institution posits a specific problem here, for anxieties of
state and an elite public invariably relate to the power images can exer-
cise in circumstances of low literacy. This anxiety is also captured in
the hostility of the state, and indeed, of elite public discourses, to the
characteristic narrative forms of the popular cinema. Such hostility
was manifest for a long period, in terms of crippling financial exac-
tions and a low cultural status. This non-legitimate cultural form
nevertheless had a mass constituency, and was a crucial vehicle of mass
publicness. This was the case at least until the emergence of privatized
audio-visual technologies after 1982, with the spread of television and
coming of the video recorder. In occupying this position—that of
the mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legiti-
mated by the state—the cinema’s function is to provide a distinctive
route for the social imaginary. Its imaginary is composed at once of the
reality of perceptual processes, the dematerialized nature of what is
perceived, and, I would suggest, of the perceiver. As such, it provides
fertile ground on which to think about a distinctive field for the emer-
gence of a transcendental subject. The spectator is transcendent not
because part of civil social discourse, but because s/he accesses a dis-
tinct imaginary publicness. The spectator is invited to be out there,
in that imaginary domain of the cinema, and to constitute a public
not only as addressee and audience, but as imaginary component of the
fictional field.
To explore this imaginary in relation to discourses of secularism, I
will highlight how the cinema addresses the public as a critical fictional
component through:
(a) logic of co-living, co-existence, inhabiting the same frame rather

than different frames, and crucially dependent on the look
of the spectator for its constitution. The example I draw on is
from the earliest period of the cinema, relating to the imagina-
tion of caste.
(b) The spectator subject as a virtual entity in the fiction, differen-
tiated from the protocols of how characters within the fiction
look. Here I draw upon the popular genre of the historical film
and its discourses of secularism to suggest that this duality of
looking within the fiction is also one which constructs a rela-
tionship between imagined pasts and futures on the grounds of
the presentness of the spectator’s look.
(c) the exceptional agent, the heroic entity who will provide a
model of transcendence, a figure who is both type but may also
shade into the individuated, psychologized character. Critical
here is the discourse of the star image. The star mobilizes a stra-
tegy of transcendence based on a screen biography and the in-
terpretive charge of performativity. The star constitutes a
distinct component of the cinema’s dematerialized imaginary:
s/he is a virtual biographical entity who can only be made sense
of in and through the screen, constituting the spectator as a
special vehicle of knowledge and interpretation in a metafiction
of the star. Critical here is the question of star performativity,
where the compendium of actorly attributes—the repertoire of
gesture, speech, and bodily dimensions—may suggest both the
distinctiveness of the star sign and the possibilities of arbitrari-
ness and interpretation. For the uniqueness of the star may be
deployed to emphasize the non-identity of actor and character,
making of the actor’s body an arbitrary signifier, not clearly
attached to the social referent it may inhabit. Such arbitrariness
may operate either through the armature of the individual film,
or, more complexly, across the screen biography of the actor/
star. For the purposes of this essay, this phenomenon is addres-
sed at two moments and across two registers:
(i) How this persona is governed by a consistent iconography,
one which may extend its foundational thematics into new
territories of exploration without compromising the origi-
nal codification. I take the case of Raj Kapoor who bears the
logic of a plebeian secularisation. The character habitual-
ly uses the city as an experimental space to undermine the
feudal certitudes of birth and lineage.
(ii) How, rather than work through a consistent logic and ex-
tension of the persona into different fields, there emerges
a logic of performative destabilization and play, where
screen persona render the possibility, and imponderability,
of rupturing the continuum of the image. Here I focus on
the career of the key contemporary actor, Nana Patekar.
Finally, there is the transcendence afforded by the spectator’s identi-
fication with the cinematic apparatus itself. This does not deny the
commonly experienced identification with characters in the fiction,
but announces, sometimes in a very emphatic and spectacular fashion,
the technology which brings these characters into being in the first
place. This, perhaps, is the instance where the spectator enters into a
compact with the all-seeing camera eye of Metz’s formulation. I have
undertaken the beginnings of this analysis elsewhere.11
11
See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Exhilaration of Dread: Narrative Form, Genre and
Film Style in the Contemporary Urban Action Film’, in Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of
2. Phalke and the Typological Discourse of

Early Cinema
Sudipta Kaviraj has argued that, in the Indian context, a language of
community emerged as the characteristic form of representational dis-
course rather than that of the individuated citizen.12 Addressing issues
of collective identification and solidarity, this formulation can address
the representational trope of the type. Kaviraj’s formulation requires
to be elaborated into a theorization pertinent to both cinema theory
and political theory: what is the transformative logic which defines
community identities and solidarities and, in turn, a dynamic typo-
logical imagination of the social?
I will examine this by charting the transformative logic of such
typologies within cinematic narratives. Arguably, typage provides
the spectator with certain conditions of knowledge, an epistemology
which both frames codifications of social reality, but also immerses
the spectator in a play with the image of the social, and, indeed, her
own image.
I start this analysis not with the overt consideration of secularist nar-
ratives, that of Hindu–Muslim relations, but how popular film con-
stitutes Hindu society. Javed Akhtar has remarked that preceding other
taboos and restrictions, such as Hindu–Muslim sociality and inter-
marriage, there is the foundational problem of social differences and
untouchability in Hindu society.13 Associated with prohibitions around
bodily contact and communication, we may consider how such found-
ational taboos extend into the domain of Hindu–Muslim relations.
This has been particularly observable of the violence in Gujarat, where
a revulsion and bid to eradicate the other have motivated Hindutva’s
Everyday Life, Delhi, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2002, and ch. 9
below.
12 Kaviraj, ‘Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India’, in Leftwich, ed.,
Democracy and Development.

13
‘This is actually part of a larger taboo area in popular cinema . . . The real taboo
is that a high-caste Hindu girl will never be shown marrying an outcaste boy. Never.
If at all the great caste divide has to be bridged, it will be done via a high-caste boy
falling in love with an outcaste girl as in Achoot Kanya, Sujaata, or Parineeta. Similarly,
the one who rebels against the Hindu–Muslim divide will never be the Hindu woman,
it will be the Hindu man. Ratnam’s Bombay bears this out.” Interview with Javed
Akhtar, ‘The Great Evasion’, Times of India, Sunday Review, 23 April 1995.
most bestial forms.14 We may thus start with a tentative formulation.
A critical strand of secularist transcendence involves strategies to neu-
tralize high-caste Hindu senses of authority and hierarchy. Arguab-
ly, such transcendence can suggest both an opening out of the Hindu
high-caste self, and a bid to reacquire power over the subordinated
other.
The notion of Hindu society as a unified form transcending histori-
cal differences, especially of caste, is arguably one of the most consis-
tent themes of the colonial and post-colonial periods. We thus witness
the ongoing attempt by high-caste Hindu reformers to annul these
differences, and of Dalit critiques of such attempts as hegemonic in
intent.15 The cinema recurrently represents the former drive, and the
tensions inherent to it.
Let us look at the key figure of early Indian cinema, D.G. Phalke.
There have been arguments that Phalke represents a Hindu nationalist
point of view, and that his films exclude or subordinate women, Dalits,
and Muslims.16 Phalke was associated with Tilak, and wrote his articles
on cinema as a swadeshi cultural enterprise, in Tilak’s Marathi news-
paper, Kesari. If all of this sounds as if Phalke’s ideological stance was
self-evident, perhaps an examination of his films will suggest some-
thing slightly more complicated.
In his 1918 film Shree Krishna Janma, the fragmentary remains of
the film highlight several episodes. These include Krishna’s emergence
on the Shesh Nag, the celestial vehicle of Vishnu and Lakshmi, a
miracle enacted through cinematic dissolves before a line of fervent
devotees. There are fragments, too, of episodes relating to the be-
heading of the wicked Kansa, and Yashodhara’s maternal idyll with the
baby Krishna, rocking his cradle. Finally, there are a series of tableaux
outlining the varnashrama dharma. It is the construction of these tab-
leaux that I would like to draw attention to. (Fig. 18, p. 139.)
Each tableau is announced by an inter-title, highlighting the varna
which is to appear in front of Vishnu. A young man who exhibits a
14 See, for example, Siddhartha Varadarajan, ed., The Making of a Tragedy, Delhi,
Penguin Books, 2002.

15
See, for example, D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet, Bangalore, South Forum
Press, 1993, for a discussion of the debates between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
16 Somnath Zutshi, ‘Women, Nation and the Outsider in Contemporary Hindi
Cinema’, in Tejaswini Niranjana, et al., eds, Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colo-
nialism in India, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 1993, 83–142.
Fig. 18: Shree Krishna Janma, D.G. Phalke, 1918, ‘The Gathering of Castes’.
childlike radiance as he stands atop a pedestal, posed frontally for the

camera, incarnates the deity. The varna announced appears in front of
the benign deity, seeking his blessings while stealing covert looks in the
direction of the camera. Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra var-
nas are brought on stage in this way, each announced by a preceding
inter-title. We see in these four tableaux a certain duality. Each of the
varnas shares the deity, who exercises a benevolent presence for them
all. However, they are strictly divided off one from the other, through
the intercession of the inter-title. The social hierarchy of separation is
replicated cinematically, through editing and inter-titles. Significant-
ly, though, there is an excess. One social group, that of the untouch-
able, is clubbed with the category of the Shudra, but enters the frame
only after the farmer has left; the broom sways in the frame, as if in-
voluntarily disclosing a tension within its composition. The untouch-
able figure here is also unspeakable, or at least unwritable, as there is
no inter-title heralding his arrival. But the visual excess of the broom
which identifies him remains insistently present within the strategy
for the dissolution of differences. Using the same camera set-up, with
Vishnu frontally posed at the back of the frame, all the varnas enter
the frame, crowding it and almost jostling with each other, the broom
again moving ostentatiously in the frame. In a sense, a transcendent
deity is being accessed differentially, separately, and it is his interven-
tion, or the intervention of his message, that dissolves this rigorous
separation. Leave all religion and come under my protection, declares
a superimposed title.
This is an important ur-text for images of inter-community mingl-
ing and self-transcendence. The transcendence is accomplished through
the figure of Vishnu, and the Vaishnavite porousness of self. It is also
accomplished through the cinematic frame as the basic unit of per-
ception, in which the simple, single-shot set-up is organized to create
a dynamic of reconstitution. But at another level it is also rendered as
a form of direct address, aimed at the spectator. Rather than creat-
ing a sequence, there is a to and fro between the figures on-screen and
the spectator, the former presenting themselves for the latter’s view.
The spectator rather than figures on screen becomes the primary refe-
rence point for the presentation. We could say that the cinema’s invo-
cation of a transcendent, mediating image is based on a narration and
viewing situation that posits the viewer as a crucial condition of its
presentation.
Of course, the complications arise when we consider that this is
not a discourse of inter-community amity, but of the reformation and
consolidation of Hindu society. Historians of lower-caste and Dalit
assertion have shown us how modern narratives of caste history invari-
ably refer to the caste as a community, with a distinct mythic narrative
about its relationship to land and environment; a narrative of origins
displaced by Brahmanical incursions and the institution of caste hier-
archy.17 It was during this period that movements of assertion were
taking place, and film narratives such as Phalke’s could be interpreted
to reassemble the coordinates of a ritual form threatened with disso-
lution. In this sense the narration could be read as consistent with the
attempts of a Hindu nationalism, also in the process of ideological
and political formation, to consolidate society via the eradication of
untouchability, but not necessarily through a questioning of social
hierarchies.
17 Mark Jurgensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability
in Twentieth Century Punjab, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982; Rosalind

O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest
in Nineteenth Century Western India, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.
I would suggest that the reading here can be somewhat more open.
Rather than a hegemonic modernized Brahmanical reference point,
Gandhi would be the more apposite figure for such a bid for reunifica-
tion.18 His symbolic resonance is carried on into the devotional genres
which emerged shortly after, and had their most sustained production
in the 1930s and 1940s. Above all, we need to hold on to the particu-
lar imaginary virtuosity, and, indeed, virtuality, of cinematic fiction:
the way an immaterial world of light and shadow can figure forth an
image condensing the social world, while holding onto all the icono-
graphies of difference and hierarchy within that frame. The frame of
Hindu society is filled to the edges, ready to burst, and the broom that
swirls suggests a tangential, centrifugal impetus, underlining the ap-
parently impossible perceptual logistics of maintaining a centripetal
orientation for the spectator.
3. The Social Film: Community

Typage/Modernity/Psychology
The social film, or the genre of modernity, carried on the primacy of
the discourse of community into its reflections on intercommunity re-
lationships. Characteristically, it sought to resolve community differ-
ences on the ground of mutual understanding and trust. An instance
of social films dealing with the theme of inter-community amity was
Shejari (Neighbours; V. Shantaram, Marathi, 1940), about the effects
of modern technological change on relations within a village commu-
nity. An Indian nationalist public saw the film as a riposte to the de-
claration of the Pakistan objective by the Muslim League. It is a moving
story about how a grasping modern businessman seeks to break village
opposition to his schemes of modernization by manipulating con-
flict between Jiwaba and Mirza, the leaders of the village community.
Interestingly, the manipulation aims, at one level, only to break up
village unity by creating a split between two village elders. But the
fact that these are Hindu and Muslim is clearly motivated to draw
upon contemporary anxieties about inter-communal ties. The estrang-
ed friends are ultimately reunited when they sacrifice their lives to
save the village, and a grieving village community builds a shrine to
their memory.
18
Kapur, ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’.
Suggestive hierarchies emerge in the construction of a transcendent
location in the film’s opening scene. A devotional hymn to the Hindu
god Rama is invoked on the soundtrack and over a tableau frame of a
village scene, a cottage and sacred pipal tree in the background. A cut-
in anchors the voice to the village elder, Jiwaba, who sits by the tree.
As he sings, we observe his good friend and neighbour, the Muslim
Mirza, arrive with his prayer mat in hand. Mirza stands at a discreet
distance, waiting for Jiwaba to finish. As Jiwaba concludes, he notices
Mirza, and wryly remarks that he should have said that the time had
arrived for his prayer; Mirza responds, what is the need when one gets
one’s requirements without asking? (Figs 19–20, pp. 142–3.)
The film opens on a Hindu devotional space. This is first articulated
by voice, and then by a figure associated with sacred symbols who is
iconized as vehicle of the discourse. Jiwaba sings from within the depth
of the frame, and it is initially difficult to locate the source of the song.
This is then an auditory address that envelops the audience and stit-
ches us into the symbolism of voice and space. Jiwaba, its expressive
vehicle, is overwhelmed by the feelings it arouses in him, and wipes
away a tear at its conclusion. In narrational terms, the envelop-
ing address is of sustained duration, and its diegetic reference is to the
perennial. A definite sense of time and sequence only emerges with
the arrival of the Muslim, for whom a specific moment is required to
conduct his prayer. The emergence of time, sequence, and narrative
Fig. 19
Fig. 20
Fig. 21
Figs 19, 20, 21: Shejari, V. Shantaram, 1940, community address, neighbourly
protocol, Keshavrao Date.
development is authorized by a privileged, because prior, Hindu dis-
course of emotive community. Jiwaba gives Mirza time, and thus is in-
augurated an incipient, if never quite actualized, discourse of national
origins. From the 1920s, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideologues
had developed an argument that India was originally composed of
Hindus, who therefore had prior rights to the country over those, es-
pecially Muslims and Christians, who arrived subsequently.19 Their
writings have provided the foundations for a Hindu majoritarianism
whose objective is to assign a subordinate status to other religious iden-
tities in the make-up of the modern Indian nation-state. Later the film
implicitly invokes anxieties about Muslim dominance in the medieval
period, when Mirza heads the village council that has to rule on char-
ges levelled against Jiwaba’s son. Jiwaba’s feelings of ignominy and
powerlessness condenses a whole, specifically modern ideology of the
historical subordination of Hindus to other communities, and pro-
vides the emotional ground for drives to assert Hindu authority over
the nation-state.
However, the complexity of the narrative lies in its taking recourse
to a modernist dismantling of these stable reference points of commu-
nity authority. While Jiwaba remains the main focus for spectatorial
engagement, as his beatific form is dismantled, the film elaborates a
new, expressionist characterology. As the character comes to be increas-
ingly assailed by threats to his dignity and standing in the community,
the actor Keshavrao Date appears driven by a symptomatology of
dread: an inability to make sense of the world is registered in an un-
seeing, almost hallucinatory performance. He drew here on the work
of the modernist natyamantwantar group in theatre, which was at the
time experimenting with European modernism. The figure of the
failed patriarch echoes the actor’s work in Shantaram’s Kunku (Marital
Mark, 1937), which strongly recalls the acting of Emil Jannings in Von
Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1931). (Fig. 21, p. 143.)
The registering of paranoia in the Hindu patriarch extends to his
son, Raiba, who determines to undertake a suicidal bombing of the
dam, perceived to be the root cause of the village’s descent into com-
munity discord. At the climax, the father tears the burning torch from
19
See Tapan Basu, Pradip Dutta, Sumit Sarkar, and Tanika Sarkar, Khaki Shorts
and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right, Delhi, Orient Longman, 1993, for
an analysis of these aspects of Hindu nationalist ideology.
his son, and accidentally flings it onto the fuse. Caught amidst the de-
tonations which explode the dam,20 he retreats into himself, drawing
a chessboard which invokes his friendly contest with his alienated
neighbour. Mirza arrives to save his distraught friend, but it is too late.
Riven by the forces of modernity, their friendship is now retrieved for
eternity. At the conclusion, villagers gather to worship at the shrine of
the martyrs.
The peculiar power of this film arises from a strange dynamic. At
first it evokes for the spectator a discourse of prior and transcendent
Hindu community and authority, that which gives order and meaning
to the world, including the conditions for the coexistence of commu-
nities. But it then goes on to dismantle this through a modernist stra-
tegy. This dismantling ultimately results not in the emergence of the
Muslim other as source of threat—although there is an impacted
narrative of such a possibility—but, rather, an image of the post-sacred
realm as a cavernous void. The void is then covered over by the recovery
of the harmonious understanding of the village elders. However, this
resolution is not a return to the original invocation of transcendence.
For that is irrevocably riven by a modernizing imperative which has
split its meaning system. Instead, the conclusion is properly utopian,
drained as it is of the original hierarchy inscribed on the basis of a tra-
ditional Hindu authority. In a sense then, it is the cinema itself which,
having stated and narrated the traditional sacred, now creates its own
transcendent moment of intercommunity amity, in the image of the
martyred elders enshrined by the survivors.
4. The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical

and Contemporary Publics
We will find something of the complexity of these moves replayed in
other generic forms. At this time, discussions about genre surfaced as
one of the key arenas in which cultural differences were conceptualiz-
ed, and central here was the historical film. Historical films developed
a number of subjects: the glory of ancient, pre-Islamic India (Chandra-
gupta, Jayant Desai, 1945); Mughal kingship and its relation to local
20
This inaugurates a tradition of narratives of modernization which showcase the
dam as vehicle of an ambiguous, and potentially destructive, set of transformations,
as with Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) and Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1982).
Hindu ruling groups, the Rajputs (Pukar [The Call], Sohrab Modi,
1939; Humayun, Mehboob Khan, 1945); the heroism of the Maratha
king Shivaji; and, after Independence a set of films based on Indian
resistance to colonial rule (Anandmath, Hemant Gupta, 1950; Jhansi
ki Rani [The Queen of Jhansi], Sohrab Modi, 1953). The historical
genre provides an account of the relationship between foreign invad-
ers and rulers and local Indian kings and ruling groups. Contemporary
secularist discourse regarded some of this work as exemplary of the bid
to forge amity amongst the communities. However, a careful reading
of these films will suggest how they offer a subtle rewriting of Indian
history: the foreign ruler’s formal authority is shown to be ultimately
contingent on the real hegemonic authority that Hindu aristocrats and
ruling groups exercised over indigenous society.
Pukar provides a particularly suggestive instance of these narrative
operations, and one which arguably alerts us to the privileged position
of the spectator. The film is punctuated by a series of spectacular public
assemblies centred on the Mughal king Jehangir. The camera at first
places the spectator at a respectful distance and through low angles
to the royal personage, echoing the heraldic discourse which warns
the assembled subjects to look away from the sacred form of the ruler
as he arrives in court. But subsequent scenes continuously alter these
spatial relations and, in turn, the authority of the kingly figure. The
film spectator is brought closer to the king, entering his personal do-
main, and is close witness to his relationship with his beloved queen
Nur Jehan. In a sense, these spatial relations develop a distinction be-
tween the diegetic audience and the cinema audience, privileging us
in the historical re-enactment. This narrational pattern climaxes when
a Rajput subject, Sangram Singh, intervenes between the king and the
diegetic audience of the court. Mangal, Sangram’s son, had killed mem-
bers of another Rajput clan when they attacked him for his roman-
tic liaison with the daughter of the family. Jehangir’s inflexible justice
refuses to consider the extenuating circumstances, and Mangal is sen-
tenced to death. Later, Nur Jehan, in showing off her prowess with bow
and arrow, accidentally kills a dhobi, a washerman. Sangram, deter-
mined to test the King, and to bring him to a different perspective,
arraigns the grieving widow of the washer man in the court to demand
justice. The Rajput’s move can be interpreted as a discourse of power:
the lowly dhobin would not normally have taken recourse to imperial
justice. The Rajput’s insistence that she lay claim to the emperor’s
Fig. 22
Fig. 23
Figs 22–23: Pukar, Sohrab Modi 1939. 22: The Command of Jehangir;
23: Sangram Singh intervenes.
justice is akin to a demonstration of the social authority exercised by
the aristocrat over the most subordinated of his society. It therefore
also appears to pit society against the state, and to show that imperial
authority is contingent on a prior Hindu social authority.
In the extraordinary climax to this narrative force field, the film’s
operations on spectator parameters acquires a particularly charged
dimension, opening the historical genre to a startling meditation on
the dialogue between imagined histories and futures. In particular, the
image of the transcendent state, here reposed in the figure of an im-
partial Mughal justice, is subject to extreme pressure. Posing the em-
peror with a traumatic possibility—the execution of his wife for her
killing of the dhobi—the Rajput’s arraignment of societal authority in
the court brings the transcendent state to the brink. In terms of a dis-
course of power, to back down and qualify his stance, Jehangir would
be giving way, and accepting another, Hindu logic of authority. The
plot pulls a surprise: the emperor will compensate the dhobin’s loss by
ordering that Nur Jehan’s punishment will be to forfeit her husband’s
life to the dhobin. This is a moment of narrative daring. Playing with
the parameters of difference between the diegetic and filmic spectator,
Jehangir’s command to the dhobin to shoot him is rendered in a series
of escalating close-ups. The address here is thus also one made by the
Mughal king to the cinematic spectator. For the order issued by the em-
peror to his subject is presented in an enormous frontal close-up that
inducts the spectator into an overwhelming direct address. It is as if
the narrative places the iconic historical figure in a force field of Hindu
authority whose ultimate logic is one of negation—the annihilation of
the transcendental state in the face of Hindu authority, indeed the
annihilation of history by the pressure of the present. This challenge
to Mughal rule and the medieval Indian past is governed by an im-
perative of recovering Hindu pride for a present and future organiza-
tion of nationalist culture, and is defined by leadership grounded in
hierarchy rather than community. The threat is arrested when the
Rajput commands the dhobin to desist, and thereby restores the spatial
balance of spectatorial relations to the diegesis. (Figs 22–23, p. 147.)
It should be noted that the Rajput challenge does not represent an
egalitarian rendering of Indian society against Mughal absolutism,
but deploys the power the upper-caste aristocrat can exercise over
<the lowest of this society, an untouchable washerwoman. In turn, the
display and withdrawal of authority is responded to in the garb of a res-
toration of the transcendent state, as Jehangir graciously grants a
general amnesty to those condemned to death. Mangal Singh is thus
only one in a host of beneficiaries of imperial magnanimity.
Pukar was understood at the time to be a film about the historical
amity between Hindu and Muslim communities, and a salient correct-
ive to the emerging sectarian animosity. We may note that another
reading, one inevitably governed by the current imprint of Hindutva
politics, and its drive to ethnicize the contemporary nation-state, has
led us into a different estimation of narrative meaning. One form
of transcendence, that of an impartial system of state justice, is recod-
ed as based on Muslim authority, and is displaced in its arbitrating
functions by a Hindu locus of power. Nevertheless, as with the case
of Shejari, we may consider that contextual reception cannot be held
to be ‘wrong’ or naïve. I have offered a reading here, a deciphering of
meanings on the grounds of oppositions between the Mughal and the
Rajput, and despite the overt rhetoric of loyalty used by the Rajput
subject. And the reading emerges in the wake of a subsequent history.
If in Shejari a utopian imaginary emerges to compensate the losses in-
curred in the modernizing imperatives and manipulations of a post-
sacred (Hindu) universe, in Pukar it is as if the cinematic audience is
brought to an awareness of the potential crisis that rereadings offer.
This brinkmanship of the fiction almost appears to offer the possibility
of imagining the apocalyptic rending of the historical referent.21 At
the conclusion, Sangram Singh reasserts not only the realm of hist-
ory, but asserts the inviolate position of the emperor in the design of
the world. The legitimacy of the Mughal order, and thereby of the hist-
orical ideology of Mughal-Rajput fealty, is reiterated, if perhaps with
a sense of the greater say the Rajput has in this polity. What has subtly
shifted, however duplicitous and hedged in this may be, is that this
rule is now grounded in the more democratic dimensions of the polity,
where the subject can exercise a voice. That this voice is the voice of so-
cial authority and hierarchy rather than equality is indicated by the
text, even if it is not acknowledged in contemporary reception.
21
For another, more contemporary example, which deploys the armature of the
video game to imagine history as a game with the possibilities of different game out-
come, see ch. 8 below.
5. The Transcendent Location of

Stellar Bodies
Unlike the overwhelming emphasis on social and community media-
tions of differences notable in the popular cinema, with the com-
plicated exception of the Mughal historical film, the cinema of the
post-Independence period exhibited an investment in the capacity of
the state to redress social injustice. This is observable in a host of films
centred on a new engagement with criminality and its social roots. The
genre of the crime film assigned central significance to the bigoted ex-
clusiveness of social hierarchies in determining attitudes to the mar-
ginal and dispossessed. This context was recurrently acknowledged
by the police and in courts of law, where the transcendent, equalizing
imprimatur of the state is staged in film after film. In films such as
Awara (Vagabond; Raj Kapoor, 1951), Shree 420 (Mr Conman; Raj
Kapoor, 1956), Jagte Raho (Stay Alert; Shambhu Mitra, 1956), Baazi
(The Wager; Guru Dutt, 1951), Aar Paar (Heads or Tails; Guru Dutt,
1954), and CID (Raj Khosla, 1956), corrupt businessmen and old
elites manipulate and marginalize the claims of those without educa-
tional or social capital, pushing protagonists into the world of crime.
However, if the state is presented as a benign entity that will inter-
cede in the just reordering of society, it is only one component of
the transformative agenda. The cinema of this period strongly enga-
ges with the city as a crucial laboratory of transformation and mode
of experience. The latter is distinctively a cinematic mode. As Moinak
Biswas has pointed out, films such as Baazi and Aar Paar are percep-
tually charged with a new sense of speed, their mise-en-scène organized
to highlight darkness and mystery, camera angles and editing facilitat-
ing a sense of the city as a space of disequilibrium.22 Within this cine-
matic armature, the street affords the functions of a narrative shifter.
It offers the possibility of encounters with strangers, and renders even
intimate figures, lost in a melodramatic shroud of time and dispersal,
into alien entities (the famous ‘lost and found’ formula of the popular).
Thus, in a number of films, fathers and sons pass each other by without
recognition. In terms of a thematics of society, the dynamics of es-
trangement are at once traumatic and liberating, registering the hurt
of social anonymity and ignominy, but also embracing the exhilarating
22 ‘The Urban Adventure’, paper presented at Delhi, Sarai, October 2003.
possibilities of escape from social hierarchy. The popular, and the city
it delineates, emerge here as a field of energy in romance, sexuality,
and social fluidity, and as retailer of the visceral effects of exploring the
city’s criminal underbelly.
I want to consider this trajectory in terms of a specific form of trans-
cendence. The transcendence of city and street, affording a release
from hierarchy and defined identity is complemented by a performative
transcendence. This lies in the particular presentational dimensions
used by actors, and, more particularly, stars. It is as if a new self-consci-
ousness emerges in the inflection of these narratively ordered displace-
ments. The perceptual world undergoes a series of displacements, in-
duced by the narrative order, and through a performative economy
that alerts us to the difference between actor and character. These dis-
placements and disconnections acquire particular force as the actor’s
body moves across a series of films.
These are obviously general issues for how to understand a logic of
star formation, how to place it and make sense of it. But they open into
our particular concerns here in that they speak the language of muta-
bility, play, and invention, and in that sense make of the body an arbi-
trary signifier. However, the interplay of systems of typage and star
discourse build historically to constitute a constellation that suggests
regularities and disruptions. It is in such movements of the body across
a screen, and indeed across many screens, both in the depth of time,
and in its simultaneity and therefore comparability, that we may dis-
cern a significant locus of meaning.
Raj Kapoor
I want to take two star personalities, or at least significant segments of
their careers, to explore this formulation. I attend to those dimensions
of their imaginary biography that specifically address the representa-
tion of communal difference, and, through this imaginary, function
also as a marker of transcendent intervention. Firstly, I will isolate one
dimension of the star personality of Raj Kapoor. This is that of the
petty thief and confidence trickster whose biography is strongly asso-
ciated with the illicit dimensions of the city, and a performative dimen-
sion specifically associated with the street. In Awara, performativity,
here the pleasurable display of bodily dexterity, in picking pockets,
staging a fictive heroism, are highlighted in the song sequence ‘Main
Awara Hoon’, and in scenes played for comedy. The cheerfulness of this
presentation of self is counterpointed to an overweening dark melo-
drama of the main narrative line, a bitter tale of social dispossession
and marginality. Rootlessness and homelessness are transmuted when
performativity becomes a major reference point in another social jus-
tice narrative, Shri 420. Here the hero, apparently a naïve figure, even
a simpleton, arrives in Bombay from Allahabad, to encounter the
corruption and exploitation of the big city. But here, even more mark-
edly than in the disjunctions of Awara, character is specifically defined
as unstable, as governed by a putting on and taking off of persona. The
simpleton exhibits unexpected skills, as in his dexterity as a cardsharp,
and then elaborates his instability by abruptly shifting social locales
and sartorial habit. Thus the Kapoor protagonist shifts registers from
his high-waisted, loose-fitting pants and coat and splayed gait to take
on the persona of a suave gentleman attired in evening lounge suit who
easily inhabits the precincts of the nightclub.
The unanchored personality, here entirely dispensing with a consis-
tency of psychological characterization, facilitates the transcenden-
tal drive which I am concerned to explore here. In the trajectory of the
1950s, we notice this development coming together suggestively with
the orbit of intercommunity representations at the end of the decade.
In Chhalia (The Cheat; Manmohan Desai, 1960), the Kapoor tramp
figure, prefiguring the tapori (street conman) of the 1990s in terms
of his emphasis on performativity over character integrity, is shifted
from the field of social justice narratives into those of intercommunity
tolerance and renewal. The film is an extremely important one in the
annals of popular secularist discourse, so I will spend some time un-
ravelling its narrative organization.
The story addresses issues which have recently been explored by
feminist historiography: the problems posed by the repatriation and
rehabilitation of women after the partition of the subcontinent in
1947.23 The drive to repatriate was complicated by the response of
families to the returned women. There was suspicion about what had
happened during their years away from the family, and social anxiety,
too, about how the community would regard the reintegration of the
23 Kamala Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s
Partition, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1998; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence,
Delhi, Kali for Women, 2001; Das, Critical Events.
Fig. 24: Chhalia, Manmohan Desai, 1960, Chhalia addresses the Ram Lila
gathering.
possibly tainted ‘rescued’ woman. Chhalia’s exploration of this issue

rapidly reassures the spectator of the virtue of the female protagonist,
Shanti (Nutan).24 Newly married, she is left behind in Lahore as riots
erupt. To her good fortune, a Pathan, Khan (Pran), takes her in and
protects her from the marauding Muslim crowd. The Pathan is a vio-
lent criminal, but is redeemed by his desire that Sakina, his sister, left
behind in Delhi, will receive protection if he provides Shanti with
protection. On her return to Delhi, Shanti’s in-laws and parents refuse
to acknowledge her, the latter with considerable heartbreak. Only
24 The career of Nutan at this time is suggestive. In 1959 she played the un-
touchable heroine of Sujata (Bimal Roy), and in 1963, in Bandini, another Bimal
Roy film, she played the role of a woman who had courted social ostracism by her
commitment to a revolutionary terrorist. Her being used in such unconventional roles
suggests not only the commitment of the Bombay industry at the time, both in its left
wing and liberal tendencies, to explore subalternity, but also the deployment of a star
discourse to make such explorations more palatable. Thus the casting of Nutan, the
impeccable high-caste actress, daughter of Shobhana Samarth, the Sita of Vijay Bhatt’s
Ramayana (1946), probably affords the spectator a reassuring distance from the so-
cial referent of these films.
Kewal (Rehman), her husband, is willing to sunder ties with his family
in order to reunite with his wife. However, he too becomes estrang-
ed when he sees that Shanti has a son who bears the name Anwar. The
ostracized Shanti contemplates suicide, but is saved from this fate by
the Chhalia of the title, Kapoor’s petty thief.
In this variant of the tramp, the obscurity of the character’s origins
is cheerfully accepted, in contrast to the traumatic ramifications of
uncertain origins in the world of Awara. Here, in the character’s own
account, such obscurity makes him akin to a saint; knowing no origins,
he transcends all religious affiliations, and can treat all with equal res-
pect. The equality here is comically that of an equalization in criminal
targeting: he makes no difference amongst Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or
Christian as to whose pocket he will pick. Chhalia becomes the vehicle
for the saving of Shanti, and her reunion with her husband.
As often happens with such a discourse of the transcendental sub-
ject, other dimensions of narrative framing suggest something slight-
ly more complicated. Without identifiable family origins, Chhalia
nevertheless has regional origins, in the city of Amritsar, where he was
caught in criminal rivalry with Khan, the Pathan who had saved Shanti
in Lahore. The two men meet each other again, when Khan comes to
India looking for his lost sister. If he fails, he has determined to find
Shanti and take her life. Chhalia defends Shanti, and it is the heroine’s
arrival which prevents Khan from killing Chhalia. Khan, shocked at
what he has almost done, is spiritually broken, and prepares to leave.
Like Saadat Hasan Manto’s character Toba Tek Singh, he does not
understand where Pakistan or India are; Chhalia explains that Pakistan
is that which Hindustan is not. This is ironic testimony to the fatal-
ity of national boundaries. He alerts the Pathan to the expiry of his
entry permit, and sees him off at the railway station. The narrative en-
acts compensatory exchange on the fulfilment of this fatalistically con-
ceived division and return. Miraculously, the Pathan finds that Sakina
too is on the train, thereby compensating for the division which the
newly constituted nations on either side are burdened with.
Shobhana Samarth, who enacted the role of Sita in the 1946 Vijay
Bhatt Ramayana, is grief stricken when her husband permits her to
visit the rehabilitation camp to see, but not acknowledge, the daughter
who has returned to her. Do these tears emerge from a mythical and
a cinematic locus, as the mother recognizes in the destiny of her own
daughter (who is, of course, her daughter in real life) the re-enactment
of the Ramayana’s tale of abduction, exile, and a recovery dogged by
suspicion? The imagery of the Ramayana is deployed here, as it is in
other 1950s’ films including the earlier Awara, and, appropriately,
the reunion of the couple takes place under the aegis of the Ramlila.
No longer is this, however, an issue of the abductor and the abducted.
The other is that which lies within, in Kewal’s unwillingness to accept
Shanti. (Remarkably, this does not prevent him from accepting his
son.) In a melodramatic conclusion, Kapoor’s address to the assembl-
ed public, and to the dramatis personae, urges an end to the Ram–Sita
kahani, and finally sees the couple united in jointly protecting their
child from the falling effigy of Ravana. (Fig. 24, p. 153.)
The Kapoor persona is critical to the architecture of the narrative.
He carries with him, from Awara through Shree 420, the imagery of
the uprooted, the déclassé, the criminal, and, in terms of spatial reso-
nance, the semantics of the street and the field of the popular. It is the
very lack of legitimacy which offers him the possibility of interrogating
social hierarchy, and the ritual boundaries, of birth and descent, which
undergirds this hierarchy. The virtual biography of the star as screen
persona—a persona who resides on the internal screen of the spec-
tator’s cinematic memory—can then be mobilized, with a sense of the-
matic consistency, into a new focus by addressing and resolving the
possible tainting of community boundaries raised by the figure of the
abducted woman. The thematic has not really changed, it still has to
do with questions of birth and descent, but it is now refocused as an
issue of community rather than class. Critically, the arena of resolution
is not the state. The state can only set up the possibility of resolution.
It is the left wing cultural terrain that has provided a critique of the
mythic reference point for patriarchy that provides the mise-en-scène
of social restitution. In fact, at another level, the state is almost negat-
ively coded. While the street conman can problematize the constraints
of community, this remains within a discourse of the nation-state.
When Chhalia and Khan are pitted against each other, at one level, it
is a reprise of an older rivalry going back to Amritsar. However, when
this is transposed to post-Partition Delhi, such a face-off now carries
a nationalist resonance with it, the hoodlums now pitted against each
other as national entities. The critical function of the nation-state here
is observable when Chhalia, who flouts the law, nevertheless reminds
the Khan of the expiry of his entry permit. Nevertheless, there is a
peculiar redemptive dimension to the way this is uttered, as a law, that
of the nation-state, which one cannot evade. The figure of the street
relays this empathetically, with a sense of compassion and fatalism.
The complexity of this development of a transcendent mediation
by the star persona gives one pause for thought. The figure of the
star may sometimes stand, may indeed condense, the experience of the
cinema in crucial ways. If the cinema has a persona, a figure who stands
for it, captures its allure and the power it exercises over memory, it is
perhaps in this figure. Is this a superego which shadows the function
of superego carried out by figures of political and public life, mobiliz-
ing popular discourses to complement the orientations of the wider
political realm?25 Bachchan carried something of what Kapoor did for
the post-Independence period on into the 1970s. There is, however, a
distinction in the way the screen persona is mobilized for the media-
tion of intercommunity difference: this is by assuming the position
of the other, as, for example, in Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan
Desai, 1977) and Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1982). In the former film,
a characteristic melodramatic narrative ensures the dispersal of the
children of a Hindu family into a set of multi-community foster fami-
lies, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. The film mirrors the conventions
of a sociological imagination, suggesting the socially superior position
of the Hindu in a middle class, professionalized setting, one carrying
a symbolic, normative function, that of the policeman. The other fig-
ures again run true to social typage, one a Muslim weaver and qawwali
singer, the other the Christian bootlegger. However, this representa-
tional grid rubs up against the stellar constellation. The Christian and
Muslim figures are played by the more popular actors, Bachchan and
Rishi Kapoor, while the lesser star, Vinod Khanna, plays the Hindu
25
Moinak Biswas in fact suggests that the popular cinema of the 1950s, especially
the work of Mehboob Khan and Raj Kapoor, better represents the ethos of the
Nehruvian mandate of social justice than, say, the art cinema of Ray, which employ-
ed strategies distancing the spectator from a Nehruvian telos of modernity. Biswas,
‘Urban Adventure’. Arguably, the power of the popular, as with other forms of creati-
vity, may derive ultimately from exploring the trauma involved in identifying oneself
with modernizing imperatives. The trauma arises from sacrificing a portion of one’s
being, inevitably represented, from Kapoor to Ray to Ghatak, in the mother, a figure
who evoked a sense of lack and loss in a protean, melodramatic way. With Mother India
(Mehboob Khan, 1957) and Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1974), there is an epic revision
of this narrative format, as an engulfing sense of trauma arises from the mother having
to sacrifice her son. See ch. 11 below for a reflection on the symbolic coordinates of
this narrative structure.
policeman. The knowing mismatch between the narrative of star autho-
rity and that of social authority and respectability affords the specta-
tor with the pleasures of a playful, carnivalesque inversion, where an
authoritative and respectable Hindu society is shown up as somewhat
strait laced and repressed (as in the triptych of romances presented
through the song sequence, ‘Hamko tumse ho gaya hai pyar kya karein . . .’
Nana Patekar
Nana Patekar, who had earlier been trained in theatre acting, brought
a new performance idiom into mainstream cinema, with his tautly
controlled body, and a bravura, staccato dialogue delivery that func-
tions as verbal assault. He lashes his opponent with a cascade of ironic
comment and irreverent wit, the whole laced with a mordant, gal-
lows humour. Intriguingly, this performance style has been deployed
in very different ways. While Patekar has increasingly come to be asso-
ciated with a machismo regional and national right wing politics (of
the chauvinist Maharashtrian party, the Shiv Sena, and more broadly
with a Hindu right politics at the national level), the actor’s screen per-
sona is not so straightforward. Thus while films such as Ankush (The
Goad; N. Chandra 1986), Krantiveer (The Brave Revolutionary;
Nana Patekar, 1991), and Prahaar (Assault; Mehul Kumar, 1994)
would appear to confirm this political characterization, his roles in
Salaam Bombay (Mira Nair, 1988) and Disha (Direction; Sai Paranj-
paye, 1990) are of the mould of the social realist genre. Others, such
as Parinda (Flight of Pigeons; Vidhu Vinod Chopra 1989), Thodasa
Rumani Ho Jaye (Let’s Have a Little Romance; Amol Palekar, 1990),
Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (And So Raju Became a Gent; Aziz Mirza,
1992), and Ghulam e Mustafa (Mustafa, the Loyal Slave; Parto Ghosh
1998), suggest a tapestry of types. These include the psychotic gangs-
ter, the emissary of the monsoon and romance, a narrator-character
retailing scathing social critique for the ‘small man’ of an earlier so-
cialist imagination, a Muslim gangster who sends up Hindu middle-
class mores.
It is this last instance which I want to draw upon for more sustain-
ed analysis. Patekar had played a Muslim character earlier, that of
a gangster in Angaar (Ashes; Shashilaal Nayar, 1992). This was part
of an emergent trend in Bombay cinema, where the Hindu hero was
pitted against a villainous character specifically marked as Muslim. In
Fig. 25: Ghulam e Mustafa, Parto Ghosh, 1998, ‘The Comedy of Cohabitation’.
Ghulam e Mustafa, Patekar plays a Muslim gangster once again, but

this time as a hero. He is of the breed of the orphaned hero, who does
not know his parents, and has to survive the demands of a ruthless city.
He comes under the tutelage of a Hindu, a mafioso who gives him the
loving care of a father. Mustafa is hitman for the Hindu don, and he
is a magnificent specimen. Sartorially, he is a visual spectacle, hark-
ing back to grandiose images of medieval courts and public arena in
his flowing colourful robes. He is also devout, meticulously perform-
ing his prayers before unleashing brutal punishment against his mas-
ter’s enemies. Ultimately, like other heroic Muslims on the Bombay
screen, he is destined to die. The death is redemptive, for it follows on
his refusal to carry out his master’s orders, or, indeed, to participate in
what he comes to see as exploitative acts demeaning to the common
citizen.
What is distinctive to all this is the centrality of Hindu–Muslim
relations to the narrative experimentation of the film. Mustafa comes
to be impressed by the upright character and dignity of a struggling,
petty bureaucratic Hindu family. When the father of this family refuses
to take a bribe for the award of a government contract, his family is put
at grave risk. The reformed Mustafa decides that he will protect the
family, and to do this, he must takes up residence in their home. There
follows a comedy of social adjustment. The mother of the household,
in particular, gives voice to all the taboos of Hindu society in the face
of the other. Mustafa’s very presence in the household as she undertakes
her daily puja is disturbing, as is his ‘Muslim’ habit of touching the
glass to his lips. (Fig. 25, p. 159.)
There are a spate of social anxieties as well: the influence Mustafa
exercises over her son, teaching him to ride and repair a motorcycle,
seems to threaten his abduction into the different world of the street.
Mustafa also functions as a substitute parent to the daughter in spheres
the parents are too conventional to handle, as when he oversees her safe
passage from a ‘date’. Ultimately, even the mother is won over, and is
overwhelmed with grief when Mustafa pays for his refusal to kowtow
to his former bosses.
How do we situate this performance? The historical landscape has
decisively shifted from the earlier instances of the 1950s and 1970s.
Patekar’s career emerges almost uncannily alongside that of a new
phase of the Shiv Sena: his 1986 film Ankush is often associated with
this polity in its profiling of neighbourhood youth, restless, frustrated
figures who rail against the injustices they have been meted out by a
corrupt society, and ultimately giving violent outlet to their simmering
rage. Subsequently, Prahaar, in its story about a Rajput commando
trainer who takes on the local hoods terrorizing a Bombay locality, is
also considered a landmark film. It showcases with a new, sadistic eco-
nomy, the violent assertion of Hindutva’s symbolic authority over the
nation. The next film, Krantiveer, emerges almost simultaneously with
the demolition of the Babri Masjid, that catastrophic assault against
India’s Muslim minority. Here, Patekar as a child ridicules the herit-
age of anticolonial patriotism, and, as an adult, is driven only by loyalty
to his adoptive family, that of a Hindu baniya. However, when the
manipulations of politicians, real estate speculators, and the police
lead to a communal conflagration in the locality, he is traumatized and
undergoes a change of perspective. He declares the absurdity and irra-
tionality of intercommunal violence before the assembled public of
survivors. However, the proof of his argument lies in a rather shock-
ing, and ambiguously coded act of bloodletting. Before the assembled
post-riot crowd, he draws out a Muslim marauder, and proceeds to
smash his fingers along with his own, to demonstrate that they have the
same blood. Significantly, it is the Hindu who has a modern, scientifi-
cally grounded perception of the world, and the Muslim who has to
be taught a basic lesson in biological science. This rather common nar-
rative of the Hindu moorings of modern, rationalist perception is, per-
haps, undergirded by a gesture to a more primordial cognition. In the
histories retailed by Hindutva, Islam and Christianity have convert-
ed the original, Hindu inhabitants of the subcontinent, threatening
the rights of this primordial identity to oversee the modern nation.26
Underneath the discourse of biological equivalence retailed by Patekar’s
sermon may then lie another one, of a primordial order rather than one
constructed by modern science. But even here the primordial is hier-
archized. The Hindu protagonist enacts a symbolic register of violent
reintegration, in which the other comes across as a vagrant gene pool,
as biological proof for he who knows himself, the nation, and can com-
mand the other to be a subordinated, functional component in the
playing out of this national-ethnic destiny.
Such a deconstruction of a humanist morality tale emerges from the
history of previous narratives, and of the function of the star’s screen
persona in these. How then to reconcile the narrative world and screen
personality of Ghulam e Mustafa with this master narrative of the star
personality? One of the ways of dealing with this is to see the perfor-
mance as the strategy of a Hindu symbolic authority to assume the
guise of the other in order to transform itself. On what grounds would
this be? Here, one can invoke a series of accounts of the desired trans-
formation of Hinduism in the modern era, especially from the time of
the colonial period. This emphasizes the firming up of Hinduism, its
acquiring a more disciplined theological cast, and a more structured
set of protocols through which to integrate and orient its following.
Such drives, manifest in writers as diverse as Bankimchandra Chatto-
padhyaya and Savarkar,27 and in the desire reposed in the refashion-
ed figure of Ram, places stress on a harder, more aggressive sense of
self. Here the self is cultivated by mirroring the perceived definitions
of the other, the Muslim and the Christian. In such a lineage, Mustafa
26
Alok Rai, ‘Religious Conversions and the Crisis of Brahmanical Hinduism’, in
Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others.
27 For these two figures, see, respectively, Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation:
Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001;
and Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Which of Us Are Hindus?’, in Pandey, ed., Hindus and
Others.
becomes the other the self must cultivate in order to assert oneself in
the world. More than a benefactor, a servant, and a sword-arm for the
moral probity of Hindu society, he is also a role model.
But surely he is too large, too magnificent to be emulated? But so
too is the refashioned Ram, who either appears in contemporary ver-
sions as a muscular marquee figure mobilizing for Hindutva,28 or,
again, in Kamalahasan’s Hey Ram! a somewhat remote, hyperbolic dis-
placement of the hero into a mythic register. These are entities that
rule the cosmos. Film narratives, by and large, require more pedestrian
registers to supplement the movement of the superego.29 The magnifi-
cence of the figure dwarfs that which surrounds him, and must find
grounding in something more quotidian. Thus I prefer to focus on
Mustafa of the net vest and filigreed cap, the figure sipping his tumbler
of coffee before the aghast eyes of a pollution fearing Hindu matri-
arch. The register of comedy here slips into the everyday conundrums
of cohabitation. It also lampoons the insularity of the Hindu self, its
cordoning itself off from a certain sensual, tactile universe. Is carica-
ture here the vehicle of an urging that one must change oneself, enter
the world and commingle with the other? Is there a subaltern register
to the lampoon, sending up the middle class from the perspective of
the sweaty, messy this worldliness of common folk across the ethno-
religious board? Patekar is a master of the scathing verbal demolition
of the other. But this is an affectionate sending up of the goodly Hindu
housewife. Whatever the film’s invocation of limits, Mustafa’s exter-
nality to the household sealed by his ultimate function of the martyred
protector, there is a point of departure for the popular cinema in this
scenario of cohabitation.
A space appears to open up, signalled in this interpretation by a will
to performance and imagination. We have seen that Patekar has es-
sayed a number of other roles, quite at variance with those which have
been most highlighted in his oeuvre. But nothing, perhaps, has pre-
pared us for this particular break in the virtual biography of his screen
persona. And it would have meant that much less if it appeared in the
oeuvre of any other present-day star. It is here that a fissure affords
28 Anuradha Kapur, ‘Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram’, ibid.,
74–109.
29
I have suggested how this duality of personality types is observable in other
Kamalahasan films such as Hindustani: see ch. 8 below.
us with the possibilities of a transcendence of community boundaries:
through the register of performance, play, and imagination—the ima-
gining, if not of the other, then of the limits of the self. The fissure has
nothing to do with the biographical character Patekar, his attitudes
or motivations. It is a break in the virtual persona we, as film spectat-
ors, have invested in. In rendering a break, the fissure or dissonance
produces a crack, a glimmer of light, where we may insert our own
subjectivity.
5
A Modernist Public:
The Double-Take of Modernism in
the Work of Satyajit Ray
R
unning against the thematic focus in this book, this chapter will
look at a different dimension of the institution of the cinema
in post-Independence India through the work of Satyajit Ray.
It continues, however, the engagement with the critical discourses that
surround the popular cinema after Independence, of which Ray’s writ-
ings and work were a key constituent, and also articulates my concern
with the idea of the cinema as a vehicle of public address, if one very
different from that of popular form. His work of course highlights
the question of realism, psychological characterization, and narrative
integration. Realism was the pre-eminent feature of the critical dis-
course instituted by art cinema critics and practices. The criticism
appears to emerge from evaluating the status of the narrative form
through which the real would be articulated—through what means
of representation, styles of acting, aesthetic strategies the real would be
invoked. As I have argued in chapter 2, the popular compendium—
studio shooting, melodramatic, externalized forms for the representa-
tion of character psychology, non- or intermittently continuous forms
of cutting, diversionary story lines, performance sequences—was not
acceptable within the emergent artistic canon, for they undermined
plausibility and a desirable regime of verisimilitude.
Art cinema criticism also addressed another dimension the popular
cinema avowedly lacked, that of authenticity to cultural traditions,
an issue central to bids to lay claim to a distinct lineage for national
culture in the wake of decolonization. Issues of authenticity in the
constitution of a post-colonial politics and culture take on different
resonances as we move through different domains within the cine-
matic institution, and across art institutions. Central here are varying
constructions of what composed an authentic art practice and what
functions such authentication performed in relation to the require-
ments of state formation, in response to wider processes of modern-
ization and, quite crucially, in terms of the imagining of the publics
that art works and commercial cultural products would seek to bring
into being.
Historians and theorists of modern Indian art have argued that,
under colonialism and after, what was always at issue was the drive to
uncover differences from Western canons of aesthetics which, in the
modern period, were heavily determined by arguments for realism.
Earlier debates from the colonial period sought to argue that Indian
art traditions were differently constituted, oriented to a certain icono-
graphic and decorative character. Geeta Kapur suggests that the three
lynchpins of this anti-colonial discourse were an aristocratic folk para-
digm emerging from the romanticism of Tagore and the Santiniketan
artists, the canonical, craft-oriented aesthetic of Coomaraswamy and
the artisanal base of Gandhian ideology. It is Kapur’s argument that
Ray combined the influence of the Santiniketan tradition with other
modern traditions in the novel and cinema, and qualified it and shifted
it to a middle-class sense of conscience and destiny that was intimately
tied to the project of modern nationhood. In contrast to the long and
problematic history of colonial modernity, in which modernity was
seen as an imposition and dissembling means had to be evolved which
would contest the modern even while deploying modern apparatuses
and procedures, Ray worked out a strategy which would authenticate
the modern, and its middle-class vehicle, by showing it as emerging
from out of previous aesthetic traditions.1 In order to do this, his films
bridged the chasm between civilizational identity and modernity, but
in ways which his critics have faulted for glossing over the traumatic
and concrete history defined by peasant immiseration, and the horrend-
ous social and political bloodletting of Partition.2
1 Geeta Kapur, ‘Sovereign Subject: Ray’s Apu’, in Geeta Kapur, When was Modern-
ism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Delhi, Tulika Books, 2000,
201–33.
2
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Satyajit Ray, Ray-movie and Ray’s films’, Journal of Arts
and Ideas 23–4, 1993, 7–16.
A Modernist Public 165
Rather than see Ray playing out a ‘destinal’ narrative that provides
for a redemptive and authenticating identification with modernity
for the protagonist, I want to suggest that he was involved in a rather
more complicated dialogue with the modern, showing it to be neces-
sarily and irreducibly split in the forms of subjectivity it gave rise to.
In a sense this is the condition of modernity, and authentication lies
in the articulation of a split position which constantly gestures to some
antecedent self that has been displaced and is in danger of entirely
disappearing from consciousness. The force of this particular modern-
ist move lies in the bid not only to find a form that can articulate this
splitting and hold on to both parts, but in determinedly seeking out
the repressed dimensions of that former self, and laying claim, on be-
half of modernity, to the ability to bring it into view.
Some of the following argument analyses this modernist double-
take through discussions of realist strategies, as these were the domi-
nant terms on which post-Independence discourses of the cinema
developed. I will pay attention here to both the potentially repressive
and expressive dimensions of Ray’s realist strategies. Locating these
discourses within a problematic of authentication, I want to see how
realist form achieved a surfacing of the present in ways which could
speak to the double-take of modernity, persuading the spectator of the
connections, however disrupted, submerged and phantom-like, of
present being with past selves; and, beyond this, how these often un-
realized pasts could reframe and reanimate the present.
Ray’s grappling with the emergence of the present can be seen as
engagement with a Bengali public’s massive investments in the history
of literary form, but also as an intervention in the category of genre.
Often, art cinema is not subject to categorizations along these lines,
as if the field inhabits a transcendent location vis-à-vis the mundane
play of similarity and difference through which popular industrial
products fabricate themselves and are publicized to an audience. How-
ever, my suggestion here is that there is an active working over of the
category of genre in Ray’s practice, one perhaps quite distinct from
popular film genres but, like them, often immersed in the difficul-
ties of finding a route, of finding the images and sounds and narratives
to articulate the present into perception. In a word, the difficulties are
those of imagining the present as a distinct moment separated from
previous times and generically coded imaginaries. And with this dif-
ficulty there comes a distinct politics, one of defining how the present
is to be negotiated into existence, which traditions need to be drawn
upon and how these should be reframed and new questions asked of
them. This particular intervention suggests connections with the deve-
lopment of a wider genre formation within the cinematic institution
of the time, the move towards the present through the constitution of
‘the Social’ as a genre of contemporary experience.
Finally, I will surmise that we cannot fully attend to Ray’s oeuvre
without at the same time seeing it as having to deal with the formal
energies arraigned at its boundaries. In particular, I will call upon the
register of the popular as specifically worked out within Bengali cul-
ture, that body of caricatural representation available through bazaar
productions in which respectable society is cast in bizarre and ir-
reverent light. Of course, high art forms can draw upon such energies
through quotation, framing them within a larger narrative discourse;
at issue here is what these energies are aligned with in the dominant
perspectives of the narrative world. There is also the possibility that
such a dominant narrative frame does not successfully contain these
energies. In the last section of this chapter, I will look at Jana Aranya
to suggest how there is a waning of conviction in Rays work, an in-
capacity to generate a plausible protagonist and provide a perspective.
In the process the other—the immoral world of seedy deals, sharp
practice and pimping—riotously overruns the diegetic world. I should
stress that this is not a criticism but rather an acknowledgement of
skills of observation and powers of capturing that which is alien and
anecdotal to you, only to find that these powers exceed those of nar-
rative integration and moral calibration. This ‘failure’ of the film may
be read as the failure of a form whose historical moment has passed,
and is therefore suggestive, simply as caesura, as an insurmountable
chasm in narrative cognition that allows other knowledges to surface
into view and command our attention. The result is a shift in the terms
of authentication away from the privileged middle-class recipient of
Ray’s imagination.
1. Ray’s Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism,

and a History of the Present
A particularly influential way of talking about realism has been in
terms of the classic realist text, in which a superior or metalanguage
level uses quotation marks to render different levels of object langu-
age within the diegetic world, and then hierarchizes these to produce
an understanding of what is true. Unlike the other languages placed
between inverted commas, regarded as certain material expressions
which assert certain meanings, the metalanguage is not regarded as
material; it is dematerialized to achieve perfect representation—to let
the identity of things shine through the window of words.3 This form
of narration has been called an excessively obvious one, as the meta-
language level does not reveal itself to the reader-spectator, as if the
story were telling itself rather than being recounted. In terms of film
form, classical realism is associated with that jointless, seamless mode
of filmic story-telling practices described by Noel Burch:
The reader’s relationship with the traditional novelistic discourse is
based on non-perception, on the ‘invisibility’ of the material articula-
tions sustaining this discourse: in other words, syntax, grammar, and
the perceptual form of words and symbols. In the cinema, this non-
perception corresponds to a reading which “sees” neither the edges of
the frame nor the changes of shot—the two materialities which in fact
tend to challenge the illusion of continuity that . . . underlies the
credibility both of the traditional novel and of the cinema which had
adopted the same specifications.4
In the context of Indian film studies, the classical realist text has been
given a particular inflection, where it has been aligned with the deve-
lopment of a culture of modernity with certain political ramifications.
These comprise the understanding that realist cinema addresses, in-
deed seeks to constitute a modern spectator invested in the cognitive
practice of individualized perception central to the development of a
civil society of freely associating individuals. A realist art cinema is
then part of a culture of civil society which in practice is the preserve
of a small segment of society quite at a remove from the wider weave
of social and political subjectivity. Its form and its thematics invite the
spectator to assume modern perceptual practices that can objectify and
distance her from the ‘traditional’ and the ‘feudal’. Insofar as social
subjectivity is much more complex in terms of the meshing of the
social forms that it institutes, then this too functions as a repressive
frame within which the citizen spectator is situated.5
3 Colin McCabe, ‘Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses’,
Screen 15 (2), 1974, 7–27.

4
Burch, ‘Fritz Lang’, in Roud, ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 584.
5
Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film; Prasad makes this argument in relationship to
the parallel cinema of the 1970s, supported by state institutions such as the National
On the surface, much of this seems to resonate with Ray’s work,
especially the trilogy: the focus on individual perception, the carefully
calibrated, invisible style of narration which does not draw atten-
tion to itself, the emphasis on modern destinies that finally transcend
previous states. It would also conform to the argument that Ray’s
camera seeks to conquer or subordinate reality for the requirements
of ideological stability, in this case a tale of the seamless emergence of
a nationalist modernity. However, I will argue that the modernist
dimensions of Ray’s work disturb any such straightforward organiza-
tion of narrative material and spectatorial perspective. In particular,
the foregrounding of the stylistic elements signals a process of irrup-
tion that drives a wedge between the contemporary and the force of
unresolved pasts.
The Modernism of the Trilogy
In addressing these issues, I would first like to consider the way in
which the trilogy undertakes some of the work of symbolization and
historical distantiation which I take to be important to Ray’s interven-
tion in the cinema. I want to identify a certain dynamic in the way this
distance emerges within a naturalistically calibrated representation. I
use the term advisedly, in that the way this mode of representation
is developed in Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), for
instance, acquires a level of formal equipoise, a concern with balance
and pace that is very different from that concrete duration of time
extolled by Andre Bazin for the neo-realists.6 What is suggestive to
me is not only that this naturalism is subjected to disruption within
Ray’s work, but that its very form undergoes different articulations
through the trilogy.
I have argued elsewhere that Pather Panchali undertakes a transfor-
mation of symbolic economy, charting changes in the forms of attach-
ment and temporality represented by the different characters in the
Film Development Corporation. It would be interesting to know if Prasad would see

this argument holding for Ray as well. For a different perspective, see Ravi Vasudevan,
‘Cinema and Citizenship in the “Third World”’, Van Zelst Lecture on Communication,
Northwestern University, 1999, condensed and reprinted as ‘An Imperfect Public:
Cinema and Citizenship in the “Third World”’, in Sarai Reader 01, Delhi, Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies, 2001; and idem, ‘The Politics of Cultural Address’,
in Gledhill and Williams, eds, Re-inventing Film Studies, rpnt as ch. 3 above.
6 See esp. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema, vol. II, ed. and trans. by Hugh Gray,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971.

story. Central here is the opposition between Durga and Apu, where
Durga is framed as continuous with nature, governed by the instincts,
and associated with an immersion in resources (an orchard formerly
owned by the declining Brahmin family) and desires that are fore-
closed to her. Durga’s fascination with a past plenitude is the attribute
of a doomed entity, while Apu is symbolically placed to escape the de-
sires that snare his sister.7
If this past/future temporality provides one axis of the film’s nar-
rative, then another is that of the gruelling present, caught in the
disposition of the mother Sarbajaya. In the history of Sarbajaya and her
struggle for familial survival we are certainly not presented with any-
thing like the histories of conflict which characterized the Bengal
countryside. Neither does the film seek to capture the politically in-
duced scarcity that erupted in the catastrophe of the Bengal famine of
1943. However, what we witness is likely to evoke this traumatic
moment for a Bengali audience of the 1950s, even if the film uses a nar-
rative structure with very different emphases, one aiming to commu-
nicate a sense of the relentless cycle imposed by the rigours of scarcity
on recently impoverished lives.
The sequence relating to Apu’s sighting of the train is in fact inaugu-
rated by this multiple sense of time, with a view of Sarbajaya, inani-
mate, inward, and conflicted in her relationship to the grandaunt,
Indir, whom she has had to expel from the household for reasons of
family survival. Indir leaves the Roy house, into an encompassing,
dwarfing nature where she will find her final resting place. The move-
ment of the children is woven out of these different logics, of present
time and the cyclical one of death, into a completely different register,
and an entirely new one for the film. The naturalism that has govern-
ed it so far has been a carefully calibrated one, and highly formal in
terms of its attention to framing, perspective, and the simulation of a
naturalist continuity, day unravelling into evening and night and into
the next morning. Its formalism is at a remove from the contingencies
of neo-realist time, and there is a strong sense of images corresponding
to the descriptive procedures of a literary naturalist mode. However,
this is a dissembling naturalism, whose high investment in formal
equipoise is displaced by the concentration of viewer attention on
character perspectives and emotions rather than on what frames them.
7 Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in
1950s’ India’, Oxford Literary Review 16, 1995.

Here we may discern the significance of classical narration for the form
of the film.
Kapur has noted of the train sequence that it provides for a seamless
sense of the emergence of time within the landscape of Santiniketan
painterly modes, a spatial strategy presenting new figure–ground rela-
tions to induct the movement of the train, and of history, into the
frame.8 In contrast, I would suggest that there is an emphatic disjoint-
ment exercised at the level of representation, drawing the viewer into
a new economy of perception, one that works through the thematics
of history not as a seamless emergence but as a rupturing and a positing
of a new and distancing perspective. Interestingly, it is through the
realm of the instincts and senses, one contrasted to the realm of verbal-
ized language, that Ray draws us into this new field of perception. For
it is through Durga that the spectator is routed into new sense per-
ceptions, as, moving ahead of Apu, she registers strange vibrations and
sounds, capturing the tremor of modernity as it is relayed in the tactile
form of a quivering telegraph pole. (Fig. 26.)
Fig. 26: Durga at the telegraph pole.
8 Kapur, ‘Sovereign Subject’.

As if needing to work disruptive effects of the sensation into filmic
structures, Ray resorts to a rare discontinuity, a temporal gap intruding
in the abrupt cut that shows Apu entering the space around the tele-
graph pole after Durga has left it; the compulsion to repeat, to go
through again, highlights the moment and the space as symbolically
charged, as marked off from the seamless flow of previous time. And
then, almost mystically, the frame itself is shot through with a de-
naturalizing impulse, high key effects rendering the kash fields in
which the children move as a graphical field defined by the textures of
light. This instinctual, sensate space is one that cannot admit of verbal
enunciation. When Apu asks Durga for an explanation of the myste-
rious sense impressions which course around, she merely gestures him
to silence, to listen. The billowing cloud of smoke that emerges on the
horizon releases the children into movement, Durga slipping awk-
wardly to fatally fall behind. If the spectator has already been invited
to enter a different, graphic realm of perception, there is now a fore-
grounding of our looking, as a swish pan, entirely going against the
tonality of anything in the film, swings to catch Apu moving towards
the railway line. (Fig. 27.)
Fig. 27: Swish pan finds Apu.

Our look here is dislocated from the smooth flow of character-
focalized narration, where the choice of frame is justified by the pres-
ence of character. For we briefly lose our object, and in the process
are alerted to the phenomenology of the moving camera at the very
moment the character becomes aware of the moving train. This double
articulation of the perceptual registering of modern machinic energies
for character and spectator is not, however, merely a clever and ironic
reflection on the impinging of two different forms and moments in the
history of modernity, although it is that as well. The moment of dis-
location is developed into a full jettisoning of the spectator’s view from
the framed character. We are denied the function of virtual looking
that tracks the characters, and come to be entirely split from the char-
acter, as the camera captures the moment of the train’s impinging on
little Apu not from his perspective, but from the other side of the
tracks. The character is abstracted and made graphic along with the
thing he watches, and the whole is offered up for a view from outside.
(Fig. 28.)
In terms of a psychoanalytical register, we could say that the Ima-
ginary domain which offers a play of recognition and identification
to the spectator within classical realist strategies has here given way
to revealing the Symbolic register through which the Imaginary is
Fig. 28: Apu from the other side.

constructed. Our position, now radically other from that of Apu and
Durga, is only fleetingly registered, before the film goes back to the
cadences of its naturalist mode. But in this moment, our dislocation
is not only that of spatial disjointment, but a temporal one. The de-
ployment of a modernist cinematic stylistics itself marks the passage
from the literary naturalist mode Ray invokes, and in the process en-
forces a temporal distance. The stylistics points to the articulation of
the here and now. And, in doing this, it also alerts us to the fact that
what we are bearing witness to is not a seamless, organic narration
of origins, as if the nation can aesthetically inscribe an uninterrupted
narrative of itself. This, I believe, also puts a question mark over the
formulation that the modernist art of this period functioned in un-
complicated ways to fulfil the images required of the state in its tale
of origins. Not only does the art cinema emerge independently of
the state in this initial phase—although in the case of Pather Panchali
the West Bengal government comes in at a later stage—it also ap-
pears to set its face against a position of organic identity for its spec-
tator. Ruptured from the flow of narrative, invited to look at the
fictive world and its literary origins from a distance induced by a self-
conscious cinematic stylistics, the spectator occupies the emergent ter-
rain of the present.
The significance of a position of externality and distance is high-
lighted by the progressive induction of distanced spectatorial attri-
butes in the character of Apu. Let us return to the train, this time as it
carries Sarbajaya and Apu back to the countryside in Aparajita (The
Unvanquished, 1956). The journey has been precipitated by two deve-
lopments. During the initial sojourn of the family in Benares, we have
been provided intimations of the vulnerable status of Sarbajaya in the
tenement, as she wards off the intrusiveness of a male neighbour. With
Harihar’s death these presentiments are reprised, and there looms up
Sarbajaya’s status as widow in a city which ritually incarnates the re-
nunciatory status of the woman who has lost her husband. The return,
however, is precipitated very abruptly, at the point that Sarbajaya
and Apu are offered a position of service within a well-to-do Bengali
household. Presentiments of this subordinate and marginalized posi-
tion leads to a moment of introspection and a jolting cut to the train
crossing the Ganga and back to countryside. It is as if the mother has
forsaken the subordinated security offered her to start the story again,
from its original location, in a move to neutralize the losses that have
arisen in between.
The journey back has something of the status, however, of a visit
rather than a return. For the time that has elapsed in between, carrying
with it the heavy burden of loss, can never be recovered (neither can
the space; Sarbajaya and Apu come to Mansapota, rather than Nischin-
dipur, although Sarbajaya hopes that they can ultimately return to
their home village). In a remarkable passage, Apu enters the house of
an aged relative of the family, and runs to the doorway on hearing the
sound of the train in the distance. He calls excitedly to his mother, in
anticipation of the sight he is about to see. But at the moment of the
sighting, his face drains of animation. Of course, Apu has just been on
the train, it is no longer a mysterious and wondrous object heralding
new experiences. But what is remarkable is not only the deflating func-
tion of this moment of disenchantment, where a structure of mund-
ane spectatorship has entered into the experience of the character,
but also the production of a moment of pathos. For what is built into
the moment is a secret sharing and exchange of spectatorial positions;
if Apu has in a sense assumed the symbolic position we were fleetingly
offered in Pather Panchali, then we are provided the one he had occu-
pied, a situation of impending lack. Durga’s fatal fall, her inability to
achieve the vision Apu attained, is here reiterated with deadening ef-
fect, as if her absence is inscribed into the space of vision now, dragging
it down, making it go quiet and look inwards. Ray’s achievement here,
without taking recourse to flashback, spelling things out for us, hon-
ours our capacity to read the image, layer it over previous images in
order to register the internalized lineaments of loss built into the trans-
formation of horizons.
This is in no way a terminal moment of disenchantment, but part
of a spiral that feeds back into cycles of re-enchantment and loss. So
Aparajita follows on from the first film in its opening out of vision and
experience for its protagonist. This is charted by the leitmotif of the
observational camera in Aparajita. Attractively, the camera is employ-
ed with a less rigorous attention to frame and duration than mark-
ed Pather Panchali, gaining a less cadenced, more rambling effect.9 In
contrast to the somewhat flexibly structured sequences concerning
9
The influence of Renoir is often noted for Ray, but it is only in Aparajito that
he evokes that director’s more open, searching relationship to bodies in space, espe-
cially in such films as Toni (1934) and La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game; 1939).
Fig. 29: Aparajita, Satyajit Ray, 1956, The View of the Mother.
Apu’s expanding world, it is perhaps significant that Ray adopts a quite

different mode of framing to evoke the position of the mother and the
space of the countryside. This space, of a bank curving around a large
pond, adorned by an overarching tree, is the space Apu comes into
and leaves, and which his mother looks to for signs of her son’s arrival.
The frame functions in the fashion of a mise-en-abyme, a structurally
precise and recurrently deployed unit of aesthetic composition. Ray’s
usage of this space as counterpoint to Apu’s evolving, expanding
world, functions not so much as a counterpoint of stasis/movement,
but as governed by an asymmetry of desire, where the mother’s desire,
to recover her son, can never be fulfilled. (Fig. 29.)
The son of course knows this desire, but he is helpless to respond
to it, carried as he is by a different momentum and temporality. Here,
as with the case of Durga, the film evokes a moment, finally, through
its absence, as Apu returns to this space to find that its occupant can
never be regained. The distinct stylistics of this evocation, the re-
turning of the protagonist to the moment of earlier being from which
he is now forever severed, conjures up a certain irreducibility of time.
Here, in a very distinctive way, Ray conveys not only a passage within
the protagonist, but a nurturing and cultivation of memory against the
depredations of modern processes and subjectivities.
The full logic of the modernist method Ray uses, signalling at once
distance and separation along with the imperative of remembering, is
something to be drawn out over a number of films. What is striking
about the last film in the trilogy is the way it appears to change track,
abandoning this particular double movement of enchantment and
loss, and confronting the protagonist with a terminal scenario of re-
nunciation. In Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), we have a
recurrence of several motifs, especially of alienated viewing, but now
modelled on a separation from the here and now rather than the past.
In an extended sequence the adult Apu looks for a job, to find that he
is considered too qualified for the teaching jobs or unable to cast him-
self in the role of routinized and deadening work. The last is a superb-
ly realized segment, Apu looking into the typesetter’s room, a scene
wonderfully dense in its evocation of humdrum labour. It should
be stressed that this has nothing to do with arrogance. The narrative
cannily draws upon the fact that Apu has been engaged in the very same
labour in the past, to facilitate his education. Driven by the desire to
Fig. 30: Apur Sansar, Satyajit Ray 1959, An Intimate Space for Modernity.
write, he appears perfectly indifferent, at the level of material wants,
to his penurious condition. And, indicating a social commitment that
is also a mark of the work’s context, it is significant that Apu has refused
to take a job that would have infringed the norms of a strike.
While the earlier films always sought to capture different tempora-
lities, Apur Sansar constitutes a bid to be of the present, but on terms
distinctive to the hero’s desires. Involved here is, pre-eminently, the de-
sire of the subject to write himself into significance. His novel, whose
themes he relates to childhood friend Pulu in their walk over the rail
tracks that lead to his rooms, is clearly autobiographical in content. It
deals with a character who is ordinary, whose everyday life is a struggle,
but who nevertheless lives life to the full. Encapsulated here, against
the background of the preceding observation of dulling work routines
and the setting of the crisscross of rail tracks, is what Geeta Kapur refers
to as the trilogy’s transcendence of the realm of necessity. But, as Pulu
points out, the writing is incomplete, lacks adequate experience, for it
lacks the experience of romantic engagement in the writer’s life.
I would suggest that this is the realm of the present, as opposed to
the realm of necessity or of freedom, for it has to be invented in the here
and now. For, in a sense, Apu lacks a social frame. He lies at the margins
of the reality which surrounds him, even if this is a self-willed distance.
To make the present real to him, he has to carve it out, and the enter-
prise is conducted within the discretion of a space, that of the conju-
gal dwelling. It is here that the film undertakes a substantial task, a
working with and containment of iconographic resources. Kapur has
pointed out that in Ray’s bid to develop a secular aesthetic, he took
characters whose names carried mythic resonances, such as Durga in
Pather Panchali, and ‘decoded’ them, rendering them into ordinary
characters. Here he adorns Apu with a flute to draw on the mythic
figure of Krishna, specifically his erotic resonance. In a set of remark-
able sequences, Ray works through iconographic elements to consti-
tute an intimate space for modernity.
The first of these follows on from Apu’s return from the job hunt.
He enters his room, takes out his flute and lies down on the bed. As
he starts playing, the shadowed figure of a woman emerges at the
window across the tenement. Apu, suddenly aware of the woman’s
look, stops playing, recedes from view, and carefully uses his flute to
push the window shut. As he does so, we see the woman withdrawing,
as if accepting the prohibition on her look. (Fig. 30, p. 176.)
This is the first time a distinct erotic play has emerged in the tril-
ogy—excepting, of course, the sensuality of Durga in the first film—
and Apu’s location as object of desire is associated with a Krishna
symbolism which is then disavowed. The use of the iconographic
instrument not to solicit desire but indeed to ward it off suggests the
issues at stake; Ray here transforms iconic functions to displace atten-
tion onto the space itself, as the place for a different order of desire—
the symbolic, privatized space of the conjugal couple rather than a
more diffuse order of desire. In a sense, the space is being prepared for
the arrival of the beloved; and, almost immediately there arrives Pulu,
who will prove to be the narrative agent who so fortuitously leads
Apu to his future bride, his cousin Aparna.
Pulu invites Apu to take a holiday, and enjoy a visit to his family
home in the country where Aparna is to be wed. We have here the ima-
gination leading back to the idyllic space outside the city, though one
very different from the impoverished hamlets of Nischindipur and
Mansapota of the first two films. For this is the estate of a well-to-do
landed family. The romanticism of the countryside, with Apu reciting
poetry as he gracefully lounges on the boat that carries them across
the river to the house, stems from the rapturous invocation of another
world which only the urban imaginary can invoke with such pleasure.
Later, as Apu lolls on a hillock above the bustling activities of marriage
preparation, he again draws out his flute; and indeed, when Aparna’s
mother first meets Apu, she likens him to Krishna. But these references
are developed only to be refigured. When it is discovered that Aparna’s
betrothed is mentally impaired, the mother refuses for the marriage to
take place, which would leave Aparna unmarriageable if the ceremo-
nies are not completed within the specified time. Pulu appeals to Apu
to step into the breach and save his cousin; Apu cannot at first believe
what is being asked of him, but after reflection accepts his friend’s plea.
What is ironic about this entire chain of events is the implausibility
of what takes place. A man from poor background would normally
never be acceptable for the daughter of a well-to-do family, and it is
only a catastrophe that could explain the match. This the narrative
offers, but the stretching of the plausibility function, normally so im-
portant for a realist narration, suggests that something symbolical-
ly charged is at work. There has been a build-up, through the previous
scenes and the iconographic evocation and containment of mythic
functions for Apu, whose ultimate goal is the constitution of a com-
panionate, conjugal marriage. The symbolic structures here seem to
posit an imperative, that of not only generating an adequate semio-
tics of secularized, privatized romance, but also a social transforma-
tion, where the space generated for Apu can posit the possibility of
dissolving other social ties of a hierarchical order. Apu’s acceptance of
Aparna withdraws her from an order whose (extreme and contingent)
sign is the compulsion to marry within appropriate social rank even at
the cost of personal ruin. Equally important is the fact that Aparna can
actually fit into Apu’s newly constituted space despite its penury, and
can provide the companionship of Apu’s romantic idyll. The narrat-
ive clearly transcends any plausibility criteria here, although the entire
relationship between Apu and Aparna—from its arrangement, through
the romance after marriage to the death of Aparna in childbirth—has
been explained by certain critics as a sociologically observable pheno-
menon, and Ray is extolled here for identifying with and capturing
‘traditional Indian realities’. The point is missed by pondering whether
such things happen, don’t happen, or should happen.10 Evidently,
these events could have happened, but the question is, why have these
been chosen over others, and what symbolic purpose do they serve? I
would argue that what is at stake is a weaning of the central characters
away from the symbolism of earlier mythic forms and contemporary
‘traditional realities’, into an image for a new society.
This making present of an ideal form is transient, and is abruptly
brought to a close with Aparna’s death in childbirth. Yet another de-
fining loss found on the death of a woman. Is the narrative form Ray
explores taking an obsessive shape, something to be explored in rather
different terms in Devi (The Goddess, 1960) and Charulata (The
Lonely Wife, 1964)? I will suggest that it is, and clarify its ultimate
symbolic trajectory, a direction that may help us place the ramifica-
tions of the trilogy more clearly. For the moment, in the context of
Apur Sansar, the function can be clearly and specifically delimited.
If in the earlier films the death finally severed the protagonist from
the past, here it provides a decisive way of rending his agency in the
10 ‘Fate had brought together a perfect idyll of happiness; then reality ended it
(death in childbirth was a common fate of women in those days) and grief had to give
way before duty . . . Apur Sansar . . . is informed by a deeply, freshly felt Indianness
going back to the archetypes of tradition in a kind of personal discovery. It is suffused
with warmth and compassion without any awareness of the old worldly values it is
internalising. The director is at one with his characters, reaching out into the heart of
the traditional realities through them, seeing them as part of the great, timeless process
of life.’ Chidananda Das Gupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Delhi, Vikas, 1980, 45.
present, his will to generate new forms within the contemporary, sug-
gesting that there is something fatalistically conceived about the pos-
sibilities of a plenitude in the present. The modernity enterprise is,
to draw upon Sudipta Kaviraj’s evocative phrase, doomed to inhabit
an unhappy consciousness, an unhappy present.11 Apu renounces his
son, Kajol and the world, and retreats into nature to dissolve himself
into labour, here a mining enterprise. The renunciation is symbolically
sealed with Apu’s casting to the winds of the pages of his manuscript,
his inscription of ideal form into the present.
The present, doomed to provide only an unhappy habitation,
nevertheless has to be returned to. Pulu seeks Apu out, and urges him
to accept responsibility for his son. The space Apu returns to, the land-
ed estate where Apu married Aparna, once a teeming, animated space,
now emerges as a hollow form, depleted of human presence. Everyone
seems to have died or left. All that is left is the taciturn grandfather—
he who had been prepared to sacrifice his daughter into a disastrous
marriage to uphold traditional norms—a paterfamilias increasingly
unwilling to shoulder the burden of looking after his daughter’s unruly
son. The space is suggestive of expressionistic tonalities that will sur-
face with a rather different symbolic weight in the following year in
Devi. Before our eyes, a space that had provided a romanticized retreat
for the city-dweller now acquires the aura of a haunted house, a bhoot
bangla, a ghostly form now enveloped in the past. The little boy Kajol
suggests the dissonances at work, with his startlingly contemporary
look, clothed in shorts and a T-shirt, and flaunting a brash and ir-
reverent disposition. Iconically, he has no place in the dying space, and
the father, vanquished in his bid to manufacture his own time, carries
him away into an unspecified future.
In contrast to the earlier films, with their emphasis on traditional
spaces and beckoning futures, Apur Sansar suggests a bid for telos, an
unravelling of past desires within the armature of the present. With
its tramways, coffee houses, contiguous railway lines, and everyday
bustle, it produces an image of the contemporary, but as a time which
can never be settled, and must give way before unspecifiable futures.
It is as if this is the symbolic register, the place of narrative authoriza-
tion, through which all previous representations can be made sense of,
where they were destined to arrive. But, at the point of arrival, the
11 Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness.
present slips, lacks a sense of possibility, and can only project itself for-
ward in time.
2. The Unfinished Agenda of History

This present is then the place of a historical perspective, that symbolic
register of temporal distance outlined across the rail tracks in Pather
Panchali, fleetingly registered by Apu in Aparajita, and then sought to
be made over into an embodied form in Apur Sansar. It is founda-
tionally governed by a sense of unresolved pasts and a lack of present
certitudes. Having deferred its realization, Ray turns back once again
into formal history, in two significant films of 1960 and 1964, reite-
rating the caesura of the present by seeking to understand the logic of
irresolution, to understand why the present cannot emerge into view
and through the conviction of embodied being.
I only want to refer to Devi to draw attention to a significant con-
tinuity with the formal structures and symbolic hurdles deployed by
Apur Sansar. This is the scenario of the father–daughter relationship,
and the enveloping, shrouded entity of the feudal household. It is
remarkable that what we see as a cantankerous, unwilling reposit-
ory of authority at the conclusion of the Apu trilogy should emerge,
full blown, as overwhelming power just a year later in Devi. Chhabi
Biswas’ envisioning of his daughter-in-law, played once again by
Sharmila Tagore, in the role of the goddess, is of course framed as a
critique of superstition, and therefore revisits the terrain of the nine-
teenth-century reform movement. Significant here is not only the op-
position of rationalism to dark and irrational imaginings, but also the
delineation of a field of persistent power. Here, in Ray’s first directly
political film, the failure of the present to come into view derives from
the way the power of unresolved pasts has crystallized as the unconsci-
ous of the contemporary. There is a strange and asymmetric mirroring
of past forms of power in the two films. In Apur Sansar past forms
are bereft of authority, while in Devi, they exercise an encompassing
and erotic regime. It is as if, registering that the moment of arrival has
fatally slipped, there is a turning back, a bringing of the past back into
perspective to capture the insidious logic of its hold.
One trajectory we have tracked lies in the fashioning of a narrative
form which, through the death of women characters reiterates the
significance of the past, and, in Apur Sansar, the slipping away of the
present from the grasp of subjectivity. With Devi there is a return to
the past as inescapable locus of the present, not as something to be
remembered, nurtured and cultivated, but as a place of nightmares and
cloistered space. Here the loss of the woman comes across as the pro-
duct of specific relations of domination and subordination, in which
the woman is rendered a figure who does not know herself, who has
submitted to the desires of the other. In all these films the city and mod-
ern experience is constituted through a male protagonist, but in this
case it is not so much an issue of the necessity of remembering that
which you no longer are, but of confrontation with a past which will
not allow you escape, which is not memory but insidious presence. As
opposed to the succession of enchantments that have defined the nar-
rative trajectory of Apu’s opening world, Devi essays a dark mesmer-
ism to immerse the contemporary spectator.
One should point to the ambiguity that surrounds the source of this
anxiety. For the opening images of the film conjure up not only the
obsessions of feudal authority, but of popular fascination with the Kali
image. In its opening passage the image is rendered in the manner of
iconic form whose increasingly shorter distance from the camera sug-
gests a hypnotic interiorizing of the image for the spectator. In this
sense the film draws on a widely influential cultural artefact to inter-
rogate a deeper anxiety about popular perceptions, not only their
authoritative embodiment in the figure of power. This critique of not
only older forms but of the way popular perception has been sub-
servient to them is, of course, quite foundational to an art cinema
involved in cultivating a rationalist sensibility in the spectator. This
project leaves a somewhat constrained imprint on this work, as if the
particular method it employs to negotiate the thickets of history to
understand the impasse of the contemporary has limited the possibili-
ties of perception.
Something of the nature of the impasse is suggested in the way one
form of the popular, that subject to the sway of feudal authority and
superstitious belief, is pitted against another, older form, harking to a
pre-modern phase of devotional culture. Kapur’s insightful analysis of
the film turns on the way the plebeian recipient of the fateful miracle,
the poor man whose ailing child has been healed by Dayamoyi, re-
turns to invoke Ramprasad’s keertan and turns a pitiful gaze on the
entrapped girl-goddess.12
12
Kapur, ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’, 79–108.
If Devi writes the unfinished agenda of history as the unconsci-
ous of the contemporary, and is therefore an overtly political statement
in Ray’s early work, it may do so in such a way as to foreclose on a cer-
tain dynamic way of thinking through the power of myths, images,
and the popular energies they channel, constraining the possibilities of
a complex stance on the legacies which the contemporary is heir to and
which have been transposed into the domain of modern popular visual
culture.13 This is surely one of the fields Ray gestures to in the way the
image captures audience perception in the opening passage of the film,
and then seeks to enframe it, to put quotation marks around it, and
construct a perspective and a distance on the compendium of power
and superstition that compose it.
In contrast Charulata, the extraordinary film which marks the end
of a certain phase of Ray’s engagement with the past, reinscribes the
popular in such a way as to forge not a distance but an alliance with
it for modernism. In this film the director’s obsessive return to the
subordinated place of women in discourses of history and modernity
in the early work lays bare a certain logic of aesthetic inquiry, finding
resources to provide a voice for a hitherto inarticulate subjectivity.

‘The zoom is a remarkable invention—not just as a time-saving
substitute for tracking, but in its own right for its power of varying
the emphasis.’
Charulata (1964)
Partha Chatterjee has argued how the emerging nationalist discourse
of the late nineteenth century fashioned an inner world secured against
13 I think this is Kapur’s stance; however, there may be a wariness, in her own ac-
count, of seeing the main objective of Ray’s critique as both the modern popular as well
as the feudal. I would also think her very suggestive analysis of the film sits a little too
easily in the paradigm of oppositions which have been the bane of studies of Indian
cinema, the opposition of Ghatak to Ray as someone better equipped to deal with the
complex mesh of signs, symbols, and narratives that compose our contemporary.
While the power and complexity of Ghatak is not at issue here, my attempt has been
to show the imponderable moments and layered strategies that the rationalist other
accesses as well, significantly complicating, and perhaps enabling us to recover, a
possible rationalist project; in a sense then, to pluralize our recovery of filmmaking
traditions which we should attend to as part of a contemporary practice.
the inroads of colonial modernity. Whatever the travails encountered
by men in the outer world of colonial disempowerment, this inner do-
main would shore up nationalist identity against the inevitable adjust-
ments to modernity of social, political, and intellectual attitudes.14
Feminist scholarship has argued that the home in fact functioned in
the 1870s and 1880s as the place where the difficulties faced by the
middle-class male in an unequal and racist public life were com-
pensated. This space of tradition was the realm over which he could
reign supreme, even if, as in many other domains of colonial ex-
perience, concepts of the traditional had been reshaped in terms of
modern codes, in this case those of house management and child rear-
ing. But this home was a space subject to repression, and women had
to shoulder the burden of representing a traditional identity protected
from the inroads of a hierarchical colonial culture.15
In the character of Charu’s husband Bhupati, Charulata focuses
on a character who precedes this understanding of nationalist politics,
one who embraces Western ideas and is focused on England as the
birthplace of progressive values and drives to liberty. The film subjects
this view to a critique, suggesting that Bhupati’s liberalism depends on
his wealth, and there is something ironic about the way a celebration
of political victory for the English liberals is presented within the for-
mat of a musical evening modelled on the patronal traditions of the
landed elite and urban gentry. Bhupati’s indifference to cultural prac-
tices, especially here poetry and novels, deprives him of an understand-
ing of the sources of energy in his wife. In the film’s portraiture of
Charu, this energy is centred on memory, on the interior, and on the
creative possibilities of speaking to the cultural resources of the village
past. The film also appears to develop a somewhat affectionate critique
of the rather timeless ruminations and metaphorical relationship to
life embodied in the brother-in-law Amal’s poetry. Nevertheless, while
distancing itself from these male characters, Charulata draws on the
reformist tradition to critique it from within, as it were. This does not
so much generate nctives on it, but recalls and reiterates perspectives,
such as those represented in Tagore’s story, which existed at the time.
14 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments.

15 Sarkar, Hindu Wife; also Partha Chatterjee, ‘Nationalism and the Woman’s
Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women: Essays in
Colonial History, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1989.
Ray’s intervention is not simply one of transposition and reitera-
tion, but, as in the case of the transformation of Santiniketan practices,
is one of constructing a modernist perspective on earlier practices and
representations by carving out a distinctive niche for the spectator
through the cinematic frame. And it is here, I think, that a new arti-
culation of modernist and popular practices comes together. Over the
previous films, we observe the way in which the popular emerges in
distinct comic fashion in films such as Parash Pathar (The Philoso-
pher’s Stone, 1957), and subsequently in Mahapurush (Holy Man,
1965); and Monihara (1961) exhibits Ray’s engagement with popu-
lar genres such as the ghost story. Ray himself draws on the lineage
of the caricaturist Sukumar, his father, for this work, but in Charulata
it would appear that in the crucial opening sequence of the film, he
mobilizes the popular in alliance with the distancing, scrutinizing in-
tent of a modernist style.
In the justly famous opening sequence, we are alert to a highly self-
conscious deployment of the camera, with Ray taking recourse to
elaborate travelling shots, zooms and an assertion of the symbolic
functions of the frame and the scene as spatial orders. The veranda run-
ning along the house’s first floor is recurrently used to define relations
between people, and to provide the spectator with a perspective, across
the landing, other than that of the characters.
The opening sequence describes Charu’s exploration of the living
space of the house. The space is divided between Bhupati’s workspace,
and that of the library and recreation, a division between politics and
culture. Looking through the books on Bhupati’s library shelf, Charu
chants the name of her hero Bankim (displacing the embroidering of
a B on the husband’s hanky in the opening shot onto an intimately
felt cultural register). This invocation invites the spectator to share
with the character a common interiority shaped by the literary do-
main. This is about reaching into oneself, into a register of the inte-
rior that the film elevates into a domain of substantive meaning, where
subjectivities which are deeper, more valid, than the world of the poli-
tical public are reawakened. The opera glasses then playfully taken by
Charu to look at the street below, ironically emphasize her separation
from the world outside. Her spectatorship of the street scene, relayed
across a series of window frames, whimsically renders the world of
everyday street life as a spectacle remote from the subject’s experience.
The spectacles here function not so much as a vehicle for enhancing
visual powers, as for providing a visual distraction from the isolation
and monotony of the cloistered space of the household. The develop-
ment of a thematics of externality/interiority comes full circle when
Charu subjects her husband to the ironic, exteriorizing gaze of the
opera glasses. (Figs 31–33, pp. 186–7.)
At one level, what Ray provides here is a modernist framing of a
history through devices of spatial staging and distantiation, as some-
thing being enacted for a spectator at a remove from the events being
narrated. Ray himself spoke rather allusively about the possibilities of
the zoom for varying the emphasis, but the rhythms of his usage of this
device come to be distinctly jolting rather than functional, jettison-
ing us into a closer view or into sudden distance. What is remark-
able too is the way the female protagonist comes to participate in
this distantiation, as she too is privy to the systems of knowledgeable
distance provided by Ray’s framing for the spectator of the film. Of
course, our gaze is different from hers; where ours is akin to the dis-
tance visited on the world of Apu in the first two films of the tri-
logy, as emerging from outside the diegesis, in the case of Charu it
is a distance to dominant ways of thinking of the world within the
narrative.
Fig. 31
Fig. 32
Fig. 33
Figs 31–33: Charulata, Satyajit Ray, 1964, Bazaar Vision.

Equally significant, I would argue, is the mobilization of the
popular into the perspective. The particular figure who draws Charu’s
attention, a pot-bellied man who is rolling along on the street, is the
type of figure favoured by the comic imagination of bazaar art and
satirical humour, of which latter tradition Ray is of course an inheri-
tor.16 Charu’s playful tracking of his perambulation also allows her to
look at other items of street life, such as an entertainer with a monkey,
and to catch the aural rhythms of the vendor. We may recall earlier
scenes, in Pather Panchali, which conjure with the fascination of child-
ren for the world heralded by the itinerant bioscope peddler, and
indeed, there is a childlike quality to Charu’s mimicking of this vision,
this invocation of mechanisms of vision for ‘distant’ views which are
actually physically proximate but socially estranged. But this is not
merely ironic reflection on the conditions of a particular alienated situ-
ation. In form, this vision is very much aligned to a different order of
representation; normally, one could say that a dominant, realist form
of representation embeds another within it, by quoting it. However,
there seems to be something a little more happening here. For we can-
not but recall that the bazaar form especially cultivated a sending up
of bhadralok pretensions to status, though often from a strictly chau-
vinist perspective which mocked the man who would allow his west-
ernized wife to dominate him.17 Here, there is an adaptation, where
Charu’s opera glasses, charged with the energy of bazaar vision, aligns
with this vision to turn it on her husband, Bhupati, caught in the pose
of serious contemplation. The cut to the viewing subject registers a
glittering, amused look, as if animated now by a caricatural energy.
The marginality of the protagonist is thus converted into a position
of articulate perspective on the world through the energies both of a
16 Tapati Guha-Thakurta has suggested that this invocation of the popular is closer
to Sukumar’s satirical form, as in Abol Tabol, than to the bazaar realism of Kalighat
patachitra. (See Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Artists, Artisans and Mass Picture Produc-
tion in Bengal’, South Asia Research 8 (1), May 1988, 3–45.) While this distinction
is probably accurate, the form Ray employs is clearly at a remove from a pre-modern
popular of the type Kapur has identified for Devi. In this sense Ray here moves into
the domain of modern print culture and its representations, a moment of representations
within modernity where the distinctions between high and low were not so marked.
See also Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occi-
dental Orientations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, for an account of
Sukumar Ray’s work.
17 See Guha-Thakurta, ‘Artists, Artisans and Mass Picture Production in Bengal’.
literary imagination and a street culture. Ray subsequently deploys
other mechanisms of popular, melodramatic contrivance, such as in
the representation of Charu’s cunning brother who embezzles from
Bhupati, and also the melodramatic effects of storms to signal emo-
tional peripeteia. As I will point out later, the specifically popular genre
of visual representation is also returned to, and in a rather suggestive
way.
Ray builds a suggestive echoing weave around a significant, swing-
ing motion: from a focus on the opera glasses swinging at Charu’s side,
through the rise and fall of Charu on the swing during her dalliance
with Amal in the garden, to the literary magazine that dangles at
Charu’s side as she rushes to meet Amal. There seems to me to be a
complex set of exchanges in this visually condensed, elaborated and
recondensed echoing chamber. The devices of visualization and pub-
licization which bookend this series, through the opera glasses and the
literary publication, define different forms for an interfacing of self
with the outside, and are mediated by the crucial reverie of the garden,
where we are invited to physically register the lineaments of Charu’s
erotic being as it opens out through her relationship to Amal. This
elaboration of the earlier motif into a fully fledged phenomenology is
abruptly subject to a rending when it is revealed that Amal’s compan-
ionship derives not from any independent desire or interest in Charu,
but from Bhupati’s request that his brother look after and cultivate his
lonely wife. Charu gets Amal to promise that what he has been inspired
to write will remain private, and, when he transgresses this injunction,
she is determined to teach him a lesson, and to upstage him in his
writerly aspirations. For her struggle to write about her most intimate
memories of village life in the essay ‘My Village’, Ray generates a
suggestive montage. Some of this recuperates the lost world of his early
village films, conjuring up an uncontaminated, pre-modern experi-
ence. There are also elements of folk performance, jatra, in the medley
of images Charu conjures up. One way of thinking about this montage
is to see it as the interior pitted against the modern and the urban; but
there is an intriguing discrepancy where, breaking the logic of the
images which apparently inhabit Charu’s interior life, there emerges
the shadowed, profiled figure of a young boy with top hat and whisky
bottle tipsily weaving around. We have here the surfacing of a
performative figure that again smacks of the bazaar, doesn’t quite
belong with the pristine images of village life, and recalls Charu’s
earlier encounter with popular forms. This articulation of a fragment,
a trace, of mediations that have come to reside within the character’s
subjectivity is strangely liberating, refusing a coherence in the consti-
tution of a self entirely other from modern urban experience. The
secret and productive compact of the first sequence thus resurfaces,
charging Charu’s face-off with her opponents with a sense of compli-
cated resources and alliances.
Whatever the complications of the way this interiority is figured,
the triumph of its assertion through Charu’s publication in a better-
known magazine than Amal has managed is an emphatically bitter
one. For the interiority within which Amal has come to acquire an
affective presence was not something to be publicized, to be brought
out into the open, but to be secretly nurtured. There is a strange viol-
ence to the way Charu has been driven to reveal herself, as if she has
been drawn into the hitherto distanced external world of her male
adversaries’ desires. At one level the politics of articulating Charu’s
subjectivity as inhabiting a different world from that of the men would
seem to resonate with that opposition between inside and outside that
has been theorized in the constitution of nationalist consciousness,
the laying claim to a more authentic consciousness. As we know, this
authenticity is processed through modern forms, and the montage of
the interior has suggested how exactly this is composed of a series of
mediations—from Ray’s earlier representations of village life, through
to the mediated forms of popular representation. However, it is more
than just laying claim to something truer, for Charu’s expression of
self comes across as a bitter submission to her articulation into an order
with which she does not identify. It is the revelation of something
not only different but something personal that is connected with an
unacknowledged desire fraught with transgression. It is here, through
the thickets of Charu’s desire, that Ray can both put a particular cri-
tical slant on the subordinated modernity of his forebears with-
out succumbing to an essentialist cultural formulation, for the village
of Charu’s interiority is connected with desires that would not
be admissible within ‘traditional’ formulations about womanhood.
The unfinished agenda of history that Ray plots here has a distinctly
interventionist quality quite at a remove from the dark ruminations
of his Devi.
It is with Charulata that some of the structure of the double-take,
the spirals of enchantment and loss, of romance and alienated viewing
that have recurrently centred on women characters now assumes a
clearer frame, urging a retrospective view. It is as if the sacrifices and
sacrificing of Durga and Sarbajaya, while obviously in a different and
‘traditional’ cultural register from the character of Charu, are opened
to scrutiny from a new, elaborated perspective. In the process, so too
are the ‘destinal’ narratives against which these lives are located. The
question becomes then not only one of an inevitable movement away
from these figures and the traditional forms of being they embody, but
an introspection about the very route the spectator has, willy-nilly,
been taken along. It is when a particular form of the modern has crys-
tallized into a determinate hierarchy, into the world of politics and
letters, of inside and outside, of the home and the world, within an
elaborated urban configuration, that a definite pause is given to the
movement of modernity. At this point its male vehicle appears con-
trived and self-indulgent, fundamentally lacking in the inner life and
imaginative resources. What is suggestive is that this de-authentication
is not founded on a counter-identification with a fiction of organic
being, but rather on a contrary image, in the heroine, of an involunt-
ary and conflicted psychology, and an interiority pictured as a modern
montage of forms rather than one of sacred and pristine essence. The
figure of Apu’s little wife stands outside this retrospective configura-
tion, because, in terms of character focalization, she is a subset, a pro-
duct, of Apu’s desires, conforming to an image congruent with the bid
to authenticate, constitute, and embody the modern within the pri-
vacy of personal relations. Her tragedy is not her own, but that of Apu’s
failed tryst with the present. Sharmila Tagore’s Dayamoyi is similarly
a plaything of superior authorities, though replayed to capture this
subjection as a form of tragedy.
3. The Contemporary
Through the actress Madhabi Mukherjee, Ray was to carry his re-
flections on the discontents of modern womanhood forward into
the contemporary with works such as Mahanagar (The Big City,
1963) and Kapurush (Coward, 1965). For my purposes here, I want
to track the complex negotiations of his formal response to the con-
temporary through two instances which capture the difficulty of his
project, Aranyer Din Ratri and Jana Aranya, the latter probably his
last substantial film. The reason I choose these films is that they ap-
pear to engage the contemporary as a problem for representation,
as something which cannot be accessed coherently because the sources
of authentication cannot be firmly figured. Deprived of the double-
take of modernist method which had provided such rich ambiguity
to the earlier work culminating in Charulata, the work from now on
provides, at its most productive, the trope of irony, a kind of remote,
comic view on an increasingly dystopian perspective on the middle
class. The bid to develop a countervailing moral economy to contain
this irony, and to locate a moral voice, invariably in the figure of a
female character, underlines a steady thinning of politically purposeful
engagement.
Aranyer Din Ratri

(Days and Nights in the Forest, 1969)
Ray’s 1969 film provides the prelude to what is often referred to as his
city trilogy, Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Seemabadha (Com-
pany Limited, 1971) and Jana Aranya (Middleman, 1975). It is also
very much a city film; although it takes place in the forests of Palamau,
it arguably captures the interactive dynamics, unthinking behaviour
and arrogance, and hierarchies of an urban middle class in an invent-
ive and playful way. The group, composed of two business executives,
a sportsman, and a hanger-on, carry ties from the days of school and
college, and reproduce within their social ensemble a microcosm of a
certain type of city relationship. The story functions as a moral tale,
where the men are meant to be shown the petty inwardness of their
ways, and urged to reflect and reform—at least this is intended for
those who are capable of such self-analysis which, admittedly, is only
pertinent to two of the group. The moral frame that Ray’s narrative
presents is routed through the character played by Sharmila Tagore as
Aparna, part of a family who periodically visits the area. But, for our
purpose, it is the combination of this moral register with two other
registers that is of significance, that of the tribal environment within
which the story takes place, and the presence of Aparna’s sister-in-law,
Jaya, the widow played by Kaberi Bose.
The wonderful ensemble of the Calcuttans, played for a comedy
of comeuppance, their dignity undone, lack of values exposed, veers
towards a darker, serious denouement. Issues of repression and desire
surface in the latter part of the film, and in a way in which signifiers
of identity become detached and mobile. Strangely, the most glaring
instance of contrivance, of blatantly inadequate representation in Ray’s
Fig. 34
Fig. 35
Figs 34 and 35: Aranyer Din Ratri, Satyajit Ray, 1969, ‘Tribal’ Semiosis.
realist trajectory, the performance of Simi Garewal, in blackface, as a
sensual, childlike tribal woman, may provide a somewhat off-colour
clue. In the final section of the film Ray interweaves three different
spaces and relationships: a sexual encounter between the sportsman
Hari and the tribal woman in the forest, followed by a payment of
money and an assault on Hari by the servant whom he had unjustly
charged with theft and had beaten; Asim (Soumitra Chatterjee) and
Aparna, as they wander towards the resthouse; and Jaya and Sanjay,
as they retire to her bungalow for a cup of coffee. The last is one of the
most extraordinary passages in Ray’s work. In the expressionistically
lit interiors of the widow’s bungalow, Jaya emerges, heavily adorned in
tribal jewellery, an overwhelming image of desire that the man is com-
pletely bewildered by. If Asim and Aparna provide a normative centre
to the film, in which the woman provides a moral education for the
man and the possibilities of carefully calibrated romance in the future,
the figures on either side do not abide by any such normative frame.
Forest and sexually charged interior provide the mise-en-scène for the
grasping, petulant sportsman from the city and the widow whose de-
sires have been repressed for so long. The mobility of tribal signs in this
interwoven tapestry is suggestive. Part of Asim and Aparna’s exchange
takes place against the stylized backdrop of the plains along which
tribal peoples move, a backdrop that frames a moral discourse with
which it has no intersection.18 Quite contrary are the developments on
either side of this rather anaemic centre, in which the mise-en-scène of
nature and primitivist signification course through expressively and
through displacement. Whatever the intention of the director, Ray’s
use of Simi Garewal, a figure of urban chic to masquerade as a tribal
serves to loosen the sign and relay it to the figure of the widow, releasing
turbulent energies that cannot be articulated through the normative
discourse of the civilized centre. (Figs 34–35, p. 193.)
None of this has to do with the adequacy or otherwise of the film’s
representation of the tribals, or, indeed, to a thematics of authenti-
city. Like its main characters, Ray had fled a city where political and
18
One may recall that these were the years in which Miklos Jancso’s work was being
showcased in international festivals. In the stylization of this scene there is someth-
ing of the choreographed forms of the Hungarian’s work, but in a way which does
not resonate within some larger organic movement, but as drained signification,
an abstracted form against which the moral discourse of the middle class can play it-
self out.
economic circumstances had become increasingly difficult in the
Naxalite years, and something of the irony he visits on his characters’
tourism, their voyeuristic externality to the places they visit, is surely
self-ironic; the environment is used to bounce off the characters, as a
stylistic vector against which to articulate different forms of urban sub-
jectivity, rather than a properly narrativized entity in itself. Neverthe-
less, it becomes a crucial resource within the diegetic world, and brings
to visibility what urban middle-class forms do not seem to have the
wherewithal to relay.
Clearly, the realist form employed here constantly seeks to address
other forms to speak about itself, its interiority, its repressions, its
desires, above all, and once again, in relation to the figure of a woman
deprived expression of desire within respectable society. The function
of the popular employed in the urban environs of Charulata gives way
to another set of energies within the environment tracked by Sunil
Ganguli’s story. In the most interesting of Ray’s city films of the 1970s,
Jana Aranya, we find that the increasingly strident moral discourse
which Ray has used to define his relationship to the contemporary—
through the Sharmila Tagore characters of Nayak (The Hero, 1967),
Aranyer Din Ratri, and Seemabadha, has now come to a point of cri-
sis and, in my view, a productive one. For the voice is no longer the
articulating centre against which excesses are managed on either side,
as in Aranyer Din Ratri. Instead it itself starts to lose a sense of clear con-
viction, lacks the force of characterization, even of enigmatic cons-
truction of the type represented in the characters played by Sharmila
Tagore.
Ray took recourse to the work of Shankar in this film, in order to
catch some of the energy of street life and observation, especially the
caricatural domain which he himself was so adept at. But a clear mis-
match starts developing between the drives of coherent character for-
mation and the multiple diegesis through which the narrative world
is put together. Ray here uses the following narrative forms:
(1) the main story line, centred on the lead character, Somnath,
and centred on the family, composed of an upright, retired
father, a cynical elder brother and a nurturing sister-in-law.
(2) the simulation of a documentary mode, as in the opening
scene in the examination hall, or the ironic tracking of an ap-
plication through the postal system; this also incorporates the
anecdote, in which marginal narrative characters and situa-
tions are shown to effect the overall course of the narrative;
this is the realm of contingency, puttivng a face and a name
to an anonymous process, for example the person who exam-
ines Somnath’s script has misplaced his spectacles, effecting his
exam result, which in turn leads to his downfall.
(3) a performative mode, deployed for the glittering gallery of
characters who provide Somnath with an immoral education.
It is the latter which steadily displaces the other types of narrative
world, producing a singularly discordant text within the Ray oeuvre.
And the very anonymity of Ray’s lead character, whose lack of strong
personality and screen presence is underlined by the shrouding ef-
fects of Ray’s lighting strategies, indicates the fulfilment, unwitting
or otherwise, of a structural effect. For the thematic of a man with-
out personality, suitable as it might be to Ray’s vision of a corrupt and
corrupting society, also provides for a peculiar evacuation of character
point of view. This is significant, if we consider that the classical
deployment of shot-reverse-shot for the induction of Ray’s gallery of
types into the film may be said to strangely obscure the figure in the
reverse field.
Although this may be to stretch a point, it is as if the cinema of nar-
rative integration that Ray had been singularly adept at constructing
within the Indian context has been combined with a cinema of at-
tractions. Film studies has generated the opposition of these forms to
contrast a cinema which successfully linked shots and sequences with-
in a stylistically consistent logic of narrative causality, and a cinema
which functioned in a segmented, intermittent, and tonally discor-
dant way.19 The cinema of attractions, originally employed to describe
the sheer, unnarrativized pleasure of looking observable in the single-
take films of early cinema, could be transposed to highlight a form that
invites the spectator to enjoy a joke, take pleasure in a song, or immerse
oneself not in the real but in its excessively relayed performance, as in
caricature, mimicry, and masquerade. Such a soliciting of the spectator’s
engagement does not necessarily require that these segments have to be
subordinated to the narrative logic within which they are placed. In
this sense the perverse pleasure these segments conjure up appear ir-
reducible to the moral narrative that frames them. This does not mean
19
Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’, 63–70.
that such fragmentation offers the possibility of an alternative read-
ing of the text, or suggest an alternative ethics to the moralism which
seeks to compensate the spectator for the de-authenticated subject of
Ray’s late films. But the distracted rather than focused disposition of
the story-telling suspends form precipitously, casting a shadow not
over the later work, but over the very possibility of a classicism and
integrity of form, and thus the bid to conquer the real ideologically.

It has been the argument here that such a classicism was never a straight-
forward matter in Ray’s oeuvre. The conflictual fields of naturalism
and modernism in the trilogy, the subterranean alliance of modernist
method with popular representational practices, and the centrifugal
formal pressures to decentre the perspective of the later work through
displacements and fragmentary irruptions all suggest the tensions at
work. If the process of authentication in Ray’s work at first glance
draws for its resources on painterly modes, literary naturalism, and
Tagore’s novels in the early work, it does so through an enframing of
these forms through a foregrounding of the cinematic apparatus, plac-
ing the spectator at a self-conscious remove from the original source.
Putting the spectator phenomenologically out of phase with this
point of representational origin, these films correspondingly displace
the locus of authentication onto the double-take. This constitutes an
awareness of the way perception is split between knowing that you are
watching this here, now, through this medium, and desiring to re-
cover a there, then, and the lineaments of another sensorium, of paint-
erly images and words. Moinak Biswas argues that this does not amount
to the successful displacement by the cinema of other media, and other
histories, as was increasingly argued for in the drive to create an auto-
nomous cinema sense in 1950s Bengal; rather, it signalled a layering
of forms and histories into the cinematic.20 Nevertheless, one would
argue that in Ray’s work there is a transposition of literary into audio-
visual elements of a very distinct type, and that there is a stylistic inter-
vention that alerts you, the spectator, that it is you, not a character
within the fiction, and not only the camera, looking.21
20
Moinak Biswas, ‘Bengali Film Debates: The Literary Liaison Revisited’, Journal
of the Moving Image 1, Calcutta, 1999, 1–13.
21 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Viewership and Democracy’, in Vasudevan, ed., Making
Meaning in Indian Cinema, 267–96.

My suggestion has been that this casts a different light on the poli-
tics of authentication, and displaces Ray’s films from the bid to authen-
ticate the nation-state by constructing a national narrative that seamlessly
traverses a point of origin to the modernity of the present. In high-
lighting the double-take, the dual temporality of Ray’s modernist
method interrogates and distances us from the passage into modernity
by reinvesting that we have lost. Charulata elaborates this interroga-
tion of a male modernity, while laying claim, in the name of the mod-
ern, to the unravelling of a complicated montage and a transgressive
rendering of the interiority repressed in the history of modernity.
Along with the rather differently calibrated destabilization of a
moral-classical form that sought to offer a pedagogical tale to the de-
authenticated middle-class addressee of Ray’s later films, where do
these observations leave us in terms of a politics of culture? It would
appear to me that formulations positing a straightforward relation-
ship between politics and culture, as in the argument that modern
classical forms confirm and reproduce the cultural limits of citizen-
ship in a post-colonial context need to ponder whether a classical
realism has ever worked in such uncomplicated ways. As Kapur notes,
‘[even] if art practice is ostensibly harnessed to the operation of the
ideology and cultural policy of the new national state, creative prac-
tice is usually heterodox. There is a certain rebellion and also a dis-
sembling radicalism among artists. Quite often there may be utopian
formulations or, on the other hand, subversive symbols that have
political import. Complemented by even an episodic intransigence
on the political front, it is enough to confound generalized theses on
politics and culture.’22
22 Kapur, ‘Sovereign Subject’, 202–3.

II
Cinema and Territorial

Imagination in the Subcontinent:
Tamilnadu and India
Introduction
I
n the second part of this book I want to consider some of the exist-
ing formulations about the territoriality of Indian film, specifical-
ly in relation to the categories of the national and the regional.
This section uses the vantage point of Tamil film interventions in the
Hindi market to consider the question of the territories within which
films circulate and to which they refer, and the larger question of the
relationship between identity and territory posed by nationalism and
successive changes in the nation-state form. This is primarily explor-
ed through the director Mani Rathnam’s bid to draw the narrative of
Tamil identity into a relationship with the pan-Indian nation. I also
here further my exploration of the melodramatic mode by considering
certain shifts in the contemporary architecture of popular film form,
specifically in relation to the new functions of the couple and modern-
ized family forms in channelling spectatorial engagement.
Taken in a strong sense, the term national suggests an invented
ethnic identification, seeking out and prescribing the commonalities
of language, territorial habitation, customs, heritage, and history. This
identification can function in various ways, bidding for maximum
inclusiveness, but also threatening to exclude and marginalize sub-
jects in a multi-religious, linguistic, and regional culture such as India’s.
Such an invention of the national was generated out of an encoun-
ter with colonialism, involving, as I have argued in chapter 3, a com-
plicated relationship to an imposed modernity, and emphasizing a
traditional and archaic identity against the seductions of modern so-
cial, cultural, and sexual dispositions. However, as Paul Willemen has
argued, there is a distinction between the national and the nationalist.
In his theorization, the national relates to the specificity of a political,
economic, and cultural formation, its complex layering and conflicts,
and cannot be assimilated to the identity and territorial protocols of
202 Cinema and Territorial Imagination
the nation-state or of nationalist identity movements.1 Further, the
national may connote a relatively unselfconscious condition of habi-
tation and social and cultural intercourse. Here shared histories, every-
day life, the regularity and repetition of circulatory/migratory forms,
and a historical familiarity and interpenetration of linguistic and reli-
gious practices all compose a less prescriptive, lived relationship in a
historically and politically determined territory, its inhabitants and
its modes of cultural consumption. Arguably, the emergence of the
nation-state, with determinate borders, rules of inclusion and ex-
clusion, and the deployment of representational politics, exercised a
pressure on such ‘fuzzy’ senses of nationhood; however, in its very re-
presentational logic, and the multiple constituencies it has to man-
age, the nation-state can also function as a field of resistance to a more
monolithic nationalist ethnos.
I would like to think about how the national is differentially and
often pragmatically composed in the cinema, both under colonialism
and after; how we need to distinguish between nation-state projects for
cinema and a differentiated spectrum of the cinema of the subconti-
nent. This involves engagement with several national projects rather
than one, and may even skirt the national in favour of a wider arc of
cultural engagement. In this last sense, we have the outlines, yet to be
properly explored, of a transnational vernacular form in the cinema
quite at a remove from the Hollywood model.
1. The Formation of a Pan-Indian Market:

Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema
of Social Reform
One of the issues which recent historical scholarship has raised is the
question of the territories within which the film product circulates. At
one level, these are language territories, with the Hindi territory being
the demographically largest and most lucrative. However, the relation-
ship between culture and language is a complicated one here, because
of the long history of dual versions and dubbing in Indian cinema.2
I need only reiterate the well-known histories of the dual versions
1 ‘The National’, in Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies
and Film Theory, London, British Film Institute, 1994, 206–19.

2
The standard account is, as noted earlier, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian
Film.
Introduction 203
which were undertaken by studios in Calcutta, Poona, and Bombay in
the pre-Independence period; the significance of Madras-made Hindi
films, especially after the success of Gemini’s Chandralekha in 1948;
the flow amongst Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam cinema of films, film-
makers, technicians, and actors; and the renewed success of dubbed
Tamil films after the substantial returns reaped by Roja (1992) in the
Hindi market.
The possibility of translatability suggests a significant level of repli-
cation, reiteration, and even interconnectedness of social, cognitive,
and perceptual histories. One of the conditions of such a convergence
was the multiplication and interconnection of social reform pers-
pectives and movements which emerged to engage with the ideology
and experience of modernity across the colonial territory. Many of
these centred on the status of women within the formation of caste
and religious community. This is represented in the cinema of the
studio period, in films such as Balayogini (K. Subrahmanyam, 1938)
in Tamilnadu, about the phenomenon of the child widow; Kunku
(Marital Mark; V. Shantaram, 1937) and Aadmi (A Man; V. Shantaram,
1939) in Maharashtra, both about women characters subordinated,
respectively, by oppressive marital arrangements and marginalized by
the strictures of an orthodox Hindu social order; Achut Kanya (Untouch-
able Girl; Franz Osten, 1935) and Achut (Untouchable; Chandulal
Shah, 1939), about the problems of untouchability as represented in
the fate of women protagonists. The spread of a certain social reform
logic relating to the Hindu social order found its echo in the delinea-
tion of women suffering under Muslim religious and social ortho-
doxy in a spate of ‘Muslim socials’ between 1943 and 1948, such as
Najma (Mehboob Khan, 1946), Nek Parveen (Virtuous Parveen; S.M.
Yusuf, 1948), and Elaan (The Announcement; Mehboob Khan,
1948). The work of social reform under colonialism has in some hist-
orical arguments been analysed as part of a repressive dimension of
Hindu middle-class nationalism. Here, goes the argument, there was
a historic alliance between colonial authorities and Hindu elites to
fashion a modernizing imperative. This turned on the salvation of
female victims of the ritual order, and reduced the space for female
autonomy as well as social and cultural diversity.3 However, recent
feminist work has argued that there was considerable middle-class
3 Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions’.
patriarchal resistance to such reform initiatives, and that the state often
entered this contentious legal arena out of public compulsion rather
than deliberate intervention.4 In the films I have cited we can indeed
observe a powerful representation of women characters who contested
middle-class orthodoxy and inevitably met with a tragic fate. In films
such as Kunku and Devdas, such features could in turn be related to
a highly dynamic modernist move in filmmaking practices.
A certain network of engagements deriving from educational and
reform initiatives and formations of the public sphere situate the film
genre of the social as part of a remapping of colonial territory into an
overtly modern social enterprise. Another realm of film genre conver-
gence lay in the phenomenon of the saint or devotional film. Working
in particular through musical traditions of worship, these films spoke
to a more local emphasis on accessing the divine beyond brahman-
ical scriptural control. These were selectively moved into the Hindi
market, but demonstrated certain similarities. For example, many of
them drew upon Vaishnavite traditions of worship, and were centred
on a variety of local versions of the child god Krishna. Here was a deity
who could offer the possibilities of a social and gendered porosity in
his allure and in the constitution of a more variegated audience culture.
While a pan-Indian intelligentsia tended to underwrite the value of
the modern social film, and even of the devotional film because it
developed a critique of social hierarchies, such a stance was often pitted
against the persistence of ‘mythological’ films and their avowedly obs-
curantist features. The emergence of the mythological film has often
been interpreted as an aspect of a nationalist, anti-colonial culture, as-
serting an indigenous culture against the domination of American and
British films, and instituting a local industry.5 However, the propo-
nents of modern social change castigated producers and audiences
for the continued hold of the genre over the industry.6 The stunt film,
another popular genre, was also never the focus of critical engagement.
4 For example, Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation.

5 Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era’.
6
For example, D. Bhaskara Rao, ‘Attention Viewers! It is Your Duty to Ban Mytho-
logical Films!’, Roopavani, June 1948, translated from the Telugu by Uma Maheshwari,
a publication for the ‘Workshop on Telugu Cinema’ organized by Anveshi, Hyderabad,
and CSCS, Bangalore, Hyderabad, 1999. Similar arguments against the mythological
film developed in Tamilnadu: see the publication by the Madras Institute of Deve-
lopment Studies entitled Tamil Cinema.
Introduction 205
Both with the mythological and the stunt film we have instances of
the differentiation of film-exhibition circuits which, in the case of the
stunt film, acquired popularity across the subcontinent, both in its
foreign and local versions. The national market was then substantially
differentiated, both by regional differences and differentiation in the
genre attractions that pandered to different audiences.
2. Differentiated Territories of a
Subcontinental Cinema Before and After
Nation-State Formation
Dual versions, and the mobilization of social-reform films then pro-
vide only one orbit to think about a cinematic geography of the social
realm as it extended across the subcontinent. Recent research has indi-
cated how film production mutated to induct and address changing
cultural configurations of the film market. In a wonderfully rich so-
cial and cultural history of early Bombay cinema, Kaushik Bhaumik
has pointed to a number of crucial moments in the changing configu-
rations of business enterprise and regional literary, theatrical, and
musical cultures for the Bombay cinema.7 Looking at first to the im-
portance of Gujarati and Parsi entrepreneurs, particularly until the late
silent era, he suggests the importance of stage plays, urban intrigue
and romance novels, and tabloid sensationalism in the make up of the
cinema. He goes on to develop a picture of the trans-regional format
of Bombay productions in the late silent and early sound period, refer-
ring here to the importance of Punjabi entrepreneurs, and also the
traditions of what he refers to as an ‘Islamicate’ culture of the bazaar
in the North Indian market. Here, performance cultures centred on
the tawaif (courtesan) and under court and landlord patronage were
mobilized into the new regimes of mechanically reproduced entertain-
ment, in the gramophone and cinema industries. Bhaumik alerts us to
a dynamic set of interpenetrating media and popular cultural produc-
tions for this new moment in cinema history. Here he points to the
importance of modern Urdu genres, including the urban masnavi
or romance literature, theatrical backdrop manufacture for historical
and costume plays, and the performance cultures of the tawaif as key
dimensions of the mise-en-scène, musical forms, and narrative cultures
7
Kaushik Bhaumik, ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1896–1936’,
D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, Oxford University, 2001.
of the cinema. Of particular significance were productions deriving
from a wider arc of Arabic and Persian culture, including romantic
narratives such as Laila–Majnu and Shireen–Farhad.
Lahore in Punjab was to prove an important production centre for
this efflorescence of the North Indian region as production space and
market. Bhaumik argues that the autonomous significance of this cul-
tural space was neutralized as its finance, industry personnel, and
its very entertainment format was inducted into Bombay during the
1930s. This argument forecloses too abruptly on the significance of
this territory both as production centre and market, a history which
was to continue into the 1940s, and, as I shall, argue, even after its
partition in the wake of decolonization in 1947. In the 1940s, produc-
tions undertaken by the Pancholi and Shorey production units were
very popular, and their distinct position as a market was also signifi-
cant. New Theatres in Bengal, a studio largely associated with a dif-
ferent type of film production, one which under B.N. Sircar laid claim
to cultural capital for the cinema on the basis of literary adaptations,
also produced costume films featuring Prithviraj Kapoor and K.L.
Saigal for this segment of the all-India market.8 What is suggestive, too,
is the way the type of productions associated with this region, what
Bhaumik refers to as the Islamicate repertoire of musical performative
cinema, moves into a wider arc of film production and distribution be-
yond the subcontinent. Here, we can only gesture to the foreign mar-
kets for Indian film productions, as these traversed territories from
North Africa and the Middle East through to South East Asia in the
period before nation-state formation. Other frames of reference than
the national are clearly required in this itinerary. The Bombay industry
manufactured films for Iran, with Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Studios,
as well as Krishna Studios, making several films for the Iranian film
entrepreneur Abdul Hossein Seponta.9 And, as William van der Heide
notes, Indian business and filmmaking experience produced films in
Malay as early as 1934, starting with Laila Majnu. The film was made
in Singapore, produced for the Motilal Chemical Company of Bom-
bay by its owner K.R.S. Chisty, and directed by B.S. Rajhans, a Punjabi
8
Bhagishwar Jha, ed., B.N. Sircar, Calcutta, National Film Archives of India and
Seagull Books, 1990.
9 Massoud Mehrabi, ‘The History of Iranian Film, Part One’, www.massoudmehrabi.
com; also Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, eds, Encylopedia of Indian Cinema (hereafter
EIC), entries on Ardeshir Irani and Imperial Talkies.
Introduction 207
who had gained filmmaking expertise in India. This is suggestive not
only of how important Indian film entrepreneurship had already be-
come at this early point in its career.10 The choice of Laila Majnu
derived, van der Heide points out, from the musical conventions and
performers of the local Bangsawan theatre, a form similar to the Parsi
theatre. Egyptian cinema also drew upon the Laila–Majnu plot, as
Viola Shafik has noted,11 and publicity for the film also highlight-
ed the attraction of Egyptian and Arabic dances.12 This suggests the
significance of a subject and a form not so much for its association
with contemporaneous subcontinental culture, but as index of the
sway held by Arabic/Persian/Urdu narratives and a musical performative
cinema across this territorial swathe. Again, amongst the significant
titles commissioned by Seponta were Laila Majnu and Shireen Farhad.
If the Punjab and North Indian production space and market was
an important pre-Independence territory for the cinema, one which
was part of a cultural formation beyond the subcontinent, another was
the emerging Tamil film network, which also extended into South East
Asia. Van der Heide points to the importance of the Tamil filmmaker
L. Krishnan, who came to be a key icon of the Malaysian film in-
dustry.13 Madras studios also constituted a distinct regional film cul-
ture in the subcontinent. Madhava Prasad has drawn our attention to
what he calls the ‘Madras Presidency’ cinema, which traversed the
Tamil-, Telugu-, and Malayalam-speaking areas.14 While these be-
came separate linguistic states and, over time, found there own local
film industries, a commerce of film-makers, actors, and dubbed ver-
sions has continued, especially between Tamil and Telugu films. And
this region tips over into the film market in Ceylon, later Sri Lanka,
where Tamil and Hindi films dominated, and early Sinhala films were
also entirely shot in South India.15
10 This is not to underplay the presence of film-makers of Indian origin in the
Malay industry. At the height of the studio system, in the 1950s, Indians were esti-
mated to have directed 105 out of 149 films made. William van der Heide, Malaysian
Cinema, Asian Film, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2005, 134.
11 Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, London, British Film Institute, 1999.
12 Van der Heide, Malaysian Cinema, 124.
13
Ibid., 133–4.
14
‘The Madras Presidency Cinema’, paper presented at a workshop on Tamil Film
Culture, Madras Institute for Development Studies, Chennai, 1997.
15 Wimal Dissanayake and Ashley Ratnavibhushana, Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema,
Boralesgamuwa, Asian Film Centre, 2000.

In all of this wider pattern of cultural flows, we may consider a signi-
ficant pre-nation-state context, that of empire. Historians of empire
have recently indicated the complex movements of merchants, labour-
ers, sailors, soldiers, and pilgrims in the inter-colonial vista set up
by the British empire. These movements were at one level initiated
by an imperial design aiming to build infrastructures, supply labour
for plantation economies, move goods, and deploy forces for em-
pire. However, such mobilization required a porousness of borders and
frontiers, and in turn allowed for less controlled movements as peo-
ple went in search of trade and employment in a host of enterprises,
a pre-nation-state constellation of movement which the cinema parti-
cipated in.16 Thus the importance of the cinema in places of Indian
settlement such as Fiji, the West Indies, East Africa, Malaysia, often as
a cultural form consumed by the multi-ethnic and linguistic popula-
tions of these territories.
The formation of nation-states in the subcontinent significantly
altered the regional territories for film in the northern and eastern ter-
ritories, if not the southern, where the Tamil industry continued to
have a separate wing devoted to the film trade in Malaysia and Ceylon
in the 1950s.17 But with the formation of West and East Pakistan, the
territories for Punjabi and Hindi–Urdu in the North and Bengali
cinema in the East were affected. With a view to developing the local
industry, something that had to start from scratch in terms of studio
plant (two of the Lahore studios had been decimated in the violence
following the Partition of the subcontinent) and relatively meagre
personnel, the Pakistani government sought to control Indian imports
into the new state.18 The profound ties to the old film territories of
Lahore, and the Hindi–Urdu cinema produced there and in Bombay,
are testified to in the account of this period provided by Mushtaq
Gazdar. He notes that many film people believed that the nation-state
division would not effect the industry, and that after a short period fol-
lowing the strife of the Partition there would be an easy movement and
16
Cf. Radhika Singha, ‘Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial
India’, Studies in History 16, 2001, 151–98; and ‘A “Proper Passport” for the Colony:
Border Crossing in British India, 1882–1920’, www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/papers/
17 Thus through most of the 1950s the Indian magazine Filmfare’s section on
South India featured Ceylon and Malaysia as part of this territory.

18
The following account is from Mushtaq Gazdar, Pakistani Cinema 1947–1997,
Lahore, Oxford University Press, 1998. Also see Alamgir Kabir, The Cinema of Pakis-
tan, Dhaka, Sandhani Publications, 1969.
Introduction 209
collaboration between film industry people in Lahore and Bombay.
Something of the power of the cultural and territorial bonds involv-
ed are indicated in Gazdar’s construction of the origins of Pakistani
cinema: he invokes the idea not of a national cinema but of a subconti-
nental cinema as the common resource both nations were to draw
upon. In particular, he took as the lineage for Pakistani cinema the tra-
ditions of Hindi–Urdu directors and networks, from Kamaal Amrohi
in Bombay to the Bhatti group in Lahore, and underlined the im-
portance of the Punjabi cinema as well. Contra a two-nation theory
dividing Hindu and Muslim culture and society, Gazdar’s construc-
tion of the cinema lineage of Hindi–Urdu film is not confined to
Muslim film people, and he places a value on the work of the key non-
Muslim producers Dalsukh M. Pancholi and Roop K. Shorey as well.
If a crucial film territory had been split up in the northern area
through nation-state formation, as I have noted the emergent Tamil in-
dustry retained its broader territory. Its productions also targeted the
Hindi market, as in the work of S.S. Vasan, A.V. Meiyappan, and, in
the Telugu industry, L.V. Prasad. The emergence of the DMK film, the
non-Brahmin film which critiqued the caste order and the bid to im-
pose Hindi as a national language, signalled an important movement
in Tamil cinema away from the pan-Indian market. The DMK film’s
significance lay not in terms of its weight in local production, but the
way it promoted a consensus centred on anti-Brahmanism, and, for a
time, a strong emphasis on an autarchic Tamil nationalist viewpoint
pitted against the pan-Indian nation-state. This was to be consolidated
with the movement’s acquisition of state power in Tamilnadu from the
late 1960s, a period where one or the other of the parties arising from
the movement have been in power.19
I highlight a history of disaggregation in the subcontinental terri-
tory of the cinema to point to the complexities of projects for a national
cinema in a multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic nation-state. As I have sug-
gested, this needs to be put together with certain histories of conver-
gence, social content, and genre production across different produc-
tion spaces; and also with the way Bombay assumed the position of a
trans-regional production centre. Having said this, the question of a
19 For Tamil cinema, see Theodore Baskaran, The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduc-
tion to Tamil Cinema, East-West Books, 1996; and for the changes effected by the
DMK film, Pandian, ‘Parashakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film’, in Vasudevan, ed.,
Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 65–98.
disaggregated history remains important, and remains persistent even
after the formation of the nation-state in 1947. It is against this back-
drop that the material in Part II has been put together, with a specific
focus on how in the 1990s the image of Tamilnadu, or of Tamilness,
moved away from earlier Tamil film traditions, with a view to map it-
self into the pan-Indian nation. These essays also carry on and reframe
some of the arguments I pose in this book, considering how the new
moment of the 1990s had provided substantially new problems for
melodramatic modes of narration.
The group of Tamil films I discuss provide an index of the new poli-
tical and cultural context for the working out of a territorial ima-
gination, as well as new aesthetic issues. The case of Mani Rathnam
conjures up something of the contemporary problem posed by the
displacement of earlier divisions between art and popular cinema
insofar as these are accessible through a discourse of authorship. Argu-
ably, Rathnam has generated a consistent body of work since the begin-
nings of his career at the end of the 1980s. At one level, his oeuvre is
very much of the commercial-popular format, and has, in conjunction
with the music directors Ilayaraja and A.R. Rahman made a significant
contribution to the song-and-dance sequence. As several critics have
argued, he has also mobilized elements of the scaled-down, quotid-
ian characterization associated with a so called middle-class cinema of
the 1970s in delineating his narrative universe.20 In keeping with this
middle-class cultural refashioning of the narrative world, Mani Rath-
nam’s films also seek to articulate song-and-dance sequences to the task
of building character perspectives, relationships, and social worlds,
that is, augmenting our sense of the world of the fiction, and the logic
of its unfolding.
What is interesting in this new configuration is the continued im-
portance of the melodramatic mode, and how it has been reorganiz-
ed. There are intimations of change in the relationship between the
public and the familial domains in the revised formats of melodra-
matic strategy. Here, in contrast to earlier melodramatic articulations,
the familial sphere is rendered somewhat autonomous of the meta-
phoric ties to social and political transformation, what I have called the
vertical axis of melodrama’s narrative articulation. The peculiar power
and interest of this shift is that it does not operate a conventional dis-
placement between levels, but makes the familial form in its apparently
20
Prasad, ‘Signs of Ideological Reform’, in Ideology of the Hindi Film.
Introduction 211
autonomous existence available for public and, more specifically, poli-
tical engagement. The family unit has undergone transformation in
another sense. While extended family ties of an intergenerational sort
remain very important, there is a movement towards a new orchestra-
tion of the intimate sphere, with the couple rapidly instituting itself,
rather than becoming the narrative’s primary object. This generates a
new focus for spectator engagement, and in turn relates to a particular
type of consumer investment, with the couple as the lynchpin for new
vistas of lifestyle and household. However, it is the logic of the melo-
dramatic mode, its mechanisms of peripeteia, abrupt plot reversal, that
the rapid institution of the couple does not guarantee its sustainabil-
ity. There is a narrative drive to push the couple into an engagement
with the political sphere, an encounter which threatens to destroy that
which has been so rapidly instituted. The couple, and in some cases the
family it has given rise to, have to generate a solution to a political prob-
lem in order to reinstitute itself. Politics here refers to the structure of
the nation-state but may, in certain instances, also centre on the poli-
tics of class, as for example in Rathnam’s Alapalayuthey (Wave; 2002).
I seek to address the question of how melodrama and its fictive
publicness are used in these films in several ways. Firstly, following the
logic of a political articulation of the family plot, strategies emerge to
incorporate new narrative locales in a bid to transform territorial ima-
gination and affiliation. Tensions emanate from the bid to resituate the
family, the intimate sphere of love and romance, and the regional cul-
ture it emerges from into the larger territorial frame of the pan-Indian
nation. There is a resulting gap in levels of territorial and historical
attachment, regional and national. The romantic couple and/or family
becomes the mobile, deterritorialized unit which condenses, displaces
and bridges these divisions through the use of certain standard con-
ventions, most classically the bid to reunite lovers and dismembered
families. Melodramatic publicness rears its head determinedly: char-
acters defined by their professionalized, middle-class modernity and
through actorly economies of restraint and silence mutate into vehicles
of patriotic fervour pitched in the escalated tones of public self-nomi-
nation and address.
But this publicness of the form has other implications. The ele-
ments of didacticism, along with the tendency to disjointed narrative
continue to define the popular format and provide the possibilities of
addressing not one public, but to manoeuvre amongst publics differ-
entiated both ideologically and in terms of storytelling orientation.
The question of multiple publics is not predicated, necessarily, on in-
dividuated viewpoints, as on the Hollywood model. In the formats I
am dealing with, the individual is invariably asked to stand for a public
discourse, even if this emerges from a sentimental, romantic character
motivation. I will try to suggest how this works in the case of Roja, as
the form runs the gamut of pitting viewpoints female against male,
private against public, but also in terms of the residue of one form of
national imagination for the Tamil against a new agenda. In Bombay
we may discern this both in the form of the film—its mobilization of
different, often contradictory accounts of the Bombay upheavals of
1992–3 in ways which are not ultimately reconciled—and in the con-
tradictory reception of the film available in journalistic discussions
and reviews. In Hey Ram, too, we observe the importance of character
articulation of a public viewpoint. This is not only to do with the pri-
vileged access of male characters to notions of the larger public good,
but also operates through the mobilization of affective investments.
Specifically, this connects individuals in a larger public network based
on shared senses of injury and loss during the Partition riots.
The work of Mani Rathnam offers us a politicized melodrama
founded on a new economy of individuated romance and middle-class
subjectivity, pushing its romance narrative to engage with various ord-
ers of political difference, including the conflict between communi-
ties, classes, and different constructions of nationhood. Hey Ram, in
contrast, deploys the full melodramatic gestural style to enact a proper
externalization and publicization of individual tragedy. The peculiar
challenge posed by this film lies in its reconstruction of melodramatic
tropes within a project which substantially challenges the truth claims
of cinematic indexicality. Drawing on digital technology and video
game narrative formats for its reconstruction of history, the film in-
vests history with the attributes of invention and manipulability. It
provides new and complicated ground on which to think of the rela-
tionship between a dramaturgy of melodramatic affect, the performative
and public articulation of characters, and a poetics of loss and uncer-
tainty. As I will suggest, this reassembly of the melodramatic format
takes place on a new ground for the imagination of desacralization,
where the nation-state has taken the place of the divine order as the
space that has come to be voided of meaning.
6
Voice, Space, Form: The Symbolic

and Territorial Itinerary of Mani
Rathnam’s Roja (1992)
R
oja (Mani Rathnam, 1992), a Tamil film dubbed into Telugu and
subsequently into Hindi, has been a great financial success at
the pan-Indian level. The existence of the film in a number of
language versions and the story’s focus on Tamil and Kashmiri identity
conjure up various issues relating to regional and national identity. It
was perhaps the film’s success across a number of regions that has made
the Indian government view it as an emblematic, indeed, a program-
matic patriotic film for a situation which, since around 1989, has been
defined by a series of central coalitions of regional parties. Doordarshan,
the national television channel, regularly screened the film on Inde-
pendence Day from the late 1990s.
Arguably, the success of the film lies in its ability to address the
fact that regional histories have often been the bugbear of a pan-Indian
identification. Only by addressing regional specificity and its contests
with the larger national form can the film persuasively construct a rhe-
torics of transcendence. As the film’s narrative construction is centred
on this reconfiguration of a combative regional history, I will first chart
a preliminary history of the regional contexts that Roja refers to.
1. Kashmir and Tamilnadu

Very briefly, the Muslim dominated border state of Kashmir has been
at the centre of the Indo-Pakistan conflict, both sides laying claim to
this strategic territory. In recent times, there has been an escalation of
militant and separatist sentiment within the state, leading to the marg-
inalization and emigration of a significant number of Kashmiri Hin-
dus. These developments fed into a majoritarian Hindu chauvinism
whose protagonists see the separatist movement as Pakistan-instigated,
as based on a ‘fanatical’ Muslim nature, and more generally emble-
matic of the marginality of Hindus in India because of the alleged ap-
peasement of minorities. It is argued that Hindu tolerance and the
weak-kneed secularism of the postcolonial state have encouraged Mus-
lim conservatism and political aggression. Apart from the quite fascis-
tic nature of the argument, it fails to take into account a particular
problem, that of the brutality of the Indian army in its dealing with the
Kashmiri populace. This in turn has caused a popular resistance to the
Indian state in Kashmir which has distinguished the present political
phase from previous currents of separatist sentiment.1
As regards Tamil identity, from the 1920s a movement espousing a
rationalist, anti-hierarchical ideology, the Self-Respect movement,
had developed a critique of high Hinduism and the caste system. In its
subsequent incarnation as the Dravida Kazhagam and the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam, it assumed a militant stance against the domina-
tion of the Hindi-speaking North over the local language and iden-
tity.2 This movement settled into the political establishment by the
end of the 1960s, the parties it generated forming state governments
ever since. The linguistic tension between Tamilnadu and the Hindi-
speaking northern states has varied in intensity. At the turn of the
1990s, the importance of a distinct Tamil identity was complicated by
the emergence of an extremist and separatist movement from with-
in the Tamil minority of neighbouring Sri Lanka. The ruling party of
Tamilnadu at that time, the DMK, was supportive of the movement
and averse to undertaking any action against Sri Lankan Tamil sepa-
ratists working out of Tamilnadu; and the Indian government, led by
Rajiv Gandhi, conciliated this sentiment. However, it was subsequent-
ly involved in a pact with the Sri Lankan government by which an
1 For an account of recent developments, see Balraj Puri, Kashmir: Towards
Insurgency, Delhi, Orient Longman, 1992.

2
For the early phase of the modern Dravidian movement, cf. Eugene F. Irschik,
Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement, and Tamil
Separatism, 1916–1929, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1969; for a stimulating theorization of the overall significance of these developments
in Tamil politics, see M.S.S. Pandian, ‘Notes on the Transformation of “Dravidian”
Ideology: Tamilnadu, c.1900–1940’, Social Scientist 22, 5–6 May–June 1994; idem,
‘“Denationalizing” the Past: “Nation” in E.V. Ramaswamy’s Political Discourse’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 16 October 1993; and idem, Brahmin and Non-
Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2008.
Voice, Space, Form 215
Indian Peace Keeping Force was deployed in an unsuccessful bid to
curb the violence. This alienated the Sri Lankan Tamil extremists from
the Indian state and led to an extremist group assassinating Rajiv
Gandhi in 1990. Subsequent Tamil regimes have distanced themselves
from Tamil extremism in Sri Lanka.
These two regional backdrops are central to our understanding of
how nationhood is imagined in Roja. In the prologue, Wasim Khan,
a militant leader, is captured by Indian forces in Kashmir. The main
body of the film opens with the song ‘Chhoti si aasha’ (Simple desires),
sung by the heroine, Roja, against the backdrop of the Tamil country-
side.3 The plot then introduces Rishi Kumar, the urbane, Madras-
based cryptographer (decoder) working for Indian military intelli-
gence. He wishes to marry a simple village girl and arrives to inspect
Roja’s elder sister, Lakshmi, as a prospective bride. Lakshmi tells him
she wishes to marry another, but is prevented by a family feud. Rishi
chooses Roja instead, to save her family from embarrassment. Roja’s
resentment on behalf of the sister dissolves at Rishi’s home in Madras,
when he explains his behaviour and Lakshmi confirms his version over
the telephone. The reconciled couple leaves for Kashmir, where Rishi
has to do a job of decoding for the military. In the film Kashmir is com-
posed of locations from resorts in the northern state of Himachal Pra-
desh and from Tamilnadu. The couple’s idyll is interrupted when the
militants abduct Rishi to demand an exchange with Wasim Khan. A
distraught Roja, incapacitated by her knowing no language except
Tamil, takes the help of a palmist and religious guide, Chachchu Maha-
raj, to plead with police, army, and even Wasim Khan himself, for
the return of her husband. The one army officer, Royappa, she can talk
with, is strongly against such a deal. The forces of the Indian state will
not at first accept the exchange, but seem to finally succumb to Roja’s
emotional pressures. In the meanwhile, Rishi expresses a staunch na-
tionalist determination in the face of extreme militant brutality, but
also a desire to convince the militant leader, Liaquat, of the inhumanity
of his enterprise. By coincidence, Liaquat can speak Tamil because
he studied in Coimbatore, a dynamic industrial centre of Tamilnadu.
Liaquat’s sister is a silent, anxious presence, clearly disturbed by Rishi’s
suffering. She and Liaquat are both grief-stricken when Pakistani
3 It would seem the locations used are not always from Tamilnadu, but I have not
been able to establish from where exactly they are drawn.

soldiers kill their younger brother, sent to Pakistan for training. Subse-
quently, the sister releases Rishi. Rishi’s only obstacle now in his head-
long rush to freedom is Liaquat. But the earlier exchanges between the
men, and the death of Liaquat’s brother are meant to have humanized
the militant, and he lets Rishi go. The hero is reunited with Roja who,
emotionally overwhelmed, falls at his feet, caressing his wounds, as the
military officer, Royappa, and the religious guide, Chachchu, look on
with relief.
From this plot summary, we notice how the film elaborates a series
of differences defined by identities of region, language, gender, com-
munity, and nation. The film’s narrative seeks to neutralize this range
of differences through a unification of identities under the ideological
linking of discourses of nationhood, humanism and modernity. Tejas-
wini Niranjana and Rustam Bharucha have outlined the power-laden
implications of this exercise.4 They argue that Roja demonizes the
Kashmiri militant as a Muslim fundamentalist, that it idealizes the
modern middle-class Hindu male as the fount of a committed and
developmentally dynamic nationalism, and that it neutralizes or at
best appropriates the woman into this larger project. I consider this
analysis persuasive but will argue that it glosses over the points at
which such ideological orientations stumble and falter in the process
of storytelling.
We can think of the space of the fiction as being composed of four
areas: the Indian side of Kashmir, the mobile militant space, the Tamil
countryside and the city of Madras. What happens in the film is that
Roja’s desire to touch the sky, to bind the cosmos within herself (images
from the song, ‘Chhoti si aasha’) is refashioned, and a boundary placed
around it as she comes to understand that she inhabits the politi-
cal space called India. Her objective is to recover her husband, to
bring him back into this (for her) newly identified space. Earlier spa-
ces are still pictured and coalesce through the narrative function of
communication media, telephone, and television, into a new, national
simultaneity.
4
Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Integrating Whose Nation? Tourists and Terrorists in Roja’,
Economic and Political Weekly 24 (3), 15 January 1994, 79–82; Rustam Bharucha,
‘On the Border of Fascism: Manufacture of Consent in Roja’, Economic and Political
Weekly 29 (23), 4 June 1994, 1390–5.
If nuclear patriarchy and the nation-state provide the coordinates
within which Roja functions, the figures of the militant and the wo-
man endanger their stability. In the introductory song sequences Roja
is presented as an energetic character unburdened by household or
occupational responsibility, a pre-adult figure, but with desires of
an excessive, undefined nature. Her investment in Rishi’s marrying
Lakshmi is akin to a projection of her own undefined desires. Her sub-
sequent marriage to Rishi appears to anchor these desires under the
sanction of a romantic, companionate conjugal tie. This closure is not,
however, quite complete. The crucial narrative development of Rishi’s
capture is set up because Roja leaves the conjugal precincts for the
innocent enough activity of seeking out a mandir (Hindu temple). Her
unannounced departure panics her husband, who rushes out with
scant security and is thus made vulnerable to the militants. Roja threa-
tens to exceed the existing boundaries demarcated by nuclear patri-
archy and nation-state, and in such a way as to reorganize the narrative
parameters of these forms. This appears to redefine and extend the nar-
rative goal of the film, in so far as it rests on an investment in the
definition of national boundaries. The discourse embedded in Roja’s
narratively influential move to the temple, that the god of Kashmir is
not different from the god of Tamilnadu, offers the Hindu religion as
a framework to transcend not only regional difference, but to extend
the space of the national territory. Kumkum Sangari argues that a ‘rhe-
toric of incitement’ animates the function of women whose agency
is circumscribed by patriarchal authority and must therefore gain
their ends through men.5 There are the traces here of such a narrative
drive, with Roja’s movement precipitating the hero into a space beyond
the limits set for civilian national life. She affords the hero entry into
dangerous spaces that set up encounters and a dialogue with the Kash-
miri/Muslim extremist, providing the ground for a future emotional
and territorial reintegration of a dismembered nation-state.
The logic of narrative incitement is not worked out as an aggressive
reintegration, in the manner of reconquering lost space, but, perhaps
inevitable in the strategy of a consensual hegemony, as a humane reso-
lution achieved through persuasion. Also, it is not my point that these
5
Cf. Kumkum Sangari, ‘Consent Agency and the Rhetorics of Incitement’,
Economic and Political Weekly 28 (18), 1 May 1993, 867–82.
Fig. 36
Fig. 37
Figs 36 and 37: Roja, Mani Rathnam, 1992, Two Women.
are the only terms on which identification is activated. Indeed, the
woman in the film becomes a kind of tabula rasa traversed by a variety
of fragmentary identities, and the stage for a series of incommensur-
able positions.
Roja cannot do anything except plead with the police and the milit-
ary. At one level, it is symbolically important that she stay on ‘this’ side,
within the national boundary. From now on, whenever she moves in
the direction of the militant camp, Indian soldiers accompany her.
Once her functions of narrative incitement have been completed, the
female character is subordinated to a conventional territoriality, de-
nied the possibilities of independent movement outside the precincts
of home and nation-state. This crisis of familial separation engenders
an imagining of this nation-space through new coordinates afforded
by modern temporal and communication technologies. Roja’s immo-
bilization is succeeded by shots of a television news broadcast infor-
ming the original village community and Rishi’s mother in Madras
of the kidnapping. The binding of the images of village and mother
into a national simultaneity delegates desire to another agent.6 Liaquat’s
sister, ‘on the other side’, is introduced immediately after these images.
This delegation is reiterated more physically and locally as Roja, now
accompanied by Royappa and his men, glimpses the sister, and there
is a significant exchange of looks between them. (Fig. 37, p. 218.)
It is the sister, of course, who achieves the goals predicated by this
narrative move when she releases Rishi, indicating her estrangement
from the militant method. The displacement and doubling of Roja’s
narrative functions in the militant’s sister protects the Indian woman
from the contamination of transgressed boundaries, but provides the
ground for a national and humanist discourse in the crucial function
of female nurture. This scenario of ‘female doubling’ and delegation
is not an untypical strategy for the Indian popular cinema.
2. The Politics of Identity

I now want to suggest that we can discern a politics of identity in the
film grounded in its use of language. Critics have focused on how both
the Tamil and Hindi versions of the film use English to solicit audience
6
For a now classic statement on the temporal and communicative framework of
the imagined national community, see Anderson, Imagined Communities.
identification with a Hindu middle-class-led dynamic of modernity.7
This tallies with the image crystallizing around Mani Rathnam as a
film-maker concerned with the modern ‘Westernized’ components of
Indian national imagination.8 But Roja’s success has been substantial,
so clearly the use of English has not alienated audiences beyond the
restricted domain of the middle-class. While certain phrases rest on
a conversational idiom, e.g., ‘What? Come again?’, others are the coin-
age of youth romance in mass culture (‘I’m sorry—s.o.r.r.y.’), hardly
indicative of a great familiarity with the language. Finally there are a
string of words which conjure up the mystique of state and public
order, terms which are part of the vocabulary of public knowledge and
anxiety. ‘Security’, and ‘curfew’, tersely invoked by the technocrat hero
do not require a ‘Westernized’ viewer for their deciphering.9 The
modernizing middle class is foregrounded as the fulcrum of the nar-
rative, and thereby of national resolution, but there is a wider address
in the film. The English language as the mark of Rishi Kumar’s urban-
ity is both a focus for ‘style’ identification, but also has a potential for
suggesting cultural alienation. His formal introduction of his wife for
‘security clearance’ is brushed away by his elderly boss who welcomes
Roja through references to a shared village culture. The mode of ad-
dress suggests that we need to think of a layered field of identification,
rather than one centring on the hero.
In the politics of the film’s use of language, the heroine occupies a
crucial position. When Madhoo, the actress who plays Roja, was asked
why she had not made many films she reacted quite strongly, empha-
sizing that she already had a substantial career in South Indian films,10
7 Bharucha raises the question of the linguistic politics involved in dubbing but
does not expand on it. ‘The real politics of language in the film has been determined
by its dubbing from Tamil into Hindi . . . the other political dimension of language
in Roja is its uncritical, even “positive” use of the English language (which, of course,
remains the same in both the Hindi and Tamil versions of the film). From the sweet
banalities of “I love you” to the more professional use of the word “cryptologist”, Roja
reveals its openness to “westernization” which is part of its project of “development”
in India.’ Bharucha, ‘On the Border of Fascism’, 1395.
8 ‘In quite a few of his films . . . Mani Rathnam has cultivated an audience prim-
arily composed of the newly articulate, assertive and self-confident middle class . . .’
Niranjana, ‘Integrating whose Nation?’, 79.
9
For an interesting argument on the phenomenon of bilingualism, see Harish
Trivedi and Susan Bassnet, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London,
Routledge, 1999.
10
I use this umbrella term simply because of the easy circulation of film-makers,
though she only started her Bombay career with Phool aur Kante
(Flowers and Thorns; Kuku Kohli, 1992).11 The lack of information
about this other space provides us with an important framework to
assess Roja. Most of the critics have referred to the original Tamil ver-
sion as essentially equivalent to the dubbed Hindi one. But in the
original version, language functions to highlight differences of iden-
tity which are entirely suppressed in the Hindi version: the protago-
nists come from Uttar Pradesh, the populous North Indian state which
has been at the centre of national politics since the 1920s and has pro-
duced all but two of India’s prime ministers. As I have pointed out, in
contrast Tamil political identity after Independence has often been
self-consciously marginal, even oppositional to the pan-Indian one,
and so this dubbing constitutes a very significant elision indeed. The
logic of the national market here is one of linguistic and political level-
ling. This is not to suggest that the original Roja encodes an ‘authen-
tic’ Tamil culture. Indeed, there is already a process of ‘hegemonization’
in the social narrative of the marriage, suggesting to some commenta-
tors the matching of an urban elite non-Brahmin with a woman of
socially lower rank.12 What I want to draw attention to is the act of
appropriation invoked both in the dubbing and in the restriction of
critical focus to the Hindi version.
3. Tamilness as Intractable Edifice

In the original film, language is not expressive of a restricted geogra-
phy, of a communication predicated on the particularity of place, it
can also transcend locality. By having Liaquat graduate from Coim-
batore, the narrative makes it possible for the hero to speak with him
in Tamil, and, in the process, claims the cultural space of the pan-
Indian nation for the language, by facilitating a conversation not about
Tamilness, but Indianness. On the other hand, for Roja, placed within
the confines of a domestic and instinctual discourse, the Tamil langu-
age works to exclude her from the larger nationalist outlook.
actors, and technicians amongst the states of Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra, and Karna-
taka through dubbing. Tamil films are regularly dubbed into Telugu.
11 Interview on Times FM Channel, 21 August 1994.
12 Venkatesh Chakravarthy and M.S.S. Pandian, ‘More on Roja’, Economic and
Political Weekly 29 (11), 12 March 1994, 642–4, and discussion with M.S.S. Pandian.
There are two ways of looking at this exclusion, both of which relate
to the heroine’s difficulties in communicating with the representatives
of the Indian state. The anxiety attached to this inability brings an
imperative of everyday emotions and desires to bear in the narrative.
When the colonel, Royappa, speaks with Roja, language is not an im-
pediment, but there is a difference in discourse, that between the
nation’s interest and the individual’s. In contrast, when Roja pleads
with a central minister to save her husband, he signals his interpreter
to be quiet at a crucial point because the language of emotion has
broken through. Narratively, this proves decisive in shifting the axis of
the state towards the needs of the affective life, thus humanizing the
nation-state form.13
But if on the one hand the woman deepens the imaginary of the
nation-state, there is a point at which linguistic positioning reiterates
another quite contrary trajectory. While there are stereotypical invo-
cations of a popular nationalist discourse in Roja’s outlook—as when
she asks Wasim Khan why he doesn’t leave India if he doesn’t like it—
the overall subordination of state to the intimate emotion of conjugal
loss and recovery in her coincide with the resistance associated with the
history of Tamil identity. This is where the film bears the residual traces
of a still contentious outlook on the nature of the Indian state, if as an
inertial presence, rather than as an active element in the narrative. This
film can at one level be seen as a kind of sublimation of the Tamil iden-
tity into the Indian one, as ‘an exorcism of the collective guilt felt by
Tamilians over Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.’14 But ironically the
identity which the narrative seeks to sublimate comes across as incom-
mensurable with the rationality of the nationalist self. This is not
to argue that Mani Rathnam has intentionally created this ambival-
ence, but that in labouring to transform the text of Tamil identity into
13
This is analogous with Helen Foley’s comments on the place of the affective in
ancient Greece: ‘The emotional, domestic sphere cannot be allowed direct political
power and the wife must subordinate herself to her husband in marriage; but the
maternal or domestic claims are nevertheless central and inviolable, a crucial check on
the bellicose male dominated democracy.’ ‘Sex and State in Ancient Greece’, in
Diacritic, quoted by Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, in Gledhill, ed.,
Home is Where the Heart Is, 76. Of course the Indian state in Roja is not depicted in
such excessive terms, and cannot be, for ideological reasons argued below; but the
realm of everyday affect is shown to be a necessary element in the constitution of a
nation-state which must distinguish itself from the ruthlessness of its opponents.
14 Niranjana, ‘Integrating Whose Nation?’, 82.
that of an Indian one, the film comes up against a symbolically intract-
able edifice.
4. The Connotations of Place

Roja then demonstrates contradictory features at the level of repre-
sentation which provide us with an understanding of the difficulties
involved in the construction of a (pan-Indian) national identity. These
difficulties are reflected in the way in which spaces are put together,
and the way subjectivities are narrated in the filmic text. As I have
noted, certain places referred to in the film as ‘Kashmir’ or ‘the Tamil
countryside’ are actually composed of other places, making the pro-
filmic a compound of displacements. However, these displacements
can also put different types of desire into play. Kashmir was former-
ly the favoured setting for romantic escapade in the popular Bombay
cinema. The political impossibility of shooting there now remaps the
romantic imaginary as a fabrication. The gap between the physical and
narrative referent exposes the crevasse between a desired emotional
fullness—of romance, of the nation-state in its ideal form—and its
realization. For Roja this is the romance of new identity, in so far as she
enters new and unthought-of spaces which ‘fill’ her and redefine her.
But, in actual fact, the split of the physical from the fictional referent
is significant. In the scene where Rishi introduces Roja to Kashmir, the
film invests in vision, Rishi covering Roja’s eyes, the camera tilting
up the snowscape, in an exultant, revelatory way. But Kashmir here is
Kulu-Manali, the untroubled hill resort of Himachal Pradesh. Here
the split is perhaps humdrum: evidently there is an equivalence and
redundancy of such resorts in the filmgoer/tourist imagination. If this
aspect of the representation of contested space is not predicated on
knowledge or recognition and the filmgoer can still participate in the
fiction of Kashmir, there is another location which is not so easily skirt-
ed. Certain key military scenes of ‘Kashmir’ were staged in Wellington,
in the Nilgiri hills of Tamilnadu. The Tamil, and more broadly ‘South
Indian’, tourist is likely to recognize this place, the Madras Regimental
Centre and Staff College, located as it is en route to the major tourist
resort of Ootacamund. (Fig. 38, p. 224.)
This recognizability serves to relocate the drama of national inte-
gration in Tamilnadu, thereby echoing the larger set of drives, of Tamil
identification with the pan-Indian nation, within which the narrat-
ive operates. This recognition underlines that in crucial respects the
Fig. 38: Roja, Madras Regimental Centre.
characters have not moved very far. In contrast to the locational absen-
ces and equivalences that elsewhere mark the representation of Kash-
mir in the film, in the deployment of Tamil locales to represent this
absent place, there is a certain over-representation of Tamil identity
and place, making it the latent subject of the film. Of course, these
features are elided in the dubbed Hindi version, as the non-Tamil audi-
ence is asked to see Tamilnadu as Uttar Pradesh!
5. The Recalibration of Popular Form

Formally, Roja has been identified as reflecting a ‘realist’ disposition
that addresses recent developments in the orientations of middle-class
culture. In the 1970s the Indian government’s National Film Develop-
ment Corporation supported social-realist films, as in the work of
Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Govind Nihalani, and others. These films
explored various topical issues of social exploitation, and political and
moral corruption. The realism of Mani Rathnam, in contrast, is pri-
vately financed and very much of the mainstream rather than the paral-
lel cinema. Moreover, as Tejaswini Niranjana points out, its realism
is oriented to celebrate middle-class modernity rather than develop
a stance of social criticism. In its mobilization of certain devices of
identification, a linearization of dispersed and disparate informa-
tion into a character-centred, goal-oriented frame, the film echoes the
methods of the classical Hollywood cinema. This form of spectatorial
coherence contrasts both with the critical orientations of the state-sup-
ported parallel cinema, and with the particular omnibus, attraction-
based elements of popular Indian cinema. In the latter instance, the
main narrative line tends to be highly circular in its orientation, even
if a ‘secular’ rearrangement of elements is achieved. Further, these lines
tend to be interrupted and dispersed by musical and performative
instances that provide us with different loci to understand ‘character’,
based not only on oppositions of the melodramatic kind, but on a
series of contrasting capacities and dispositions.15
In a sense then, we might assess Roja’s structural features as
emblematic of the drive to orient the spectator to the psychic and per-
ceptual needs of a dynamic, ‘properly’ modernized national forma-
tion. In terms of these formal dimensions, however, there are certain
elements which must give pause to the formulation that Roja repre-
sents a straightforward departure from earlier currents. The particular
way this formal reorganization is used to express nationalism, as well
as its distinct aesthetics of spectacular framing, undercuts a straight-
forward linearization. Mani Rathnam clearly works with certain realist
concerns, at the level of restrained acting styles, and a classicism of
formal construction and narrative dovetailing of cause–effect struc-
tures. Nevertheless, the film retains a stress on spectacular and per-
formative dimensions which externalize thematics from their smooth
anchoring within the flow of character actions and subjectivities. This
is evident at a series of points in Roja: in the representation of cer-
tain aspects of the real, especially the narrative positioning of techno-
logy; and finally, in the expression and positioning of character within
the formally and referentially overdetermined framework of the song
sequence.
In the representation of the army, the film invests in a mode of dis-
play which is not always related to narrative causality. The investment
is in the movement and the display of the military institution, of the
15 See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi
Cinema: Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s’, Screen 30 (3), 1989,
pp. 29–50; and ch. 3 above.
travelling camera, of the techniques of the stunt. While these features
are yoked to the narrative of the hunt in the film’s prologue, where the
army track down and capture Wasim Khan, subsequent episodes of
display have no such narrative pay-off. These scenes recall the type of
motivations of spectacle associated with the ritualized staging of state
power, as in Independence and Republic Day parades, except that the
tableau form characteristic of pageants is here played out in narrative
time. The realist citational aspect of the film, in which verisimilitude
is sketched in by the background detail, also enables the highlight-
ing of the state as a visual form, composed of the soldiers undergo-
ing regimentation in a scene shot at the Madras Regimental Centre,
Wellington.
Another narratively unassimilated feature is both the discourse and
the narrative sequence relating to the hero’s professional activity. A
mystique attaches to Rishi Kumar’s work, both as impenetrable verbal
sign, as the village women stand bewildered when he informs them of
his work, but also as activity. Avowedly undertaking decoding for the
military, his work is given no narrative context. We are not provided
information that would make his activity goal-oriented and subject to
deadlines, locking the activity into a hermeneutic unravelling of the
narrative. Further, any expectations that his abduction relates to the
militants’ need for information only he can provide are swiftly belied.
It would seem that any Indian national would have done, or at least any
state functionary. Performing a negligible narrative function then,
Rishi’s work is primarily presented for our view. Posed before his moni-
tor, and looking at a series of mathematical figures incomprehensible
to us, this sequence fits into a larger tendency to figure the scientific
as a compendium of mysterious signs, the preserve of a narrative agent
whose specialist skills make him into an elite figure remote from com-
mon or everyday knowledge and identity.
These alienations from narrative flow stand metonymically for a
larger framing of the relations between state and subject, and the do-
main of science and the subject as they are relayed in the wider extra-
cinematic universe of signs rather than within the film text. Inflected
in the film by notations of propaganda and of mystique centred on an
image of professionalized modernity, these scenes invite us to think of
a different architecture of the film text, in which blocks of time hover
in the space of the text, secure in their exemplary authority, but re-
quiring other agents to mobilize affect on their behalf.
This particular regime of spectacle is much more complicated-
ly organized around the person and the body of the women. In the
song sequence ‘Chhoti si aasha’, the montage constructs Roja as body
through choreography and interplay with natural textures, especially
water. But she is also positioned as person when she is pictured in a
number of social situations, especially of family life, as also in her as-
sumption of public roles, driving a tractor, graduating from college,
even taking on the garb of the patriarch. As some critics have suggested,
the rhythms of body construction tend to fetishize both the woman
and the countryside in the manner of the ad film. However, the viva-
city of the actress Madhoo’s performance combines with the wider
features of her social articulation in the montage to generate a highly
condensed and dynamic narrative of the woman. This narrative is not
so much an interplay between family life and a professional future;
rather, it plays out the idyll of a tension-free negotiation of many roles.
Structurally speaking, this sequence is as impacted as the foregoing
instances which I have discussed, but it is fuller in its work of narrat-
ive condensation and it is, if only implicitly, in contradiction with the
main narrative line of the film. This subsequent narrative constantly
blocks dreams of a future for women that the idyll generated around
Roja conjures up. Despite protest by the girl, her education is derailed
by the parents’ decision that she must marry Rishi to save the family
honour. Subsequently, the high mobility that the girl exhibits has to be
constrained by the dictates of territoriality, as I have shown.
Mani Rathnam has then modified the terms of popular cinema,
sharpening its somewhat disjointed and disparate form of address into
regimes of spectacle, performance, and narrative sequence that have a
more articulate relationship, of development, antagonism, and rever-
sal, than is conventional. One of the features which might be said to
distinguish its narrative form from the conventions of the popular is
the way a certain didactic element, encompassing structures of rheto-
ric, dialogue, and visual figurations such as the tableau have been dis-
placed from the expression of moral imperatives centred on the logic
of family identity into that of political imperatives, representing the
interests of the nation-state. As I have suggested, this process of dis-
placement and refiguration seeks out a number of spatial nodes, in the
images of state and modernity, alongside the more conventional sites
of articulation.
The drive for a certain type of integrity has been enabled by the
honing of form through its articulation with the methods of classical
Hollywood cinema, its regimes of subjectivity, linearity, and norms of
balance in composition and editing. This interaction derives from a
longer engagement, stretching from the 1930s,16 and is part of the
story of the Indian cinema as a key institution in the imaginary nego-
tiation of modernity. I have tried to suggest how that story, rather than
being an unravelling of a drive towards a coherent, formally integrated
modern subjectivity, bears the imprint of other traditions and different
forms of identity. Finally and almost inevitable perhaps for a popular
political project of this order, it generates space for a directive, hor-
tatory function, a didactics of address which speaks as much of the
need to cohere meaning as the difficulty of doing so.
16
See ch. 2 above for an analysis of the combination of codes from Hollywood
and indigenous visual culture in Hindi film around Independence.
7
Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995)

and Its Publics
1. Plot Synopsis
S
hekhar Mishra, a journalist working in Bombay, visits his village
home in Andhra, where he sees and falls in love with Shaila,
daughter of the brick-maker, Bashir Ahmad. Both Shekhar’s
father, the village notable Narayan Mishra, and Bashir are incensed at
the idea of the match, but Shekhar arranges for Shaila to flee the vil-
lage and join him in Bombay, where they are joined in civil marriage.
Twins, Kamal Bashir and Kabir Narayan, are born to the couple, and
they are visited by parents anxious at news of communal rioting in the
city. The reconciliation is blighted by a renewed spate of rioting, lead-
ing to the death of the elders and the loss of the children. As Shekhar
and Shaila search the strife-torn city for their sons, Hindus and Mus-
lims are locked in unrelenting slaughter. At the climax we see Shekhar
and several others pleading with the rampaging mobs to stop the kil-
ling; Shekhar douses himself with kerosene, urging Hindu rioters to
kill him. The appeal quietens the crowd, and amidst the dispersal of
the riot, the twins emerge and the family is reunited.

Within the space of three years, Mani Rathnam took his lead actor,
Arvindswamy, the Rishi of Roja, along with the compendium of
attributes his character stood for—the professionalized modernity
of the Hindu middle class, social urbanity, and a pan-Indian patrio-
tic vision—and repositioned him in a rather different narrative world.
Between Roja and his 1995 film Bombay intercedes the epochal catas-
trophe of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1993, a symbolic
attack by majoritarian Hindu chauvinists on the minority Muslim
community. In its wake there came face-offs between the state and a
wounded minority, and thereafter, violence unleashed by the extreme
wings of the Hindu right that resulted in something tantamount to a
pogrom in the city of Bombay. The event posed fundamental ques-
tions for Mani Rathnam’s hero; how would he respond to the new con-
figuration while retaining the key features which defined him?
Here I look at Mani Rathnam’s much-debated film, Bombay, in its
movement between cinematic address and public reception. As a film,
and as a form of popular narrative, my concern is to understand its
structural features, its generic location, and its intertextual animation
of key motifs in public life. In terms of reception, my analysis is con-
cerned with the response of the articulate strata of ‘the public’, as ex-
pressed in the outlook of mainstream politicians, journalists, and
reviewers. Writers of liberal outlook, left-wing affiliation, and the
votaries of majority and minority identity have been outspoken in
their evaluation of Bombay. They have argued about the rules of repre-
sentation that ought to govern the exploration of national crisis, in
particular the place of the ‘real’ in this enterprise, and the way prohi-
bitions surrounding women are central to definitions of communal
identity. I also try to understand a practice which is both a form of pro-
duction as well as one of reception, that of government censorship.
The prohibitions enforced by the censor board add up to a certain
image of the state and its understanding of the impact of images on
social perception and official authority.
I have argued that the narrative construction of this film has a ten-
dency to discontinuity, with segments acquiring a certain autonomy
from each other. However, a pattern emerges over the time of the
narrative, one of forgetting the past within the text. These features are
echoed in the way the narrative is constructed by segments of the audi-
ence. The opinions I draw upon makes sense of the text through a
selection of material, and by highlighting the logic of certain narrative
phases. The last section below presents my own susceptibility to vest-
ing the film with coherent meaning. In seeking to go beyond the
existing terms of the debate, I focus on a particular feature which
has not attracted much attention, that of the sacrificial male body.
Through this figure I try to suggest that the particular way the text
seeks coherence generates contradictory elements which offer the spec-
tator an ambivalent viewpoint on the narrative of communal relation-
ships and sectarian violence.
Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 231
2. Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic

Narrative Structure
In Bombay we have one narrative logic running through the film: how
can a family be constituted across the divisions that define Indian so-
ciety? These are divisions at once between families and communities;
and the divisions, refigured in the larger frame of the riot, dismember
the family generationally. Although the children are separated from
each other for a while, each generation finally retains its integrity. The
film thereby sets out a symbolic temporality, a common enough past,
present, future logic. The constitution of the family, its rupture with
the past, and its drive to preserve its legacy for the future provides
the overarching motivational structure, one which brings the nuclear
family into dialogue with the representatives of state and society. This
dialogue is avowedly one which the innocents of the film conduct with
those who wield power. Innocents is a term regularly employed by the
reporter Shekhar in his discussions with Hindu and Muslim leaders,
as well as with the police; are they not disturbed by the death of inno-
cents? Ultimately, the innocents are condensed in the image of dead
children, and the notion feeds back into the narrative structure which
sees the parents struggling to recover their children and the social
future, torn from them by the upheavals. The discourse of the family
meets with that of state and civil society when the protagonist moves
beyond his own concerns into a wider frame of action and restitution.
Thus from the logic of recovering his family the hero is thrust into the
logic of protecting society. The achievement of the one enables the
other, as the children suddenly emerge in the wake of Shekhar’s suc-
cessful bid to diffuse an angry mob, and the nuclear family is reunited.
The commutation of spaces is a key device in the unravelling of this
narrative logic. Bombay must replace the village in order for the mar-
riage to take place under the sign of modernity, the film’s ultimate goal
and resource. Shekhar Mishra’s home in Bombay now becomes the
iconic space in which all the significant kinship relations can regroup
on the basis of a twofold fantasy. The first is revealed in the names of
the twin grandchildren, Kabir Narayan and Kamal Bashir. The mix in
which they reincarnate their grandfathers’ names is the idyll of recon-
ciliation. In this fantasy Shekhar and Shaila give birth to their parents
to reconcile their differences with them, or more pertinently, to exer-
cise authority over them and refashion them in terms of their ideals.
The second fantasy is the wish expressed by the newly arrived grand-
parents to recover the family unit from the catastrophe of the riots
by reclaiming it for a reconstituted village. With this comes the now
‘comic’ contest over who will oversee the religious upbringing of the
children. That which was a source of tension earlier can now be comic
because it is deferred to a future condition of utopian revival. Simply
put, these are fantasies generated out of an opposition between mod-
ernity and tradition, and the fantasy of modernity ultimately sup-
plants that of tradition. That one fantasy is organized to deal with the
other is indicated in a significant instance of narrative amnesia. This
is when the hero and heroine, caught in the vortex of the riots and in
the trauma of losing their children, forget that they have lost their par-
ents (whom we, the audience, know are dead). This lacuna could be
attributed to weak and hurried scripting but it is consistent with an
obsessive narrative logic, in that the protagonists have already introjected
their parents in their children. Not only are the children two, they are
twins, so that Shekhar and Shaila have in effect recreated, in their
children, their parents without difference, without conflict. This is
therefore an ideal image generated by modernity, one which incorpo-
rates the past gesturally. The full logic of this substitution emerges
when the iconic family space which has seen the dispersal of the family,
the death of the grandparents, the desperate search of parents for child-
ren, finally sees the reunion of the twins. In a classical Hollywood shot-
reverse-shot arrangement, Kamal Bashir looks, and sees Kabir Narayan,
who returns the look (or is it the other way around?); there is no differ-
ence between their images. Where the grandparents were pitted Hindu
against Muslim, here the children are drained not only of the signs of
religious difference but of any marks of difference at all.
We can say that the film is a reflection on the transformation from
one structure of authority (a traditional patriarchy) into another
which denies that it is authority. It claims instead that it is an identity
and a point of view predicated on mutuality with the beloved and free-
dom of choice. However, if we penetrate below the structure of senti-
ments we find that Shekhar generates Shaila through an anticipatory
(and therefore markedly fantasy) point of view.1 As he is walking along
the jetty, he comes to a halt, distracted, it would appear, by something
1
A classic instance of such a narrative move is when Guru Dutt’s look generates
Mala Sinha in Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957).
off-screen. The next shot shows the woman in a burqa, but the burqa
only lifts in the wind now, suggesting that Shekhar’s look exposes
Shaila to his, and our gaze. It is also Shekhar, largely, who generates the
momentum for the romance, in terms of meetings, ultimata to par-
ents, the blood bonding with Shaila, denial of parental authority, the
mastery over movement by his sending of rail tickets to his beloved,
the privileged view of Shaila at Victoria Terminus, the setting up of
the registered marriage. Perhaps most significant of all, it is his non-
religiosity which defines the non-identity of the children. Whatever
we may imagine of the practical problems posed by the marriage of the
communally differentiated couple for the identity of the children, in
effect the children follow the father in not practising religion.
3. The Representation of
Inter-Community Differences
Apparently contrary to the orientation of the narrative to the modern,
in its basic understanding of cultural difference the film lies squarely
within the dominant representations of communal relations in Indian
cinema and popular narrative. While the traditional society of both
communities is caught within a conservative outlook, the Muslim is
lower in the social hierarchy. More sparse in its dwelling, associated
with fishing and brick-making, Bashir Ahmed’s family stands in
contrast to Narayan Mishra’s. In Mishra’s upper-caste dwelling, clearly
based on landed wealth and community standing, labour is not men-
tioned or seen at all. That the Muslim is also affected by modernity is
reflected in the education of his daughter. However, these attributes
make narrative sense only in her being aligned with the beloved. She
knows English which, while not the everyday language of the lovers,
comes to be symbolically central. For Shekhar uses it to write to Shaila,
enabling her move to the city and into modernity. These sociologi-
cal imaginings are complemented by a familiar iconography of com-
munity. When the Muslim father is confronted with perceived slights
and open insults, his response is composed of a gestural aggression.
Bashir takes immediate recourse to sharp-edged implements—knives,
swords, cleavers; Narayan, on the other hand, is given to verbal anger
and noticeably backs down in certain exchanges, urging moderation.
Again, as a parent he much more readily succumbs to sentimental ap-
peals than the Muslim, even accepting the important distinction that
he is dealing with a son already expressing autonomy and Bashir’s
authority relates to a dependent daughter.
While this stereotypical image reproduces a characteristic othering
of the Muslim, it should be noted that the film institutes another logic
of difference which seeks to disavow the first, that between the city and
the village. The film portrays intercommunal conflict in the village
reaching a certain point and no further. Thus the particular frozen
iconicity to even the most precipitate of encounters, the Muslim
father, brandishing knife, but allowing himself to be held back by his
women-folk and community fellows. One is reminded here of Anu-
radha Kapur’s references to conventions of representation in which
iconic figures rest in autonomous space, not quite engaging/referring
to other iconic figures juxtaposed to them in the frame.2 It is in the city
that we are given a representational mode for intercommunal relation-
ships which is more goal-oriented in its construction. The menacing
features held in balance by the codes and emotions of social acquain-
tance in the village now surface in bloody conflict.
The film covers its traces here. For the very structure of representa-
tions already has this conclusion built into its premises, the knife-
wielding Muslim already given within the iconography of village life.
Characteristics do not change or emerge within a community or scat-
ter amongst communities; they are already inscribed in the commu-
nity, awaiting particular circumstances to bring them to the surface.
4. Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims:

The Pattern of Public Events
The apparent evenhandedness in the representation of communal
violence is then undercut at the outset, in terms of the basic digits of
community representation. What happens subsequently allows us
both to be aware of that premise, but also to be forgetful, and even to
become confused. I suggest how this happens through the way the film
represents the communal violence of that period as taking place in
three phases.
(i) The Hindus assume the aggressive stance. We are shown the
rathyatra, the processions centred on the ceremonial chariot that were
2 Anuradha Kapur, ‘Deity to Crusader: The Hindutva Movement in Ayodhya’, in

used to mobilize a Hindu constituency in the Ram temple campaign,
often with violent results. Shaila witnesses this, along with intimi-
dating door-to-door collection of funds for the campaign. This seg-
ment of the film culminates in the destruction of the Babri Masjid on
6 December, shown through newspaper headlines and photographs,
and the resulting encounters between Muslims and policemen. At the
conclusion, unidentifiable assailants threaten the life of the twins.
(ii) 5 January: two mathadi workers, load carriers, are killed; news-
paper headlines declare that ‘Bombay burns’; Hindus and Muslims are
shown mobilizing their communities in localities, the Hindus through
the street corner maha arti, Muslims through namaaz; Muslims threa-
ten the Hindu grandfather, Narayan Mishra, but move away on Bashir
Ahmed’s intervention; a Hindu house is burnt, the grandparents
perish in an arson attack, and Shaila and Shekhar are parted from their
children in the resulting mêlée.
(iii) In the last phase of the film we see intercommunal rioting, in-
terspersed with the parents’ search for the twins; the twins receive help
from a hijra and the child bearing their mother’s name, ‘Shaila Bano’;
Shekhar upbraids his communalized friends. In the climax, Shekhar,
two Muslims, and the hijra, defuse the rioting; the twins are reunited
with their parents.
One of the features of the public debate on the film has been the
degree to which Muslim aggression has been visibly more evident,
especially through the film’s tendency to fetishize their image in the
white filigreed cap.3 I believe that this is largely correct, and indicates
the premise of a mainstream, and therefore necessarily Hindu secular-
ist narrative dealing with cultural difference as its central theme: in its
reconstruction of events, and its bid for intercommunal reconcilia-
tion, the narrative cannot neutralize constructions of the Muslim as
other. What is missed in this observation is the amnesiac propensities
of popular narrative, as it states certain premises only to skirt them, a
process centred on more than one elision.
In this connection we may consider the film’s introduction of a spe-
cifically Hindu aggression, both in the city and in the countryside,
3
‘The first show of the riots is a Muslim picking up the sword in aggression. The
number of white caps is always foregrounded and framed well, in tasteful colours,
while the Hindu mobs are more indistinct, it is difficult to make out faces.’ Chitra
Padmanabhan, ‘“Money” Ratnam Walks the Razor’s Edge to Sell in a Communal
Market’, Economic Times, 16 April 1995.
around the agitation at Ayodhya. This fearsome image of the Hindu
is a most extraordinary one, a landmark perhaps in the history of popu-
lar film narrative in India. The image is shown to us through Shaila’s
point of view, in a context where her somewhat uneasy position in the
Hindu locality has been established. Already vulnerable, she sees the
emergence of the rathyatra as a fearful sight, an ominous soundtrack
coding the moment in this way for us as well. A ragbag of sadhus con-
jure up an image of unruly force, followed by the rath bearing a figure
aloft who resembles the BJP leader Advani. (Fig. 39.)
Our alienation from this vision of a political Hinduism is further
solicited when members of the ‘Shakti Samaj’, standing in for the Shiv
Sena, approach the couple for a donation to build the temple. In a
lesser vein, Narayan Mishra directs a calculated insult at Bashir Ahmed
when he orders a truckload of bricks for the Ayodhya temple from the
Muslilm brick-maker.
There is, as I have suggested, an extraordinary unprecedentedness
to this accumulation of anxiety-inducing images of a Hindu commu-
nal consciousness as far as the popular cinema is concerned. Following
again upon the image of the anxious Shaila, this segment concludes
with the newspaper headlines announcing the demolition of the Babri
Fig. 39: Bombay, Mani Rathnam, 1995, Shaila’s View of the Rathyatra.
Masjid. The atmosphere of foreboding generated in the opening stages
of communal mobilization would have concluded with documentary
footage of the demolition but the censor board had these images delet-
ed. The representation of communal violence in the second phase
focuses almost entirely on Muslim activity in the riots of December
1993, though it depicts it as aimed at property and state rather than
against civilians. It also allows for the representation of Muslim deaths
under police firing. The overall lopsidedness of the narrative continues
into the depiction of another turn in the riots. Here the attack on the
mathadi workers (loaders), the murderous advance on Narayan Mishra,
and the burning of a Hindu household in a slum, relentlessly focus
our attention on anti-Hindu actions. Indeed, the only point of relief
in the representation upto this moment is one which remains ambigu-
ous. When the children are attacked, the identity of their assailants is
obscured by the scarves that swathe their faces.
However, in the last phase of the film, there is a noticeable shift
in the treatment, as the film shows both communities involved in an
alternating pattern of blood-letting. It is this impression that liberal
and left-wing public opinion has taken away from the film, despite the
fact that the earlier episodes contradict such a clear-cut picture. How-
ever, the reasons for this impression vary considerably with left wing
and civil rights activists on the one side and those expressing a liberal
humanist viewpoint on the other. The former argue that the apparent
‘evenhandedness’ of the film is a terrible misrepresentation of the riots,
as these were in reality an anti-Muslim pogrom. ‘Did someone say it’s
a balanced view because the director has shown one maha arti for
every namaaz. But what of the sleight of hand by which what was an
effective pogrom engineered by state forces against one community
became a riot between sections of two communities . . .’4
4 Padmanabhan, ‘“Money” Ratnam’. Cf. also Namrata Joshi, ‘The Film Represents
Reality!’, Economic Times, 16 April 1995: ‘Mani Ratnam has virtually re-invented the
Bombay “riots” in a grotesque expression of what it “ought” to have been—universally
played and, ultimately, amenable to cessation in the face of sentimental, moralis-
tic rhetoric. A version even Bal Thackeray approves . . . His “reality” is a communal
“riot”—shot much in the style of a ding-dong kabaddi match . . . It is a contest be-
tween equals, with points being scored by either side with a pendulum-like regularity—
and fairness . . . Though the theme of communal conflict engulfs the film for nearly
three-fourths of its duration, there is no hint of the possibility of the entire episode in
Bombay in 1993, having been an organized and planned pogrom against a minority,
the scars of which are yet to heal . . .’
Liberal opinion on the other hand does not recognize that there is
a misrepresentation. One such writer concedes that the film did not
draw out the complexities of the riots in terms of police and criminal
involvement, but ‘the juxtaposition of street corner artis and congre-
gations at mosques is powerful enough . . .’5 A particularly strident
version of this view berates the Muslim lobby for not appreciating the
evenness of the treatment: ‘Offence was taken we are told, because
a Hindu family was shown being burned alive. A Muslim family is
also shown being similarly murdered, because this also happened in
the terrible riots of 1992, but our Muslim objectors are selective in
their opinion.’6 Here the ‘equality’ in the treatment of communities is
understood as truthful ‘because this . . . happened.’ I think it is part of
the liberal argument that instead of being critical, the Muslim lobby
should be grateful, for ‘Bombay is one of the first films to portray the
Muslim victims of the Bombay riots sympathetically. And yet it is
somehow typical of the pathetic leadership of the Muslim community
that the objections should have come from Muslims.’7
These liberal views are based on an acceptance of the film’s mis-
representation of the riots as finally centring on the equal guilt of the
two communities. More remarkable though is the fact that observers
who are ideologically opposed are susceptible to a common miscog-
nition, that the film holds Muslims and Hindus as culpable in a similar
manner. Can it be because the moment of the figuration of equal culp-
ability is also that of the coherence, reparation, and renewed legitima-
tion of Indian society in the film? This is the moment that engages both
critics and apologists, making the film an essentially coherent object
to engage with, rather than an inchoate and dissonant one. Or is it
a miscognition that the narrative process successfully generates, con-
taining/disavowing earlier figurations of identity and conflict?
In an article by S.S.A. Aiyar the liberal apologia abandons its refe-
rences to the real and demands an investment in the myth of equal
culpability. Referring to criticisms that the film had failed to represent
the violence for what it was, a pogrom, Aiyar writes:
5
Sunil Sethi, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Pioneer, 16 April 1995.
6 Tavleen Singh, ‘Pampering the Minority Ego’, Indian Express, 16 April 1995. In
Tavleen Singh’s writing there is a slippage between official Muslim opinion, or the
views of the Muslim leadership, and Muslims as a whole. For example, ‘Embolden-
ed by their success in stopping Bombay, Maharashtra’s Muslims notched up another
little fundamentalist victory last week.’
7 Sunday, 28 April 1995, 84.
This objection cannot stand scrutiny. No film can or should claim to
represent the absolute truth (there is probably no such thing). Besides
the whole point of the film—and indeed of secularism—is that violence
is wrong in principle, not because one community suffers more casual-
ties than another. Numbers are not irrelevant—they add another
dimension to the injustice of violence. But the fundamental issue is the
inhumanity of all slaughter, and it is unwise to get diverted from this
by looking at riot statistics. Had ‘Bombay’ been a documentary film,
a mention of numbers would have been appropriate. But as a film trying
to show that there are no winners in the inhumanity of communal
strife, it would have lost its message by going into who did how much
to whom.8
This is an active advocacy for the suppression of facts except, rather
contradictorily, in the format of the documentary. Is this because
the documentary is generically and ethically oriented to representing
facts? Or is it because it is a minority medium which does not have the
communicative possibilities of the mainstream fiction film? I sense
it is the latter. The detail that Bombay knowingly draws upon docu-
mentary conventions, and therefore might be expected to observe the
ethics of the documentary is beside the point in Aiyar’s argument. For
what matters is that the film is a vehicle for the mass communication
of myths, and these must be rendered in such a way as to mitigate speci-
fic responsibility and liability to punishment by generalizing culpabil-
ity. Everyone is guilty, so let us agree to accept this guilt and move on.
In writing about that which should be addressed by the film (and
on ‘secularist’ principles), Aiyar unwittingly raises a genuine prob-
lem. While the working premise of social representation in main-
stream cinema is the stereotype, we must understand that the Bombay
cinema has always tended to reserve a notion of normalcy for the
Hindu hero, the apex figure in the composite nationalism of its fic-
tions. Exaggeration in cultural behaviour is attributed to other so-
cial groups, especially Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. If this is the
conventional mode of representation, should we castigate Bombay
for reproducing it? As a mainstream film engaged in purveying myths
for the nation, we need to look at the popular film in terms of what
it can represent within the limits historically and institutionally set
for this form. However, even within these limits, one may ask whether
Bombay is not part of a larger regressive move. While the attributes of
8
Times of India, 15 April 1995.
social backwardness, cultural conservatism, and deep religiosity are
common enough to the stereotype of the plebeian Muslim in the
popular cinema, the popular cinema does not usually cite aggressive-
ness as a defining quality. This characteristic may recur in popular
cultural stereotypes of the Muslim,9 but cinema has been much more
careful in this context. In the recent past Bombay cinema has rede-
fined these conventions by showing Muslims as villainous characters
in films such as Tezaab (N. Chandra, 1988), Gardish (Priyadarshan,
1993), and Angaar (Shashilal Nayar, 1993).10 But Muslims in these
narratives come from Bombay’s criminal groups. Mani Rathnam’s
Bombay participates in this shift (as did his Roja in a sense), but it
also makes a distinct intervention by figuring aggression as residing
within the community rather than as characterizing its criminal off-
shoots. In this sense the film may have brought about an alignment
between mainstream cinematic fiction and the popular Hindu imagin-
ing of the communal other.
Along with these politically regressive interventions in popular
cinematic modes, Bombay has contributed certain other new elements
Fig. 40: Bombay, Intertitle, place and date.
9
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘The Bigoted Julaha’, in Gyanendra Pandey, The Construc-
tion of Communalism in Colonial North India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990,
66–108.
10 Rashmi Doraiswamy, ‘Commercial Hindi Cinema: Changing Narrative Stra-
tegies’, Cinemaya 23, 1994, 4–12.

into mainstream cinema: its proximity to the events it depicts, and
the invocation of documentary methods, the use of dates, newspaper
headlines, and place-names to situate the violence. (Fig. 40, p. 240.)
These features place the film in the arc of recent public memory, and
make it an intervention in the construction of that memory. Indeed,
where reviews actually claim that the film is objective and balanced
in its account of what took place in Bombay, it could be said to be a
substitute for memory.11 It is here, in the historical proximity and the
truth claims of the fiction, that we need to apply a different register of
reception than that accorded to the mainstream consensual form. In
Bombay the inbuilt cultural politics of the mainstream, its constituent
units of representation, are harnessed via documentary simulation to
the politics of the immediate, the justification, condemnation, or dis-
avowal of Hindu actions, depending upon the particular narrative
segment one chooses to highlight. Thus, it is remarkable that Thackeray,
the Shiv Sena leader, concentrates on the facts which the film draws
upon, and how it organizes these facts, not on the myth of equal culp-
ability around which left and liberal critics orient their position: ‘We
didn’t start the violence. If you look carefully at the film, you will find
that it is all there. The murder of the Mathadi workers. The burning
of the house in Jogeshwari. We had no choice but to retaliate . . .’12
It is no coincidence that the ‘Muslim lobby’ also highlighted these
references to identifiable incidents as ‘giv[ing] the impression that the
Muslims are the aggressors.’13 While the liberal and left-wing critics
dwell only upon the narrative’s process of equalizing responsibility, it
is the communal lobbies on either side which point to how significant
documentary strategies construct a tale of Muslim aggression as a cen-
tral component of the riots. Of course, these constructions also ex-
clude a great deal which goes on in the film in their own particular bid
for narrative coherence.
The discourse around censorship and the bid to ban the film draw
out the political implications of its representation of Bombay’s com-
munal violence for the state and a certain image of the Muslim com-
munity. It would seem that the censors operated through a mixture of
11
‘The film maker has taken great pains to structure his objective and impartial
documentation of the communal riots in Bombay two years ago.’ ‘Battle over Bombay’,
editorial, Screen, 14 April 1995.
12 Sunday, 28 April 1995, 81.
13
‘Muslims Object to “Bombay” Scenes’, Times of India, 9 April 1995.
considerations regarding the film’s portrayal of the state, its impact
on diplomatic relations and on the sentiments of the Muslim com-
munity.14 Thus the cutting of references to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
‘Islamic state’ must be related to diplomatic prohibitions. Sensitivity
to reminding Muslims of the campaign against them appears to under-
lie the censor board’s deletion of the following: visuals of the rathyatra
along with dialogue ‘Babri Masjid todenge, Ram mandir bana-
yenge’; dialogue relating to a door-to-door collection of funds from
Hindu households; visuals of the Babri Masjid and its demolition;
and, amongst other dialogue cuts, ‘5000 years ago there was a temple
here. Who destroyed it?’
The suggestion is that the depiction of certain incendiary anti-Mus-
lim rhetoric and actions might inflame passions, presumably of the
Muslims rather than of the Hindus. This means that these events
are isolated from their treatment within the narrative process. The pre-
sumption is that even if a director employs a method which alienates
the spectator from such scenes of anti-Muslim aggression, this would
nevertheless involve the re-experiencing of the affront with possible
political repercussions. What the censors particularly feared, I would
think, was the rekindling of anti-government sentiment among the
Muslims, on the assumption that the demolition of the mosque was
a failure of the government to represent their interests. The censor
board’s cutting of references to the high incidence of Muslim deaths
in the December violence, and of visuals showing police firing on
Muslim crowds, conforms to this imperative. There is also another
anxiety: not only that the government should not be shown to be inef-
fective or opposed to the community, but that it must not appear
vulnerable to popular assault. Thus an episode showing the death of
a policeman was also removed. Anxiety about the government image
amongst Hindus, on the other hand, is hardly in evidence. Perhaps the
excision of the dialogue ‘Go and ask the government which is cheating
you in the name of secularism’ is the solitary instance, suggesting a con-
cern for the impact of Hindu communalist propaganda on public
perceptions that the government was guilty of ‘minority appeasement’.
Despite such anxieties, the censor board still displayed a respect for
realist representation for it did not demand a complete excision of
any reference to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. But, within this
14 For details of censorship, see Times of India, 12 March 1995; and Frontline, 16
June 1995.
‘reality orientation’ it made a distinction: only newspaper clippings
could be shown, implying that documentary footage had the capa-
city to stir passions in a way that the photograph did not. Indeed, we
can say that the censors reflected a general concern to contain move-
ment, whether of people’s emotions, or of the image, in keeping with
the motivations of order.15
If the censor board allowed for a muted representation of reality, it
made excisions which were significantly opposed to the clear articula-
tion of a causal logic. This is especially indicated by two cuts. The first
is the response of a policeman to the Muslim actions of December:
‘These people have started the riots against the demolition of the mas-
jid in Ayodhya.’ The second is the deletion of visuals and dialogues
spoken by Tinu Anand while distributing bangles. Apparently the
Thackeray stand-in was shown giving his followers bangles in the wake
of the killing of the mathadi workers. While these cuts follow the logic
of blocking the recreation of injured sentiment and of the rhetoric used
to justify violence, they contribute to critical gaps in narrative causal-
ity. To a large extent the film’s organization of images around the demo-
lition provides an explanation of the Muslim response despite the cut.
But the particular location of Tinu Anand’s dialogue suggests that the
film offers an explanation for Hindu violence in the last phase which
now stands obscured. At least one of the discontinuities of the film’s
present structure derives not from the peculiarities of its organization
but from censorship cuts.
The official Muslim lobby, on the other had, objected to represen-
tations of Hindu mobilization and the images of the demolition even
after the censor’s excisions.16 We must assume that the demand de-
rived from the sensitivity of the spokesmen to the re-enactment of a
humiliation. But, at another level, their outlook amounts to an ironic
15
Thus, too, the much publicized induction of Bombay police officers to evaluate
the impact of the film on public emotions.
16 According to the Muslim League corporator Yusuf Abrahani ‘who has emerged
as a spokesman of the protesters’, the following scenes are anti-Islamic: ‘In a shot
showing a procession of Hindus, a placard demands “Tala Kholo” . . . This is an obvi-
ous reference to the removal of locks on the Babri Masjid . . . The hero’s father who
is a Hindu flings money at the heroine’s father, who is a brick manufacturer, and
asks him to make bricks with Ram inscribed on them . . . There is a shot of the Babri
Masjid. Even though its demolition is not shown, newspaper clippings carrying news
about the demolition are shown while the soundtrack makes it clear that the structure
is being demolished.’ Times of India, 9 April 1995.
intensification of Chidananda Das Gupta’s thesis that, in the case of
the Indian audience, seeing is believing.17 Das Gupta of course sought
to conjure up a cognitive mind-set here, the gullible spectator for
whom the ‘impression of reality’ achieved by the cinema makes the un-
real real. In this case of course the image refers to reality, and the lobby
fears that to see it will make it, shall we say, more real or hyper-real.
Whereas Eco uses that term to describe a striving for reality effects by
cultures lacking history,18 such as America, here I would suggest that
we are presented with a very distinct viewpoint. The images in con-
tention suggest that the sacred is fallible and can be violated. I am not
suggesting that the Babri Masjid had an uncomplicated sacred status.
Rather, I think what is important here is a process of displacement,
where politics causes the sacred to resurface in particular locations
which then come to stand not for the sacred but for the socio-political
community constructed in its name. The hyper-reality effect then
speaks of a particular imaginary public sphere in which images are im-
pacted with affect, a cluster of emotive political intensities which be-
come the object of psychic and public defence. Such an imaginary
investment is not necessarily shared by the community as a whole. The
trauma suffered by the mass of Muslim people over the destruction of
the masjid is not under question here, but their hypostasization as
community in the representational claims of both government and
Muslim spokesmen is. The government displayed an intention to
contain images which conjured a reality in which it was culpable. And
the drive of Muslim leaders to erase the trajectory of loss may reveal a
need to maintain the imaginary of the socio-political community in
which they as a limited interest group have a particular stake.19
Each of these components in the public response to Bombay are
characterized by indifference to particular representations in favour of
others. These investigations suggest that amnesia is a procedure more
generally observable in the reception of popular narrative forms and
goes against the grain of discontinuity which characterize these forms.
In the case of Bombay, we have seen how censorship has contributed
to certain discontinuities, but this does not explain all of them. The
17 Das Gupta, The Painted Face.

18 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper-Reality, London, Picador, 1987.
19
Cf. for example, Rashmee Z. Ahmad’s analysis of the protest by Sahabuddin
Owaisi’s Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen in Hyderabad. ‘Bombay: Competitive Com-
munalism’, Times of India, 21 March 1995.
explanations of communal violence implicit in various parts of the
film can be considered as comprising both discontinuity, and as orga-
nized in such a way that earlier events are systematically contained
by later ones. The description of cultural difference through popular
stereotype, the gesture to the documentary mode, the fictive recons-
truction in its various hues, these modes of representation amount to
a certain layering, iconically and temporally, of the narrative’s cons-
truction of Indian identity. A deep structure of cultural difference pro-
vides the bedrock of perceptions, one coloured by Hindu, and more
broadly modern modes of ‘othering’. While this never actually under-
goes any change in the film, the figuration of the dangerous Hindu
must cause us to reflect that the film’s mode of address is a rather com-
plicated one. These images need to be held onto even as we consider
the operations of ideological coherence at work in the film.
5. The Navigation of Sectarian Differences:

Community and Sexuality
The Hindu right has been relatively quiet in the discussion around
censorship. It was given a privileged position over Muslim groups
when Amitabh Bachchan organized a meeting between Mani Rath-
nam and Bal Thackeray, providing the film’s initial public image with
a slanted sense of political negotiation. Despite liberal disclaimers, the
film has not been able to discount this image in terms of the emphases
of its own narrative structure. The discussion was a minimal but sig-
nificant one. Apart from Thackeray’s argument that the film should
be renamed ‘Mumbai’, something he did not persist with, the Shiv
Sena leader demanded the deletion of a scene showing his stand-in
(Tinu Anand) repenting the riots. This demand reflected Thackeray’s
reading of the film’s narrative of the riots as a Hindu retaliation against
Muslim aggression. In other words, there was nothing to repent.20 The
Shiv Sena’s relationship to the film has subsequently acquired the aura
of a liberal defence of free speech; Thackeray stridently asserted that
he would ensure the release of the film against the drive of the Muslim
groups to have it banned.21 This pattern of response indicates that the
fiction does not, overall, directly assail the Hindu right or their under-
20
Sunday, 28 April 1995, 81.
21
He said efforts to give a communal tinge to the film’s release would not be
tolerated. ‘Thackeray Warns Muslims on Bombay’, Pioneer, 9 April 1995.
standing of what happened. In fact, Thackeray called it ‘a damned
good film’.22
The Hindu right also had no objection to the film’s romantic scena-
rio; the official Muslim position, on the other hand, argued that the
implication of Muslim tradition and identity in the heroine’s moving
out of the community (the association of the Koran with her flight
to her lover, the throwing off of the burqa) was anti-Islamic.23 Charac-
teristic of both positions, however, is the significance attributed to
women in the definition of wider group identities. That communal
spokesmen mirror each other in this premise is clear from the fol-
lowing statements:
Love knows no barriers and can blossom even under a rain of fire and
brimstone. No one can therefore object to a Muslim man falling in love
with a Hindu woman and vice versa.—Syed Shahabuddin24
It was a fact that there were marriages between Hindu boys and
Muslim girls, but no one created a fuss.—Interview with Bal Thackeray.25
We may observe that both spokesmen assume the masculine posi-

tion for their community when they speculate about intercommunal
marriages. While Bombay constitutes a departure in referring to such
marriages, it does so within the rules of the Hindu nationalist hege-
mony that the popular cinema has by and large reproduced. The hero
must come from the majority community, thereby exercising a sym-
bolic patriarchal–communal authority over the constitution of the
nation.26 Once again, Thackeray obviously has no problems on this
account.
22 ‘I Have Never Called Muslims Traitors, Says Bal Thackeray’, Times of India,
31 March 1995.
23
Times of India, 9 April 1995.
24 Hindustan Times, 7 May 1995.
25 Pioneer, 9 April 1995. Thackeray also noted that actors like Meena Kumari, Dilip
Kumar, and Madhubala were Muslims and no one had objected when they took
Hindu names. This again fits the rules of a Hindu nationalist hegemony, in which
it is perfectly acceptable that minorities negate their identity and assume the major-
ity one.
26
Cf. Javed Akhtar’s eloquent elaboration of the problem of popular cinema’s
inability to represent Hindu–Muslim romance: ‘This is actually part of a larger taboo
area in popular cinema . . . The real taboo is that a high-caste Hindu girl will never
be shown marrying an outcaste boy. Never. If at all the great caste divide has to
be bridged, it will be done via a high-caste boy falling in love with an outcaste girl, as
I want to reflect on how this order of symbolic narrative is worked
out in the domain of romance, sexuality and of domestic life, and what
tensions surface within a narrative of the subordination or assimilation
of community identity through marriage. As with the larger narrat-
ive of public events, amnesia is important here too, and centres on the
codes of deportment of the woman, and the signs through which she
is represented. The first half of the film clearly codes Shaila as a Mus-
lim, perhaps most emphatically in her springing free from her burqa
to meet her beloved. From the time of her arrival in Bombay onwards,
her identity is marked not through clothes and the burqa, but by her
name. Though she does not apply sindoor or the bindi, she now wears
the sari. The subtle neutralization of her identity is only seriously dis-
turbed in the fleeting but significant glimpse of her going through the
namaaz, during a song montage. The persistent signs of her Muslim
identity derive from a narrative strategy which cannot afford to forget
it entirely. To recall secures a position not only for Shaila the Muslim
but also for a secular position which is provided with an assimilable
rather than an intractable other (the one who bears the sword). The
power-laden terms of the assimilation are indicated in Shaila’s vulner-
ability, not only to larger public forces, but also, in her perception,
to the whims of Hindu patriarchy. Thus Shaila anxiously enquires
whether Narayan Mishra seeks to take her children away from her. The
particular resonances of this scene are one of subtle masquerade, the
Muslim woman pleading her case by adopting the demeanour and
submissive idiom of the dutiful Hindu bahu.
But the fragments of her Muslim identity are not easily dismissed.
The instance of her prayer is assimilable because it fits the film’s socio-
logical imagination: the jeans and T-shirt-clad ex-Hindu male stands
discreetly in the background, overseeing his wife’s immersion in pra-
yer, the moment iconizing a benevolent (Hindu-derived) modernity
indulging a private and unobtrusive Muslim religiosity.27 However, a
in Achoot Kanya, Sujaata, or Parineeta. Similarly, the one who rebels against the
Hindu–Muslim divide will never be the Hindu woman, it will be the Hindu man.
Ratnam’s Bombay bears this out.’ ‘The Great Evasion’, Times of India, Sunday Review,
23 April 1995.
27 The other side of this indulgence is the hero’s offer to give up his religion to
compensate for his father’s attitude. The offer is a gesture rather than a belief, and so
does not compromise the modern transcendence of religious identity.
more conflictual note is sounded when Shaila first enters Shekhar’s
landlord’s house. In a film which obscures and hypostasizes the Mus-
lim community, or frames it as otherwise assimilable, these circums-
tances force an assertion of identity from the heroine. Encircled by a
shocked and pollution-fearing household, she firmly announces that
she is a Muslim.
However, beyond the fragment, which I take to be the transient sur-
facing of a silenced subjectivity, there is a mise-en-abime effect which
derives from the observation of a structure of taboo, the repetitive trac-
ing of a ritually coded mark of difference. The burqa as veil, as material
which conceals, separates, but also allows a constrained intimacy,
resurfaces when Shekhar grapples with Shaila through the saris on a
washing line, and when Shaila’s pallu covers her face when Shekhar
kisses her. The sign of the taboo weaves into the narrative of assimila-
tion, tracking back over it by maintaining a symbolic division even at
the moment of consummation. (Fig. 41.)
The film’s complicity with community prohibition is woven into a
larger narrative of the place of romance and sexuality in public and
private spaces. Some of Bombay’s critics have suggested that, from the
Fig. 41: Bombay, Veiled Kiss.

beginning, the romance between Shekhar and Shaila is defined by a
Hindu male gaze motivated by a curiosity to penetrate the exoticism
of the other.28 This interpretation fails to note that this gaze is an in-
fringement of a prohibition with a much wider currency. This is the
public monitoring and containment of sexuality, and its corollary, the
difficulty of carving out a private sphere for the register of the intimate
and the erotic.29 The infringement of public regulation is common
to popular film romance. As Khalid Mohammed and Iqbal Masud
have pointed out, Bombay draws upon the tradition of the romantic
Muslim social whose narrative is generated by a fleeting glimpse of the
woman.30 Bombay inaugurates its romantic scenario around a fantasy
of the look roaming in public space, unbounded by public scrutiny. In
the song sequence ‘Kehna Hi Kya’, Shekhar’s free movement through
the Muslim wedding yokes this fantasy to the tale of intercommunal
love. Shaila is constantly repositioned for our and Shekhar’s view with-
in the characteristic discontinuities of the song sequence. The swish
pan affords an accelerated pace for recentring the woman in different
spaces and bodily dispositions. But its usage in the later riot scenes is
anticipated here when Shaila, in a kaleidoscopic sweep, turns her look
in search of Shekhar, whose look she has hitherto evaded. Centred
on female performance for a male spectator, this turnaround in the
last stages may be said to set the scene for Shaila’s own desiring look
at Shekhar in his family house and the subsequent centring of the man
as vulnerable, emotional figure in the ‘Tu hi re’ song sequence.
The larger problems of the representation of romance and sexuality
emerge only after the couple is married. Here the film defers the con-
summation of the marriage by denying privacy to the couple, children
28 Sadanand Menon, ‘Bombay is Political Cinema at Its Best!’, Economic Times,
16 April 1995.
29
For a suggestive consideration of the problems surrounding the distinction
between public and private in the constitution of the Indian cinema, see the work of
Madhava Prasad, for example: ‘Cinema and the Desire for Modernity’, Journal of Arts
and Ideas 25–6, 1994.
30
Lenseye, ‘Truth or Dare’, Times of India, Sunday Review, 2 April 1995; Iqbal
Masud, ‘A Damp Squib’, Indian Express, 14 May 1995. Masud castigates Mani Rath-
nam for not being able to understand and represent Muslim culture; one wonders if
this is not to mistake the project of the film. Strangely, he advises viewers to see Nana
Patekar in Krantiveer (1994) for a better representation of the riots. To my mind this
is a film which underwrites Hindu male authority much more brutally than Bombay.
of visiting relatives being quartered in the tenant’s dwelling. This
amounts to the institution of a public gaze within the fiction, mirror-
ing the prohibitions of the censorship code. Does this articulation of
the symbolic then negotiate a second-level prohibition with the ima-
ginary, not only upholding the primacy of patriarchal–communal
norms but their extended observation in the marking out of a space
between communities?
We may turn to the position of the Hindu matriarch of the house-
hold for an elaboration of this problem of the public and the private.
In opposition to the street mother who flirts with Shekhar, this one
highlights in her person the repressiveness which Narayan Mishra and
her own husband transcend (she also balances an absence: a Hindu
matriarchal presence in the absence of Narayan Mishra’s wife). This re-
turn of a repressive attitude serves to point up the question of bound-
aries, the playing out of those everyday taboos through the vehicle of
women as prime repository of the virtues and rituals of the household.
The Muslim woman has to be made acceptable in everyday Hindu life,
so the Hindu landlady as the domestic image of a communal ethos has
to be humanized. She is shown to relent at the sight of heady, youth-
ful love. When Shekhar mistakenly embraces her in his pursuit of
Shaila, she is taken aback and is then made to smile. Put plainly, this
is an instance of bad acting. A glitch in the performance of a minor
character suggests a problem for representation; how to employ mar-
ginal characters in such a way that the transformation of attributes,
their main function, does not appear imposed on the material. If
such minor systems of representation fail, an interesting gap opens up
in the relations between the pro-filmic and the filmic, where the for-
mer becomes a kind of unnarrativized dead weight in the texture of
the narration. Put into the structure of the film’s regime of affect, the
failure of performance suggests a difficulty in superseding an earlier
representation. The transformation of this character that follows is
still inflected with an anxiety: the young couple, walking through
the proximate red light area are shooed into the domestic interior by
the matriarch, anxious that their flirtation is not the object of public
scrutiny.
Why is this Hindu domestic space composed in such tight narrative
proximity to the red light area? Shekhar and Shaila’s walk is cast against
the backdrop of his rueful exchange with the prostitutes; perhaps
the narrative invites us to speculate about a bachelor’s familiarity with
these women. But the point is that the couple, on the threshold of sex-
ual relations now that the children have left their apartment, commu-
nicate the taint of sexuality from one space into the other, eliciting the
matriarch’s anxious plea that they go inside. The red light area then
becomes a metaphor for the sexuality of the couple, one which the
matriarch must conceal in the household. We can see a slippage here
between the general prohibitions operating around the companionate
couple, and their particular refraction through the prohibitions of a
Hindu–Muslim romance.
In contrast to the amnesiac propensities of the narrative, whose
problems and uncertain features are periodically suppressed, a per-
formative register is drawn upon to invest the surplus arising from the
deferment of the couple’s sexuality. In the song sequence ‘Hamma
Hamma’ identity is transformed arbitrarily, relayed now in the way the
lovers are projected through their bodies and to the rhythms of disco-
sensuality. Instead of a careful development of expressive attributes
through narration, these are abruptly rendered through gesture and
performance. Indeed, this is a performative coding of the access to sex-
uality, one displaced onto the ‘Hamma Hamma’ performance, where
the figure in white from the ‘Kahna hi kya’ song sequence returns as a
ramp artist (Sonali Bendre). The problems of identity addressed in the
narrative are fleetingly transcended. Skirting the requirements of
character development, modernity defines itself here as composed of
the pleasures of performative surfaces rather than ‘authentically’ evolv-
ed psychologies. And with disposition of the body now integral to the
cultural refashioning of the character, there is a foregrounding of the
vivacity of the star personality, Koirala’s impishness surfacing from the
constraints of the shy and timid Shaila. However, there is still a trace
of the problem sexuality poses for the narrative in the strangely ornate
and sleazy environs of the performance; here couples are glimpsed in
intimate poses as they take pleasure in the dance. While the sexuality
of the couple is secured in the domestic interior, a peculiar undertow
of the illicit and disreputable suffuses the scene.
6. Self-Alienation in the Constitution of

Decommunalized Space
Performance contrived out of generic resources such as the roman-
tic Muslim social and the fashion show allows for a release from the
constraints of social representation. As a result, the film generates a
certain spectrum of personality traits rather than a tightly coded pat-
tern of identity. Something of these effects of dispersal characterize the
climactic sequence, in which a multi-communal agency as agency of
re-paration (now forgotten in the more characteristic narrative of the
mainstream cinema) intervenes in the riots to recover the image of an
inclusive nationhood. However, this agency too is hierarchically cod-
ed, and finally clusters around the offer of sacrifice from the posi-
tion of a modern Hindu identity. This particular organization of moral
authority is clearly highlighted in the film’s climax.
The actions are systematically developed along a particular axis.
Shekhar’s defence of a Muslim family from a Hindu mob provides the
focal point for other similar actions, and has the phenomenal form of
an epicentre, the travelling camera describing an arc around his space.
New spaces in which other agents neutralize communal antagonism
follow on from this key action and space, our views being calibrated
to its rhythms of representation, with segments getting shorter, and a
greater frequency to the recurrence of the original scene, on which, of
course, the sequence concludes.
If this master space generates the narrative rhythm of the sequence,
it also provides rules for the construction of decommunalized space.
Pacification is undertaken by figures who make appeals to aggressors
of their own denomination. There is an important implication to this.
As they are amongst their co-religionists, they can draw upon the safety
of a common identity; they are not victims pleading for their lives, they
are not the other, but an alienated figuration of the self. While these
figures perform at the boundary of identity, an active claiming of the
other as the self, as in the case of the Muslim woman who claims those
she protects as her child and her sister, is not a common strategy.
It could be said then that the hero generates a model, an exemplary
instance which is echoed in a number of actions of a similar kind. But
this model of decommunalization has a certain discreteness of com-
munity address built into it. There is a suggestion here that the film’s
vision of the bringing to an end of antagonism nevertheless entails the
reproduction of difference. However, there are two, possibly three ins-
tances in which the rule of community self-address does not operate.
The first instance is that of the policeman who intervenes between
communities, gesturing here to the highly ideological image of a trans-
cendent state. The second is the hijra, whose self-image is beech wala,
one who stands in between. This ironical self-image alludes of course
to gender identity as well as community identity, suggesting that there
is a relationship between a clearcut communal identity and a clearcut
sexual one. The idiom here would conjure up a certain distance from
the gendered terms through which hierarchies of authority and sub-
mission, oppressor and victim, are played out across the masculine-
feminine opposition. But the hijra is shown to be protecting a Muslim
from a Hindu mob, rather than mediating ‘in between’ communities.
The placement of this character therefore establishes a homology with
others similarly placed, and pre-eminently with the hero. For the hijra,
like the hero, invites the mob to kill the dissenter first. This ‘doubling’
must not obscure an earlier identity that the ‘hermaphrodite’ conjures
up, that of the mother who protects the lost child; after all, the first,
fleeting image we have of the hijra is as a figure in a sari . . . But perhaps
we are doing a disservice to this figure by constraining him/her within
this grid of parallels; for the main parallel, the hero, proceeds through
a process of negating identity to the avowal of an Indian identity,
something the hijra never does.
7. Melodramatic Identification: The Claims

of Self-Sacrifice
Let me go back now to the set of problems which have emerged in the
course of this analysis. How does the film’s project of a transcendent
secular modernity and national identity square with its reproduction
of the minority as other? At one level it can do this because it figures
modernity as evolving from the trajectory of Hindu subjectivity. To
that extent it remains within the conventions of the popular Indian
cinema. It is this authoritative structure which generates a number of
apparently dissonant elements: from the invocation of popular stereo-
types of the Muslim and the film’s skewed rendering of their role in
the riots, to the position of assimilation (through marriage) and multi-
community integration on the model of the Hindu hero at the climax.
We can see that the apex Hindu position identifies the particular posi-
tion the minority is to occupy in various situations.
However, against the drive to coherence in the text and its vari-
ous public constructions, I suggest that we need to locate the sources
of discontinuity, and to capture its timbre. The key issue here is how
the narrative places the spectator; how does it seek to persuade us of its
particular project of modernity? It does this, I suggest, by inviting us
to assume a melodramatic subjection, where notations of victimhood
and powerlessness bind us to the film’s vision. It is clear enough that
in the case of the Muslim woman, the terrified children, and ultimately
even the grandparents, we are immersed in a melodramatic subjecthood,
the situation of the disempowered. But how does the film work out a
relationship between the hero’s authoritative position and such a melo-
dramatic subjection? Is a position of narrative authority, defined by
a culturally confident voicing of a rational-humane viewpoint, auto-
matically a position with which we can identify? Or does some other
process, or repositioning, have to take place? For there is no automa-
tic process by which we should empathize with the hero’s attributes.
Indeed, Shekhar’s passion for Shaila is attractive not because it is con-
trolled but because it is out of control, tumultuous, culminating in the
remarkable agony of the song ‘Tu hi re’, where the hero’s face crumbles
in a helpless weeping. There are notations here of hysteria, of an out-
pouring that will not be contained by the confidence of rational out-
look and disposition. It is such an aspect of melodramatic excess that
the film uses to structure subjectivity, a strategy through which the
rational modern both creates affect by a focus on the powerless and
then increasingly thematizes itself as ultimate locus of the marginal
and the dispossessed (a patriarch without his children). This is an un-
usual narrative strategy, for it is much more common that innocence
and victimization, and in terms of narrative tropes, silence, are favour-
ed to elicit feelings of pathos.31 Here it is the clearly articulated voice
of rationality that is put on the margins, bearing a truth-claiming rhe-
toric, but a powerless one.
This rationality on the margins ironically displaces the feminine
figure who would be the conventional locus of such a disempowerment,
appropriating to its person those ‘feminine’ features of emotionality
and, most interestingly, a making vulnerable of the body. There is a
working out here of a logic stated early in the film where Shekhar cuts
his hand to indicate the depth of his passion for Shaila.32 The cul-
mination of this repositioning of the body as object of a self-inflicted
wound occurs when Shekhar douses himself with kerosene and invites
the rampaging Hindu mob to burn him alive.
31
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.
32
This is of course followed by the much more ambiguous and for me repulsive act
of Shekhar cutting Shailabano’s arm for a blood-bonding.
This invitation to harm the body follows upon two premises: the
hero’s negation of his given identity and his making that negation visi-
ble. In negating his given religious identity he embraces sheer negati-
vity: hum koi nahin hain; but then he claims a name: hum sirf Indian
hain. In the second move, the hero, safe from aggression, desires, de-
mands that he be like the other, and that the threat of the self he denies
be visited upon him. The hero’s invitation that the mob immolate him
is a direct visual and rhetorical throwback to Rishi Kumar’s throw-
ing himself on the burning Indian flag in Roja, except that act was not
preceded by a step of negation; there was a repulsive fullness to the
protagonist’s affirmation of an identity. (Figs. 42–43, p. 256.)
In contrast, it is the negativity of Bombay which puts nationalistic
rhetoric into perspective as predicated not on a fullness but on an ab-
sence of identity. The rhetoric distinguishes the hero and makes him
visible amongst a body of other Hindus, the distinction of marginality
proving to be the yardstick of difference. The narrative effects a dis-
placement of authority where the hero’s confidence, his control over
his destiny at the microcosmic level, at the level of decisions concern-
ing family and career is rendered ineffectual when the wider universe
consorts to negate that logic of freedom. Melodramatic subjection
here enforces an evacuation of positions of power and authority in
a nightmare articulation of the desire to negate oneself publicly, to
exonerate oneself of the taint of identity.
The hero’s offer of sacrifice requires us to reflect on certain practices
of male self-immolation. The Tamil instance—and after all, this is also
a Tamil film33—has been associated with the cult of MGR and also
with Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka. The Tamil experience offers a
negation/sublimation of the self into the large image of the leader, an
image which is indeed confirmed and constituted by such acts. The
second instance is that of the anti-Mandal agitation which dramatized
the despair of an identity grounded in perceptions of fallen status, but
also reflected the sense of closure amongst isolated lower-middle-class
youth.34 The Mandal context did not provide the act with a positive
33 But, unlike Roja, it is not primarily a Tamil film. In its conception from the out-
set as a multiple version film it is a new type of film which is also an old one, harking
back to the 1930s’ practices. A more considered analysis of this feature is necessary to
situate the film market as a critical component in Mani Rathnam’s ‘nation’.
34 Cf., for example, Dinesh Mohan, ‘Imitative Suicides?’ and Harsh Sethi, ‘Many
Unexplained Issues: The Anti-Mandal “Suicides” Spate’, Manushi 63–4, March–June

1991, 31–3 and 69–72.
Fig. 42
Fig. 43
Figs 42 and 43, Roja, and Bombay, Bodies for Burning.

or purposive name such as leader or nation. However, the image of the
immolation was appropriated to a discourse of merit generated by the
privileged and mobile sections of the middle class who linked it to a
dynamic of national reconstruction. One could speculate that these
acts emerge out of a sense of marginality, an experience obscured by the
discourses surrounding them. Rishi Kumar’s act in Roja reproduces
the discourse of appropriation by sublimating individual, class, and
in this case, regional identity, into that of the nation. Bombay, on the
other hand, echoes much more strongly the negativity which underlies
discourses of sacrifice. While speaking in the name of humanity and
nationhood, Shekhar Mishra simultaneously speaks the language of
alienation, indeed of revulsion.
Although Roja and Bombay solicit quite different sentiments, both
arise from a similar subjectivity: that of a modern nationalist view, with
the modern hero bearing the characteristic attributes of professional
identity, cosmopolitanism, ideological humanism, rationalism, and
the marginalization of religion. In Roja, the hero’s religion is at best a
desire for a life-style which is simple, unadorned, and therefore gestur-
ally fulfils that need of the modern to secure its roots, to specify an
identity. Otherwise the significance of Hindu identity derives not
from its reference to religiosity, but its capacity to adapt to modern so-
cial and cultural processes, and is cast in opposition to the intractable
Muslim fanaticism of the Kashmiri separatists.35 In contrast, in
Bombay the hero finds himself stranded on the margins of a social space
inundated with genocidal identity conflicts in which he is ultimately
pitted against Hindus. Alienation from the Muslim other is here sub-
ordinated to self-alienation.
The desired identity is always above other identities, and this trans-
cendental situation has a name: ‘Indian’. It is against this resolution
that Sadanand Menon expresses his unease, indeed abhorrence, urging
that a resolution of conflicts cannot be founded on transcendental
denial but on an admission of difference and an acceptance of it.36 Im-
portant (and difficult) as this argument is, it perhaps fails to consider
that whatever the cultural ‘thinness’ of the modern-universal, its
35 Significantly, the Muslim is a modern too, one who has denied rationality but
can be recovered into it; the hero and the extremist leader can speak the same langu-
age, not only Tamil, but intellectually, too.
36
‘Bombay is Political Cinema at Its Best!’
will to negativity exercises pressure on the notion of a single dominant
identity.
It is through such a negativity that it is possible to conceive of the
aspects of discontinuity which characterize the film. The dangerous
Hindu, perhaps the most startling image the film has generated, emer-
ges from the negative reflections of a protagonist whose modernity
must at once derive from his Hinduness and deny it of any signifi-
cance. It is thus a peculiarly inward discourse of the self, an inwardness
which allows for the peculiar self-alienation which abides in the film
alongside the firm tracing of the communal other. The modern pond-
ers on its national unease, performs versions of itself that abruptly and
pleasurably depart from troubled scenarios of antagonistic identity,
and generates spaces in which the other may be assimilated only to
surface in a less congenial disposition. That discontinuity at the level
of form and narrative statement can be integrated within the conflicts
of a unique subjectivity must lead to scepticism. I can only suggest, in
conclusion, that this is indeed my own surmise, and leaves me to con-
jure with the disconcertingly calm reflections of a subjectivity which
should have no room in this narrative discourse: ‘We know hundreds
of people fall in love with persons of another religious community,
caste, and marry the person they love. A film cannot be rejected on that
ground. And it is for the people themselves to judge whether a film is
worth watching or not. In the case of Bombay also, the Muslim mas-
ses did not respond to the Muslim leaders’ initiative . . .’37
We can only wait upon the moment of the popular to disabuse us
of the impertinence of analysis.
37
Asghar Ali Engineer, ‘A Controversial Film on Bombay Riots’, Mainstream,
6 May 1995, 6.
8
Another History Rises to the

Surface: Melodrama in the Age
of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram!
(Kamalahasan, 1999)
1. Plot Synopsis
I
n Chennai, on 6 December 1999, an old man, Saket Ram (Kamala-
hasan), is in a critical condition, and it’s from his point of view
that the film flashes back to the Partition period. Archaeolog-
ists at Mortimer Wheeler’s dig at Mohenjo Daro, Ram and his collea-
gue Amjad Khan (Shah Rukh Khan), are abruptly asked to pack up
when Hindu–Muslim riots erupt. Ram returns to Calcutta to be with
his beloved, Aparna (Rani Mukherjee), and finds the streets torn by
marauding Muslim crowds answering Jinnah’s Direct Action call. A
nightmarish account of Direct Action Day follows, with Aparna raped
and killed by Muslims. Amongst these is a tailor, Altaf, well known to
Ram, and Ram himself is almost sodomized by the tailor’s mate. Ram
subsequently finds and kills Altaf, and witnesses the systematic execu-
tion of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs. Assailed by guilt at his actions,
Ram meets a Hindu firebrand, Abhyankar, who urges Ram to join him
on his ‘shikar’ to hunt down Muslims. It is, however, Gandhi whom
Abhyankar deems most culpable for the tragic fate of Hindus because
of his alleged appeasement of Muslim leaders.
A numbed Ram returns to Madras, where he submits to the desires
of his Iyengar family and marries Maithili (Vasundhra Das). The two
travel to Maharashtra to meet Abhyankar, now the protégé of a funda-
mentalist Hindu raja. A friend from the past, Lalvani, a Sindhi mer-
chant, fortuitously surfaces at this point, a figure ravaged by the rape
and murder of his wife, the loss of his daughters, and the destruction
of his business in Karachi. The raja responds compassionately to this
devastated figure and provides him with a job. Ram’s indoctrination
continues, and, when Abhyankar is crippled in a riding accident, Ram
is chosen to take his place as Gandhi’s assassin. Ram prepares for this
through elaborate rituals performed at Benares and arrives in Delhi
where he stakes out the Birla Mandir for his assassination bid. A plot
twist takes him to the Muslim quarters of old Delhi, where he happens
upon his old friend Amjad who, despite personal losses incurred dur-
ing the riots, remains fervent in his Gandhian values. At first implac-
able in his Hindutva beliefs, Ram’s attitude changes when Amjad is
threatened by what are clearly RSS incendiaries. He defends Amjad
and his family, but Amjad dies. Overwhelmed, Saket Ram, now cele-
brated as the defender of Muslims, goes to seek atonement for his sins
from the Mahatma, only to see him felled by Godse’s bullet. A trauma-
tized Ram removes Gandhi’s sandals and glasses, and we subsequently
find these housed in the room where Ram lives out his later life in dark-
ness and silence. This museum of personal history is hung about with
numerous photos, and a huge image of the Mahatma is pasted over the
windows. In a peculiarly haunting and ambiguous last shot, as the cre-
dits roll Saket Ram’s grandson opens these windows, and light begins
flooding through and fragmenting the Mahatma’s image.

Here I examine Kamalahasan’s controversial film Hey Ram! along the
following axes of reflection. What new perspective does the film offer
on the traumatic Partition of the subcontinent? And from what loca-
tion in contemporary politics and culture does it launch this reflec-
tion? In other words, how does the film’s historiographical agenda
relate to present imperatives for issues of identity formation? The ques-
tion of perspective here is also one of narrative point of view. It leads
to a second series of reflections on the structure of filmic story telling,
and whether the film offers the spectator a coherent perspective on its
narrative world. I will seek to focus on the contradictory effects of
the film, the distinct uncertainty which viewers experience when con-
fronted with the inflammatory images and voices that conjure up a
narrative of Muslim bloodlust and Hindu trauma and retaliation. The
uncertainty is compounded because these deeply troubling passages
Another History Rises to the Surface 261
seem to be only ineptly redressed by less forceful narrative moves to dis-
tance the spectator from an extreme Hindutva perspective.
I want to place this analysis in terms of larger issues of popular cine-
matic form: specifically around the question of how a melodramatic
mode of narration has been subjected to revision in the contemporary
era. In particular, I want to consider how the sweep of melodrama’s
Manichaean, bipolar universe is refigured against the grid of contem-
porary political systems. This is an arena far removed from the origi-
nal contexts of the melodramatic mode which negotiated shifts in
social experience away from the certitudes of traditional hierarch-
ies and concepts of the sacred.1 Of central concern here is the chang-
ed location of the sacred itself, now transposed onto the domain of
nationhood and its key icons such as the Mahatma. I am also con-
cerned with the way narratives of national origins turn on the public
modes of address of melodramatic performance. In this rendering,
the individual agent is subsumed as a hyperbolic incarnation of the
national drama even when a specifically psychological set of motifs—
ineradicable feelings of loss and guilt, for example—are deployed.
Arguably, such characterization complicates any project of empathetic
identification. For in this film the narrative seeks to construct the char-
acter through a personalized discourse of history, but also by staging
identity as spectacle, and therefore in a key which does not quite allow
us, as spectators, to internalize the character.2
This melodramatic staging of history, in which the character is a
figure who performs for us rather than is us, directs attention to the
particular regime of play associated with the star personality of
Kamalahasan. The actor is known for his extensive experiments with
cinematic representations of bodily mutation through physical con-
tortions, makeup, and digital manipulation. These performative dimen-
sions may speak to the what-if, fiction-foregrounding premise of the
narrative—its invitation to reimagine the history of the nation-state as
a biography of murder and revenge that speaks to the suppressed de-
sires of Hindus at large. They braid in with the regime of play generated
1
For a more extended discussion of melodrama, see ch. 1 above.
2 SeeMadhava Prasad’s suggestive distinction between empathetic identification
and symbolic identification, the latter encouraging a relationship of representation for
the viewer rather than similarity. Prasad, ‘The Aesthetic of Mobilization’, Ideology of
the Hindi Film.
by the film’s deployment of video-game structures and digital modes
in key sequences. The cinematic art of the index, in which the photo-
graphed object leaves its physical trace on the film stock, is here chal-
lenged by a regime of effects that manipulate the image internally,
without any relationship to an external referent. I suggest that these de-
vices invite us (at least temporarily) to disengage from a relationship
to history as something grounded in materially defined socio-political
experience. Instead of ‘this happened’ or ‘Godse killed Gandhi’, the
issue becomes ‘any Hindu could have killed Gandhi’ and ‘I invite you
to re-play that possibility through a regime of images’. Hey Ram rend-
ers cinema and history as manipulable, as open to the play of desire
which is in the active process of constitution. Yet, in essaying this, the
film nevertheless seems to come up against a blockage, as if it cannot
produce a new symbolic structure and national biography that will
entirely replace earlier ones. The crisis in national identification sig-
nalled by the film and the shifting, unanchored structure of the post-
cinematic signifier push protagonist and spectator to the brink of an
imaginative abyss. As I will suggest, melodramatic history in the age
of digital simulation produces uncanny compensations to recover mean-
ing and the lost object of sacralized nationhood.
2. A New History?
In interviews, Kamalahasan has said that it took him some time to un-
derstand that Pakistan was not just another country, it was a religion.3
In another context, drawing attention to an iconoclastic disposition
in himself, he has spoken, ironically but not without seriousness, of
the oedipal contest with the father, referring to the Mahatma, but also,
perhaps, to ‘Periyar’— E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker—the ideologue of
the anti-caste non-Brahmin movement of Tamilnadu. The director’s
rather cryptic references to Periyar suggest that the Dravida Kazhagam
movement had fashioned a cultural hegemony within which some
Brahmins such as himself had also distanced themselves from their
identity. The situation has now changed, though the account does not
provide us with a sense of how this happened and of its implications.4
3
Interview in Screen, 4 February 2000.
4
Seminar on ‘Gandhi, Film and History’, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
(NMML), April 2000.
What is being signalled here is a basic shift in perspective, one that
marks the passing of a time in which there was a certain consensus
about leading figures such as Gandhi and Periyar in an official or overt
public discourse about secularism, democracy, and identity. Running
parallel with such discourses was a repressed and therefore potential-
ly seductive domain of beliefs and affiliations that could not be spoken
loudly and fulsomely because it was deemed politically incorrect by
reigning hegemonies. There are three strands involved here: the history
of the Hindu public’s relationship with minority communities; that of
the Tamil to questions of caste and his/her place within the wider for-
mation of the Indian nation-state; and, finally, the Hindutva critique
of secularism functioning as a new common sense which fashions its
own repression of Hindu identity and memory. I will come back to the
last and most complicated of these formulations later.
The secularism developed under the Congress state is now under
sustained attack from the Hindu Right which castigates it for ‘appeas-
ing’ a minority characterized as reactionary and backward. In the
Hindutva perspective, this ‘appeasement’ has not only undermined
the Hindu majority but also India’s investment in modernizing ini-
tiatives. The Hindu Right seeks to attribute responsibility to the Mus-
lim for historical atrocities visited on the majority, and to effect the
proper subordination of the Muslim, and other minority communi-
ties, to the Hindu in the name of a majoritarian diktat. From an en-
tirely different location the secularism of the nation-state has been
critiqued for its politically repressive projects by left-wing, feminist,
and Dalit intellectuals. One point of criticism is the covert complicity
of the nation-state with high-caste Hindu elite and with reactionary
elements in minority community formations. Secularism is blamed
for having excluded the articulation of the specific cultural and poli-
tical dimensions of low-caste and Dalit subordination. It is also said
to have excluded other ways of thinking about the relation of com-
munity and nation-state than that of a composite yet hierarchized
nationalism.5
At one level, Hey Ram would seem to be aligned with the Hindu
Right’s unleashing of certain public discourses, its narrative highlight-
ing Muslim atrocities and underwriting high-caste Hindu identity as
5
This current is probably best represented by Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments.
the vehicle of a resurgent nationalism. Here lies the importance of the
janeu, the sacred thread worn by the twice-born, the talisman through
which Abhyankar recognizes Ram for what he is and what binds them.
This talisman seeks to undertake a symbolic transformation, forg-
ing a pan-Indian elite that will be the vanguard for the reconstruction
of the nation-state. Some of the narrative also hints at contempo-
rary Hindu grievances through a displaced reference in the figure of the
devastated Sindhi merchant Lalvani. His uprootedness from region,
the ruination of his property and family, could clearly refer to the cur-
rent anguish of the Kashmiri Hindu community. As Pankaj Butalia has
remarked, it is significant that while the film has been attacked by a
number of groups, and especially the Congress, the RSS has remained
quiet about it; perhaps because the film has told the tale from their
point of view. 6
On the other hand, in the representation of Tamil identity, Hey
Ram! is part of a recent current that challenges the Dravidian move-
ment’s influence by highlighting two features in the hero’s profile, his
Brahmanical identity, and his identification with the broader Indian
nation-state. The DMK-influenced cinema of the 1940s and 1950s
subjected the brahmanical order to a radical critique. It also distanc-
ed itself from the web of imperatives set by a North Indian nationalism,
drawing on the anti-Hindi movement as a crucial vector of Tamil
nationalism.7 We have observed such transformations in other Tamil
films, especially the work of Mani Rathnam, in Roja (1992) and Bom-
bay (1995), where elite, if not Brahmin-coded characters, urbane, cos-
mopolitan professionals, had thrown themselves into situations of
patriotic endeavour, in Kashmir and Bombay.8 This would have been
an alien agenda for an earlier generation of Tamil directors.9 Hey Ram
6
Presentation at the seminar, ‘Gandhi, Film and History’, NMML, 4 April 2000.
However, Butalia went on to suggest that the film controverts this possibility in its
conclusion.
7 See, for example, Pandian, ‘Parashakthi: The Life and Times of a DMK Film’, in
Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.

8
M.S.S. Pandian has suggested to me that Mani Rathnam in fact consciously uses
non-Brahmin characters, as if to deflect criticism that tales of modernity and mod-
ernization are inevitably associated with brahmanical destinies in popular Tamil per-
ception. Personal conversation.
9
This does not apply only to an earlier generation. Mani Rathnam’s Nayakan
(1988) tracks the alienated circumstances of the Tamil poor in Bombay, showing its
hero violently resisting the dictates of local policemen and politicians to carve out a
space for his community. It has been argued that the shift in representation takes place
follows in the wake of this shift, but is even more strident, exhibiting
no anxiety about emphasizing the hero’s Brahmin identity. In fact, this
becomes a crucially enabling identity. It generates a neo-traditional
invocation of an archaic and hierarchical Hindu symbolic order as the
ritual form through which the narrative can elaborate a renunciatory
relationship for the higher cause of national regeneration.
This construction of the neo-traditional is pitted against another
version of the traditional, that of the Tamil Iyengar household which
underwrites the Mahatma’s vision of the nation. Thus Ram’s mother-
in-law strongly affirms the power of Gandhian non-cooperation, and
her husband is part of Gandhi’s entourage. This Iyengar household
is suggestive of the earlier linkage between nationalism, modernity,
and high-caste society emblematized by a leader such as C. Rajago-
palachari. The hero distances himself from this earlier, ‘unmarked’
identity formation, turning instead to an aggressively figured pan-
Indian Hindu consciousness grounded in Brahmanism as politically
symbolic identity.
These trends in the Tamil cinema are part of a long-term concern
to succeed in the Hindi market, the most substantial domestic market,
through dubbed and multiple versions. The new feature is to yoke this
drive into the national market to a pan-Indian patriotism that thrusts
the Tamilian into a wider political agenda. It has been argued that
Mani Rathnam’s films negotiate a new position for the Tamilian vis-
à-vis the Indian nation-state as an entity now reconfigured onto the
global stage. The earlier investment of popular film in a narrative of
alienation from the West, defined by caricatures of English-speak-
ing westernized Indians, sexually permissive, and indifferent to family
allegiances, is now suppressed. Instead audiences are invited to identify
with the urbane, English-knowing, cosmopolitan figure. It is as if a
conduit had been set up between Tamilness and a new trans-regional
national elite at par with its global counterparts, a new stage for mobi-
lity at home and around the globe.10
There are wider historical transformations therefore being chan-
nelled through Kamalahasan’s casual references to an oedipal logic
challenging the father, be it Gandhi or Periyar. However, to take these
after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by the LTTE, from when films started
demonstrating the pan-Indian nationalist credentials of Tamil protagonists.
10 See, for example, Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Integrating Whose Nation? Tourists and
Terrorists in Roja’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 (3), 15 January 1994.

remarks at face value, especially in relation to the Mahatma, may be to
ignore certain tensions within the project. This is something I will
return to later, after tracking some of the key representational strategies
used in the film.
3. Publicizing an Unofficial History

Central to Hey Ram!, and more generally to the popular Indian cin-
ema, is the concept of an iconic history. The past is rendered through
a set of emblematic figures, locations, and events which are deploy-
ed to represent that which is already known. It is important here to
distinguish between contexts of knowledge. As I noted earlier, the
secularist project has been criticized for not accurately representing
historical realities—for the Hindu Right this includes an account of
‘Muslim atrocities against Hindus’. This has long been one of the
strands which contend within the popular Hindu understanding of
the national past, but it did not force its way into the official discourse
of political parties and in arenas such as the cinema until the substan-
tial emergence of the Sangh Parivar. Manohar Shyam Joshi, who wrote
the dialogue for Hey Ram!, noted that it had brought widely held popu-
lar attitudes into the cinema for the first time.
This iconized history is the sort familiar from pilgrimage maps and
hagiographies, where the life of the bhakt, heroic figure, or exemplary
character is charted through his association with particular events
and iconic spaces. The figure who carries the destiny of society in his
life story may authenticate certain historical constructions by his sta-
tus as witness. Even more seductive and insidious is the character on
whose body and mind these public histories are imprinted through the
direct experience of loss and suffering. This strategy works most trans-
parently through the function of rape narratives. Nothing breaches
the boundaries between the public and the private in as devastating
a fashion.
At issue here is not only a partisan, Hindu communalized reading
of history, but the fact that this has been mobilized into the cinema.
The flashback devoted to Direct Action Day, events which Kamalahasan
described in an interview as ‘an execution by the Muslim community
of Jinnah Sahib’s orders’,11 has in some fundamental sense broken the
rules by which communal conflict was represented in popular Indian
11
Television interview with Kamalahasan on BBC, February 2000.
cinema: the Muslim crowd banging at the windows of Ram’s car, sug-
gestive of a primordial simian mass; the Muslim tailor, welcoming his
salivating mates to gang-rape the winsome Aparna (the use of the
popular teen star Rani Mukherjee hyperbolizes the horror); Ram tied
down and vulnerable to somewhat different pleasures, the threat of
sodomization suggestive of Hindu masculine anxieties; and, finally,
the blood welling up from the slit throat of the dying wife. In its ex-
tended, graphic description of Muslim bloodlust and sexual assault—
reiterated in other stories told by Hindus in the film—Hey Ram goes
against the secular discretion exercised by popular film. That Saket
Ram subsequently feels guilt-stricken at having let vengeful and mur-
derous instincts towards the Muslims take him over hardly neutralizes
the bestiality we have witnessed. The undermining of such popular
conventions is not necessarily ‘wrong’ in itself, and its functions are
something we will come back to later.
In the sections of the film devoted to Saket Ram’s relationship with
Abhyankar, the Hindu extremist gives voice to the familiar set of criti-
cisms against the Mahatma. The belief that Hindus and Muslims can
or should be allied is lampooned as naïve in the wake of the traumatic
suffering Hindus have suffered at Muslim hands. In such exchanges,
the film mobilizes a black humour on the side of the Hindutva ideo-
logue, and allows it to gain resonance. Subsequently, Ram is drawn
into the logic of Hindutva perception by Abhyankar and the princely
ruler. The iconographic rendering of the Hindutva conspiracy retains
the disturbing features I have described earlier. The native ruler is a
figure of regal equipoise, benevolent and deliberate in his demean-
our. The ruined Sindhi merchant’s tale of Hindu loss is received with
a paternalist concern by the Hindu raja. However, from within this
scenario a more sinister image for the raja also emerges. The secret
meetings between Ram and the others take place in a room ornament-
ed with portraits of Hitler and Savarkar. In the director’s account,
this appears to function as a critique, putting the movement into the
perspective of a rightist alignment with racist ramifications.12 How-
ever, there has always been considerable ambiguity in India towards
the Nazi movement and Japanese fascism, ambivalence suggestive of
a fascination in Indian nationalism with military assertion and a strong
nation-state.
12
At the seminar, ‘Gandhi, Film and History, NMML, 4 April 2000.
Abhyankar is crippled in a fall from a horse, and the film then emp-
loys a heroic Hindu iconography to figure Ram as he takes over the role
of Gandhi’s assassin. He is framed in battle with the elements, after
which he undergoes a ritual renunciation in Benares. This is an icono-
graphy now familiar from the Ayodhya movement to destroy the Babri
Masjid, one expressive of the desire to refigure a deity defined by the
attributes of a harmonious disposition into one governed by aggres-
sive drives.13
4. Narrative Form: Dropping the

Quotation Marks
I suggest that these passages are crucial to what I would call a narrative
method without quotation marks. Realist narratives commonly at-
tempt to outline a superior narrative authority which stands above the
text, quotes various points of view, and arranges these into a hier-
archical formation for the reader/viewer, allocating different truth and
moral claims to the statements over the time of the narrative.14 A state-
ment which has a particular rhetorical power at one point may be con-
troverted in the overall architecture of statements. The more simplified
structures of melodrama do something similar, by marking out a series
of bipolar oppositions that suggest who is good, who is bad. However,
in Hey Ram, neither at the time of their occurrence, nor retrospectively,
are certain sequences properly situated in terms of the overall architec-
ture of the narrative. This is especially notable of the scenes relating to
Abhyankar, the princely ruler, and the fashioning of Ram into an icon
of a heroic Hindutva.
Clearly, the director intended some of this to be menacing, espe-
cially the passages relating to the Hindutva conspiracy in the native
state. At such points, the film could be interpreted as a critique of
the politics, narratives, and symbols associated with a resurgent poli-
tical Hinduism, its ties to other right wing movements and, indeed,
to contemporary Hindutva. But the film cannot or will not provide a
structured distance through which the spectator can view these pas-
sages, by putting them into quotation marks, that is, as something be-
ing commented upon rather than inviting identification.
13
Anuradha Kapur, ‘Deity to Crusader: The Hindutva Movement in Ayodhya’, in
14 For example, Colin McCabe, ‘The Classical Realist Text’, Screen 15 (2), 1974.
This unauthorized form of storytelling, in which a stance is not
outlined for what is said and shown, is quite different from the dis-
jointed but nevertheless morally structured melodramas of the Indian
popular cinema. Showing something without being able to explain it
or asking the audience to assume a definite stance towards it, allows
the director to say he was being critical of the Hindutva perspective
in precisely those passages where the textual organization leaves one
bemused about the film’s point of view. Is the image or narrative ac-
count we see meant to be menacing or laudatory? Does it invite reflec-
tion, or does it simply court fascination with the charismatic Hindu
personality and Hindu masculine assertion, and employ a narrative
rhetoric prejudiced against Muslims? Apart from the ambiguous pas-
sages, the textual organization does not allow for a refutation of any
of the micro-narrations that recount a Hindutva scenario of Muslim
bloodlust and the Mahatma’s politics of appeasement. The overall
architecture lets these elements float, and despite the ambiguities of the
film’s conclusion, they return as irreducible features of the historical
memory relayed by the film.
Strangely, the much more offensive passages are those in which the
film apparently seeks to take a stronger position against the Hindu
Right. The turning point in Ram’s development, his conversion after
the meeting with Amjad and defence of the embattled Muslim com-
munity against Hindu extremists, is particularly offensive. For here,
in the name of a reformed, more humane perspective, the film un-
self-consciously conforms to the prevailing Hindutva ideology that a
Hindu nation provided with a renewed sense of its potency will pro-
vide protection to the minority from majoritarian extremists.
5. Reading Hindutva Masculinity

The complexity of the narrative strategy is augmented by a series of
images and sequences that invite an ironic perspective rather than
relay a didactic position. There is a subtle way in which the desire
for masculine potency is implicitly tied to colonial affiliations. Thus,
apart from the expression of male action through the hunt held
in the native kingdom, there is also a set piece in which the men,
sporting solar topis, engage in a game of polo. The interweaving of
a colonial masculine sport with the desires of Hindu political asser-
tion outline linkages which may be quite uncomfortable for anyone
looking to authentic indigenous coordinates for the heroic Hindu.
Clear anti-Hindutva positions are also articulated through Maithili,
Saket Ram’s second wife. She is introduced to us as someone who be-
lieves in the Mahatma, and insists on a dialogue on this with her hus-
band. Following on from the sensual play between Ram and Aparna
another field of desire opens up, posing an alternative realm of human
possibility than the male-bonded assertion of Hindutva. In the scenes
in the princely kingdom, this dialogue between Maithili and Ram is
displaced into a logic of sensual and spatial oppositions. From the
moment of their arrival, Maithili inducts a discordant note into the
designs of Abhyankar. Disconcerted to find Ram married, Abhyankar
seeks to immerse Ram into a different sensate universe by plying him
with an intoxicant. However, the results are quite contradictory, re-
trieving the strange images which haunt Ram, as when Maithili is
transfigured into the orphaned Muslim girl whose plight Ram wit-
nessed during the Partition killings in Calcutta. (See Figs 44–47.) In
an unusual fashion, the sensual here retrieves an image for the cons-
cience, a sense of the desire to be in the world, to hold onto existence
against the vicissitudes of a violent history. In the film’s depiction of
Ram’s relationship with his two wives, there is a clear investment in the
playfulness and intimacy of the relationship, and a desire that the
women should not take the hero as some kind of domestic deity.
But the realm of the sensual also encompasses other drives that have
been foreshadowed in a statement made by Ram after he and Aparna
have engaged in a gently erotic and playful love-making. Aparna says
she fears going out into the riot-torn city, apprehensive that she will
be sexually assaulted. In a strangely insensitive remark, Ram says,
‘you have already been sexually assaulted, madam’. This conflation be-
tween love-making and rape pre-figures Aparna’s rape and death.15
But it arguably also foreshadows the unleashing of sadistic dispositions
within the hero, in which the political imperatives of self-assertion are
channelled through a refiguring of personality within a new, or at least
hitherto suppressed, order of masculinity. Crucial here is Abhyankar
who, in Anirudh Kulkarni’s performance, emerges as a mesmerizing,
indeed homo-erotic emissary of a repressed and shadowy world. Thus
the image-work of the film stages conflicting realms of the sensual, in
15 For an exploration of the way censorship codes proscribing the representation
of sex has led to an ambiguous use of rape scenes in Indian cinema, see Lalitha Gopa-
lan, ‘Avenging Women in Indian Cinema’, Screen, 38 (1), 1997, rpnt in Vasudevan,
ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.
which sadism, death drives, and an erotics of being glance off each
other. In terms of the force of images there is however a definite shift
in the balance of elements, as sadism and masculine vainglory acquire
centre stage.
6. ‘Lifting the Mogul Pardha’
‘You see, Hindu ideologies represented by Konarak or Meera-like

bhajans in Tamil were all created by Hindus. Their ideology pertaining
to sex, love and life seems to be at odds with what came to India after
the advent of the Moguls and Christians. Today, they ostensibly fight over
the Hindu ideology. But when it comes to my film—and I’m not even
addressing myself as a Hindu but as an Indian who would like to
compete with the rest of the world intellectually, no one seems to be
bothered.’—Kamalahasan, interviewed by Screen
I would suggest we need to place these layered and contrary modes of

erotic address within a particular discourse set in train by Kamalahasan.
His self-image appears to be that of the artist who fights to liberate
representations of sex, bigotry, hatred, from the edict of the censor, in
order to provide an outlet for taboos, to get things out in the open.
What is disturbing about his remarks is that a certain understanding
of political freedom—from the repressive lineage enforced on Hindus
by Muslims and Christians—is the condition for the recovery of sup-
pressed sensual instincts. Despite the disclaimer that he is talking as an
Indian rather than as a Hindu, the othering of Muslims and Christians
suggests that this is hardly the case. Another instance of this is Kamala-
hasan’s statement that Pakistan is not a country but a religion, implying
fanatical dimensions that will not accept the boundary of countries
and nation-states. This formulation also illustrates the way in which
contemporary discourses of the Hindu nation-state have generated a
temporal conflation in the rendering of the historical past. Thus, the
past is rendered in terms of Mughal and Christian domination, rather
than say Mughal and British colonial, or Muslim and Christian. With-
in political discourse, the reference to Mughal rule appears to suggest
a past-ness to this repressive formation, while Christian repression,
perhaps alluding to Victorian morality, relocates the other in the do-
main of contemporary politics, suggestive of the current Hindutva at-
tack on the Christian communities of India. This is important. The
reference to Mughal repression brushes aside a complex understand-
ing of regimes which were always alert to the fact that they ruled over
a complex weave of ethnic groups and cultures. And, in the second
slippage, Kamalahasan is imprisoned within a highly contempo-
rary discourse, deriving from another deferred revenge scenario, that
of subordinating Indian Christians as representatives of the West-
ern other.
At the same time, one has to attend to the fact that the director does
not seem quite satisfied with the representatives of a resurgent politi-
cal Hinduism: ‘they ostensibly fight over the Hindu ideology’ but do
nothing about the attempts to censor his film. In other words, ‘they’
are not adequately true to what it means to recover ‘Indianness’ from
the repressions it has been subject to. Perhaps there is a domain here
which exceeds what Hindutva is concerned to represent as Hindu.
This is what I meant when I remarked that the Hindutva critique of
an earlier secular political construction of intercommunity amity is
embraced by the film but Hindutva also seems to enact another order
of repression, that of certain crucial attributes of Hindu identity. That
the repressed self within Hindutva is still a Hindu one, still the main
point of identification, is of course heavily problematic. But my sug-
gestion is that the film reveals that there may be insurmountable prob-
lems in the institution of this Hindu personality.
7. Melodrama: Peformativity and Expressivity

These tensions in the representation of a desirable Hindu personality
lead to a significant splitting of character into different forms of re-
presentation. In an earlier film of patriotic provenance, Hindustani,
Kamalahasan had played two roles, splitting his performance between
a superior entity driven by the higher calling of patriotism, and his
more everyday counterpart, a son who has rebelled against his father’s
impractically upright attitudes. The son immerses himself in the dense
circuits of a corrupt and sensual everyday world. The old patriot,
adorned either in chaste veshti or INA uniform, determines to
undertake a secret crusade against the corruption he sees around him.
The film invites the audience to indulge a vicarious pleasure in the
vengeance he unleashes against corrupt officials on behalf of the peo-
ple. However, this is not a figure that invites empathetic identification.
Kamalahasan’s fascination with filmic mutations of appearance, through
make-up, morphing, and physically demanding distortions, works to
render the older protagonist into an implacable and indeed sadistic
mask. And there is something quite disturbing about the patriot’s
single-minded pursuit of the just path, as he even sacrifices his daught-
er’s life, rather than pay bribes to a bevy of corrupt policemen, hospital
administrators, and doctors. The dilemma is meant to provide the ele-
ment of tragedy, but the position he takes is not one easy to identify
with. In contrast, the mundane world of the son, a tout who facilitates
applications and wants a regular job as a transport official, is cynically
but amusingly depicted. This is a world at once more realistic and,
punctuated by standard comedy and dance sequences, easier for the
audience to find a place in. The narrative manages the tensions gene-
rated by this bifurcation by having one of the son’s casual acts of cor-
ruption result in horrendous consequences: he takes a bribe to issue a
licence for a bus which is not roadworthy, there is an accident and
many schoolchildren die. The relentlessly principled Hindustani takes
his own son’s life, a sacrificial punishment that his wife and the boy’s
girlfriend accept.
These different drives are composed of different modes of represen-
tation. One is edifying and iconizing, it freezes the patriotic figure into
a kind of death mask/mould. The other, deploying realist and perfor-
mative tropes, elevates the domain of comedy to a significant status
within the organization of film narrative. The narrative generates a set
of conflicts that ultimately results in a moral resolution—the film’s
conclusion shows Hindustani in another country, informing a corrupt
state that he is still at large and its functionaries cannot rest easy. Even
so this does not ensure that one mode of representation supplants the
other. The presence of two modes of representation, and the persist-
ence of an alienating and punitive dimension to the patriotic superego
suggests a sado-masochistic double bind for the spectator. S/he is in-
vited to approve the actions of a just state, and destined to remain
alienated from it, and to fear that the imaginary state’s punitive drives
will ultimately be visited on the mass spectator him/herself, caught as
s/he is in a circuit of adjustments with the corrupt everyday world.16
16 We may also consider the way the hero has been split in key film narratives of the
1990s, such as Darr (Yash Chopra, 1992), where identification is split between a
powerful hero, a naval commando who successfully carries out anti-terrorist actions;
and a weaker entity, a psychotic harbouring romantic desires for the commando’s wife.
Ultimately, the hero bests his rival, but goes beyond the justification of survival to
execute his other. The splitting of spectatorial identification again suggests a soliciting
of sado-masochistic drives.
If this were a coherent strategy, seeking to integrate the different levels
properly rather than bifurcate them, then it would move characters
through registers of guilt at what they have done. Thus in classic Indian
melodramas such as Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) the mother’s
moral imprimatur is routed through the characteristic melodra-
matic plot structures of suffering. A strongly conceived pathos re-
sults when the mother has to punish her bandit son for transgressing
moral communal norms and taboos. In Hindustani, something re-
mains strangely disjointed. The moral-political domain is situated in
a vacuum, and ultimately in another country/space, and finally fails
to become part of the register of the everyday. Morality springs free
from all sense of suffering and mortality, and achieves a transcendent
iconicity.
I will suggest that the problem posed by Hindustani for the mode
of performance, figuration, and representation, has implications for
Hey Ram as well. To show how, I will take a slightly convoluted route,
looking to the overall narrative strategies of the melodramatic mode
to understand the way in which the spectator is invited to relate to
character in Hey Ram. It has been argued that melodrama is a mode of
representation that addresses the shift in sacred and socially hierarchi-
cal meaning systems in the transition to modernity. Melodrama strives
to retrieve the security afforded by earlier systems. However oppressive
these were, they nevertheless provided people with a sense of where
they were located, and how to rationalize their circumstances. But this
recovery is not possible, and, in however unconfident and faltering a
fashion, melodrama generates new sources of meaning in the secu-
larized world of family and a non-hierarchically situated individual
personality. In this sense, the logic of representation exceeds known
systems of meaning, and this lack of fit is registered in the tropes of
pathos associated with characters who suffer the trauma inflicted by
the old and the uncertainties of the new. This melodramatic modern-
ity relates the individual to larger formations, of the civil domain, in
which s/he can vent a repressed set of truths and moral claims. The arti-
culation of personality as locus of meaning is predicated then on a par-
ticular frame, that of the modern state supplanting the intermediate
term of the family, an organism associated with issues of status and ex-
tended power within traditional societies. Melodramatic narration
places its subject in transit—displacing attachments to the father and
the connotations of power he carries from earlier social hierarchies, re-
volving emotionally around the mother, and apparently locating the
ultimate outlet for its protagonist in the transcendent, equalizing im-
primatur of the modern state form and the identity of the citizen-
subject. Its distinctive feature is uncertainty and messiness, a striving
to reinscribe the security of older forms while feeling its way towards
an uncharted territory of the new. Some of the particular power and
interest of melodramatic undedicedness is the way its hesitations may
ask us to look back at older forms in different ways, rather than simp-
ly urge us to look forward into entirely new ways of figuring past
and future.
The melodrama of Hey Ram! addresses a new territory of trans-
formation. Instead of traditional hierarchies and older, religious con-
notations of the sacred, it opens onto a symbolic domain that has
already been transformed by modernity, repositioning the sacred in
the nation-state and its sacred icons. The oppressiveness of the sacred
lies in the subordination of a certain construction of the self, that of
the Hindu who believes s/he has been and continues to be wronged by
the state, in a sense that s/he has been denied the full rights and political
determinacy of citizenship. As I will suggest, this deployment of melo-
dramatic form hinges on the drive to articulate a notion of citizen-
ship which is founded not on the sovereignty of the individual but that
of the community that the individual represents. This new articu-
lation of the melodramatic form cuts across earlier formulations
about the relationship between tradition and modernity. Instead of
rendering these as binary opposites, the film pits two different cons-
tructions of the modernizing of tradition against each other: one
deploys Gandhi and a certain image of the high-caste Tamilian fol-
lower, smoothly carrying the marks of ritual identity and being into
a new territory of social and political flexibility and openness; the
other poses the first form as colluding with the repression of histori-
cal wrongs, and embraces a tradition of the ascetic warrior. The ritual
identity of this figure speaks not of a sociology of identity and its adapt-
ability, but of a symbolic of identity, something which allows a high-
caste Hindu identity to transcend its localness, and its particularity. In
the process, it reinvents a Hindu community, in an imaginary in which
it can stand up, speak out unashamed and act against a tide of a history
which seems to deny it a sense of right, of pride and the will to exact
retribution. There is no space in either of these trajectories to speak of
other identities, they remain resolutely Hindu in their provenance. In
this sense the oppositions are played out within the Hinduness of the
protagonist. It is perhaps suggestive that the second form, the symbolic
of Hindu political identity, arises in a figure who has already distin-
guished himself from the sociologically defined elite who are the
Mahatma’s followers. Though Ram follows family diktat in terms of
marital arrangements, it is a form of accommodation that is under-
taken in order to renounce it and to assume a transcendent identity.
The character is uprooted from the determinants of a local sociology
and space, and refigured as an entity fashioned by the historical iti-
nerary of a wounded and then resurgent Hindu nationhood.
What is distinctive to this melodramatic form is the recourse it takes
to the large gesture, the scaling upwards of expressive functions, in
terms of emotional pitch, bodily disposition, musicality and mise-en-
scène. Central here is the publicness of melodrama, where the mode of
excess, an inflated mode of speech, demeanour and iconic figuration,
displaces the realist, intimate communication between characters. It is
as if such expressive functions are meant to be seen and heard publicly,
beyond the delimited narrative world we see on screen. This publicness
relates to a staging of the personality, not simply to a process of making
it plausible. On being questioned about the nature of characteriza-
tion in the film, Kamalahasan said that it would be wrong to see the
character as realistic in the way we have been used to when viewing
Hollywood cinema. Instead, he stated that he was drawing upon indi-
genous conventions which presented character as character, as a figure
being enacted rather than inhabited, in the mode of a sutradhar func-
tion. And, indeed, the histrionic excess of his performance, and the
outright invocation of iconic dimensions when Saket Ram is invested
with the imagery of the Hindu ascetic warrior, could be read in exactly
these ways. This again problematizes identification with the character.
The tortuous dimensions of melodramatic transitions is expressive-
ly heightened, refusing the calibration of a lower pitched, natural-
ist performance, and gesturing instead to the ineffable, to a zone of
meaning that has not been settled or normalized. The complications
involved are suggested in the way the performance also hyperbolizes
interiority. There are key moments where the character is defined by
the ravages of loss and guilt, when he witnesses Aparna’s death, and
subsequently when he is haunted by her loss and the death of other—
Muslim—victims. In the first instance, the actor renders the loss of
his wife through a highly gestural range of effects, groping for support,
turning away from the horrific sight, and finally giving vent to angu-
ish by a scream from the balcony, framed for architectural affect by the
low-angle camera.
I have spent some time on these expressive functions to suggest
where Hey Ram’s strategy of characterization departs in some respects
from that of Hindustani, with different effects for the mechanisms of
spectator identification. Hindustani splits its iconic character from the
logic of everyday life, mobilizing the embalmed figure of nation-state
history as a punitive superego. Hey Ram seeks to bring this figure in-
to an intimate register to recover a sense of historical wrongs as experi-
enced by an ‘ordinary’ or typical character; but it does this in such a way
as to retain large-scale personality tropes. The performative excess of
intimate expression presents the audience with a staging of an ordinary
life caught in extraordinary times, as a form of public identity rather
than a personal one. Internality, ‘interiorization’, identification, are
not domains and processes that emerge out of the subliminal com-
pact between screen images, characters, worlds, and the individuated
spectator. Instead, they are governed by the articulation of collectively
invested narratives, myths, historical constructions, in which the spec-
tator is mobilized into a wider orbit of subjectivity. I think this is an
important distinction, for in recovering the ordinary or typical ex-
perience as supra-individual, the narration makes an insidious move.
It invites us into a narrative community united by a melodramatic urge
to give voice to a suppressed sense of historical wrong and victimhood.
But, as I have said, there is only a partial departure from Hindustani’s
structures of representation. For the film also invokes the extraordi-
nary rather than the typical, investing the character with the attributes
of the mythical Ram. This iconic figure is brought into being by a
highly ambiguous set of story-telling mechanisms that induct the spec-
tator into a regime of play rather than straightforward identification.
8. Melodrama in
the Age of Digital Simulation
In terms of symbolic transactions around concepts of the sacred, the
hero seems to be the vehicle of a melodrama that seeks to displace the
earlier icons and cultural strategies used to create identification with
the nation-state. It sets him up in opposition to the earlier Congress-
inspired tradition of high-caste nationalism and, in terms of filmic
narrative traditions, against the DMK-inspired anti-caste Tamil na-
tionalism. The countervailing pull here is that of the sensual and the
domestic, the this-worldliness of women and of everyday life, and it
is augmented by that characteristic melodramatic striving to retrieve
the securities of an older sense of self. Thus the film traces a tortuous
route back to the sacredness of older notions of imagining the nation,
in the persona of Gandhi.
This particular tracking back is made problematic because of a
sign-referent problem emerging from the deployment of particular
modes and technologies of representation. For the sacred now re-
turns in the somewhat caricatural performance by Naseerudin Shah
as the Mahatma. The climactic moment of the assassination has the
Mahatma flung backwards off the ground in a manner normally em-
ployed for stunt and action scenes. The sobriety of the sacred is fur-
ther compromised when Mahatma, charkha, and crescent become
objects within a video-game format, where the spectator/player is in-
vited to blow away this constellation and generate a swirling set of
computer images, the swastik metamorphosing into a swastika and a
hard-edged lotus. (Figs 48–51, pp. 282–3.)
The mechanics of the video-game and computer-generated ima-
ges relate to a particular moment in the Hindutva conspiracy to assas-
sinate the Mahatma. The almost cartoonish treatment of the figure
of Gandhi indicates a general problem in representing him with a
sense of gravity and dignity. This is a highly unusual compendium of
effects with which to represent a revered, iconic entity. Indeed, the
armature is suggestive of a post-modern aesthetic, generating a certain
pastiche-driven, depthless quality in the relationship between viewer
and screen.17 More specifically, the use of digital means to represent
the Mahatma displaces an indexical relationship of sign to referent, in
which film physically captures a trace of the human body, by a digital
mode that can alter the nature of the image internally, without refe-
rence to a ‘real’ image.18
It would be productive to see the video-game format influencing
the structure of other scenes as well, not only those where its form is
specifically used.19 This is when a scene may be read as providing a
17 For example, Jameson, Postmodernism.

18
For example, Lev Manovich, ‘Cinema and Digital Media’, in Jeffrey Shaw and
Hans Peter Schwarz, eds, Perspectives of Media Art, Germany, Cantz Verlag Ostfildern,
1996; also see Manovich’s site at http://jupiter/ucsd.edu/-manovich.
19 This is also the name of a film by David Fincher, an important contemporary
Hollywood filmmaker who started as a music video filmmaker. The Game (1998) re-
plicates many of the drives of video games, thrusting the protagonist into a series of
possible gambits which are given a frisson by their being perceived to be real dangers
when, in fact, they are highly controlled and staged manoeuvres.
Fig. 44
Fig. 45
Figs 44 and 45: Hey Ram!, Kamalahasan, 1999, The Return of the Dead 1.
sequence of effects governed by player choices. In the key sequence
at the raja’s palace, the spectator-player is provided a path into the game
by the movements and awareness of Ram, who has been induced into
intoxication by Abhyankar. He wanders as if in a maze, the coordi-
nates of which are Abhyankar, his wife Maithili, the destitute Lalvani,
and the raja. The first phase of the game does not picture the latter
figure, and inducts the player into an intoxicated, sensualized experi-
ence, with Ram approaching Maithili as an erotically charged object.
Unexpectedly, this phase relays this erotic charge as opening the pro-
tagonist to a heightened awareness of the tragic loss of human exist-
ence, as the erotic object morphs into the eerie figure of the bereft
Muslim child. (Figs 44–45, p. 279.)
The springing of memory and conscience through the sensualiza-
tion of the character conjures an appropriate mise-en-scène, weaving
the tragic, drunken figure of Lalvani through its field. However, a new
phase is inaugurated, where the player’s acceptance, or rather submis-
sion, to particular game-paths, constrains options. The raja emerges to
conduct Ram into his sanctum sanctorum, but Maithili and Lalvani
are denied entry. It is as if Ram’s acceptance of the raja’s domain jetti-
sons certain options, a more open erotics and an alertness to human
loss. This configuration will not allow for the weaknesses of com-
passion.
The metaphor of the game for registering the dissolution of earlier
forms and the inauguration of the new phase is captured through Ram’s
giddy fall into the checkerboard black and white floor. The raja’s rheto-
ric now constrains the terms of verbal and perceptual discourse. He
decries the Mahatma as the enemy of Hinduism, and selects Abhyan-
kar and Ram to carry out the assassination. The decor includes pictures
of Hitler and Savarkar, and produces three appropriate computer-
generated images. As the raja exhorts the men to action in defence of
Hinduism, he is morphed into Ram’s dead Bengali wife Aparna, who,
her head swathed in saffron cloth, seems to invoke both Vivekananda
and more contemporary images of the militant sadhvi. (Fig. 46–47,
p. 281.)
This iconography, associating Hindu consciousness with nota-
tions of honour and revenge in the image of the murdered wife, is in
sharp contrast to the possibilities which opened up around the figure
of Maithili in the previous phase of the ‘game’. The second vision con-
jures images of Abhyankar’s refrain that the Mahatma’s policies have
nurtured the Muslim threat from a sapling into an overwhelming
Fig. 46
Fig. 47
Figs 46 and 47: Hey Ram!, The Return of the Dead 2.

Fig. 48
Fig. 49
Fig. 50
Fig. 51
Figs 48, 49, 50, 51: Hey Ram!, Video Game Format.
tree. And, finally, there is the computer-generated annihilation of the
Mahatma and the hated symbols of the Muslim other.20 The overarching
filmic domain of this mediating point in the game presents a compo-
site structure of filmic and post-filmic effects, linking narrative to
older photographic and newer computer-generated modes of repre-
sentation and address. The particular pathways accepted by the ‘player’
structures subsequent choices. There is a machismo quality to Ram’s
love-making, and the game’s aggressive channelling of libidinal drives
metamorphoses the woman’s body into the kitsch image of a gun. It
has been argued that game culture, and new regimes of special effects,
have articulated the possibility of multiple narrative drives, rather than
a linear, cause–effect driven one.21 At one level, this would mean giv-
ing the spectator multiple plot structures which would allow a variety
of choices in fashioning the way narratives could develop. Science fic-
tion’s manipulation of temporality—its foundational premise that
technology has remade human existence in terms of space-time cons-
traints, thereby making alternative pasts and futures possible—makes
it the favoured genre for a simulation of spectator interactivity with
screen narratives. This is the case, even if closure ultimately reasserts
itself within standard narrative formats. (It is through video game
culture, and CD-Rom and net-based interactive packages for experi-
mentation with familiar serials and films that a more structured variety
of endings have emerged.) But the issue is not only that of multiple
plots but also of the multiple forms made possible by the transcend-
ence of cinematic indexicality through special effects.
Here the simulation of film characters into history provides an im-
portant background. Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) mobil-
ized the eponymous simpleton hero into newsreels associating him
with great public leaders at decisive moments in American history;
Zelig (Woody Allen, 1990) did the same for its man without person-
ality, a figure who assumes an identity through the environments he
is placed in. Hindustani follows on from this, but to make the hero
20
The image is inflected with an irreverent wit, as, almost subliminally, we also see
the image of the three monkeys who would hear, see, and speak no evil. It is as if the
director lampoons the Mahatma’s message of tolerance as debilitatingly suppressive
of the truth.
21
Alison McMahan, ‘The Effect of Multiform Narrative on Subjectivity’, Screen
40 (2), Summer 1999, special issue on FX, CGI, and the question of spectacle.
monumental rather than mundane, placing the INA hero in the same
frame as Subhas Bose. These films clearly provide a technological ins-
piration for Kamalahasan, as he seeks to simulate the subject’s presence
in history: in Zelig, in ways that enact a comedy of the totalitarian sub-
ject, or in Forrest Gump, to assert the way in which its simpleton in-
carnates basic human values that enable him to bear empathetic
witness and bring balm to the victims of the history through which he
has lived.
But films such as Zelig and Forrest Gump do not bring simulated
history into tension with official history, or symbolically rewrite hist-
ory. In Hey Ram, digital technologies articulate the domain of possi-
ble histories, histories other than those which a society has stabilized
for itself over time. There are distinct strategies involved here. Hindus-
tani morphed character into actuality footage, a procedure which
renders history as physically alterable at the level of its mechanically
determined representation. Hey Ram, on the other hand, by and large
maintains its indexical relationship to what takes place in front of the
camera, accepting the historicity of its own fictional representations,
distinct from earlier live action representations of historical personae.
Instead of simulating presence, its use of computer graphics and 3D
artwork disrupts the seamless induction of fiction into history. This
alerts the spectator to the different ways in which forms of remem-
brance refigure the drives which compose the shifting terrain of the
present. The configuration of these drives in the crucial sequence is re-
layed through the game structures I have described, as artifice, pro-
jection, and play. They markedly exceed the requirements of defining
character motivation and character perception.
The 3D art and video-game rendering of the Mahatma as a target
is relayed through Ram’s point of view in the raja’s inner sanctum. But
these frontally composed frames are phenomenologically marked off
from the rest of the scene. This disjointment breaks the textural cohe-
rence of the scene and opens it out for a different view. Fabricated to
render the drugged perspective of the protagonist, these images are
not however sealed off through his point of view. They appear to be
borne by an agentless gaze, one which inducts the spectator into a
direct regime of play with perspective and history. It is here that the
film makes a crucial move, inviting the spectator to directly assume a
point of view on the possibilities of symbolically re-writing history. It
is no longer the case that someone else, a fictional character in a film,
has such visions, but that we are invited to assume this vision, to view
history as a game with alternative outcomes. This symbolic rewriting
is crucially to do with something which exceeds prosaic fact, and
mobilizes a realm of desire. It is an acknowledgement of what people
imagined and wanted to happen, and an acknowledgement that these
desires still animate present consciousness. To kill the Mahatma here
signifies not merely a larger complicity and desire which exceeds a
specific character and organization, but amounts to a will to visit a
symbolic death on him and the politics of appeasement of which he is
characterized as an exemplar. The game metaphor then opens history
to a collective rewriting. But in posing this as game, in disrupting the
flow of character driven narration, the film may open up the possibil-
ity of the question: Do we want to play the game?
It is here that the narrative without quotation marks, where the
spectator is not clearly signposted on what standpoint to assume, takes
on a particular distancing dimension. For, from this point on, the film
also shifts registers of representation. If earlier the character Ram re-
layed a large-scale rendering of the intimate effects of catastrophic
events, from now on he assumes an iconic set of poses. Refashioned
by the particular channelling of libido with aggression, he acquires the
transcendent figuration familiar from Kamalahasan’s Hindustani in-
carnation. The tableaux which displays his mythical empowerment, as
a brahmanical figure who can withstand the elements and undertakes
a symbolic cleansing and renunciation at Benares, draws upon the
imagery of the Ayodhya campaign, and provides the spectator with a
distanced stance, for these are no longer the registers of the ordinary
or typical character.
None of this carries the charge of melodramatic investment, urg-
ing us to identify and imaginatively participate in character transfor-
mation. Instead they are presented as a sublimation of individual
subjectivity into iconic character. Nevertheless, this sequence of trans-
formations poses definite problems. Marked as artifice and game,
their depthless quality denies history to our look, leading, appa-
rently, to a waning of affect, a diminishing of investment in earlier
figurations of the sacred. In this particular deployment, the digitally
composed animation complicates the conventions of sobriety and
emotional sanctity with which significant historical entities are repre-
sented. In melodramatic terms, this has a serious implication. The
bid to recover lost meaning, always fraught in narratives of transi-
tion, is rendered thinner by the loss of the cinematic signifier’s referen-
tial integrity.
The waning of affect lies not only in the difficulty of reinvesting the
nation-state and its icons with value and meaning, but in the transfor-
mation of the cinematic signifier away from its own claims to cap-
turing the real. However, this is to put things rather too simply, for
the waning of affect on these terms may in turn induce a pathos, a sense
of lack, on the part of the spectator for earlier certitudes in symbo-
lic meaning and cinematic referentiality. And the transformation of
the signifier highlights, in some fundamental sense, a pathos around
the lost body of reality—of the human body, of a stable and verifiable
history, of earlier codings of history which revered the Mahatma. This
doubling of lack—of the nation-state in its earlier incarnation, of the
signifier—heralds the need, in terms of symbolic exchange, for a new
order of compensation.
This, I would suggest, is what is caught in the film’s framing narrat-
ive about Saket Ram. When we first see the figure, in old age and on
his deathbed, he is organized to conjure up the image of the Mahatma:
Kamalahasan’s face, heavily adorned with make-up, is fixed on top
of the emaciated, dhoti-clad body of the Mahatma in the present of
6 December 1999. (Fig. 52, p. 288.)
The eeriness of the fabrication arises from the narrative it implies:
that by some strange osmosis Saket Ram was transformed into the lost
body of the Mahatma, and that thereafter time froze over. The realm
of the simulacrum displaces the Mahatma from the orbit of sanctity,
but the film generates a compensatory simulacrum, one that takes over
and neutralizes the subjectivity of the disaffected Hindu in the body
of the Mahatma. Significantly, this offering of another position for
spectatorial affect rests within a space that rigorously refuses to sub-
limate the rest of the past. The traces of the old, traumatized Saket Ram
are maintained, including the prominent placement of Abhyankar’s
photograph. The peculiar duality of the last scenes, of Gandhi’s huge
image both fractured and illuminated by the opening out of discourses
by the present generation suggests the issues involved. The icon and
the history that it embodies have been dissected to reveal other layers
of subjectivity, but in ways which still require a reinvestment in the
Mahatma.

Fig. 52: Hey Ram!, The Merging of Bodies.
Does the film invoke a project of necessary catharsis? One could

paraphrase the argument for such a project along the following lines:
repressed beliefs lead to festering psyches, and sustain a political un-
conscious that can be manipulated for the politics of hate. Instead of
keeping quiet about these beliefs it would be better to let them erupt,
come to the surface in their most virulent form, and then see if cultural
resources can be generated to return from the brink. From this pers-
pective the film-maker’s ambition would be that of making the cine-
matic public privy to an exhibition of wounds whose display has
hitherto been proscribed. Thereafter the narrative could assume the
functions of the confessional, where the Hindu protagonist admits to
succumbing to a retaliatory bloodlust and the spectator in turn is in-
vited to acknowledge a collective desire to rewrite history. However,
for this second account to work there must be a conviction that the
confessional form does not become an exercise in vindication, but
actually stages a debate which opens out discussion. This the film clear-
ly does not do. But I would suggest that it is important not to see the
film in isolation, but as part of an emergent and, crucially public, re-
evaluation of history animated by different viewpoints. Jabbar Patel’s
Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000), for example, stages a series of debates
between Ambedkar and Gandhi which has the iconized Dalit leader
upstaging a notably diminished Mahatma.
Generated within the coordinates of a post-Hindutva identity, Hey
Ram constructs the Muslim other in a variety of ways: as bestial other,
as a reasonable, self-effacing entity amenable to political assimilation,
and as object of the conscience. Much of this is congruent with Hindu-
tva perception. Yet in associating images of conscience and sensuality,
the narration gestures to a domain of feeling that I think is ill at ease
with the obsessive, puritanical discourses of Hindutva. Highly charged
encounters are succeeded by much more ambiguously defined and
‘open’ structures of narration that appear to solicit interpretation from
the spectator rather than offer a coherent position. The draining of in-
vestment in earlier forms of the national-sacred is strangely mirrored
by the invocation of the emotionally remote entity of the all-powerful
Hindu. Unable to chart a clear path through an erupting unconsci-
ous, the film acknowledges a public will to rewrite history and ‘kill the
father’, but can compensate for the resulting sense of shame and loss
only by a simulated imbrication in the iconicity of the great other, and
a silence thereafter.
Ridding oneself of the father isn’t all that easy, after all; recovering
him is even harder.
III
Melodrama Mutated and

Differentiated: Narrative Form,
Urban Vistas, and New Publics
in a History of the Present
Introduction
1. The Urban Imagination
I
n the way I have ordered these essays, we move from an emphasis
on the mode of address and fictive publicness of melodramatic
cinema through to a situating of these issues of textuality in a shift-
ing register of methodological engagements. From the analysis of
film form and its intersection with a political theory of citizenship, we
move into the question of posing the cinematic imagination in
relation to broader historical canvases. Through the triptych of Tamil/
Hindi films, this canvas comes into view as part of a history of the
territorial imagination of film and of nation-state. In the last section
of the book I want to move from the register of history qua history to
the idea of the contemporary, and of the present.
This does not mean to imply that the contemporary and the present
lack history. But in the proximity of these formations to our experi-
ence, the historical as a discipline of context has to be unpacked across
a series of axes. To initiate this engagement with contemporary film ex-
perience, I want to highlight a specific context for cinematic reflection
and practice, that of the city, a material and imaginative form that has
become significant in a number of different ways. Indian cities have
obviously been crucial in cinematic representation over a long period,
and before addressing that particular junction I want to briefly plot the
ways cities have been engaged with in the post-colonial imagination.
As spaces of migration, they have been a laboratory of cosmopolitan
coexistence as well as heightened ethnic violence, of social deracination
and reinvention. Their morphologies speak to the dramatic, concentra-
ted engagement with the technology and culture of modernity,
offering heightened sense perception through mechanical transporta-
tion, new modes of simultaneous communication across space, from
broadsheets and newspapers to telephones and the internet, and an
unprecedented sense of anonymous living, of being part of the crowd.
294 Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated
On the other hand, Indian and most postcolonial urban experience
has also marked out a distinctiveness simply in terms of the way cities
also keep some of these transformative indices at bay, or slow down
their effect. For a long time Indian cities were defined both by the pre-
sence of new technologies, and their restricted availability. The tele-
phone, for example, has only become commonly or easily available in
the period of liberalization, in which context it has leapfrogged in-
to the heightened communicative mobility offered by the cellular
phone, now a commonplace of modern business, informal bazaar, and
mobile labour practices. Transportation too presents a vivid example
of the way human physical cartage and animal labour can be deployed
to maintain cost-reducing economies alongside high-speed vehicu-
lar transportation. And, in terms of social and cultural congregation,
the generation of neighbourhoods and slum settlements on the basis
of ethnic-regional migratory patterns, labour, and employment net-
works sits cheek by jowl with the idea of the stranger city which re-
quires the fashioning of new modes of public exchange.
It is only in the last ten years that we have seen the emergence of
what Gyan Prakash has called the urban turn in the thematic engage-
ments of history and the social sciences, with publications on Bombay,1
Calcutta,2 and Delhi,3 collating academic, activist, and public in-
tellectual writings, and important monographs on Chandigarh and
Bangalore.4 Prakash suggests that earlier modernist assumptions that
the city would be crucial to Indian society’s achievement of a full mod-
ernity has been given pause for thought by the emergence in the urban
1
Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds, Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, Bombay
and Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1995; idem, Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture,
Bombay and Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996; Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos, eds,
Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2003;
Thomas Blom Hansen, The Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial
Bombay, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001.
2 Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta, the Living City. Volume 1, The Past; Volume II,
The Present and the Future, Calcutta, Oxford University Press, 1990.
3
Veronique Dupont, Emma Tarlo, and Denis Vidal, Delhi: Urban Space and
Human Destinies, Delhi, Manohar, 2000; Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives
of India’s ‘Emergency’, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2003.
4 Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City, Carbondale, Southern
Illinois University Press, 1987; also see idem, Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to
Capital City, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994; Janaki Nair,
The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century, Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 2005.
Introduction 295
sphere of powerful currents which provide us with a layered sense of
the modern city. Prakash highlights the emergence of ethnic plebeian
movements such as the sons of the soil Shiv Sena in Bombay, the asser-
tion of Dalit politics, and the practices of pavement dwellers seeking
to secure rights of home and livelihood on the streets of Bombay. All
of this substantially altered earlier consensuses based on an elite liberal
modernity of the cities, one which aimed for a rational, planned city
which could resolve issues of inequality and its manifestations in slum
formations and land appropriation.5 The break in the planning ima-
ginary urges us to cast an eye back in time to address the disarticulat-
ed nature of urban formations, and the different logics and histories
which composed them, and, in turn, postcolonial modernity.
To this we may add a series of specific conjunctures. Most power-
ful, perhaps, was the impact of the ‘Emergency’ of 1975–7. While
the ‘Emergency’ was a complicated assertion of central authority over
democratic movements that sought to topple what were perceived to
be corrupt regional governments, its ambitions were clearly in the ser-
vice of a vision of authoritarian modernization. Crucial features of this
regime included population control through forcible sterilization,
greater efficiency in governmental functioning, state control over
finances through bank nationalization, the symbolic undercutting of
feudal remnants by ending privy purses to the former princes of British
India.6 While this move to an authoritarian modernization impacted
both urban and rural society, there was a notable way in which the city
became the symbolic centre for what would become a leitmotif in the
emergence of the contemporary epoch: the forcible eviction and dis-
placement of squatter settlements, many with a very long history, in or-
der to facilitate an image of an urban vista cleansed of its subaltern
social groups. In the long run this had a sustained impact on cities such
as Delhi, as areas were cleared and new settlements initiated on the
outskirts of the city. Inaugurated in the 1970s to project a strong state
initiative in nationalist modernization, we will see the motif reappear
in the last decade or so, but for rather different objectives. This is in
the wake of liberalization, where the Indian state has sought to deve-
lop an urban vista, infrastructure, and consumer economy that would
5
Gyan Prakash, ‘The Urban Turn’, in Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life,
Delhi, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2002, 2–6.
6 For the ‘Emergency’, see David Selbourne, An Eye to India: The Unmasking of a
Tyranny, Harmonsdworth, Penguin, 1977; and Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.

cultivate India as a viable field for foreign direct investment. The ques-
tion of the squatter was to remain a persistent motif of cities such as
Bombay in the 1980s, but has become the objective of sustained state
intervention primarily in the era of liberalization.
As we weave our way into the contemporary period, the decisive is-
sue remains the division between the formal and the informal city, the
latter composed of bazaars, squatter settlements, and neighbourhood
workshops which are integral to the sustenance of the formal city. We
have seen these spheres of activity and sustenance come under scrutiny,
juridical regulation, and eviction as the momentum of what has been
called the new urbanism has gathered pace. In turn, a new imperative
has surfaced, as globalized regimes for the regulation of intellectual
property impact on India. Here, the bazaar economy is under target for
its retailing of goods which emerge from the ‘pirated’ end of duplicate
goods in clothes, household appliances, and electronic merchandise.
2. Differentiated Film Publics

This is where we come back to the culture of film and the film pub-
lic, how it is distributed, exhibited, and, in the contemporary period,
delivered through new digital formats to its audiences and consum-
ers. From the work of Stephen Hughes and Kaushik Bhaumik in
the period of early cinema history, through to the work of Rosie
Thomas, S.V. Srinivas, Bhrigupati Singh, and Anand Taneja, film
history has explored how film exhibition was disaggregated into dif-
ferent circuits, according to the quality of film halls and their loca-
tion in the city (Madras, Madurai, Bombay, and Delhi).7 Divisions
related to the colonial and native towns, between halls screening West-
ern (British and US) and Indian films, as well as internal hierarchies
and cross-overs between cinema circuits exhibiting locally made films.
7 Hughes, ‘The Pre-Phalke Era’; idem, ‘House Full: Silent Film Genre, Exhibition
and Audiences in South India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (1) 2006,
32–6; Rosie Thomas, ‘Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts’,
in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, eds, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through
a Transnational Lens, Delhi, Sage, 2005, 35–69; S.V. Srinivas, ‘Hong Kong Action
Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies 4 (1), April 2003, 40–62;
Bhrigupati Singh, ‘Aadhamkor Hasina (Man Eating Beauty) and the Anthropology of
a Moment’, paper presented to the panel ‘Cinema and the City’, City One Conference,
Sarai–CSDS, January 2001, for a discussion of the B and C circuits of film exhibition
in Delhi: www.sarai.net/events; also Sarai Broadsheet 01: Film in the City, 2000,
www.sarai.net, compiled and written by Bhrigupati Singh; for the differentiation of
Introduction 297
Several different issues come up for consideration in this research.
The question of how the industry used genre to target audiences is
a recurrent theme. Here, Hughes has highlighted the action serial
as a format targeting working class audiences in the native town of
Georgetown in Madras. This was the European and US-produced
action serial, and the importance of this international genre carried
over into the development of local versions presented to plebeian
audiences. Scholars have underlined the importance of this format
and its characteristic audiences to complicate formulations about
too indigenist a construction of what would attract local audiences.
Thus, this new scholarship has complicated the highlighting of
the mythological film, and later, the cinema of social reform made in
the 1930s by a number of prestige studios as the privileged objects of
film history. As I have noted, both these genres appeared to speak to
the development of a subcontinental enterprise in film, sometimes a
specifically nationalist one, as in the formulations relating to D.G.
Phalke’s pioneering work in the mythological film. But the impor-
tance of other genres and circuits suggests different purchases on the
cinema by plebeian audiences. Thus Thomas counterpoints the func-
tions of ‘Fearless Nadia’, the Australian Greek action star—a figure
who conjured up a hybrid racial persona while playing Indian women
adventurers—to those of socially respectable heroines such as Devika
Rani. Here she argues for the greater openness of plebeian audiences
to hybridity over authenticity and female action over melodrama-
tic suffering. Bhaumik also points to the importance of hybridity at
the level of language, art direction, and costume, in the composition
of the musical performance cinema. He suggests that this derived
from a wide-ranging bazaar culture where ethnic groups commingl-
ed and cultures of visuality and music traversed a wide arc of north
Indian towns and cities. Differences in genre and public respectabil-
ity did not necessarily set up different circuits of film exhibition.
Thus, Bhaumik points out how exhibitors in the higher circuits
started showing Wadia’s Fearless Nadia films after their success in the
lower circuits.8
film exhibition in Delhi, see also Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Cinema in Urban Space’, Seminar
525: Unsettling Cinema, May 2003, http://www.india-seminar.com; Anand Vivek
Taneja, ‘Begum Samru and the Security Guard’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Delhi,
CSDS, 2005, 287–96, on old and new cinema circuits in Delhi.
8
Bhaumik, ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1896–1936’, 192.
Of crucial importance here was the whole status of the cinema thea-
tre and the public which went to see films. Film trade and newspaper
press recurrently featured complaints about how poorly equipped
theatres for Indian films were in contrast to venues for American films.
In an important body of research, S.V. Srinivas argues for the peculiar
subaltern conditions of the film public.9 Using material from the
Telugu film periodical Roopvani of the 1950s, he notes that both mid-
dle class and plebeian spectators were subject to rough and arbitrary
treatment by theatre staff. Amongst the litany of complaints were
double sale of tickets, selling after the show had begun, manhandling
of customers, and so on. In these accounts, the cinema assumed the sta-
tus of a subaltern institution where, irrespective of the customer’s
social background and ticket class, they were likely to find the experi-
ence demeaning.
Cinemas catering for Indian films were replete with such com-
plaints, indicating that the lowly social and cultural space occupied by
the cinema in the policies of the national elite was manifest in everyday
filmgoing experience. In Srinivas’s logic, the cinema did not fit the de-
sign of an institution of the public sphere, where a bourgeois logic of
taste, conduct, and opinion formation could take place. This arose not
only from the vulnerability of its public, but, in the second step of his
argument, because this public lacked the cultural attributes required
of a bourgeois public. He outlines a middle-class discourse about the
cinema which goes beyond the question of the failed civility of its ad-
ministrative habitat. This lies in the desire of middle-class opinion to
cultivate the more plebeian sectors of the audience both in their rights
to civil treatment, a right that audiences needed to invoke irrespective
of class distinction, but also because the plebeian sector had to be
cultivated in the virtues and skills of concentrated, silent viewing. Here
we have a bourgeois civilizing process in operation, a prescription
for how the cinema public should behave. Thus, within the not-yet-
legitimate institution lay a potential public sphere governed by the at-
tributes of reasoned behaviour, silence, and focused attention.
Within the subordinated institutional positioning of the cinema
under and after colonialism, we may observe then the emergence of a
discourse of social and cultural uplift and institutional reform for the
creation of a unified cinema public. Srinivas’s work on the fan clubs
9 S.V. Srinivas, ‘Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall’, 2000, www. frameworkonline.
com.
Introduction 299
of the Telugu film star Chiranjeevi indicates how fraught such a pro-
ject was, as a fractious subaltern society entered violent contests for the
(temporary) control of cinema theatres showcasing their star icons.10
More generally, the ongoing studies of the B and C circuits (the lat-
ter specifically presenting films made or marketed as soft porn) sug-
gest the more general problem of disciplining the institution into a
civilized form.11 The history of the cinema, its different circuits, and
differentiated if sometimes overlapping publics suggests that this ob-
jective was never to be gained. This has been so more generally in world
cinema, with the differentiation of cinema circuits and publics being
a commonplace dimension of the institution.12
3. Discourses and Practices of the

Cinematic Public: Bollywood, Globalization,
and Genre Diversification
As I have implied, in crucial ways, the discourses and contests about
the cinema’s cultural status and functions have been most visible in the
landscape of the city, even if the rural circuits have been historically im-
portant, as well as the phenomenon of the touring cinema which en-
tered areas without permanent theatres.13 In the contemporary epoch,
after the inauguration of economic liberalization, there has been a
greater push to this focus around the city. Here, under the impulse to
refabricate the city into a more desirable venue for investment and
consumption, we have seen the emergence of the new mall-multiplex
format, where the cinema becomes one amongst a series of attractions
to cultivate a new regime of branded, globalized consumption. Muni-
cipal regulations are altered to accommodate changes in cinema for-
mats, real-estate companies and consultants take the mall-multiplex as
a key engagement and the new consumer economy becomes the
cornerstone for the reconstruction of the city vista.14
10 S.V. Srinivas, ‘Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’, in Vasudevan, ed.,
Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 297–317.

11
See especially the work of Bhrigupati Singh and Anand Taneja cited above.
12 See, for example, Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie
Exhibition in the United States, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

13
There has been very little work on this phenomenon. See the postings by Sougata
Bhattacharya on the Aurora Film Company of Bengal in the Sarai Reader List,
www.sarai.net.
14 Sarai Broadsheet 02: The Contemporary Fabric of the Media City, www.sarai.net.
Contests now emerge along the urban grid between the mall-multi-
plex and a new technological context for the bazaar economy. Where
the cinema of the older, pre-multiplex model had already come under
threat from the early 1980s with the advent of videocassette piracy, the
new digital context provides an even greater challenge. Cheap copying
technologies make for a highly dynamic, portable culture difficult to
police, the low costs of CDs allows for easily affordable consump-
tion, and a sophisticated network of piracy in the region from South
Asia through East Asia ensures the availability of the latest film in
the local market almost simultaneously with its release at cinema halls.
An elaborate apparatus of lawyers, investigators, and special police
departments have been put together to try and protect the film in-
dustry’s intellectual property rights, often without discernible im-
pact on the functioning of this parallel economy of film consumption
through video.15
I have tried to capture the diversity of this history of the city and the
cinema at two levels. One is a more freewheeling, imaginative exercise
that seeks to plot the cinema’s intervention in perceptions of the ur-
ban experience. I engage key contexts—the ‘Emergency’, mid-1980s
Bombay and the emergence of a post-industrial landscape and new
ethnic nationalisms—to focus on cinematic representation and its em-
bodiment of social and political conflicts on the stage of the city. In this
essay, the politics of the institution of the cinema is considered prim-
arily by looking at the way differentiated film practices engage with
urban experience, from the mainstream format, through to art and
auteur cinema, and into the field of documentary practices. Issues of
narrative discourse, melodrama, and realism are refracted through a
particular concern with the way figures are aesthetically organized and
indexed as vehicles of urban performance. Motivated by an enquiry
into the sources and modes of presentation of violence, the essay spills
out of the city into other story worlds marked by political violence, and
also fleetingly considers how a global framing of identity conflicts,
here taken from the logic of British Indian film and television pro-
duction, offers us a different purchase on identity performance.
This global context, and the place of cinema and urban experience
in the contemporary situation is carried forward in chapter 10, which
15See the research notes by the media city research team at Sarai, ‘Complicating
the City: Media Itineraries’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Delhi, Sarai, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies, 2005, 258–86, and www.sarai.net.
Introduction 301
deals with the politics, economics, and cultural formats of contempo-
rary cinema. Here I consider the category of Bollywood in relation to
the global market targeted by segments of the Indian film industry,
and the new commodity constellation of which the cinema has be-
come a crucial part. Analyses of the new perspectives of the Indian
government, encoded in the 1998 recognition of cinema as an indus-
try, goes alongside a discussion of the new corporate strategies involved
in mining the new entertainment commodity. I then go on to consider
the different ways in which the category of Bollywood has been used
in film-critical discourse, with special attention on the work being
done on the way Hindi cinema circulates globally, and the terms on
which it is received, with a view to develop the possibilities of a multi-
sited history of Indian film.
In the final chapter I come back to the larger thematic of melodrama
and public form, but also address the ways in which the emergence of
new genres has altered the connotations of Indian popular film. Melo-
drama remains crucial, especially in the high-end film product with
global aspirations. The use of the family-film genre suggests an archa-
ism and throwback quality but, along with the conventions of reconcil-
ing family differences, the genre now navigates shifts in global location
and culture. It also functions as a clearly ornamental form, staging
the extended family, its ritual dimensions and marriage ceremonies as
fashionable and desirable. While acknowledging these features, my
larger concern is to suggest the complexity of the narrative strategies
involved in key works of the genre, and also to note and analyse how
the national imaginings offered by the genre may alter. Thus these
films reiterate the tradition/modernity paradigm familiar from the
older family film, but do so in a way that suggests the cinema’s own
transcendence of these parameters. This is achieved through a new
star iconicity, with the star as sutradhar or storyteller, the vehicle of
melodramatic affect. As I will suggest, the specific appeal of Shah Rukh
Khan in this format is emblematic.
To focus on the family movie would be misleading, for the con-
temporary period has generated a remarkable amount of genre diversi-
fication. As I will argue, this form of production was also grounded in
economic processes of corporatization not dissimilar from the high-
end, global-oriented family movie. Nevertheless, it moves in a dif-
ferent direction. Genres such as the horror film, urban thriller, erotic
thriller, and road movie move an engagement with lifestyle and com-
modity world very specifically into the space of the couple. These films
also exhibit a greater investment in Hollywood economies of narra-
tion, even in some cases doing away with song, dance, and comic se-
quences from the entertainment format. While the consideration of
such genres requires us to think afresh the relationship between genre
practices and melodramatic modes, my initial formulation is that this
development does not follow the pattern of a bourgeois segmentation
of the social realm into the public/private division. Instead these genres
often display a significant narrative momentum which requires the
articulation of new (or newly acknowledged) subjectivities in relation-
ship, if not to the state, then to the impossibility of forging a bour-
geois autonomy. Thus, in films such as Ek Hasina Thi (There Was a
Pretty Woman; Sriram Raghavan, 2004), Road (Rajat Mukherjee,
2002), Ab Tak Chhappan (56 and Counting; Shimit Amin, 2004) or
Bhoot (Ghost; Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) traversing urban thriller,
road movie, policier, and horror genres, the genre momentum refuses
the possibilities of domestic autonomy from the dangers which course
through contemporary society.
9
Selves Made Strange: Violent

and Performative Bodies in the
Cities of Indian Cinema
1974–2003
W
hen we are asked to look at the time we are living through,
current images and their narrative organization keep pulling
us back into other times. The contemporary is like an image
track which is layered into other image tracks, just as music too loops
back into earlier melodies and voices. At one level, this is to do with
the constitution of selves: inevitably, different generations will regard
the contemporary with different time scales. But, stepping outside
these subjective ties, there is the historical institution of the cinema.
Composed of the layered experience of its practitioners, its codes of
representation and performance, its narrative tropes, the cinema opens
such temporal loops even as claims are made for the contemporary
moment as distinctive and unique to itself.
The built environments of cities in the cinema of today conjure up
earlier moments in a history of cinematic representation. Public spaces
such as the Bombay Victoria Terminus, high-rises, the interior dimen-
sions of middle-class households and lower-income tenements, facto-
ries, warehouses, docks, the raw terrain of construction sites, shopping
malls, and bazaars resonate across time. And screen personae, their
social typage, generic placement, and performative repertoire set up
dialogues with earlier formations of personality. Here I look at these
parameters, the city and the body, as they are woven in the narrative
space of the cinema. My exploration of these ways of looking will prim-
arily focus on the experience associated with Bombay in the cinema.
But the exploration will periodically flow beyond this focus, to see how
other spaces, including those of rural life and of global forms, are con-
figured through such body-space articulations. Central to my narra-
tive is a focus on the body as an object and vehicle of violence, but
also the body as a vehicle of performance. By this I mean a form which
renders the body as artifice, as subject to play and transmutation.
Rather than a self locked into a body, there is a disjunction, affording
us with the possibility of seeing the body as interpretative vehicle.
The contemporary situation has witnessed substantial changes in
state and civil society discourses about the cinema. A key term here is
Bollywood. This is a term widely used to describe the institution of
contemporary Bombay cinema. By and large, it seems to have emerged
with the development of a substantial external market for the Bombay
cinema, one which exports the elaborate staging of Indianness through
the rituals of the so-called traditional family. Such a cultural form, it
has been argued, panders to the needs of cultural affiliation and repro-
duction for Indians who have settled beyond the ‘motherland’. Argu-
ably, such a narrative is as important inside as it is outside, for Indian
society has opened up so substantially in the last ten-odd years that the
dangers to ‘traditional’ culture are felt at home as well. The question
of Bollywood is a complex one, addressing issues of globalization, state
cultural policies, new linkages between cinema, fashion, advertising,
and music, and a new constellation of commodity culture.1 I will pur-
sue these issues over the next two chapters. But for now I want to set
this important phenomenon aside, in order to provide another sense
of the contemporary, and provide a route for a different engagement
with ‘our time’.
I will turn to the 1970s as my point of origin, developing a narrative
that moves between the cinema and social and political transforma-
tions. Indian state, social, and civil institutions, organizational frame-
works and cultural forms underwent a crisis whose ramifications were
not immediately clear. A huge railway strike paralysed the country in
1974. The government’s breaking of this strike, along with the later
failure of strikes in the textile industry in the early 1980s, perhaps sig-
nalled the long-term decline of trade unions in the country. The early
1 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural

Nationalism in a Global Arena’, in Kaarsholm, ed. Cityflicks; and Madhava Prasad,
‘This Thing Called Bollywood’, Seminar 525, May 2003. Rajadhyaksha’s argument
is discussed at length in ch. 10 below.
Selves Made Strange 305
1970s also witnessed movements against the corruption of local gov-
ernments, sweeping through the federal states of Bihar and Gujarat,
and indicating a groundswell against the ruling Congress Party, but
also against the forms of social alliance and consensus the party had
represented since the time of Independence. In the face of escalating
opposition, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi declared an ‘Emer-
gency’, arrested opposition leaders, suspended civil liberties, institut-
ed extensive censorship and an executive authority unchecked by rule
of law. This dictatorship prefigured, in its governmental policies, some
of the imperatives which have come up over the last ten years or so.
These include a governmental address to the increasing complexity
of Indian cities, which had, in these years, witnessed a large influx of
population.2 The Emergency deployed a rhetoric about efficiency of
government, and a drive to discipline society, including the notorious
government-led drives for sterilization and the clearance and reloca-
tion of slums.3 Reaction to the Emergency saw the turning back of
some of these drives. In the last ten years, much of the earlier agenda
has re-emerged. Now, urban spaces in particular, and the disorderly
and polluting publics of the city, have become the main targets for
cleansing and reform by governments. Of course, where the 1970s
regimes operated within the parameters of protectionist policies, cur-
rent regimes have opened up the economy, so that many state interven-
tions for the reorganization of cities relate to the cultivation of foreign
investment.4
This historical background suggests a complicated field against
which to situate the domain of culture. One of the independent state’s
agendas was the development of modernizing cultural protocols. The
state had set itself the agenda of supporting a ‘good’ cinema which
could vary from the experimentalist to the social realist form. Madhava
Prasad has analysed how this developed in the differentiated cinema-
tic field of the 1970s. He identifies a state-supported cinema that es-
poused a developmental realism, a middle-class cinema devoted to the
2 See Chatterjee, ‘Is the Indian City Finally Becoming Bourgeois’, for a discussion
of the new forms of governmentality which emerged in the 1970s.

3
David Selbourne An Eye to India: The Unmasking of a Tyranny, Harmondsworth,
Pelican, 1977; Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.
4 Aditya Nigam, ‘Dislocating Delhi: A City in the 1990s’, Sarai Reader 01: The
Public Domain, Delhi, CSDS, 2001; A. Sharan, ‘Claims on Cleanliness: Environment

and Justice in Contemporary Delhi’, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life.
ordinary and the everyday, and what he refers to as an aesthetics of
mobilization launched by the industry.5 The latter refers both to the
narrative content but also to the imperative of mobilizing a mass audi-
ence into cinema halls against the perceived threat to the industry
posed by state intervention and support.
1. In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas

Here I want to keep aside the more ideologically normative role out-
lined in Prasad’s description of cinematic differentiation. Instead, I
will look at a range of cinematic practices which constitute what I will
call a breaching of vistas. These are forms of inquiry into received para-
digms for social transformation, which include texts of social realism
along with popular forms of deconstruction, and the orchestration of
the cinema as a type of energy field. These practices undertake the work
of unsettling a horizon of desire for national reconstruction by
targeting the iconographies through which this imagination has
been instituted. They range in generic form from the author cinema,
through popular action, domestic melodrama, and slapstick comedy.
This outlines, then, a body of perspectives that cast a critical eye on the
history I have charted.
At the outset, let me gesture to a body of work which, in a sense,
never settled into an iconography or established a horizon for national
reconstruction. This is the work of the left-wing Bengali director
Ritwik Ghatak which emerged from the historical catastrophe of
India’s Partition, a phenomenon which involved large-scale bloodshed
and displacement. The event marked his work deeply, generating a
highly innovative inquiry into the ramifications of this violent rup-
ture. Using mythic and epic resonances in his delineation of characters
and settings, his work documented how displacement had blighted
attempts to put a world together again, whether on the basis of the
household, the radical collective, or the ground of a realist and ration-
alist ontology. In 1974 Ghatak made something like a last will and
testament. His Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, Story) in many
ways carries on the earlier forms, composing materials as varied as the
traditions of folk-dance (Chau), the symbolic itinerary of a Bangladeshi
5 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film.

woman displaced after the war, meditations on the failed extreme left
Naxalite movement, along with kitsch iconography and autobiogra-
phical narrative.6
In a sense, this work suggests a disaggregation, a breaking up of
forms in order to interrogate the relationship between constituent ele-
ments. This, I would argue, has great resonance, if in very different
ways, across the cinematic institution of the time. Let me take certain
instances from mainstream cinema to suggest the outlines of this para-
digm shift. The 1957 popular classic, Mother India (Mehboob Khan),
tells the story of the struggles of a peasant woman, Radha, to carry her
family through starvation and indignity. Its narrative is framed by
Radha, now a respected village matriarch, overseeing the construction
of a dam. Mother and earth mingle as nature is converted through a
nationalist dream of technologically driven plenitude. Nehru’s by now
well-worn statement claimed that the dams would be the temples of
modern India; the popular film narrative suggests that an image of the
suffering, sacrificial mother is the ultimate source of meaning and
value. A quarter of a century later, in Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983),
a villainous entity, motivated by sheer lust and the drive to domi-
nate, opens the dam walls to inundate a village. An image of techno-
logy not as benign vehicle of plenitude, but instrument of destruction
and mayhem, surfaces into view.
This is testimony, perhaps, to the epochal rending of the develop-
mentalist dream beloved of Nehru. Images such as these accumulate
from this period. A number of icons of modernization, of Nehru’s new
faith, are rendered with a dark, even popular modernist sensibility.
Railways, seen as magical vehicles to carry one into an extending uni-
verse of new experience, most famously perhaps in Pather Panchali
(Song of the Road; Satyajit Ray, 1955) are composed within a rather
different mise-en-scène of the city in films such as Zanjeer (The Chain;
Prakash Mehra, 1973).7 Here the narrative’s existential sense of the
contingency of life, ruled over by the imminent possibilities of acci-
dent, sends a man tumbling to his death from a mass commuter train.
6 Geeta Kapur, ‘Articulating the Self into History: Ghatak’s Jukti Takko Aar Gappo’,
in Pines and Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema, 179–94, rpntd in Geeta
Kapur, When Was Modernism, Delhi, Tulika, 2000; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik
Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Mumbai, Screen Unit, 1982.
7 For a more complicated account of the train sequence in Ray, see ch. 5 above.
Elsewhere in this film, the rail bridge and rail tracks are presented as
symbolic backdrops for the hero’s merciless beating.8
While the 1950s rarely displayed an engagement with the represent-
ation of work, whether in the popular or art cinemas, in this period
work is evoked through a realist description of the space of dockyards,
warehouses, railway platforms, mines, construction sites. But the evo-
cation is not noble; the personality is bound up with involuntary,
industrialized rhythms. In Deewar (The Wall; Yash Chopra, 1974),
the anger of the migrant child-worker Vijay at the insult to his mother
is displaced onto the reverberations of an earth-breaking drill. Else-
where, the city provides the setting for violent, traumatic outcomes,
as when, in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Emperor of Destiny; Prakash
Mehra, 1978), Bachchan and another subaltern figure mistaken-
ly attack each other due to the cunning manipulation of forces behind
the scenes. Locked in battle at a construction site, they use weapons
Fig. 53: Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Prakash Mehra, 1978, Fight at the Construction
Site.
8
See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and
Film Style in Contemporary Urban Action Films’, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of
Everyday Life.
picked from the debris of the site, the deadly armature of the city-in-
the-making claiming its sacrificial victims. (Fig. 53, p. 308.)
Realist typage and melodramatic fantasy cohabit in the formal
structures of this cinematic universe. The city often becomes a crucial
space for staging the particular relay between the evocation of the real
and its fantastical mutation. Bachchan’s body appears almost archi-
tecturally of a piece with the vertical lines of the Bombay cityscape. In
Yash Chopra’s Trishul (The Trident,1978), set in Delhi, the ravaging
of selves is engineered by a narrative of relentless business logic. A pro-
mising young executive forsakes his beloved to pursue a career that will
make him the first name in Delhi’s burgeoning construction business.
Unknown to him, he has a son by this earlier liaison, and the illegiti-
mate scion grows up with the ambition of upstaging and overturning
his father’s business. All of this is motivated by the desire to embla-
zon the city with the banner of Shanti Constructions, named after his
mother. Here and elsewhere, Bachchan recurrently gestures in his
screen personae to the built environment of cities as alienated forms.
These must be repossessed in the name of the alienated labourer, the
mother who is also the producer of the conditions of life and of labour.
City as the narrative space for the undermining of ethical certitudes
is observable across the board. Ray’s last film in his city series, Jana
Aranya (The Middleman, 1975), indicates the emergence of a cynical
imagination within a humanist oeuvre. His protagonist, normally de-
fined in clear moral terms is here rendered as a shadowy entity. A dili-
gent student who falls foul of the vagaries of the exam system, he gets
caught up, with a sense of fascination, in the world of middlemen who
get contracts on the basis of bribes and pimping. There is a clear delight
in etching a gallery of inventively corrupt characters, glitteringly per-
formed by major character actors such as Robi Ghosh. The city is a
space of sharp practices worked out in the offices of political parties,
government offices, classy brothels and respectable restaurants. Per-
haps a sign of the times, Ray, the Indian master of classical film form
and narrative integration, provides a default narrative setting which al-
lows for the play of intermittent attraction rather than causal and
moral coherence.9 A delightful version of this new form of engage-
ment comes from a film by Film Institute graduate Kundan Shah,
9
Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray’,
Journal of the Moving Image 2, Calcutta, Jadavpur University, 2002, rpntd as ‘A
part of the elite New Indian Cinema movement supported by state
finance. In Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Let Sleeping Dogs Lie; 1983), the
urban energies are channelled not through melodrama and action but
through slapstick and a cynical, black humour. The post-Emergency
scenario had generated a new journalistic form, that of the investigat-
ive journalist who would expose governmental and corporate collu-
sion in the distribution of licences and contracts at the cost of public
interest. Shah’s film takes this on board and renders it as a cynical whir-
ligig, building his narrative world through references to a topical slew
of contemporary scandals, but also fashioning a world shot through
with allusions to cinema history. This is an amiable self-reflexivity that
leavens the film’s cynical outlook on the hoopla of investigation so
lauded in those years. The city as comic, absurdist frame displaces na-
tionalist narratives of truth and justice, offering the spectator a rather
different form of visceral engagement.
Let me return, however, to the issue of melodrama. The nested spa-
ces of the household within the city afford a powerful location from
which to launch an inquiry into received terms of value and meaning.
The popular domestic melodrama of these years offers a significant
lexicon. A database of images and narrative syntagma brings Bachchan
into view again, this time as a force straddling the revenge scenario and
domestic melodrama. Both Trishul and the domestic melodrama
Kabhi Kabhi (Sometimes; Yash Chopra, 1976), frame him against a
backdrop of explosions. Destruction and construction, destruction
for construction, these are well established motifs in a modernist reins-
cription of the world.10 But here the modernist motif is interrupted,
destruction is torn from the chain of signification, the object of cons-
truction drained of value.
In Kabhi Kabhi, the motif is channelled into domestic space. Amit
(Bachchan) had given up his love for Pooja (Raakhee), asserting that
their happiness should not be at the cost of her parents’ misery. But he
carries and nurtures this loss into adult life, marriage, and fatherhood.
Construction provides a metaphorical imagery here. Amit is a builder,
and Vijay, Pooja’s husband by arranged marriage, is an architect and
interior designer. As builder, Amit is associated with explosions used
Modernist Public: The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray’,
ch. 4 above.
10 A brilliant analysis of this process features in Harun Farocki’s documentary
film, Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988).

to clear spaces for building, and this metaphorizes an interior devast-
ation resulting from the sacrifice of desire. Building requires a design,
not only of internal and external structure and public placement, but
a design for habitation and intimate living. Shifted to the domestic
field, Bachchan is singularly ill equipped to fulfil such a design, un-
like Vijay. Here the name Bachchan uses to incarnate the victorious
persona of public revenge fantasy is transposed onto another, for he
cannot animate the interior, defined as he is by a sense of lack. A re-
markable performative juxtaposition articulates this in a discourse of
the body. Amit is inward, held in, brooding. Vijay is raucous, lives
in the present, refuses to dwell on the past. The deployment of melo-
drama as a mode of performative excess, a forcefield for unravelling
expressive energies, is multiplied into the next generation. Vijay’s son,
Vikki (Rishi Kapoor), a bundle of disco-rhythms, romantic and sexual
kinesis must find an outlet or attachment for otherwise his uninvested
drives will destabilize the possibilities of generational renewal.11
If Bachchan captures the fissure in the nationalist imaginary through
a powerful melancholia, doomed to revisit scenarios of revenge which
can never compensate for the losses he has sustained, there are other,
quite contrary modes. The procedures of an anti-melodrama achieve
eerie force in passages from Tarang (Wave; Kumar Shahani, 1984).
Coming from the experimental side of the New Indian cinema, Shaha-
ni’s film analyses the social transitions of its time, capturing the decline
of the trade union movement, and the internecine fighting between
nationalist and dependent visions of capitalism. Shahani’s treatment
is that of the distanced eye which frames, positions, and mobilizes fig-
ures in a careful mise-en-scène of factory, family home and office, re-
designing space through a scenario of class cohabitation. Janaki (Smita
Patil), widow of a worker activist, is taken in as servant in the house
of the industrialist Sethji. Caught in the conflict between her father
and her husband, Rahul (Amol Palekar), Rahul’s wraith-like wife
Hansa (Kawal Gandhiok) exhibits a strange lassitude. Rather than
pathos, here is the body depleted by spiritual enervation, drained by
her capture in a generational conflict within the capitalist class. Shahani
renders Janaki’s transcendence of this world through an intricate ico-
nography drawn from the epics. More memorable is his work with
Hansa, who assumes the position of an Ophelia, but one who gives up
11
For further information about this film and the work of Yash Chopra, see Rachel
Dwyer, Yash Chopra, London, British Film Institute, 2002.
her life out of estrangement rather than melodramatic subjection. The
figure glides across Shahani’s widescreen composition, fleetingly
glimpses the inner machinations, sexual logics, and business manoeuv-
res, and moves on, in a perambulation which echoes and creatively
reinvests a Bressonian choreography.12
2. Our Violent Times: The Morphology

of Bodies in Space
The narrativization of built environments and home-making is a per-
sistent motif as we enter the contemporary. The question of a dwelling,
a habitation in a city where state is no longer an impartial arbiter of
social justice is the subject of one of the independent document-
ary movement’s major films, Anand Patwardhan’s Bombay, Hamara
Shahar (Bombay, Our City, 1985). This movement, working outside
the domain of the state-run Films Division, started up substantially
after the Emergency with films such as Patwardhan’s Prisoners of Cons-
cience (1978).13 His work displays great discretion in rendering the
situation of the pavement dwellers, deploying their own voices for off-
screen narration. The voice floats, and the film takes time to locate it
in a specific person. The director plays his own presence down, except
to highlight it as the object of working-class scepticism about the func-
tion of such activist documentaries. However, if discretion rules at one
level, the film is politically unambiguous in delineating the world of
the elite, in their comfortable bungalows, expensive flats, municipal
offices, and self-absorbed citizen and flat-owners meetings. The di-
rector uses sharp juxtapositions between these worlds, deploying a
melodrama of argumentation rather than expressive form to develop
a perspective.
If the independent documentary functions within the orbit of an
imagination no longer persuaded of the state’s arbitration of social
justice, it appears suggestive to me that certain dimensions of this
scenario appear to be off the agenda. While investigative journalism
takes state and corporate corruption as its main object, in general,
12 For the work of Kumar Shahani, see Framework 30–1, 1986, Dossier on Kumar
Shahani.
13
Vinod Pavarala, ‘Other Voices: Exploring the “Cinema of Resistance”’, Indian
Darpan, Hyderabad, 2000.
neither the film documentary nor the print journalistic genres inves-
tigate popular and subaltern crime, a crucial dimension of urban real-
ity, and of the imagining of the city. Art cinema, too, has by and large
left this subject alone, with the exception of Govind Nihalani (Ardh
Satya [Half-Truth], 1983; and Aaghat [The Shock], 1985). From the
1950s onwards, Bombay popular cinema has taken crime as a key the-
matic, generic form, and mode of urban representation and experi-
ence. While these earlier forays used criminality to dramatize social
injustice, and as metaphoric narrative for situations of illegitimacy and
social exclusion, the contemporary cinema from the mid-1970s deve-
lops a different symbolic narrative of crime. It is perhaps instructive
to look at Bombay, Hamara Shahar alongside the popular fictions
of the period, for example Ankush (The Goad; N. Chandra), made
in the same year. Surely a life at the margins, on the streets, of the sort
depicted in Patwardhan’s film, is also one open to the seductions of
petty crime? But this the documentary format does not take up; apart
from the fact that it would deplete the activist focussing of issues of
injustice, it is also perhaps a more difficult world to enter.
Let us track back to the Bachchan persona. His characters derive
from realist typage and display a representational capacity, as the wor-
ker who has the moral and physical courage to take on exploiters and
represent his class. But, in films such as Deewar, he does this only to
sidestep the representational function. For, in a world which was in-
creasingly to see the demise of trade union forms (Deewar captures this
in the destiny of Bachchan’s father), the film appears to anticipate this
and to take its hero into a world of crime and the illicit accumulation
of wealth, although, of course, in the name of the mother. This body
of work is thus entangled in a particular vision of the delegitimiza-
tion not only of the state as vehicle of social justice but of critical re-
presentational institutions such as the trade union, which function at
the boundary of the civil and the political.
From the mid-1980s, this scenario is reframed, narrativizing new
visions of social subjectivity and urban being, and offers a variety
of political trajectories. Arguably, the violent trajectories unravel-
ling the earlier consensus are no longer ones of displaced class protest
and disaffection. The work of N. Chandra is crucial here, in Ankush
and Tezaab (Acid; 1987). The off-mainstream Ankush generates its
own sense of documentary reality. Its evocation of street corner, neigh-
bourhood, and bazaar is distinctive, bringing a new semantics of the
Fig. 54: Ankush, N. Chandra, 1986, One Day, Everyday.
cinematic city into being. Later, these spaces would often be more
ornately represented in studio sets, but here, a realistic mise-en-scène,
relying on location shooting, is observable. The realism extends into
the characterization of the male group which clusters at the street cor-
ner. The film gives us a sense of distended time, as if this could be one
day, everyday. (Fig. 54.)
It also captures the condition of unemployment, but also of em-
bitterment which provides the film with its political slant. Made in the
wake of the decimation of the huge Bombay textile labour strike, and,
in turn, the substantial dispersal of the city’s textile industry itself, the
four main characters both gesture to this, and posit a more general con-
dition. This is of the educated unemployed who have been unable to
adjust to the demands of a corrupt society.
The social configuration speaks of the constituency widely noted to
be a critical base of the Shiv Sena, Maharashtra’s chauvinist regional
party which later became an important part of the countrywide Hindu
majoritarian polity.14 This group’s sense of status is under attack, they
14 On the Shiv Sena, see for example Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence.
are fallen, and this sense of unjust social demotion embitters them.
Public assertion is critical, and takes the form of contests with gangs
who seek to control right of way in the film’s opening spectacle of the
Ganesh Chaturti processions, a key feature of city public life and poli-
tical mobilization in a chauvinist Hindu politics from the time of the
nationalist leader Tilak.15
All of this corroborates the thesis that the film is like a Shiv Sena
propaganda vehicle.16 In its social configuration it also anticipated
the national conflicts that were to erupt a few years later. In 1989, V.P.
Singh, the prime minister of a minority government, decided to im-
plement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission on reser-
vation of jobs for historically backward classes. That move sparked a
spate of public protests. An elite public believed such policies would
cut at meritocracy and put a brake on India’s developmental dynamic.
More complicatedly, a high-caste, lower-middle-class population ex-
pressed a frustration and despair which saw a number of young peo-
ple taking their lives.17 Of course, it is not in the imagination of an
Ankush to capture this last scenario. Male bravado is its chosen route,
as the protagonists undertake the annihilation of a corrupt bevy of
businessmen and accept their guilt and public execution in the manner
of martyrs to a social cause.
However, the importance of the film as a generator of a new langu-
age for the capture of Bombay in the cinema should not be under-
estimated. From the Ganesh Chaturthi, through neighbourhood,
street-corner, and bazaar, Chandra would go on to capture the railway
tracks, and the shanty town at the borders of the city in Tezaab, his
major commercial success of 1987. The film defines an inside/outside
logic to the city of Bombay. The sometime starry-eyed navel cadet and
patriot, the middle-class Munna, has fallen on evil times because of the
machinations of various forces and the failures of the court and the
police. Like the mythic Ram, Munna is unjustly exiled from his city,
and undergoes a proper criminalization. The ultimate logic of the
15 However, the Ganesh festival was also much more complicated, as shown by
Raminder Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism.

16
This is the argument put forward by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen
in Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 469.
17 For a discussion of this spate of suicides, see ch. 7 above on the image of the
burning male body in Roja (Mani Rathnam, 1992) and Bombay (Mani Rathnam,
1995).
narrative is to return him to his city on his fulfilment of the Ramayana-
style rescue of his beloved, this time from the clutches of a villainous
Muslim criminal, Lothia Pathan. The film charts a history of disap-
pointed patriotism, and the reacquisition of symbolic capital through
exile and return, setting up new social coordinates for a mythically ins-
cribed renewal of the nation.
Such trajectories were not the only ones possible, and this is indi-
cated by two other films of the period, Nayakan (Hero; Mani Rath-
nam, 1987),18 and Parinda (The Flight of Pigeons; Vidhu Vinod
Chopra, 1988).19 Deewar was meant to gesture to the career of Haji
Mastaan, a gangster who was also seen as something of a godfather
figure in the Bombay of that time. While Deewar hardly touches on
such issues, Nayakan alludes to the paternalist legitimacy of the crimi-
nal in its evocation of the important Tamil gangster, Varadarajan
Mudaliar, for its protagonist Velu Naicker. The narrative could be read
as pitted against the emergent Shiv Sena, sons of the soil, vision for the
city, which took as its first target the immigrant from Tamilnadu and
Kerala. The film adapted Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) for its story
set in the Tamil slums of the megalopolis, doubly marginalized by
poverty and ethnic subordination. Here Ankush’s iconography of
the violent slum neighbourhood is carried on with a different in-
flection. Kamalahasan essays a bravura condensation of Brando and
Pacino’s performances, and, perhaps, the iconic Tamil star Sivaji Gane-
san.20 The iconography of the chaste, dhoti-wearing leader is familiar
from Tamil politics, and political resonances are echoed, too, in the
way art director Thotta Tharani and cameraman P.C. Sriram stage
Naicker’s home. Rather than the sepulchral inner world of Don Vito
Corleone, this is a brightly lit space blocked to emphasize frontal regis-
ters for those who supplicate the Tamil mobster. There are suggestions
here of the architecture of the court and the political realm. The film
subtly traverses the field from crime to politics in such a mise-en-scène,
suggesting not only the links but also the rhetorical structures through
which constituencies converge around the image of the leader.
There are the workings here of a complicated relay between spaces
of politics and criminality via the axis of the cinema. And this is done
18 For Nayakan, see Lalitha Gopalan, A Cinema of Interruptions, London, British
Film Institute, 2002.

19
Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Ruin and the Uncanny City: Memory, Despair and Death
in Parinda’, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life.
20 I thank Indira Chandrashekhar for this observation.
in ways which take the new lexicon of slum/crime/politics into a
different direction than that which N. Chandra’s films of this period
configure. But there is also, powerfully, an intra-cinematic relay in
the re-imagining of the contemporary. If Nayakan offers a riposte to
N. Chandra’s work, then Vinod Chopra’s Parinda takes the figure of
the Tamil gangster, strips him of political functions or references, and
makes him the ambiguous psychotic villain, Anna (Nana Patekar) This
is not so much a depoliticization of the ethnic narrative of Bombay
subaltern life as a generic, and indeed, realistic description of the cross-
ethnic dimensions of the criminal world. As Ira Bhaskar has point-
ed out, gothic elements now emerge strongly in the genre.21 Bombay
is the night city alternately composed of anonymous crowds, or an
empty canvas for the staging of irrupting violence. And it is a city where
the subject is never quite remote from the enquiring eyes of a malevo-
lent network which may penetrate law courts, sacred religious spaces,
and the household itself. The specifically gothic rendering emerges in
the revelations about Anna’s factory system, the city’s underbelly.
Apparently organized to produce drugs under the guise of an oil press,
perceptually it is only available to us as a dis-assembly line for the pro-
duction of death. An assembly of steel vises, industrial mixers and
chutes mangle the bodies of Anna’s opponents and betrayers, and pro-
duce them as destroyed end-product.
The penetration of the household will become a major thematic
later, but becomes a focus for a specifically generic inquiry in this film.
As Ranjani Mazumdar has shown, the putative formation of a couple
that bids to escape from the criminal nexus is constantly interrupted,
as the domestic idyll is threatened by anonymous telephone calls and
sudden blackouts.22 Film noir and gothic elements function to desta-
bilize the romance fiction otherwise available in the Bombay cinema
of the time.

Remarkably, the popular cinema has captured these transitions in
the cognitive map of the city of Bombay much more powerfully than
21
Ira Bhaskar, ‘Melodrama and the Urban Action Film’, paper presented at the
workshop, ‘The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in the
Urban Action Film’, Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi,
November 2001.
22
Mazumdar, ‘Ruin and the Uncanny City’.
work in the art cinema. While Nihalani’s work addressed the com-
plex relations between law and criminality, there was a strong pedagogic
insistence in the make-up of the parallel cinema. This is perhaps re-
presented most strongly by the work of Saeed Akhta Mirza, who, with
Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Makes Alberto Pinto
Angry?; 1980) Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho (Mohan Joshi, Present Yourself;
1983), and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Don’t Shed Tears for Lame Salim;
1989) essayed a series of films on ethnic subalternity, and other forms
of marginality. Arguably, these exercises, inspired by a Brechtian form
of engagement, speak a language of conscientization that fits the im-
peratives of the realist art cinema and documentary film of this time:
to strengthen a civil social discourse of reasoned representation, com-
munication, and debate. Much of the power of the popular cinema is
exactly in outflanking such a discursive terrain and setting up scenarios
of the city, its violent landscapes and subaltern experience not easily
admissible within such a discourse. This breaching of the vistas of the
developmental dream of nationalism is effected by outlining new sen-
ses of frustration and violence. There is a generative grammar of urban
criminality which can speak about a range of experiences, from twisted
forms of subalternity, new locales for urban meaning in the neigh-
bourhood, down to the cinema as mode of urban experience. As we
have seen, the politics of such an outflanking can go in different direc-
tions, providing both the possibilities of reassembling the national on
a more chauvinist ground, and side-stepping its discursive frames in
order to look at the social as the social, without clear ideological and
political trappings.
3. Diagnosing the Sources of Violence

One of the most startling of popular films steps outside the sphere of
the urban, and looks to the countryside for its diagnosis of the sour-
ces of contemporary violence. In Maachis (Spark; Gulzar, 1994), the
state is arraigned for the terror it unleashed to quell the Sikh militant
movement from the mid-1980s, resulting in an arbitrary targeting and
torture of many youths. Maachis’ director, Gulzar, functions at the
intersection of the popular, middle class and parallel cinemas, and this
is suggested in his deployment of realist narrative causation, quota-
tions from newspaper reports to highlight civil libertarian issues, and
song sequences that carefully dovetail with narrative requirements.
The latter evokes the nostalgic bonding of young men who, in the face
of an arbitrary state terror, have exiled themselves into a vengeful
identification with militancy. Violence, hitherto associated with the
genre of urban action, is now accessed through a social realism that
captures an eerily silent Punjab countryside. Gulzar’s scenario posi-
tions the spectator with the wronged innocent, and at a distance from
the militant. And it deploys a melodramatic and mythic structure,
invoking the narrative of a Savitri who would bring her husband back
from the dead, with startling consequences.
If the violent resonances of the contemporary have a series of sour-
ces, ranging from the complicated transformations of the city, through
to entanglements of nation-state and ethnic movements, it is never-
theless the movement of Hindu majoritarian chauvinism that pro-
vided an epochal transformation in the violent contours of the
contemporary. Increasingly influential from the mid 1980s, with
the movement’s parliamentary wing acquiring powerful political
presence in the elections of 1988, its leader L.K. Advani unleashed
violent encounters through a series of public processions evoking a
mythic symbolism, the rathyatra. Parliamentary and extra-parliamen-
tary strategies by the Hindu Right maintained an atmosphere of po-
litical brinkmanship around the cultivation of an imagined Hindu
mass constituency, culminating in the symbolically devastating des-
truction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Riots followed, in-
cluding something akin to a pogrom of the Muslim population of
Bombay in January 1993.23
The independent documentary movement provided a powerful
engagement with these developments. Patwardhan’s Ram Ke Naam
(In the Name of God, 1992) undertook a kind of field research of the
Hindutva movement, testing its historical claims against versions
which contested these, and uncovering its high-caste mobilization to
counter the democratizing impulses of the 1989 implementation of
the Mandal Commission. Madhushree Dutta’s I Live in Behrampada
(1993) rendered the attacks on a locality in Bombay during the 1993
riots through a dynamic, whiplash capturing of different testimonies.
The art cinema too produced one of its best works of recent times in
Saeed Mirza’s Naseem (1995). Mirza retains elements of his pedagogi-
cal form, this time to extol the ideal of female education against the
23
For the Hindutva movement, Tapan Basu, et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags;
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, New York, Colum-
bia University Press, 1998.
characterization of the Muslim community as oppressive of female
agency, something quite important to Hindutva ideology. But the film
also provided a rich evocation of an earlier, secular nationalist Mus-
lim intelligentsia in the figure of the legendary left wing poet and lyri-
cist Kaifi Azmi. The character’s death converges with a dark sense of
impending doom for the secular dream of inter-community amity, fol-
lowing as it does on the destruction of the mosque.
Powerful, sensitive testimony to the changing face of nationalism,
the histories and experiences its aggressive transformation has chal-
lenged and suppressed, these works are part of an ongoing series of re-
flections on the shape of the contemporary offered by the cinema.
As always, the popular format provides intimations of such drives
in much more ambiguous terms. Films such as Baazigar (Gambler;
Abbas Mustan, 1993), Darr (Fear; Yash Chopra, 1994), and Gardish
(Vicious Circle; Priyadarshan, 1992) access political changes via ambi-
guous character motivation, splitting of spectatorial identification,
and disorientating narrative methods. They also constitute a suggest-
ive picture of the city as a space of uncertain identity and anonymous
threat. At one level, these films pose questions about identity—how
well we know someone, where they come from—and this uncertainty
itself can make the city into a mysterious, even terrifying place. But
there is also the terror arising from the attempt to use identity claims
to include and exclude from the sphere of social and political legiti-
macy. We have observed how the state becomes the main culprit for
the violent targeting and attribution of militant identity to inno-
cents in Maachis. Mahesh Bhatt’s Zakhm (The Wound, 1999) takes
the security, indeed arrogance, of a domineering, politicized Hindu
identity and submits its transparency of identity claims to historical
dissection. Bhatt inaugurates his favoured exploration into the ramifica-
tions of illegitimacy with the killing of a woman during the Bombay
riots. The killer is a Muslim youth, angered by the assault on his com-
munity let loose by the Hindu Right in January 1993. In fact, he has
killed a Muslim, and Bhatt goes into the history of this suppressed
identity, and its impact on the children of the dead woman. As in
another landmark film, Yash Chopra’s Dharamputra (Righteous Son,
1961), one of the children has grown up believing he is Hindu, and
has become a rabid anti-Muslim fanatic. The revelation of his parent-
age brings a devastating halt to his fanatical activity. As in his 1983
Saaransh (The Essence), Bhatt captures urban violence through mini-
malist means, a fire, a burnt car, a group of straggling youth; and
he uses flashback structures to recount the earlier history of Hindu-
Muslim romance. This is done inventively, especially in a scene where
children burst into the studio of the filmmaker father. They come
upon a mythological film shoot, with Hanuman bearing down up-
on them. The monkey god, a threatening figure within contemporary
Hindutva mobilization, invokes here the pleasurable, tacky fabrica-
tions of the cinema, reawakening our memories of a more benign and
playful iconography.
In films such as Maachis and Zakhm, the popular cinema steps
back and offers the possibilities of a quieter, less fevered perspective on
a violent history and the identity conflicts which undergird it. In turn,
new departures in the independent documentary format move from
the logic of the public, activist form seeking to open the parameters of
civil society, into a more exploratory dimension. Here, the register of
the intimate rather than the public surface, along with essays in self-
interrogation, and richly textured explorations of the documentary
form and its characteristic subject matter.
What constitutes our relationship to the history of violence; how to
explore this as a relationship, between spectator and audio-visual
material, between filmmaker and subject, between the individual sub-
ject, present experience and historical memory? How to capture a vista,
a space, a perspective, that can talk about violence, but in ways which
do not exclude the viewer from the spectacle? In A Season Outside
(1998) filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s voice-over is not an expository one,
leading us from one shot to the next, but one which insistently regards
a space and reflects on its meanings. He looks at the Wagah border
between India and Pakistan, a camp for the display of Sikh military
prowess, a Tibetan refugee camp, and chooses to look at a distance,
from a window above Chandni Chowk, at the Republic Day parade.
Distance, and a brooding, enquiring disposition composes a new rela-
tionship of viewer to image, breaks up the documentary transparency
of the image’s relationship to event, everyday routine, ritual forms,
marginal spaces. In contrast to the campaign or activist documentary,
with its own, very important field of pertinence, the reflective form
opens the possibilities of inquiry rather than making definitive truth
claims and establishing clear-cut critical paradigms. (Fig. 55, p. 322.)
Fig. 55: A Season Outside, Amar Kanwar, 1998, At the Border.
4. Intimations of Dispersal: The Poetry and

Anxiety of a Decentred World
Ruchir Joshi’s remarkable Eleven Miles (1991) is an ambitious engage-
ment with the conventions of the ethnographic documentary. The
film’s exploration of Baul folk performance, philosophy, and experi-
ence is framed within a structure that accommodates very different
tonalities, cognitive orientations, and sense-making enterprises. The
challenge is to re-contextualize the fixed ethnographic object, the
folk form deprived of a relationship to an ongoing history. This sense
of historical transformation is conveyed through the itineraries of Baul
history presented by the film. Thus it tracks back to singing conven-
tions that characterized Baul performance in the pre-Partition period,
moves to a contemporary situation where Baul performers are mobi-
lized by the West Bengal Left Front government to commemorate
the French Revolution, and refers to their cultural interaction with
international currents, for example the work of Grotowski in Poland,
or the rather different, exoticizing dynamics of their cultural export to
France. The itinerary is composed not only of a new geography, but
also encompasses a sense of how Baul philosophy, idioms, and narrat-
ive forms respond to modern experiences in technology, say of elec-
tricity, of musical form, and the new rhythms of life associated with the
city. In tracking this expanding experience the film defamiliarizes spa-
ces, as when a performer wanders through the night city, its shopping
arcades, its pavements festooned with the different argot of popular
entertainment forms. The night city becomes a city of reverie, which
in turn recalls how earlier cities of the cinema looked (Motilal, like
a wraith, drunkenly wandering down the street in another Calcutta
film, Jagte Raho! [Stay Awake!], Shambhu Mitra, 1956). This induc-
tion of a different performativity into the textures of the city unlocks
perspective, asks us to start looking and thinking about images around
us all over again: a city stripped of people, sheer built environment,
objects without people.
There is a powerful sense of familiar narrative forms and documen-
tary procedures unravelling here, as if demanding a starting over again.
Such dispersal, a dispersal of narrative procedure in Eleven Miles, is
evident in other work at a level of the thematics of urban experience.
Dahan (Smouldering; Rituparno Ghosh, 1997) is based on a well-
known incident, subsequently novelized, where a woman reporter ob-
served and intervened in a case of sexual harassment outside a Calcutta
metro station. Ghosh takes the incident as a critical intersection of a
number of lives: the intrepid citizen, in the film a schoolteacher; the
victim, a woman who has married into a conservative, lower-middle-
class family; and the girlfriend of the attacker. The last is the most fleet-
ingly captured of these different narratives. The attacker too comes
from a well-to-do family, and his girlfriend, while appalled at what
he has done, is nevertheless borne down by the pressures internal to
her space. After the initial incident, none of these women meet, and
a particularly fragmented image of the city emerges from the secluded
spaces in which each woman confronts the constraints of her own
positioning. Ghosh interweaves testimony from passersby, and delin-
eates micro-social pressures at home and in the work-place with a fine
sense of composition, detail, and duration. At times, the form sug-
gests the complex, serialized television film, indicating the emergence
of new dynamics in the intersection between art cinema and the new
televisual space it how inhabits.
In our traversal of the movement from the crisis of the 1970s, we
have witnessed the emergence of a landscape from which icons of
earlier vistas have been deracinated, and new senses of space and orga-
nizations of subjectivity have emerged in a post-industrial city. Such
intimations of dispersal are captured with a sense of density and in-
tricacy in Surabhi Sharma’s Jari Mari—Of Cloth and Other Stories
(2001). The household, and female labour, become the sources of
stable reference in the shifting labour situations of the contemporary.
Men move from place to place, seeking employment, while a new put-
ting-out system provides women with work at home. The preservation
of this space becomes crucial to familial stability and reproduction.
Surabhi meets several women in these domestic workplaces, small,
hemmed-in dwellings which build over the time of the film into an
intricate, miniaturized aesthetic of work. (Fig. 56.) Along with the
vendor, and images of movement and transience, the miniature form
provides a tapestry of dispersal that shapes a new sense of the con-
temporary. The former cloth district lies adjacent to the airport, where
flights constantly take off, connecting this space to a world economy
for commodities and labour. In all this, the filmmaker displays a resi-
dual investment in the older forms of trade union organization, as she
captures a failed union mobilization of workers. In these dispersed
Fig. 56: Jari Mari, Surabhi Sharma, 2001, ‘Miniaturized Aesthetic’.

vistas, the invocation appears strangely anachronistic. What innova-
tions will emerge in thinking about these new spaces and forms of
work, where women are so central to the contemporary situation?24
5. Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended

Seductions of Performance: The Work
of Aamir Khan
Rarely does one get the opportunity to see this invisible tapestry. As we
have noticed, it is men, and usually violent men, who have dominated
the cinematic field outside the documentary and art cinema practice.
But men have increasingly come into focus not simply as figures to
identify with but as objects of enquiry. Rahul Roy’s When Four Friends
Meet (2000), his documentary on young men in a northwest Delhi
neighbourhood, provides pause for thought. Not only does it enable
us to reflect on the sources and problems posed to masculinity in the
contemporary epoch, it may also provide us with a bridge to open out
the status of fiction and performance in the rendering of experience.
In his film, a significant reference point for male identity is the affective
unit of the family, and the space of the household. However, this is not
necessarily a productive setting for his subjects to express themselves,
their memories and desires. Rather, it is the male group that proves par-
ticularly potent for the expression of interpersonal memories, a con-
tinued sharing of experiences and a context where they appear to be at
ease and can take shelter from society and its expectations. It is a crucial
emotional resource and outlet. In temporal terms, the realm of the
everyday is central to this group subjectivity, one whose pleasures lie
in repetition rather than the cycle of personality development. Even in
the case of individual interviews, it would appear that the filmmaker
found the best setting to be a place outside the domain of the family,
on the balcony of the family dwelling, a terrace, or in the personalized
space of one of the men.
The group both represents individual male views and exceeds them,
generating an inter-subjective field. I would suggest that male group
subjectivity is governed by performativity, the practice of assuming a
role, character attributes, nuances of style and speech which are lived
24
For an analysis of such dispersed work situations, Jan Breman, Footloose Labour:
Working in India’s Informal Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
in, through, and for the group. The anecdote is a typical vector for ad-
dressing the group, performing for it and with it, in the mode of the
ensemble. For instance, the group recount and comment uproarious-
ly on how a group of men had sex with a mentally unbalanced wo-
man. This is humour of the nudge-and-wink sort, performing a
worldly knowledge of what men get up to and what women really
want. The filmmaker’s voice then intervenes, disturbing the rhythms
of group performance, and inducing a more reflective and moral dis-
course on an event that clearly verges on gang rape.
It is tempting to deploy Roy’s sensitive film as a deconstruction of
the new subjectivities which we have observed emerging from the
ground of the dis-assembled nation. Surely it bounces off films such
as Ankush or Tezaab, uncovering what lies beneath male braggadocio?
Similarly, perhaps Jari Mari can also be intercalated as a text of de-
construction, laying bare the composition and content of slum neigh-
bourhoods for what really holds them together? Such a stance coun-
terposes and privileges the real over the fictional and performative,
denying the latter a meaningful and truth-bearing function. The
strength of When Four Friends Meet lies not only in its non-judge-
mental method of documentation (which is not the same thing as
failing to develop a point of view). Rather, it lies in attending to the
performativity of the male group, the inventiveness which they con-
jure up when they come together, and to give that performativity an
affective force, to discern that it is a mode of self-realization.
The popular in fact, does not necessarily contest truths by laying
reality bare. As we have observed, reality may in fact provide a mise-en-
scène and launching pad for a peformativity displaying fantasies of
action and potency.25 These fantasies have a definite narrative struc-
ture and symbolic economy; they are not without narrative controls.
For example, the Bachchan performance is charged by a discourse
of subalternity and representational politics manqué, one driven by
a sense of lack. Ultimately, the character gains fantasy achievement
which is simultaneously hollow and dramatizes the impossibility of
self-realization. This is a species of melodramatic tragedy, but one that
25 Richard Dyer looks suggestively at the relationship between representations of
the humdrum everyday, performative excess and utopian transcendence in ‘Enter-

tainment and Utopia’, Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods, vol. II, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1987.
at the same time mobilizes visceral gratification for the spectator in-
vested in the motor excitements of urban action genres. The counter-
point to this performativity may, in fact lie in another register of per-
formativity. In a series of brilliant comic turns in Amar Akbar Anthony
(1977: the drunken and rather less-than-omnipotent Christian boot-
legger), Lawaris (Orphan; 1981: the illegitimate offspring involved in
high melodrama but also the comedy of female transvestism) Sharaabi
(Drunkard, 1984: the drunkard again), Don (1978: where his small
town yokel in the city is the double of a powerful mafioso), not to men-
tion domestic comedies such as Chupke Chupke (Hush Hush; 1975)
Bachchan generates his own other.
The main performative personality of the contemporary is, argu-
ably, the comic hero Govinda. With a physical appearance somewhat
at variance with the conventions of the popular hero, Govinda lam-
poons many of the stereotypical narratives of the subaltern achieving
unlikely success as a hero or in romantic pursuit of glamorous, socially
remote women. And he has developed a signature style composed of
nonsensical repartee and frantic jock dance moves, mimicking and
sending up a genre of phallic performance. This performer requires an
extended inquiry, but for this essay, in keeping with the dualities and
overlaps in my twin focus around violence and performativity, I refer
the reader back to my analysis of the Nana Patekar persona, and will
briefly look at another key star, Aamir Khan.26
Aamir Khan started his career with Raakh (Ashes; Aditya Bhatta-
charya, 1988), in many ways a deconstruction of the male revenge
sagas so long a staple of the Bombay industry. However, he swiftly
moved into standard industrial groove, featuring as a strutting, con-
fident, macho teen hero in films such as Qayamat se Qayamat Tak
(Road to Disaster; Mansoor Khan, 1988), and Dil (The Heart; Indra
Kumar, 1990), both major box office successes. Other films suggested
a slightly more complicated screen persona. Dil Hai ke Manta Nahin
(The Heart Won’t Listen; Mahesh Bhatt), Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar
(Winner Takes All; Mansoor Khan) and Andaz Apna Apna (A Style of
One’s Own; Raj Kumar Santoshi), all suggested a playfulness verging
on a perverse, manipulative disposition. A slump in the mid 1990s
signalled a time for reinvention of persona. Aamir essayed the yokel in
the city (Raja Hindustani), with great success, and then went on to try
26
For Nana Patekar, see ch. 3 above.
on a tapori (street conman) mask in Varma’s Rangeela (Colour My
World; 1995), and Vikram Bhatt’s Ghulam (Slave; 1998). Just when
the urban street mask seemed to have settled in rather well, Aamir
assumed the role of the educated, middle class patriot, a policeman
pitted against terrorists from both within and beyond India’s borders
in John Mathew Mathen’s Sarfarosh (Martyr; 1999). Both here and in
the tapori films, the Aamir persona appeared to grapple with the re-
assertion of a secularist legacy under threat from the Hindu Right, if
in rather ambivalent ways in the case of Sarfarosh. Aamir’s urbane
screen persona contributes a certain darkness to the innovations of
Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (Desires of the Heart; 2001), which
the director says was consciously aimed at a sophisticated, ‘yuppie’
audience, evoking an attitude to love, work and friendship different
from those constructed by mainstream cinema convention. Finally, of
course, Lagaan (Land Tax; 2001), the much-touted foreign Oscar
nominee, and Aamir Khan’s own production. This rural saga, avowed-
ly about a peasant encounter with British imperialism through the
medium of a cricket match, draws upon the national passion for a
game in which India is a world player. The film in a sense thus addresses
globalization rather than earlier historical experiences in the life of the
nation. It is the image of the nation which is arresting here, composed
as it is of a highly inclusive representation of social groups and types,
if in sometimes patronizing ways (as in the case of an ‘untouchable’
character). Aamir rendered this play with typage, in a series of Coke
ads featuring a Muslim street stall vendor, urban tough, Punjabi peas-
ant, Bihari contractor. While these constitute an entertaining play
with the idea of the unanchored persona, with Lagaan and other
mainstream features, there is a distinctive way in which this star per-
sona continues to deploy his cinema to revive older, more generous
forms of national self-perception.
Let me turn away from domestic production to look to the instance
of British Indian culture. Until recently, fictional forms dwelling on
the problems of an Indian experience brought up at the intersection of
migrant ethnic culture and local mores tended to be restricted in its
appeal; on the other hand, ‘Bollywood’ was and continues to be largely
consumed by an ethnic Indian and Pakistani audience. However, re-
cently there have been signs of the development of a crossover culture
in a clutch of new films that went beyond the ethnic and art cinema
audience to achieve broader local and international success, as in the
case of East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999), My Son the Fanatic
(Udayan Prasad, 1997), and Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha,
2002). The first two films have made Om Puri, primarily an actor of
India’s parallel cinema, into an internationally recognized star. Argu-
ably, these films are in some fashion continuous with British social
realism, now reframed through the comedy and melodrama of people’s
negotiation between ethnic cultures and the dominant British cul-
ture. The inventive Goodness Gracious Me (Meera Syal) is, perhaps, of
the same cultural derivation, though its strategies are rather different.
Here, once again, performativity appears to have provided a force that
unpacks cultural differences. Deploying elements of stand-up com-
edy, musical skit/cabaret and the comedy routine, this TV comedy
sends up Indian ethnic mores with a daring assurance that is un-
precedented. Perhaps this is in some part because the skit form can be
indifferent to the humanizing requirements of the social realist fic-
tion. At the same time, the series is very much apiece with a scatological
British body humour, with its profuse recourse to bathroom jokes and
gross out-representations.
6. Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and

Cinephiliac Performativity
Let me conclude by looking at a specific type of performativity. This
is the performativity of the cinema itself, as vehicle of an aesthetics of
astonishment, where technology announces itself as a primary attrac-
tion and where the love for cinema constantly quotes, annexes and re-
deploys cinema history to mediate what we see and how we see it. I will
take as my example a film that works at the intersection of violent
and performative imaginations about the city, and essays a significant
intervention in our understanding of contemporary experience and
politics.
In Ram Gopal Varma’s gangster film Satya (1998), a gang fight is
orchestrated via a highly self-conscious camera. A massive crane move-
ment sweeps down the length of an apartment block to meet a gang as
they exit from a lift. Subsequently, character and camera movements
parallel each other, creating a dynamic doubling of presence, and cul-
minating in a top angle pan from the rooftops as we look down on the
chase in the streets below. In a particularly resonant segment, the chase
climaxes on an overhead suburban railway bridge, quoting from
Fig. 57
Fig. 58
Figs 57–59: Satya, Ram Gopal Varma, 1999, ‘The Killing of Bhau Thakre’.
Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), and then crescendoing via

Scorsese’s De Niro/Pesci double gunburst in Goodfellas (1990) as the
protagonists Bhiku and Satya dispatch their opponent Guru Narayan.
The scene is cast against the backdrop of the train hurtling below.
Apparatuses of cinema and everyday urban speed double each other,
referencing the moment through a kind of world cinema parallax.
Characters and actions shadow each other in phantom relay, the baton
of form being carried into another territory of social experience. We
have here an act of transposition of form where the experience of cine-
matic looking is not merely self-referential and auto-erotic but enabl-
ing of a heightened perception of reality.
Omniscient camera framing in Satya is such that there is both recog-
nition and a strange sense of hyper-location in the way the film pri-
vileges the spectator with perceptions about how the everyday social
world and the world of terror are contiguous and threaten to overlap.
A top angle shot on a bar terrace above a crowded Bombay street allows
us to see goons mercilessly beat down on Satya as an unaware everyday
concourse streams by on the street below. As Bhiku, Satya, and their
gang torture an opponent in a basement, we see Satya’s beloved, Vidya,
through a skylight which opens out onto the street above, as she
walks along, unaware of what we are privileged to see. The systematic
deployment of the steadicam, of seamless bodily movement and
character focalization, essayed by Varma earlier as an abstract formal
exercise notionally yoked to the horror genre in Raat (Night; 1991)
is in Satya recurrently deployed to problematize the inside/outside
world in the city. Here the camera’s bodily pursuit of a character high-
lights how privatized spaces may be rapidly infiltrated, often with viol-
ent results. Such a hyper-location, braiding the spectator into spa-
ces that are differentiated, draws upon the omniscient conventions
of classical narration, but, above all, foregrounds the technology
through which our perception is organized. Separated spaces can be
figured as adjacent, as collapsing into each other, and as rapidly nego-
tiable, via that key apparatus of contemporary communication, the
mobile phone.
What does such a braiding of the violent, the performative, and the
cinephiliac signify in terms of political imagination? As I have pointed
out, there are ways in which contemporary political transformations
are echoed in the films we have discussed in this essay, as in the pheno-
menon of the extended male group, founded on neighbourhood ties
and united by a perceived sense of deprivation and fallen status. I have
suggested how a variety of narrative strategies have emerged from this
new lexicon of the cinematic city. However, the overall political fram-
ing of experience through the cinema is probably more complicat-
ed. Can we come back to the political through the play of sounds
and images that compose our relationship to the genre? Let me end
by pointing to a motif in Satya, which may be construed as the cine-
ma’s performative intervention in contemporary forms of political
spectacle.
Satya, determined to avenge his comrade Bhiku, arrives at the
Ganesh Chaturti on the beach, which, as we have already noted, is a
crucial cultural form in contemporary Shiv Sena and Hindutva poli-
tics. Bhiku’s assassin, Bhau Thakre, the gangster successfully turned
politician, presents himself and his followers before the deity. As Satya
moves in, the camera focuses on the red cloth which he has swathed
around a knife. The red sheath bobs along in the crowd, reminding us
of a similar scene in Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974) in which
Vito Corleone moves through a street overwhelmed by festivities cele-
brating a Roman Catholic holy day to target the local gang leader. Satya
stabs Bhau Thakre to death, and as the scene dissipates into chaos, we
are left with a haunting image. The camera is positioned at the lofty
elevation of the deity, looking down on the solitary figure of the dead
villain as the ebb and flow of the tide tugs at his body. His followers
dispersed, his command over spectacle voided, his rag-doll body is
offered up for a view that at once assumes the cosmic perspective of the
deity, and the cultural momentum of a cinephiliac camera that en-
frames it. We do not need to recognize the cinematic reference to be
caught in the allure of the moment. (Figs 57–59, pp. 330–1.)
It is as if the film invites us to be carried along by the rush of a senso-
rium specifically composed by our investment in the cinema. The
energy of that very particular compact between screen and audience is
then channelled as an intervention into the contemporary, dis-
embowelling one form of political spectacle by our heady engagement
with another.
10
The Contemporary
Film Industry—I: The Meanings of
‘Bollywood’
O
ne of the dominant senses of our contemporary times is a
massive sense of change in Indian urban life. Several nodes
of transformation have been identified as the source of these
changes, especially those of economic liberalization and globaliza-
tion. In the wake of the massive debt to the World Bank incurred
by the Indian economy at the end of the 1980s, the Indian government
undertook to start dismantling a protectionist regime initiated after
Independence to shore up local industrial growth, in order to invite
foreign direct investment, including non-resident Indian investment,
and to open the Indian market to foreign goods and competition.1
One of the noticeable changes of this period has been the rapid trans-
formation of urban landscapes in line with this new set of compul-
sions. The clearing of key urban spaces of slum settlements, pavement
dwellings, and street vending has been inaugurated to set up new mar-
kets, malls, and entertainment spaces with a view to build a powerful
consumer economy. This efflorescence of a new commodity culture
and urbanism has gone hand in hand with contests of various types,
specifically on issues of property right, the deployment of munici-
pal government to take over lands, and the displacement of working
populations. The new urbanism has also had a complicated intersec-
tion with urban environmentalism, as the presence of polluting small
factories and workshops in residential areas has given rise to campaigns
1
Payer, The Debt Trap; Kavaljit Singh, Taming Global Financial Flows: A Citizen’s
Guide, Delhi, Madhyam Books, 2000 and London, Zed Books, 2000; Payer, Lent
and Lost; Peet, Unholy Trinity.
The Contemporary Film Industry—I 335
for industrial relocation, again with considerable impact on a mass of
the urban working class.2
Along with this new urbanism and consumer economy, the con-
temporary period has showcased new types of production centred on
information and communication technology, and the high profile
given by government and corporate sectors to this area on the basis
of the impact made by Indian Information Technology knowhow in
the global market. In terms of the consumer economy, this context has
been marked by an accelerated availability of communication and
media forms, from telephony through to satellite broadcasting and
cable television, and new systems of distribution and delivery based on
digitized formats. Much of this has taken the form of corporate initia-
tives, with considerable state backing. However, such transformation
has not been controllable, and has given rise to different and contest-
ed circuits of production, circulation, and consumption. Rather than
an image of corporate enterprise and leadership, the second focus
looks to the phenomenon of more informal, dispersed types of initiat-
ive, challenging attempts to control new economic forms through a
burgeoning regime of intellectual property rights.3
Where do we place the cinema in this firmament? What does an
exploration of the cinema offer us in terms of understanding the new
relations between the state, corporate enterprise, media, and public
life? We have a new context for Indian cinema in the 1990s, one which
contrasts sharply with its official status during the decades after Inde-
pendence. If from the 1950s the cinema in its dominant, commercial
2 For the possibilities of manoeuvring around the law in issues such as land allo-
cation, access to urban amenities, and intellectual property contests, Lawrence Liang,
‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 6–17;
Solomon Benjamin, ‘Touts, Pirates and Ghosts’, ibid., 242–54; for changes in land
allocation to facilitate the construction of malls and multiplexes in Delhi, Anand
Vivek Taneja, ‘Begum Samru and the Security Guard’, ibid., 287–96; and, more
generally, Media Researchers@Sarai, ‘Complicating the City: Media Itineraries’, ibid.,
258–86; for the impact of urban environmental lobbies and experts in urban trans-
formation, Awadhendra Sharan, ‘Claims on Cleanliness: Environment and Justice in
Contemporary Delhi’, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, 3–17; and ‘New
Delhi: Fashioning an Urban Environment through Science and Law’, in Sarai Reader
04: Bare Acts, 69–77.
3 For an overview, Ravi Sundaram, ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New
Globalization’, Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), 3 January 2004, 64–71; Rakesh
Kumar, ed., Medianagar, 1 and 2, Delhi, Sarai-CSDS, 2004–5.
format was understood by the state to be a form that did not warrant
sympathetic policies, and was to be taxed and regulated in order to
control its dubious attractions for a mass audience, then the situation
has changed substantially. One of the major issues here has been the
emergence of a significant market, getting high returns, in Indian cine-
ma’s export-oriented sector. The phenomenon went hand in hand with
the reframing of the nation-state, and, indeed of the national imagin-
ary. Rather than the territorial nation, whose economy, boundaries,
and cultural protocols needed protection, we witness the emergence of
the global nation where non-resident Indians come to have an increas-
ingly high profile, symbolically expressed in the annual prime minis-
terial meetings with the success stories of what are now referred to as
PIOs, People of Indian Origin.4 Of course, one must emphasize that
such a global nation is skewed in its deployment of boundaries, retain-
ing new forms of openness for the successful diaspora, and otherwise
constantly emphasizing territoriality when monitoring the movement
of undesirable populations across South Asian borders.
The increased importance of the high-end migrant culture, along
with the spectacular movement of software engineers into different
sites of the world economy, now project the idea of India as a world
power with greater confidence. Significantly, rather than yoke such a
newly found pride and expansionist logic to a national art cinema, it
has been the commercial mainstream film which has invited most at-
tention. And the export market has been a crucial component in the
profile of returns on Indian films by the turn of the century.
$250,000 was considered a dream figure for overseas rights 10 years
ago. Today worldwide rights for a major Indian film range from $2m–
$3m. The rights for Hindi films in South Africa sell for $50,000, in
Aus for $60,000. Equally good for non-Hindi. Muthu grossed $1.7m
in 23 weeks at a cinema in Japan, and his next film, Padayappa was sold
in Japan for $50,000.5
The success of Bombay (and Tamil) cinema is composed of a series
of intersecting investments, in multi-media forms of distribution
and exhibition (cinema, DVD, VCD, satellite broadcast, video on de-
mand, as well as music rights), and in relation to fashion, advertising,
4
See the website of the organization of PIOs, http://www.gopio.org.
5 Bhuvan Lall, ‘Indian Summer’, Screen International, 24 November 2000.
the music industry, internet websites, and live performances. The suc-
cess of this enterprise suggests how important new corporate cultures
have become to the fashioning of the global nation. Earlier arguments
that Indian film consumption abroad was important in negotiating
identity dilemmas amidst a metropolitan modernity that suborned
ethnic cultures no longer carries the same conviction.6 Thus Indian
capital abroad has had occasion to bestride public culture triumphant-
ly, displaying its wares in mainline shops, restaurants, cinemas, and
theatres. A case in point was the month-long focus by the well-known
British departmental store, Selfridges, in May 2002, highlighting
Indian décor and clothes, and deploying a ‘Bollywood’ theme in its
London and Manchester shops. During this period a broad-based pro-
motion of South Asian film, dance, theatre, and music was undertaken
as well, called Imaginasia.7
I do not mean to sound judgemental about this cinema simply
because of its association with a new, assertive dimension of capital.
Especially in the United Kingdom, it has generated a new space for
multicultural engagements, circumstances which have allowed for
innovative outputs which lampoon some of the canonical differences
and hierarchies of an earlier metropolitan culture, as witnessed in the
brilliance of creations such as the British Indian skitcom Goodness
Gracious Me (Meera Syal et al., 1997–2000). If this would indicate the
creative end of the spectrum, it is significant how a formerly ‘middle’
or realist cinema of the diaspora, for example by Mira Nair and Gurinder
Chadha, has actively partaken of export-oriented Bombay cinema’s
investment in the world of the family as commodity form. In contempo-
rary Bombay, the ‘traditional’ identity presented by family films pro-
vides a sheen, a glossy texture where ritual forms such as the marriage,
its modes of ornamentation and performance provide a lustrous drape
to clothe the self in and offer others transient distraction. This has been
the mode for films from Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who Am I to You;
Sooraj Barjatya, 1994) through to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Brave
of Heart Wins the Bride; Aditya Chopra, 1995, hereafter DDLJ ) Pardes
(Foreign Land; Subhash Ghai, 1997), Kal Ho Na Ho (Whether or Not
6 Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, New York, Routledge,
1995.
7
See Screen, 3 May 2002, www.screenindia.com/archive, consulted 28 December
2007.
There’s a Tomorrow; Nikhil Advani, 2004), and even down to films
such as Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004). Arguably, Mira
Nair’s Monsoon Wedding too can be bracketed in this cycle of pro-
duction, despite uncovering a narrative of incest trauma and unhappy
alliances within the armature of a so-called traditional family culture.
This is because it uses the format of the brand—including its orna-
mentation, energy and performative excesses—in order to place it-
self in the world market of art cinema, where differentiation from
mainstream products provides a distinctive selling point. Crossing the
familiarities of an ornamental commodity universe with social con-
cern, Nair’s work here appears to spring from a confluence similar to
that of the mass cultural genre it seeks to critique and establish a dis-
tance from. But in the process it achieved a crossover success that al-
most brought it on par with the mainstream ‘Bollywood’ film.8
This question of the extended commodity functions of this cinema
also potentially destabilizes the inside/outside dichotomies of the na-
tion. By this logic, a burgeoning world of newly available commodities
mobilizes a desire for narratives that both express and draw upon this
fascination, while seeking to generate an identity equilibrium within
which these desires can be cohered, made happy. The drama of the ex-
tended family provides the generic format to explore these drives not
only across territorial boundaries, but also across the emergent bound-
aries initiated by the unleashing of new forms of desire at ‘home’. I
say only potentially as, while these films are often as successful in
India’s metropolises as they are abroad, audience profiles and cultu-
ral contexts are not the same, and an analysis of different reception
contexts could provide for a suggestive mapping of the cultures of
Indian filmgoing. I will suggest how such tensions of audience address
and composition may be interpreted in the locus classicus of a cinema
with globalizing intent, DDLJ, and by an examination of reception
studies emerging in the USA and UK. Further, I will suggest how too
constrained a reading of the ‘Bollywood’ diaspora family movie does
not capture possible dynamics in the genre; and also that to focus on
8
Monsoon Wedding was the most successful of the ‘cross-over films’, and made re-
turns of 3.2 million pounds in the UK and $13.9 in the USA. Screen Digest, July 2003.
By 2002 it was reported that the standard return on a ‘superhit’ Bollywood film
would be 3.8 million pounds, but importers were aiming to cross the 9 million bar-
rier. Bhuvan Lall, ‘Indian Pins Box Office Hopes on Devdas’, Screen International,
5 July 2002.
this strand of film production as emblematic of the moment of global-
ization is to underestimate the deep transformation wrought by the
present moment in the film economy as a whole.
Whatever the complex and differentiated qualities of contempo-
rary film culture, one trend seems clear: the state is not much con-
cerned, any more, with providing an authentic rendering of cultural
identity through a national aesthetic, as was the case in the years after
Independence. As I have noted, at that time there was constant anx-
iety to avoid the trap of derivative culture, especially the influence of
American culture, and a depletion of traditional art and craft values.
In a sense, what we are observing now, at least at the crucial level of
the high-profile, export-oriented Bombay film is the displacement of
nation as art form by nation as brand, adding and deriving distinction
and value from products which circulate widely, servicing the global
nation in its identity triumphs and struggles, and earning substan-
tial profits. Interestingly, brand India is embraced enthusiastically in
the wider bid to convert nations into brand equity, as for example with
the recent cultivation of Indian cinema and its apparatus of location
shooting and tourism by brand Switzerland, a term knowingly used
by the president of one of the most popular resorts of the global India’s
cinematic vista. 9
1. Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of

the Bombay Film Economy
One of the remarkable features of this transformation is the emerg-
ence of the category ‘Bollywood’. Nowadays, this term is used as if it
had always existed. It is used profusely in trade magazines, television
shows, and popular periodicals, and it is used retrospectively. While
looking at trade papers of the 1990s, I only started noticing its regular
usage in the latter part of the decade. Clearly, it may have been used at
various times, but not so systematically as now. Common sense would
suggest that earlier usages would be idiomatic and casual, perhaps
9
Screen, May 2002. See also the moves of the Greater Zurich Area to encourage
Indian film, tourism, and other ‘branded’ products, including ayurveda and yoga, in
the bid to ‘brand’ Switzerland as a base for European business. ‘Switzerland Keen
to Market Bollywood Merchandise’, Times of India Online, 28 September 2006,
consulted 31 December 2007: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/
2033440.cms.
sending up the pretensions of a third world imitator of the real Ameri-
can thing. However, there is no such sense of this now, and it would
be reasonable to go with the logic that it emerged in the wake of
the success of the diaspora-themed films from DDLJ onwards. More
specifically, the term might then be associated with the reinvention
of the family-film genre to address not only diaspora audiences but
to provide a mise-en-scène for the new types of commoditization that
have developed around cinema in India.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha has drawn on this set of associations and gone
on to designate Bollywood in more expansive terms, as referring to
the ensemble of interests that govern the contemporary entertain-
ment industry.10 In this definition, film is only one element, even if
one from which other entertainment and consumer sectors, in tele-
vision, music, advertising, fashion, and websites derive cultural capi-
tal. Rajadhyaksha makes a strong political-cultural argument here. He
believes that such an ensemble has fundamentally redefined the lack of
fit we have observed between cinema and nation-state. Whereas earlier
the state denied the dominant cinematic form legitimacy, and sought
to cultivate an alternative logic of cultural production in keeping with
the criteria of art and cultural authenticity, the cinema neverthe-
less carried the investment of a national culture with it. This was
an unofficial culture, but also the prevailing culture of cinema, and
the disjunction afforded the working out of a variety of critical con-
flicts with the design of the nation-state, and its ambition to institute
a civil social form with adequate cultural constituents, for example
those more oriented to realism and classical and folk art practices.
Rajadhyaksha situates the cinema’s historical and political signi-
ficance in its extension of the field of rights, where the purchase of a
ticket afforded the filmgoer a right to a view.11 Here, the cinema pro-
vided a space for public access and congregation that was symboli-
cally significant in a society which had prevented those low in the
social hierarchy from participating in spaces of public spectacle and
10
‘The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global
Arena’, in Inter-Asian Cultural Studies 4 (1), April 2003, special issue on ‘Cinema,
Culture Industry and Political Societies’, rpntd in Kaarsholm, Cityflicks. References
to this article are from Cityflicks.
11
Also see his ‘Who’s Looking? Viewership and Democracy in Indian Cinema’, in
Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 267–96.
performance. Specifically, this was a ritual public, composed of spa-
ces ranging from the temple to various types of classical and ritual
performance.12 This type of right exceeded the ensemble of rights dis-
bursed by the modern enumerative state in relation to citizens who
were entitled to vote and thereby receive welfare. Rather, the state had
to regulate the rights of the filmgoer, for the cinema generated an il-
legitimate content which exposed its viewers to cultural denigration.
Thus the government imposed taxes, and subjected films to moral
regulation through censorship. As with subaltern and post-colonial
societies more generally, the cinema echoed the messier dimensions of
democracy’s bid for inclusiveness, exhibiting and channelling mass
energies that exceeded the normative and procedural prescriptions of
an elite modernity.13
In Rajadhyaksha’s view, contemporary changes in state policy and
industrial initiative have threatened these democratic features of the
cinema. The threat arises from the new forms of corporatization that
have secured the industrial recognition, financial investment, and cul-
tural legitimacy historically denied to the cinema. This reorganization
has taken place at the cost of the cinema itself, insofar as it was a field
of resistance to the imposition of an elite modernity, and provided
an arena of contests around social and cultural transformation. The
Bollywood sector of Indian film production is anti-cinema, not only
because the cinema occupies only a small, if significant, space in its
commodity complex, but also because it has secured legitimacy and
instituted a reformist imaginary long in the making. For Rajadhyaksha,
in terms of narrative form, this question of legitimacy is an identitarian
project to do with successfully laying claim to an indigenous authenti-
city. And it appears to simultaneously regulate and discipline audience
responses in that it successfully addresses its audience as a family audi-
ence and on the basis of ‘family values’.
This is one of several areas where this otherwise insightful mapping
of contemporary film economy appears problematic. Firstly, the argu-
ment does not appear to accept that criteria of what constitutes indi-
genous authenticity have changed between the 1950s and the present.
12 Rajadhyaksha draws on the work of Karthigesu Sivathamby, Tamil Film as a
Medium of Political Communication, Madras, New Century Book House, 1981.

13
For the argument about the contradictions between modernity and demo-
cracy, see Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.
. . . in the barely concealed claims to some sort of reformism that Bolly-
wood so often presents these days in its biggest successes—the
claim of commitment to family values, to the ‘feel-good-happy-
ending’ romance that carries the tag of ‘our culture’—one can see the
ghosts of past trends going quite far back into time. The problem of
the cinema’s legitimacy has, since the pre-War years, consistently pro-
duced version after version of what was claimed as culturally
authentic cinema—authentic because authenticated by the national
culture. One distant ancestor to, say, HAHK [Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? ]
would be the pre-War ‘Swadeshi’ movie—the devotionals and socials
emphasizing indigenism of story and production. Post-War and in the
early years of Independence, there was the first descendant of this
indigenism—the cinema that the State repeatedly anointed as ‘authen-
tically national’. The process of authentication in this time was more
palpable than the films that benefited by various declarations
of recommended view-ing—and continues to be so, if we see, for ex-
ample, the extraordinary premium that the film industry continues to
place upon the government’s national film awards and its tax exemp-
tion criteria. One could safely say, however, that among the candi-
dates vying for this kind of accreditation were included Devika Rani
and Ashok Kumar socials from the Bombay Talkies studios, reformist
musicals such as some of Raj Kapoor’s work or some from Dev Anand’s
Navketan production house (both of which often hired ex-practitio-
ners from the IPTA movement of the 1940s) and realist-internation-
alist films by directors from Satyajit Ray to Bimal Roy to the early
Merchant-Ivory . . .14
It is not clear what defines this peculiar ancestry, as the claims of ‘in-
digenism’ of story and production was something that much of Indian
cinema laid claim to from the time of D.G. Phalke onwards. But Raja-
dhyaksha’s argument appears to be that devotional (sometimes seen
as a kind of medieval social reform movie by pro-realist critics such
as K.A. Abbas15), social, ‘reformist musical’, ‘realist-internationalist’
films shared certain rationalist drives that fitted a civil-social agenda
to educate and reform cinema audiences. If indigenist legitimacy
14
Rajadhyaksha, ‘Bollywoodization’, 130.
15
K.A. Abbas, ‘Sant Dnyaneshwar—His Miracles and Manushya Dharma’,
Bombay Chronicle, 25 May 1940, rpntd in Bapu Watve, V. Damle and S. Fattelal, Pune,
National Film Archive of India, 1985, 33–5.
was the claim of this assemblage of films (an unusual one, to put it very
mildly), then it could only be insofar as ‘realism’ claims the capacity
to be true to the life patterns (and conflicts) of peoples.
Rather than a very loosely defined realist reformism being the ances-
tor to ‘Bollywood’, the ‘family social’ film would appear to be its more
obvious predecessor. Madhava Prasad, of course argued that such a
feudal family romance, vehicle for the reproduction of ‘tradionally
regulated social relationships’, was in fact the dominant narrative
mode of popular Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 1960s.16 By this logic,
rather than Bollywood bringing the family into a position of symbolic
and disciplinary ascendancy, it was already in place as the central struc-
turing feature of popular cinema. Further, it was this form, and its sys-
tem of assemblage through song, dance, and comedy, that was looked
down upon in state cultural policy and its funding practices, and in the
realist protocols instituted by an art cinema intelligentsia. From their
perspective, narrative reform required a fundamental reworking of a
popular format that had failed to develop industrial coherence, real-
ist methods, and psychological portraiture. Chidananda Das Gupta,
a key figure of the art cinema/film society movement, would in fact
specify popular narrative structures which cultivated individual sub-
ordination to the family as one of the central problems of the popular
format.17 There is a huge gap then between earlier state and art cinema
discourses of narrative reform and Rajadhyaksha’s invocation of the
family as the lynchpin of a long-term reformist discourse.
I have argued that the family film does not, in fact, provide the
dominant architecture of the popular. The cinema was generically
differentiated, and familial thematics too had a shifting function in
the articulation of narrative structures.18 However, let me backtrack
slightly, and offer a different argument to support the centrality of the
family in terms of institutional imagination. The critical issue here is
not the complexity and variety of what we see on the screen, but what
we are not allowed to see, and how this structures the terms of nar-
ration. In a crucial sense, Prasad’s argument about the feudal family
romance centres on how an absolutist gaze constrains the privacy of the
16 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 30–1.

17 Das Gupta, ‘The Oedipal Hero’, in The Painted Face, 70–106.
18
See above, ch. 1, II.9.
couple by textual procedures secured by the institution of censor-
ship.19 This is echoed in a key document of industrial reform advo-
cacy, the Film Enquiry Committee Report of 1951. While asserting
the need for more varied stories and the cultivation of a liberal outlook
in terms of social change, for example in the position of women, the
committee nevertheless asserted that in India, people preferred to seek
entertainment as families.
. . . owing to the family life and habits of Indians in general, we cannot
imagine a state of affairs where the parents would generally be ready to
go to pictures leaving their children behind. . . . We therefore consider
that any plan for the future of the film industry must take account of
the fact that these would be seen in an overwhelming majority of cases
by adults along with other members of their families. It is necessary
therefore, not merely to exercise the greater care in the selection of the
material for making pictures but also in their scrutiny when the films
are being certified.20
The committee’s recommendation of state support for industrial re-
form by sympathetic tariff, taxation, and funding policies needs to be
counterpointed with a lack of any reform perspective on censorship.21
This emphasis was to change with the G.D. Khosla report of 1969,
which argued for a greater flexibility in the depiction of sexuality.22 But
even after this, we do not observe a substantial change in what Prasad
underlines as a key feature of the regime, the prohibition on the kiss
as mark of the privatized space of the couple. In this sense the family
as a symbolic limit and disciplinary frame already existed under the
aegis of state censorship; it did not have to be brought into being by
the new life provided the family film in the contemporary epoch.
Current changes have addressed, explicitly or implicitly, the key
constraints which have dogged the institution of cinema since Inde-
pendence. The government gave cinema industrial recognition in
1998 and by 2000 banks were formally instructed ‘that the central
19 ‘Guardians of the View: The Prohibition of the Private’, Ideology of the Hindi
Film, ch 4.
20
Film Enquiry Committee Report, 59; for the importance of more ‘progressive’
representation of women in the cinema, ibid., 45–6.
21 For censorship, Film Enquiry Committee, 21.
22 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship, New Delhi, Government
of India Publications, 1969.

government had listed the entertainment industry including films as
an approved activity under industrial concern.’23 Further, while not
reducing the onerous burden of entertainment tax, a number of state
governments nevertheless waived it for the periods when multiplex
cinemas were being introduced, normally for a three-year period.24
Many states have also pursued flexible municipal policies, allowing
land allocated for single-screen cinema to be redeployed for multiplex
and mall construction, revising statutory cheap ticket classes to target
upper-class cinemagoers, and more generally making the cinema in-
to a crucial dimension in the fashioning of a new urban vista and
consumer economy to attract corporate investment.25 And, while the
National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) continues to fund
an art cinema, it is notable that many directors associated with the arts
cinema wing, such as Shyam Benegal and Sudhir Mishra, have turn-
ed to new corporate investors, such as Sahara Manoranjan and Pritish
Nandy Communications, for their finance.26 These corporations in
turn fund a varied spectrum of commercial filmmaking.
Finally, censorship remains a crucial regulatory drive, but its appli-
cation appears to focus political issues, rather than the representation
of sexuality. Thus the key films to suffer censorship have been Zakhm
(1999) for its anti-Hindutva stance, Black Sunday (Anurag Kashyap,
2005, released 2007), dealing with the bomb blasts that shook Mum-
bai in 1993, and the documentaries War and Peace (Anand Patwar-
dhan, 1998) on India’s nuclear bomb, and The Final Solution (Rakesh
Sharma, 2003) documenting the Hindutva attacks on Muslims in
Gujarat in 2002. Notably, films sold on the depiction of sexuality,
especially a spate of films produced by Mahesh Bhatt, have not run
into any trouble. Interestingly, this is in contrast to the trouble faced
23 Bhuvan Lall, ‘The Talk of Mumbai . . . Industry Gains Its Wings’, Screen Inter-
national, 1 December 2000.

24
‘New multiplexes are granted a five-year tax subsidy by state governments:
entertainment tax is waived for the first three years, and there’s a 50 per cent and
25 per cent waiver for the fourth and fifth years respectively (by which time capital
costs are more than recovered). Single-screen theatres, on the other hand, pay 45%
entertainment tax’: ‘Multiplex Mafia Rules Tinsel Town’, Times of India, 29 May
2006, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1585472.cms, consulted
18 January 2008.
25 See Taneja, ‘Begum Samru and the Security Guard’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts.
26
See below, ch. 11, pt 2: ‘Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch—II’.
by films depicting lesbian relationships, such as Deepa Mehta’s Fire
(1996), but here again the main source of opposition has been street-
level violence launched by extremist wings of the Hindu Right to inti-
midate cinema managements.
This suggests that the family drama, as vehicle of moral order and
social regulation, is no longer the lynchpin of the contemporary cine-
matic institution. The transformation of the cinema, and its location
within an entertainment and image business spectrum, so well des-
cribed by Rajadhyaksha, is not clearly yoked to one narrative or insti-
tutional architecture. As I will indicate, the cinema emerging from this
new configuration of the business is varied in its genre structures,
much more so than ever before, and this is intimately related to cor-
poratization and its bid to create differentiated product. Whether such
product requires significant returns from foreign markets has still to
be evaluated, especially, one would anticipate, in spheres such as DVD
sales, satellite broadcasting, and video on demand. Even modest re-
turns in these sectors would be useful to films of lower budgets. In turn,
our sense of consumption patterns for Indian cinema in a global sense
might undergo substantial change. However, we should finally re-
member that, if we consider only theatrical exhibition, the diaspora
family movie appears to have been the most spectacular player at
the foreign box office in the USA and UK. It therefore has a significant
financial and symbolic presence in the narrative of globalization, an
issue I will consider at some length in the next chapter.
2. Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories

of Indian Cinema
‘It’s a term only foreigners who don’t know our films use.’—Shah
Rukh Khan in conversation with Derek Malcolm, 2002 27
‘Do not call it Bollywood. This is a very wrong thing to call it. We
are not trying to copy Hollywood. We are making films for an audi-
ence of a billion people. Over 80 per cent of these people don’t have
enough food in their bellies. Our country does not provide its people
with pool halls, basketball courts and video parlours, so we make
films for them that will let them forget their lives for 3 hours. We
27 Vanity Fair, Supplement, 2002, 4.

create total fantasy, not the polished reality that Hollywood por-
trays. Never forget that, never forget that we are making films that
allow people to believe for 3 hours that they are not poor and
hungry.’—Subhash Ghai, 200228
We have the remarkable phenomenon that representative filmmakers

and actors such as Subhash Ghai and Shah Rukh Khan should react
against the very brand name which has garnered them such high, easily
recognizable global profile. As I will suggest now, this is particularly
ironic for the term has been embraced not only by journalists and pub-
licists but by academics as well, at least in the UK and the USA. The
disavowal by key representatives of the Bombay film industry under-
lines the impression that the term and the brand actually emerged out-
side India, in places like Birmingham, Leicester, and Bradford, where
Hindi films are marketed and advertised as Bollywood, and in the bid
to capitalize on the ‘brand’ in film-location economies outside India.
However, to denigrate this ‘misdescription’ as emerging from cultur-
ally deracinated contexts has its pitfalls; for it may lead to the affir-
mation of what are essentially nationalist terms of criticism that assert
the distinctiveness and originality of Bombay Hindi cinema, and the
rights of those in India to name it.
In fact there seem to be two types of cultural nationalism at stake
in contemporary film discourse about Bollywood. The first we could
call a Bollywoodian discourse of cultural nationalism. By this I mean
a discourse about cinema which has emerged in the wake of global stra-
tegies for Bombay film and for the integration of the film economy
with other image/sound/music industries such as fashion, interior de-
sign, advertising, and music. The nationalism of this discourse would
lay claim to a distinct cultural constituency that has retained its iden-
tity wherever it is located, an identity which can be brought into being
and nourished by a particular type of cinematic address; at the same
time, the particular ambition of this strategy is exactly to supplement
or exceed that national audience by composing a product whose bal-
ance of spectacle, choreography, costumes, and music should create
an allure for a cross-over audience. If this is one’s working defini-
tion of ‘Bollywood’, one can be Bollywoodian without subscribing to
the brand name. The second, on the other hand, avowedly contests the
28
Ibid., 12.
Bollywood label, apparently insisting on the location of national cul-
ture and its cinema ‘at home’, and as something which specifically ad-
dresses not the westernized sectors but the mass of people outside the
circuits of modernized leisure and commodity experience. In practice,
the very people who espouse this second position, such as Ghai and
Khan, are also robust icons of Bombay cinema’s global spread, its inte-
gration with other image/music enterprises, in a word its Bollywood-
ization. Claims to being the authentic voice of India does not prevent
the industry, at one and the same time, of relaying this Indianness both
at home and abroad, for the global nation and for foreign, cross-over
audiences.
Arguably, the usage of the Bollywood category is complicated when
we shift our location to a diaspora context. I undertake a preliminary
exploration of this territory by considering the academic discourse
which has emerged around Bollywood in these locations, and primari-
ly the British context. It is perhaps not surprising that the incidence
of academic usage replicates the privileged diasporic reference point
for the category’s emergence and usage in trade and popular discourse.
Three features appear notable about this output. The more pedestrian
of these is that Bollywood has provided a brand name for publishers
to position their product, a phenomenon which probably also pressur-
izes authors to adopt this category. As a result, the titles of a number
of books, which might earlier have simply used Hindi cinema, or
‘popular Indian cinema’, now use the term Bollywood; however, after
indicating the currency of the term in global discourse, they then
jettison any use of it when they talk about Indian popular film hist-
ory.29 What in such instances could be seen to be a compulsion deriv-
ing from academic-institutional ‘brand equity’ may, in a second logic
of naming, indicate a more substantial investment, the relative empha-
sis placed by certain authors on film experience not in India but in the
key diasporic locations of the UK and USA. Such a motivation, driven
by the impulses of geographical location are often supplemented by a
third logic, that of contemporary engagement, often resulting in a
cavalier relationship to the past of Indian film. Thus, the term Bolly-
wood has been read back in time, with one account telling us blithely
that ‘the history of Bollywood film viewing in Britain dates as far back
29 This would be the case with Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular
Hindi Cinema, London, Routledge, 2004; and Vijay Mishra: Bollywood: Temples of
Desire, London, Routledge, 2002.
as 1926, when King George V and Queen Mary held a command per-
formance of Prem Sanyas (Light of Asia) at Windsor Castle. This film
was made in 1925 and co-directed [sic] by the Indo-German team of
Himansu Rai and Franz Osten.’30
The anachronistic usage of the term is startling in its unselfconscious-
ness. A mise-en- scène of the royal personage overseeing orientalist
spectacle appears brazenly penetrated by Shah Rukh Khan and an as-
sembly of bhangra dancers. The casual relationship to history appears
only corroborated by the wrong attribution to Himanshu Rai of the
direction of Light of Asia.
What is intriguing is that ‘Bollywoodian’ criticism does not fail to
notice the question mark hanging over the status of the category. After
noting the argument that the word may have been generated by ‘some
cocky white journalist to describe the Indian film industry in a some-
what idiosyncratic and derogatory manner’, Rajinder Dudrah goes on
to note: ‘Uncertainties aside . . . Bollywood is more popularly desc-
ribed in relation to, and against, the hegemony of Hollywood . . . The
naming and popular usage of the Mumbai film industry as “Bollywood”
not only reveals on a literal level an obvious reworking of the appel-
lation of the cinema of Hollywood, but, on a more significant level,
that Bollywood is able to serve alternative cultural and social represen-
tations away from dominant white ethnocentric audio-visual possi-
bilities.’31
As we will see, it is the argument that Bollywood offers a positive,
even counter-hegemonic dynamic to Hollywood and American capi-
talism, that appears to motivate some of this Bollywoodian academic
work. The argument is notable too in the Introduction to Bollyworld:
Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens.32 In this case,
also, we notice the fleeting acknowledgement that the category Bolly-
wood is debatable, an admission swiftly recouped as a sign of product-
ive hybridity.
In its very (sometimes) contentious name, Bollywood cinema indicates
the crossing of borders. The hybrid term refers to India’s commercial
Hindi film industry, based primarily, but not exclusively, in the city of
Bombay, now officially designated as Mumbai since 1995. It has a
30 Rajinder Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, London, Sage,
2006, 32.
31
Dudrah, Bollywood, 34–5.
32
Edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, New Delhi, Sage, 2005.
complex history, but much like Hollywood, this commercial industry
has hegemony over the diverse, regional cinema in India, and circulates
globally, from Japan to the US, through a transnational distribution
network as well as video piracy.33
The swift glossing over of the ‘contentious’ term moves us to a
‘complex history’ whose invocation includes the mis-description that
Bombay’s Hindi film industry exercises hegemony over the region.
Such a statement is either ignorant of or indifferent to the power of
India’s Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam cinemas which often produce
more films than Bombay. This strangely casual attitude leads to the
hazy claim that Bollywood’s reach extends to Japan, which probably
refers to the avowed craze of Japanese film audiences not for Hindi but
for Tamil cinema, and, in particular, the cinema of Rajnikant.
However, while I certainly believe this gestural relationship to hist-
ory and, indeed, to cinema, needs to be challenged, to focus on this
alone would be to fail to register the issues posed by this writing. The
fact that the authors actually acknowledge the uncertain status of the
term, but nevertheless embrace it, suggests a will to assert some kind
of insistent presence through it. As such they provide a window into
a particular form of experience that seeks to complicate the idea that
Indian popular cinema is primarily understood as centred in India.
Such a change of focus implicitly urges a multisited tracking of Hindi
cinema rather than privileging one space, the point of apparent ori-
gins, over others. This is an important agenda, if one that needs to be
thought through more carefully than it has been in the introduction
to the Bollyworld volume. Secondly, Bollywoodian academic discourse
tends often to be contemporary in its focus. In the primarily socio-
logical and ethnographic engagements of Dudrah, for example, there
appears to be a strong investment in a contemporary culture compos-
ed of Hindi cinema, satellite broadcasting, music, especially hybrid
forms such as bhangra rap, and practices such as club nights and live
entertainment. Collectively, these appear quite critical to the author’s
account of group practices and cultural identification that is poten-
tially counter-hegemonic in its implications.
The stated aim of the Bollyworld volume is to expand the terms of
historical thinking, by collating a loose cluster of research that roams
in space and time, going as far back as the 1930s, and moving from
33
Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 16.
North to South Africa, and on to Germany, England, New York, and
into the cultural experience of a host of different migrant communi-
ties, their second- and third-generation descendants. The ambition
proposed by the editors is to question a national framework for ‘Bolly-
wood’, and to argue that both as product and as experience, transnational
aesthetic impulses, and multiple sites of reception constituted popular
Indian film.34
There are several problems with what at first glance has the virtue
of a more open and exploratory approach in researching film history.
Firstly, I do not believe it is sufficient to suggest that transnational film
circulation and multiple aesthetic currents determine the output of a
specific industry. There are obviously context-driven ways of selecting
and configuring influences, and, further, to understand the impact of
such currents, we need to mobilize some form of style analysis that will
move us beyond the impressionistic (and widely made) statement that
Hong Kong Kung-fu cinema impacted Bombay in the 1970s. Also,
rather than dismissing the national as an oppressive and restrictive
34
‘The question it explores is: how and in what ways did global dynamics take on
such a regionalist or nationalistic veneer in the history of Indian cinema; and, how do
movies from the subcontinent continue to interact with their global counterparts in
their multifarious forms?’ Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 14. The first question,
about how the national constrains our understanding of the wider network of which
it is a part, is not really pursued. The editors themselves offer a rather unhelpful
understanding of the national in their estimation of Phalke, for example. ‘Phalke’s
Hindu mythologicals did not have an even effect on all parts and people of India,
particularly if one considers the reluctance of Muslims to view movies about Hindu
deities’ (apparently taken from Stephen Hughes’s dissertation on early film exhibition
in South India, ‘Is There an Audience Out There’, University of Chicago, 1996, 179,
185). In fact Hughes points out that while Raja Harishchandra, 1913, was not
substantially exhibited in the South, Shree Krishna Janma, 1918, was, and was
successful at large. Stephen Hughes, ‘Mythologicals and Modernity: Contesting Silent
Cinema in South India’, in Stephen P. Hughes and Birgit Meyer, eds, Postscripts: The
Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds, 1.2/1.3, 2006, 207–35. To assume
that Muslims would not venture out to see Hindu mythologicals suggests a fetishistic
understanding of identity and its attributes. The Introduction is also littered with
strange remarks about the nature of Indian nationhood, for example that ‘in the post-
Independence years . . . Hindi language commercial cinema quickly came to be seen
as the “national” cinema of India.’ By whom? When the Indian government started
its system of national awards, it was Ray’s Pather Panchali which won the first award.
While the volume does not pursue the question of the national coherently, some of
the articles productively address the second question, about interaction—especially
those by Rosie Thomas and Brian Larkin.
conceptual frame, we need clearer investigation of how the national
frame functions: as in the films and genres national industries produce,
the way the state regulates the industry through censorship, licensing
and other controls, what films are imported, and how film content is
distributed through the various film circuits which define the mar-
ket. One does not need to be nationalist to pursue these questions.
Further, the transnational needs greater precision in its usage, as Fred-
rick Cooper has argued about the more general category of the glo-
bal.35 Regional distribution offices in the Middle East, North, East and
South Africa date back to the 1940s and were feeding into a particular
market for ‘Arabian night stories’, and Laila-Majnu, Shireen-Farhad
style love legends. There were definite narrative and performative cul-
tures involved here that included North India in their field. These
cultures were pre-national, and continued to have an existence after
the formation of nation-states, but were thus trans-national in a very
specific arc of shared culture.36
The particular composite nature of popular film form in India cer-
tainly distinguished it from the traditions of Hollywood film-making,
while still generating, in the long run, definite narrative conventions
and musical forms which underwent changes in interaction with new
constellations of film, musical, and literary cultures. However, Kaur
and Sinha require this composite form to do something more:
If Hollywood represents the homogenizing effect of American capital-
ism in global cultures, a study of Bollywood allows a unique opportu-
nity to map the contrasting move of globalization in popular culture.
Bollywood’s integration with film studies has brought it closer to the
conceptual frameworks developed for Hollywood narratives (audience
voyeurism, narrative techniques and so on), and consequently Holly-
wood’s cultural capitalism is mapped, consciously or unconsciously,
onto that of India’s commercial cinema. One fundamental difference
between Hollywood and Bollywood is that the former pushes world
cultures towards homogenization, whereas the latter introduces in
those cultures a fragmentary process. Hybrid in its production since
its beginnings, the circulation of India’s commercial cinema through
the globe has led to the proliferation and fragmentation of its fantasy
35 Fredrick Cooper, ‘What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African
Historian’s Perspective’, African Affairs 100, 189–213.

36
See above, Introduction to Part II.
space, as its narrative and spectacle beget diverse fantasies for diasporic
communities and others.37
As we have seen, the study of American cinema has been the subject of
considerable debate, with writers such as Hansen arguing for the im-
portance of the diverse and reinventable terms of Hollywood cinema,
especially in the way its body genres circulated and were reformat-
ted in different territories, and how films were altered, for example
in terms of endings, to suit different markets.38 The issue then is not
simply that of one form and industrial culture inviting a singular,
homogenizing textual effect and corresponding theoretical apparatus,
and the other resisting it.39 Hollywood cinema too has been subject
to ‘fragmentation’ and its meanings recalibrated. Such an unsettling of
textual unity and coherence relates not only to a changed evaluation
of how films circulate, the forms they assume, and the meanings they
acquire in different contexts. It is also a definite methodological inter-
vention that points to linkages between film and other sound/image/
design elements within a wider economy of perception. Thus aspects
of Hollywood films, their specific genres and ancillary features such as
publicity, have been explored, for example, to generate linkages with
window shopping,40 sensationalist photojournalism, urban map-
ping, and spatial practices,41 discourses of domesticity,42 and of mobil-
ity, for example in gauging the status and imagination surrounding
37
Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 15.
38 See above, ch. 1, pt I.5: ‘Deconstructing the Universal and the National’.
39 This despite Hollywood’s extension of ideological hegemony through the
apparatus of a film studies fashioned for it being imposed on the study of ‘Bolly-
wood’ cinema!
40 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley, Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993.

41
See especially Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity,
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004.
42 This is especially notable in studies of melodrama and the women’s film, and
how such discourses reflect on constructions of the domestic sphere. See, for example,
Kathleeen Mchugh, American Domesticity: From ‘How To’ Manual to Hollywood Melo-
drama, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999; Nancy Abelman deploys melo-
drama’s poetics of loss and pathos to explore the subjectivity of women riven from
home through political upheavals and economic compulsions in the Korean context:
‘Melodramatic Texts and Contexts: Women’s Lives, Movies, and Men’, in Kathleen
Mchugh and Nancy Abelman, eds, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender,
Genre and National Cinema, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2005.
different technologies of transportation.43 And, in the context of Ind-
ian film studies, we have observed similar currents recently, for
example in Ranjani Mazumdar’s research into the linkages between
contemporary film culture, and practices ranging from urban plan-
ning and spatial mapping to fashion photography and interior de-
sign.44 These approaches do not necessarily supplant an engagement
with storytelling codes and practices; rather they engage filmic mate-
rial in a metanarrative relating to another story, for example that of the
transformations in economies of desire wrought by the market, the
recalibration of sense perception in the wake of modern technological
changes, and the story of the city, its built and imaginary environment,
its relay of speed and danger, of crowds and anonymity. This engage-
ment with such an interpenetrative design, where elements in one
discipline/field/business of perceptual organization are made to speak
to others, expands the terms on which the interpretation of film nar-
rative is undertaken, rather than to sideline narrative itself. Further,
this offers new opportunities to think about the effect of cinematic
images, sequence, and generic elements as films circulate in different
territories and offer modular forms with which to engage audiences in
new regimes of sensational experience, as Hansen suggests.45
Bollyworld’s tendentious story of Hollywood hegemony versus
Bollywood diversity thus begs the question whether Hollywood is, in-
deed, as unified a phenomenon as the formulation requires it to be.
Further, the argument that Indian cinema has a fragmentary dimen-
sion which allows for it to appeal and recombine with diverse local
cultures may also beg the question whether such attraction is so un-
bounded. As I have argued, the longer history of Indian film circula-
tion indicates its participation in a cultural arc where there are overlaps
43 Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, Durham, Duke
University Press, 1996; Paul Virillio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception,
London, Verso, 1989; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational
Cinema and Its Contexts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001; Kristin Ross,
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Bodies, Cam-
bridge, MIT Press, 1996.
44
Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema.
eds, Reinventing Film Studies, 332–50; ‘Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Hori-
zons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism’, Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn
2000, 10–22.
in certain narrative, musical and performance cultures. Such cultural
networks were subject to revision and augmentation, especially after
the formation of nation-states, when cultural exchange between states,
for example India and the Soviet Union, opened up new markets and
cultural territories, in the Soviet bloc, China, and, probably as some
kind of knock-on effect, in the privatized distribution territories of
Greece and Turkey as well;46 and again, when under the impact of
globalization the Bombay film industry entered the US and UK mar-
kets on new terms.
Keeping this in mind, we will note that the articles on Bombay film
reception in this volume make very different entry points into under-
standing the attraction of Indian films. The first and most straightfor-
ward of these relates not to diversity but to a certain sameness of experi-
ence: how diasporic Indian communities view films as families, and
to negotiate generational differences and cultural challenges posed by
the new cultural context. From Marie Gillespie’s work on video con-
sumption in South Asian families, to Bollyworld articles by Chris-
tiane Brosius on Germany and Narmala Halstead on West Indian
migrants,47 it is not fragmentation and recombination which such ac-
counts retail, but a fairly systematic cultural function internal to the
diaspora community. Such an allure, centred on ideas of kin obligation
and filial duty have also more generally been understood to be the
attraction Indian popular films offer audiences defined by traditional
social mores. We may be sceptical that Hindi films elicit such con-
sistent reception across the world, and on the grounds of an affiliation
to traditional social norms. I have earlier suggested that the idea of a
transitional social and cultural context might provide us with a sense
of the attractions involved,48 but this needs to be fleshed out if such a
formulation is not to collapse into that of a sociological explanation.
Here Brian Larkin’s article on bandiri music provides for a significant
46
Dimitris Elefthioritis, ‘A Cultural Colony of India’, South Asian Popular Culture
4 (2), October 2006, 101–12; Ahmet Gurata, ‘Translation and Reception of Indian
Cinema in Turkey: The Life of Awara’, forthcoming in Kaushik Bhaumik, The Indian
Cinema Book, London, British Film Institute.
47
Christiane Brosius, The Scattered Homelands of the Migrant: Bollyworld
through the Diasporic Lens’, in Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 207–38; Narmala
Halstead, ‘Belonging and Respect Notions vis-à-vis Modern East Indians: Hindi
Movies in the Guyanese East Indian Diaspora’, in ibid., 261–83.
48
See above, ch. 2.
point of departure. Where his earlier writing gave us a vivid sense of
the place of the cinema within the coordinates of urban transforma-
tion in an Islamic society,49 the article on bandiri engages with the
content and form of cultural experience and, more specifically, the
handling of the erotic rather than familial dimensions of ‘Bollywood’
films.50 This is not fragmentation, and its recombinations are deeply
ambivalent, as Hindi film melodies are used with words that appar-
ently abide by cultural injunctions against the expression of erotic
desire. The issue here seems to go beyond the countering of Hollywood
by affiliation with its more diversified other. For this is an appro-
priation of Indian film melody, at once gesturing to the original and
its erotic content for the knowledgeable spectator/listener, and appar-
ently neutralizing it through the observation of local religious in-
junction. Thus, for this operation, Bollywood too is problematic, and
the task is to manoeuvre the problematic allure of ‘Bollywood’ into
‘local’ forms.
Here film-related elements such as music are made over into a new
cultural composition and practice. If Larkin suggests how this happens
with Bandiri music, then Dudrah’s ethnography of clubs where Hindi
film images provide a background into which images and sequences
are inserted is an index of the assemblage.51 Elements are separated out
and reconfigured, and the space/image/sound relation becomes the
very site of subjectivity. Dudrah’s ethnographic work with Amit Rai in
New York extends the idea of the assemblage as the intersection be-
tween cinema hall and auditory, visual, and tactile bodily pleasures
available in the surrounding space, and through the sound and image
technologies whose regime of simultaneity connects the subject to a
wider universe.52
49
Brian Larkin, ‘Materializing Culture: Cinema and the Creation of Social Space’,
in Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds, Media Worlds: Anthropo-
logy on New Terrain, Berkeley, University of California Press, 319–36.
50 ‘Bandiri Music, Globalisation and Urban Experience in Nigeria’, in Kaur and
Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 284–308; for how local film production simulates ‘Bollywood’
dance, but through an economy of bodily presentation that attempts to curb sexual
excess, see also Mathias Krings, ‘Muslim Martyrs and Pagan Vampires: The Popular
Video Film and the Propagation of Islam in Northern Nigeria’, in Hughes and Meyer,
eds, Postscripts, 183–204.
51
‘Queer as Desis: Secret Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in
Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes’, in Dudrah, Bollywood, ch. 5.
52 ‘Bollywood Cinema-going in New York City’, ibid., ch. 4.
There is an imaginary here which refuses the limits of the cinema
hall, or of a unified filmic address in defining the scope of film experi-
ence. For, in these accounts, filmic experience is now substantially
hybridized as it is entangled, mixed, remodelled, by its mobilization
into the highly fluid forms of contemporary media experience. How-
ever, even if we were to take the space and address of the cinema as
primary vehicle of experience, we could still contest the idea that audi-
ence reception of the cinema event is only of one type. Thus Raminder
Kaur displays justifiable unease at the idea that the meanings of Hindi
films can be accepted at face value, that is in terms of legitimizing fixed
identities and ‘family value’, at least for younger, professional Ind-
ian filmgoers in Britain.53 On the basis of conversations with filmgo-
ers who are second- or third-generation Indians and Pakistanis, and
presumably her own response, Kaur points out that her interviewees
regard the film story, its characters and its message with scepticism,
irony, and pleasure, and, she estimates, a displaced identification.
Identification is with the situation of viewing, and with the others who
view, rather than with the screen fiction, and this provides the ground
of cultural identification. This is in counterpoint to the involvement
of an earlier generation who saw the cinema as vehicle of belonging
(to earlier times and places). Bollywoodian criticism or, to put it less
polemically now, criticism which takes the parameters of the contemp-
orary diaspora as its primary object, like Dudrah or Kaur, seem to
consciously divest the cinema of the identity longings associated with
it by an earlier generation. In the process, the family is also supplanted
as privileged context in which the Hindi cinema was experienced and
afforded the possibilities of a shared culture and generational nego-
tiation of identities.54 Such a critical disposition certainly appears to
offer a more complex sense of diasporic film cultures than a strictly
identity-bounded one yoked to the axis of the past would. The alter-
native to a framework based on identity-derived and reinforcing film
53 Raminder Kaur, ‘Cruising on the Vilayeti Bandwagon: Diasporic Representa-

tions and Reception of Popular Indian Movies’, in Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld,
309–29.
54 Thus Rajinder Dudrah criticizes Gillespie for making the ‘flawed claim that a
generational split can be detected in the ways in which first and second generation
diasporic South Asians read popular Hindi cinema—the former as purveyors of cul-
tural tradition and the latter as struggling to come to terms with cultural negotiation
between the two generations.’ See Dudrah, Bollywood, 40.
culture is not that clear, however. Dudrah, for example, seems to fall
back on just such a function in his interviews with filmgoers. In his
case, the more productive agenda appears to arise from an engage-
ment with the ethnographies centred on mediatized spaces such as the
dance clubs with their refabricated Hindi film mise-en-scène and the
possibilities of mixed audiences.55
There is another factor, exceeding that of consumption internal
to the diasporic community. This is the particular self-image Hindi
cinema conveyed to its audiences and to a wider public culture. Thus
Thomas Blom Hansen notes that younger audiences had been fal-
ling off from viewing Hindi films in Durban, and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
(Something is Happening; Karan Johar, 1998) changed all of that
because it provided a modernized self-image to Indian youth, and
in their perception, held up a more satisfactory mirror or window for
non-Indian culture to look into. Here, as in England, there was a subs-
tantial shift in urban connotation when, after apartheid, hitherto
white-controlled residential and upmarket commercial areas now
changed hands. The cinema for Indian films now came to be located
in more fashionable malls and shopping areas, and, while dominantly
being consumed by Indians, nevertheless offered the possibility of a
crossover audience. Here, in contrast to North Africa for instance, a
history of segregation ensured that African viewership was minimal,
and Indian film viewing thereby remained an activity restricted to the
diasporic community.56
There is a final, specifically oppositional cultural agenda to a certain
strand of British-based Bollywoodian criticism, and this relates to the
carving out of a space within Black British Cultural Studies. In a more
substantial engagement with local cinema history, Dudrah has sketched
the history of cinema exhibition for Indian films in Birmingham, a
major residential concentration for the diasporic population after the
Second World War.57 Three sequences emerge. The first immediate-
ly followed the war, capturing the moment of diasporic settlement.
This has resonances with work by Nirmal Puwar on the Ritz cinema
55
‘Reading Popular Hindi Films in the Diaspora and the Performance of Urban
Indian and Diasporic Identity’, in Dudrah, Bollywood, ch. 3.
56 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘In Search of the Diasporic Self: Bollywood in South
Africa’, Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 239–60.

57
Rajinder Dudrah, ‘Vilayati Bollywood: Popular Hindi Cinema-Going and
Diasporic South Asian Identity in Birmingham’, The Public 9 (1), 2002, 19–36.
in Coventry, a specifically working class settlement associated with car
manufacturing. In Puwar’s account, the cinema hall was part of a
longer history of public gathering, which involved live performances,
wrestling matches, and political meetings, along with cinema screen-
ings.58 This is reminiscent of ways in which the cinema provided an
opportunity or intersection with other types of popular performance
and public interaction, as for example the way the Girni Kamgar
working class union of Bombay used halls in the 1920s.59 Other se-
quences follow in the wake of changes in urban geography and set-
tlement, for example the settlement of inner cities by Asians and Black
populations in the wake of white populations moving out. This
occurred in the 1970s, and was substantially checked with the emer-
gence of videocassette retail in the 1980s, in which the Asian video
shop became a prominent market. Dudrah makes the important point
here that the political engagement of black British cultural studies
reanimates places that were considered run down or depleted in terms
of urban infrastructures by showing how regular cultural activity made
these over into live public cultures. The final phase is that of the con-
temporary, where white-owned and frequented halls came under
Asian management, and Indian film started being shown on a regular
basis. The last phase relates to the current epoch, and the renewal of
the Bombay film industry in its bid to create new linkages and generate
new types of production.
This suggestive outline of different periods of Indian film exhibi-
tion in Birmingham emphasizes the role of Indian filmgoing in terms
of community formation and public culture. However, the sympto-
matic naming both of present and past film cultures as Bollywood
points to a crucial problem with the present state of play in this field.
Crucial here is a substantial absence of the cinema, whether as textual
form involving narrative and performance, or as industrial product,
from the accounts generated in this body of work. The focus tends ins-
tead to be on audiences separated out from the practice of film viewing.
Thus, even Dudrah’s suggestive entry into the mapping of the differ-
ent phases of post-Second World War cinema lacks any reference to the
58
Nirmal Puwar, ‘Kabhi Ritz, Kabhie Palladium: South Asian Cinema in Coventry
1940–1980’, Wasafiri, Special Issue on Global Cinema. See also Nirmal Puwar’s film
Coventry Ritz Cinema, produced by AV Frontline, http://www.darkmatter101.org/
site/2007/03/12/coventry-ritz-cinema.
59
Bhaumik, ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry’.
agencies of film circulation, what films were shown or were popular in
which circuits, a project which would render Indian film history in a
more site-specific way. As I have pointed out, the productive dimen-
sions of this analysis derive from sociological and ethnographic moves,
especially in terms of cultural practices that emerge in the wake of the
cinema.
The crucial problem with this contemporary launching point for
analysis is the danger of accepting or involuntarily reproducing the
parameters set by the business form. Thus Dudrah, Sinha, Kaur, and
others urge that Bollywood be taken as an alternative to Hollywood,
as a bid to assert cultural choices against racially marked hierarchies
determined by the value placed on Hollywood as the norm. However,
‘Bollywood’ as business is equally intent on being an alternative by
breaking into markets dominated by American film, aiming for cross-
over appeal, and building complex commodity networks. So to valor-
ize it indiscriminately appears merely to echo its objectives. These
include ‘Bollywood’ motivating university degree courses, universities
liaising with local business initiatives, metropolitan councils building
on Bollywood’s drive to set up venues equipped for location shooting,
universities and councils throwing themselves into the commercial
networks of Bollywood film shows and awards, and museums stag-
ing ‘Bollywood’ retrospectives. While the generation of employment
is hardly something to be indifferent to, and we may understand the
rationale of local government and even local universities getting on the
Bollywood bandwagon, a scholarly agenda needs to develop autonom-
ously of this logic.60
A marked absence in these attempts to diagnose Bollywood,
whether by Rajadhyaksha or the British and US-based criticism, is any
substantial reference to film form, storytelling practices, actorly and
star economies, and even on-screen performance cultures. The filmic
dimension of film studies seems to have been lost in the process of try-
ing to understand the political economy and sociology of the cinema
60 Yorkshire is central to the Bollywood project, with the district business
associations and the Leeds Metropolitan University building ties centred on film
location shooting, award shows, and tourism. For information about this, see the on-
line business magazine to promote Indian and European film ties, www_iefilmi_com—
India EU Film Initiative—Bollywood in 2006.htm. Yorkshire Forward and the web-
site of the Leeds Metropolitan University highlights local economic interests in
‘Bollywood’.
institution. In the next chapter, I want to pay attention to on-screen
practice, firstly in terms of the ‘Bollywood’ family film, and then by
examining the broader coordinates of contemporary film culture,
especially in relation to its genre dynamics. I believe there are substan-
tial changes in the symbolic economy of the stories retailed by the
contemporary institution of the cinema, ones more complex than any
formulaic rendering of the cinema could capture. In the analysis of the
family film which follows, I will try to suggest that it is a more dynamic
and complex form than has been allowed for, and also that it under-
takes a substantial alteration of the symbolic economy within which
relations between the familial, the social, and the national have been
configured. Central here is the image and function of the father. I will
also try and complicate our understanding of the contemporary film
industry, suggesting that the attempt to think of the contrast between
family film and genre cinema as springing from the division between
‘Bollywood’ and non-‘Bollywood’ sectors and markets (foreign versus
local) is perhaps inadequate.
11
The Contemporary
Film Industry—II: Textual Form,
Genre Diversity, and Industrial
Strategies
I
focus now on the question of textual form, firstly seeking to
capture the complexity of the family film, its strategies and its
mutations. Here I will draw attention to two features: the sym-
bolic importance of father figures in articulating a vision of the na-
tional, in contrast to earlier emphases in melodramas of the national
saga to emphasize the mother; and, secondly, the development of a
marked performativity and play in contemporary melodramatic strat-
egies. In the preceding chapter I had pointed to British-based recep-
tion studies indicating that to take film stories and emotional appeals
at face value might be problematic. Here I suggest that such a surmise
appears not only when we look through the prism of reception studies,
but may be signalled in the rhetorical form and actorly economies
of the films as well. I then go on to consider the lines of transforma-
tion emerging from genre diversification, considering in particular the
changes in form observable in the productions of Ram Gopal Varma,
an emblematic figure of industrial change. In the process, I will suggest
that corporate forms, new markets and product tie-ins, often seen to
be the preserve of the high-end family movie, in fact have a wider pur-
chase in the contemporary industry.
1. Narrative Form in the

Contemporary Epoch—I: Father India and
the Emergence of the Global Nation
Can we think of the father as carrying in his persona a societal form,
channelling through his body, bearing, and imagination, a structure
The Contemporary Film Industry—II 363
of genealogy, of blood ties and neighbourly networks that jell into an
elaborate mise-en-scène? This mode of figuring the father is part of a
longer paradigm of Indian popular cinema, going back to the 1930s
and 1940s, contested substantially in the 1950s, and once again in
the 1970s. It is as if at each point of significant social, political, and
industrial transition there emerged a significant pressure on the stabil-
ity, certitude, and virtue of traditional familial and social structures
embodied in and by the father. I have highlighted the emergence of
the mother in demarcating a different regime of narrative signific-
ance, and one that is often pitted against the rule of the father.1 This
was especially notable in the 1950s. As Moinak Biswas has argued,
in the wake of the decline of the studio system, and its more settl-
ed stylistic and narrative parameters, we observe a release of visual
energy, with significant innovations in the capture of urban space,
in senses of speed, in the use of light, and in the patterns of fram-
ing.2 This was often centred on a rebellious or irreverent hero, from
Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, and Guru Dutt in 1950s thrillers, through
to Amitabh Bachchan and a host of others including the early Shah
Rukh Khan in the period from the 1970s through to the 1990s. What
we observed on-screen was a new dynamic in the use of vehicular
movement for shooting and a drive to capture the porous terrain of
street, bazaar, and shantytown in the life of the protagonist. The irreve-
rent social outsider aligns with the mother, real or symbolic, a source
of spatial and ethical stability in a shifting universe, and a resource in
his contest with the patriarchal social order.
Mothers, Communities, Nations

While functioning as a figure of ethical motivation and primal contest,
the mother very rarely acquired the authority to oversee the very struc-
ture of social relationships. The legendary status of Mehboob Khan’s
Mother India (1957) which appeared to assign the mother such a role,
obscures this fact. Arguably, the power of Radha (Nargis) derived not
from social authority but a residual community authority. The peas-
ant mother’s bid was to preserve her family against exploitation and
natural disaster, and her struggles came to symbolize those of the com-
munity and the nation. Her triumph over the ravages of a flood and
1See above, ch. 2.
2
Moinak Biswas, ‘Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema’,
PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002.
a rapacious moneylender was converted into a call to her migrating
fellow villagers to return, a moment captured by their imaging in
the shape of the map of India. When her rebellious son’s challenge to
moneylender exploitation tips over the moral circumference of retri-
butional logic by not only killing the usurer but abducting his daugh-
ter, Radha assumes a punitive stance on behalf of village women and
kills her son. This form of punishment is at once righteous, a matter
of dharma, as it is traumatic; there is a sense that the mother lies outside
the symbolic resolutions of the narrative trajectory, as her struggles
for the village culminate in the construction of dams in the wake of
Independence. For the still grieving mother, it is not water she sees
being released on the opening of the dam, but her son’s blood. The
state, as an abstract entity and vehicle of development, seems pictured
at a remove from the emotional world of the folk it oversees.
In Deewar, Salim-Javed’s updated urban version of the Mother India
story, the mother, Shanti (Nirupa Roy), was a much more vulnerable
figure, dependent on a son who, like Birjoo in Mother India, took to
a heroic but illegal path. Here we witness a steep fall in the social status
accorded the mother. She is properly subalternized in a passage that
rhymed in clearly dystopian counterpoint to the opening of Mother
India. In contrast to the image of Radha’s mingling with the earth in
a layered, mythicizing depiction of the emergence of the dam, Shanti
was involved in carrying earth from the construction site of a highrise
building, clearing the space to install the city’s monuments of alienated
labour. (Figs 60–61, p. 365.)
Further, she appeared much more clearly an instrument of the legal
and moral order when she sanctions action against her son. The com-
munity has been dispersed in Deewar’s city, and, almost by default, the
moral discourse became a statist underwriting of law and order. In
both films, we could argue that the form of the final result was not will-
ed by the mother: for it was the state, and, in Mother India, specifically
the nation-state, represented by its characteristic developmental imag-
ery of large-scale irrigation projects and dams, that was erected on the
soil of the mother’s sacrifices.3 The framing narrative and flashback
structures of both films alerted us to the gap between past struggles and
3
See ch. 9 above; and Vasudevan, ‘Disreputable and Illegal Publics: Cinematic
Allegories in Times of Crisis’, Sarai Reader 04, for attempts to frame the Bachchan and
Khan protagonists.
Fig. 60
Fig. 61
Fig. 60–61: Mother India, Mehboob Khan 1957, and Deewar, Yash Chopra,
1974, Two Mothers.
sacrifices, and the present, suggesting ambivalence towards the nar-
rative’s denouement. The unresolved pathos of the past brought into
focus a characteristic melodramatic undecidedness, where a beckon-
ing past enshrined the loss of community forms, in Mother India’s vil-
lages and Deewar’s labouring communities.4
Father, Social Order, State Form

I have undertaken this ‘flashback’ to provide a backdrop to the work
undertaken by contemporary ‘Bollywood’ family films around the
parameters of family, social order, and nationhood. Taking the com-
munity as a unit of affective investment, in contrast to a rule-bound
social order or society, we could argue that there was a recurrent bid,
from the heyday of the ‘feudal family romance’ of the 1930s and 1940s,
to build equivalence between the social realm and the (hierarchical)
community under the authority of the extended patriarchal family.
Here the father, most commonly the landed magnate or zamindar,
exercised a control over the social domain, with most characters ow-
ing him obeisance. For example, in the ‘village social’ of the Bombay
Talkies type, this would include estate managers, servants, tenants,
peasant cultivators through to the emblematic figures of religious, so-
cial, and professional life such as priests and even postmasters. Oedipal
conflicts flowed into socially transgressive romance and, on occasion,
the city provided an outlet or escape route for a rebellious son, as in the
case of Kangan (Bracelet; Franz Osten, 1939) or Jhoola (Swing; Gyan
Mukerji, 1941). The city was ambiguously coded, snaring heroes with
its hedonistic appeal and permissiveness, and it was almost inevitable
that the story had to return to the village to resolve the conflicts that
led to the original flight. This was a face-to-face community in which
an initially repressive father could turn into a benevolent entity at-
tentive to the very desires he had denied. It was also a loosely cluster-
ed social realm, defined by hierarchy, but allowing within its space
4 Amongst a growing literature on these iconic films, see Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘From
Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The Angry Man and the Psychotic Hero’, in

Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning; and Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema, ch. 1, for the
Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan figures; and, for Mother India, Rosie
Thomas, ‘From Sanctity to Scandal: The Mythologisation of Mother India’, Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 3, 1989; and Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India, BFI World
Cinema Classics, London, BFI, 2001.
a variety of comic and performative registers characteristic of the
popular compendium.
Symbolically, this cinema represented society as a ‘horizontal’ form,
rarely featuring a symbolic space superior to that of the family, whether
that of the state or the nation. In contrast, the films highlighting
the mother assumed the form of ‘vertical’ melodrama, ultimately sup-
planting the family order with an order consecrating the state form,
however ambiguously. In the contemporary epoch, the horizontal
form with the father as the authoritative figure of power embeds the
political within it. The symbolism of political economy and cultural
form come together, with the state’s withdrawal from the determina-
tion of cultural hierarchies and investments now mirrored in its ab-
sence within the fiction of the globalizing nation.5 The global frame is
crucial: for the contemporary family film is distinguished from its
earlier avatars in its bid to reconcile the division between West and East
such that a Western upbringing does not make a protagonist ineligible
for the national project in a globalizing era. In all of this it is the father
rather than the mother who is arbiter of national belonging. In the pro-
cess, the affective ties of community are decisively supplanted by social
rules of inclusion and exclusion overseen by the baleful and punitive
presence of father figures, most famously incarnated in the perform-
ance of Amrish Puri.
The Symbolic Functions of the Father:

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
(Aditya Chopra, 1995)
The first of the Bollywood family movies pointed to this reconfigu-
ration in their initial passages. In both, Amrish Puri plays characters
settled abroad, and caught up in the romance of the homeland. Dilwale
Dulhania Le Jayenge (hereafter DDLJ ) projects this desire more power-
fully, perhaps because it was presented as part of the biography of
a lower-middle class character who feels a transient in England, a
country he had come to out of financial need. The father Baldev
Singh’s current habitat dissolves into the mustard fields and folk forms
of his native Punjab, an imaginary investment which appears to
5
For arguments about the contemporary institution of the cinema, see Rajadhyak-
sha, ‘The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema’, Inter Asian Cultural Studies 4 (1),
April 2003, reprinted in Kaarsholm, Cityflicks.
Fig. 62: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Aditya Chopra, 1995, Father India.
lend him a confidence as he strides forth through the scenic spaces of

London on his way to his shop. The opening is suggestive in terms of
figure/ground relations: the father does not submit to his environs;
rather, dressed in the traditional kurta and coat, his stride suggests an
irreducible iconicity, something which will not change despite the
new environments into which he moves. (Fig. 62.)
Here is an iconic entity who conjures up a cultural and spatial
imagination in his character, creating a vortex so that he commands the
spaces he inhabits, even while we know he is actually a very modest in-
habitant of the modern metropolis.6 Pardes counterpoints the small
shopkeeper of DDLJ to the brash and confident businessmen hailing
from New York, whose evocation of India is firstly channelled through
a touristic display of spaces such as the Taj Mahal, preceding the man-
datory return to the space of the countryside.
Baldev Singh is increasingly shown to be a repressive entity, insist-
ing on the maintenance of traditional arrangements and ideals, in-
cluding those of marital pledges deriving from ties of friendship and
the desire to reaffiliate to the motherland. The hero, Raj (Shah Rukh
Khan), contends with this not by opposition or elopement but by seek-
ing to persuade the father of his love for Simran (Kajol). In terms of
6 For discussions of iconicity in film, see Geeta Kapur, ‘Revelation and Doubt
in Sant Tukaram and Devi’, in Kapur, When Was Modernism; and Rajadhyaksha,
‘The Phalke Era’, rpntd in Niranjana et al., eds, Interrogating Modernity; and chs 2 and
3 above.
agency the daughter is ineffectual, while the mother (Farida Jalal)
occupies a recessed position, locus of care and enunciator of the pathos
generated by the patriarch’s repression of his daughter’s desire.
Shah Rukh Khan, the key icon of the diaspora family social film
warrants a separate and extended treatment in terms of the changing
story, indeed, storytelling functions, of his star personality. Here I will
outline what I think are pertinent parameters as they play out in a
specific group of diaspora movies, and, in particular DDLJ and Kal Ho
Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004). In both of these films, Khan’s perfor-
mance style markedly lacks any of the conventional signs of interior-
ity, and plays on a hyperbolic surface histrionics that, along with the
attributes of the tease who is forever taking people for a ride, suggests
an indeterminacy of character viewpoint. The audience is denied clear
signs of ‘plausible’ emotional drive, so that declarations of romantic
intent, and also declarations of identity—what he believes, what values
he holds dear in terms of a definition of who he is—come across as ges-
tural and performative. My description here is not meant to be judge-
mental, but semiotic, trying to understand performance within the
requirements of the narrative form it serves. In DDLJ, Khan is initially
presented as a callow youth, intent only on a good time, and he and his
wealthy NRI father, Dharamveer Malhotra (Anupam Kher), are
comically indifferent to matters of serious educational pursuit or
worldly struggle. In sharp contrast to Baldev Singh, they also appear
to easily inhabit a certain image of the metropolitan world, if not a
realist one. And yet Khan becomes the film’s primary vehicle for the
demonstration of Hindustani identity in matters of morality and in
the observation of parental desires. There appear to be two key passages
in which this shift takes place. Both of them derive from the logic of
a game which requires characters to assume a role.
The first is when Simran gets drunk, imagines making love to Raj,
and finds herself in a state of undress in bed the next morning. Raj
at first plays with Simran’s trauma, suggesting that they did indeed
make love. However, after teasing her in this way, and suspending her
in a state of anxiety, he clarifies matters predictably, by asserting that
Hindustani folk couldn’t behave in such a way. The sequence, based on
a narrative gap which withholds the spectator’s full knowledge of what
transpired, has a routine enigmatic structure rapidly dispensed with by
the appropriate moral resolution. The goal of the sequence is to assert
that, given the identity of the dramatis personae, this was all that could
have happened. Identity and its moral attributes do not have to be
proved by reference to a character’s history, behaviour, and through a
process of narrative persuasion. Uttering it proves it, as Judith Butler
might say, except that in this context the utterance derives not from the
repetitive register of everyday life, but as hyperbolic utterance, befit-
ting the symbolic move to reconcile large-scale differences —or at least
apprehensions of difference—between the identity produced at home
and in foreign lands.
This is identity as a (serious) game, one which the narrative goes
onto make more elaborate. Thus, when Simran is betrothed in the tra-
ditional way, Raj takes this as a challenge and insists that he will per-
suade Baldev to change his views and give Simran to the one she loves.
This strategy is undertaken despite Simran’s sense of helplessness and
her mother’s urging that they elope. Raj’s strategy is to project a res-
pectful relationship to the beloved’s lower middle class NRI father and
his world, that of the rituals, iconic landscape and cultural practices of
his native Punjab. This is a peculiarly ‘darshanic’ strategy, in that Raj
assumes the position of a devout subject constituting himself with-
in the presence of the respected community elder.7 However, there is
a genuine puzzle, rather than a routine enigma, built into this strategy.
How can the bid for authentication of the self by a sheerly darshanic
activity be converted into parentally sanctioned romance and mar-
riage? For there is a countervailing social structure and habitus built
into Baldev Singh’s choice of marriage partner: this is the commitment
to his childhood friend, Ajit Singh (Satish Shah), that their children
will marry.
It is the very differently organized scene of violence which facilitates
the conversion. When Baldev discovers Raj’s designs on his daughter,
he casts the suitor out. As the hero and his father gather at the local rail-
way station, they are set upon by the bridegroom’s party, who, riding
horses and carrying shotguns, are the very image of a rampant feu-
dal code bent on avenging slighted honour. Here is a very different
image of the Punjab from the one nurtured by Baldev Singh. Raj
appears helpless before the relentless assault, until the assailants attack
his father. It is this attack which causes the emergence of Shah Rukh
7 For the deployment of darshanic images, in which the viewer/devotee seeks to

gain benefits by presenting himself to the authoritative iconic entity—where the
image, in a sense, has power over the viewer—see Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film,
esp. ch. 3; and ch. 3 above.
Khan’s earlier avatar, deriving from a well-known cycle of ‘psychotic’
movies from his early film career;8 it also mobilizes a different register
of cinematic appeal, suggesting a more complex audience address. Raj
is converted into a figure of uncontrollable, indeed psychotic rage, and
launches an attack on his opponents. The performative nature of this
violence is significant. It evokes the psychotic in Shah Rukh Khan’s
visage, and yet uses the parameters of the choreographed stunt se-
quence, replete with somersaults, feints, and tumbling manoeuvres. In
short, the scene has the aspect of an item, a separable unit of pleasure
within the traditional format. However, if we so wish, we could pro-
vide narrative integrity to this tonal shift and textual disruption by
arguing that it dramatizes, quite literally, that ties of blood and kinship
have to be given body and graphic force in order to persuade of the
possibilities of reaffiliation to the nation in an epoch of global dis-
persal. This is not a one-off feature, for DDLJ ’s action sequences are
mirrored at the climax of Pardes as well, and with a similar symbo-
lic design.
In both cases, the scene (temporarily) supplants a drama of recon-
ciliation founded on a strategy of demonstrating respect and obedi-
ence to patriarchal traditions, and deploying elements of the family
social film and romantic comedy. What comes into view at this point
is the challenge not of demonstrating respect, but of displaying pri-
mordial, visceral affiliation by defending family honour. The scene in
DDLJ is set up to demonstrate Raj’s willingness to fight for his fath-
er’s honour, and ends when Baldev thunderously closes the proceed-
ings, and outcasts the frivolous suitor yet again. There seems a fatal lag,
where the rationale of the son’s violence on behalf of his father is not
properly witnessed by the other father, the symbolic father, the one
who has the power to define who is an Indian. If this father is not there
at the correct moment, the scene nevertheless appears to have an after-
life that now recovers the motif of obedience. Raj submits to Baldev’s
order of expulsion, and he looks out from the departing train as Bal-
dev holds a struggling Simran, who pleads that he let her go. This is
a rather fascinatingly rendered passage. ‘Father’ and ‘son’ are fixed in
a shot-reverse shot exchange of looks across the increasing distance
8
See Mazumdar, ‘From Subjectification to Schizophrenia’, and Vasudevan, ‘Dis-
reputable and Illegal Publics’, for analysis of Baazigar (Abbas Mustan, 1992) and Darr
(Yash Chopra, 1994).
set up by the motion of the train, and the father seems blind to the girl
struggling in his grip, although the two-shot highlights her in the fath-
er’s frame, screaming to be allowed to go to her beloved. It is as if the
sound/image registers are split in the father’s perceptual economy: he
has eyes only for the interloper, whose bloodied face retains the traces
of a symbolic violence; if he registers his daughter’s will, it can only be
by hearing her and feeling her at his side. In a startling reversal, the
father suddenly releases the daughter, and announces that no-one can
love his daughter as Raj does. The apparently fatal gap in time which
prevented the father’s witnessing the earlier scene of filially motivat-
ed violence appears to be recovered in the bloody proof offered in the
visage of the pretender, and the screams of the desperate young wo-
man. The release of the girl, and the formation of the couple reord-
ers the perceptual economy, making the father into a willing spectator
of a scene both sanctioned by him, but now disappearing from his view
and into the vast beyond.
We should note that the sanction is supplemented by a symbolic
exchange: the father recognizes the virtue of the son, and accordingly
releases the daughter into the expanded space of the nation; in ex-
change, he receives a sign, a thumbs up from Raj, which he enthusiasti-
cally responds to. (Figs 63–64, p. 373.)
The abrupt reversal of demeanour, from the dark, punitive father,
to the beaming elder fully converted not only by the virtue but, indeed,
the virtuosity of the son, signals an excess. The Indian viewer, in par-
ticular, cannot fail to spot the liberalization narrative nested in the
exchange. The protectionist economics and import substitution logic
of the 1970s had denied multinational soft drinks giants such as Coke
and Pepsi a market since 1977, when a series of local products such as
Campa Cola and Thums Up were promoted, the latter with great
success. With the return of the big multinational firms, Pepsi in 1988,
and Coke in 1993, there was a bid to buy up the ‘brand equity’ of local
products, so that Coke took over Thums Up in 1994, the year before
the release of DDLJ. According to ‘brand strategy analysis’, the bid to
use local bottling plant to distribute Coke did not win over a clientele,
and Coke reintroduced Thums Up shortly after.9 The concluding
gesture of the film, the exchange of a thumbs up sign between father
and son, then suggests that the acknowledging of the next, globalized
9 Sicco Van Gelder, Global Brand Strategy, London, Kogan Page, 2003, 197.
Fig. 63
Fig. 64
Figs 63–64: DDLJ, Thumbs Up!
generation as legitimate successors comes under the sign not only of

patriarchal sanction, but of the integration and, indeed, assertion, of
local product in the global commodity constellation.
We should not allow this concluding semiotics to obscure the
complexity of the new assemblage of the cinema in the contemporary
epoch. Apart from the fact that the diaspora-themed cinema addresses
transformations in India as much as generating strategies to include
Indians settled abroad, we have a layered sense of audience dispositions
addressed by the film. As a number of critics have noted, the very idea
of the arranged love marriage, securing parental sanction for indi-
vidual romantic choices in marriage partners, is part of a longer pattern
of conventions in the cinema that seeks cross-class inclusivity for its
audiences. Further, and this perhaps indicates the transitional nature
of DDLJ and, indeed, of Pardes, the necessity of the action/stunt se-
quences suggests an expanded audience address, with a formulaic
combination of ‘traditional’ morality along with the disaggregated
visceral attraction. I say this is transitional because the cinema has not
yet arrived in the time of urban globalized vistas centred on the mall-
multiplex as its high-end exhibition/consumer point. Here is a des-
cription of the audiences that have become characteristic for DDLJ in
its record-breaking run at Bombay’s Maratha Mandir theatre:
Twenty-four-year old Nathu Ghorpade, a porter at Mumbai Central
station, does not subscribe to the view that his city is one of the costliest
in the world. Over the past few years, he, along with his friends, has,
at least once a week, been spending four hours in air-conditioned com-
fort, munching popcorn and watching a hit movie for just Rs 14 (till
recently it was Rs 9) . . .
Arriving an hour early, this writer watched the audience lining up at
the booking counter, comprising mostly typical, working-class males.
The stalls and dress circle did not have a single woman viewer, the
balcony, though, had five. The men sat with their legs up on the seats,
dozed for some time but went on repeating the Shahrukh Khan dia-
logues and wolf whistling at the romantic scenes. ‘It’s a good time pass
for us’, they say. ‘Many of us live close by in the slums and lost count
how many times we have seen the film. This is unbelievable comfort for
us’, they add.
Porters at Mumbai Central, during the lean morning hours, often
drop in at the theatre. Manoj Desai [owner, Maratha Mandir] knew of
cases of people visiting the theatre more than 80–90 times. Yet, it is
not an all-male, working-class audience. There are courting couples,
co-eds, travelling salesmen and a whole lot of other movie-watchers.
Almost 40 per cent of the audience comprises casual visitors from
outside Mumbai. Since Maratha Mandir lies close to Mumbai Central
and the State Transport Bus Stand, the visitors watch the movie either
before or after their work is over. The packed weekend audience is dif-
ferent. Families drive in, watch the film and then lunch in one of the
many restaurants in the area. It is a day well spent for them.
Obviously, the theatre and the film are made for each other. Says
Desai, ‘We have one of the best sound systems in town, installed at a
cost of Rs 70 lakh. The film itself is well made, as the theme appeals to
the Indian mind and the songs are still popular. The theatre’s location
helps a lot. But most of all, it is the low ticket rates of Rs 20, Rs 17 and
Rs 14, which pull the people in’, he points out.—V. Gangadhar, ‘Love
at Maratha Mandir’, The Hindu10
The description provides us with a sense of the layered audiences that
compose the city, from workers, itinerant businessmen, travellers who
factor in film-viewing as punctuation in their work day and peripatetic
lives, through to more clearly demarcated leisure practices. It is this
particular intersection between the city and the cinema that distingui-
shes it from the multiplex form with its bid to virtualize its space,
even if this is not always quite possible because of municipal govern-
ment practices which often position the multiplex in a differentiated
ensemble of consumer economies.
The Multicultural Father Deceased and

Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho
(Nikhil Advani, 2004)
Shah Rukh Khan functioned in DDLJ as an enunciator, a figure who
is central to the organization of the narrative, negotiates amongst its
various drives to reconcile differences and demonstrates great dexterity
in accommodating himself to changing narrative locales and mise-èn-
scene. Thus he inhabits different territories of cultural reference and
enacts heterogeneous modes of representation, ranging from the cal-
low NRI through to the obedient son who can be both docile and
psychotic in his filial devotion. Central to a storytelling design with-
in which the star personality became prime narrative mover is a play
with identity which includes the possibilities that the enunciator is
entirely removed from the emotions of the situation his character goes
through. In crucial ways, the other characters provide the main focus
for audience identification, specifically those caught within a scena-
rio of pathos. This is perhaps an excessive claim for the workings of the
Shah Rukh Khan personality in DDLJ, but we can see similar features
at work in Kal Ho Na Ho (KHNH).
10
Hindu Business Line Internet Edition, 28 April 2004, consulted 18 February
2008.
Fig. 65: Kal Ho Na Ho, Nikhil Advani, 2004, Figure of Destiny.
The performance style and narrative function of Khan in DDLJ

indicates the way in which the transformation of the symbolic father
was achieved through darshanic gambits, visceral action and, finally,
a turn to the symbolism of the game as globalizing semiotic. We will
notice both continuity and mutation of these features in KHNH, a
film which undertook a complicated revision of the certitudes of iden-
tity parameters, in particular by complicating the definition of Indian
identity in topical ways. This film, written and produced by Karan
Johar, and directed by Nikhil Advani, represented many points of
divergence from the original codification of the diaspora film.
The plot centres on Naina Catherine Kapoor (Preity Zinta), a
young aspiring professional (she and her friend Rohit are enrolled in
management classes) who has grown up in New York, and is weighed
down by the various problems that assail her family. She lives with
her widowed mother, Jennifer (Jaya Bachchan), a sister, Gia (Jhanak
Shukla) a spastic brother, Shiv (Ashit Naik), and their grandmother,
Lajjo (Sushma Seth). Naina’s father is dead, and the film emphasizes
the importance of this loss in the opening sequence, when Naina, on
her morning run, comes to the point on the Hudson River where she
recalls her father playing with her as a child. The father was a Punjabi
Hindu, and his marriage to Jennifer, an Indian Christian, was some-
thing his mother Lajjo was never reconciled to. The circumstances sur-
rounding the father’s death, and, indeed, the status of Gia, are left un-
specified until much later in the film. The unceasing tension between
Jennifer and Lajjo take their toll on the household and suspend Naina
in a state of unhappiness. The fragile economic status of the restaurant
Jennifer owns also adds to the tension. Naina’s friend, Rohit (Saif Ali
Khan), is a likeable character, not unlike Saif ’s role in Dil Chahta Hai
(Farhan Akhtar, 2003), that of the hopeful but ineffectual woman-
izer. Into this scenario arrives Aman Mathur, who has come to the USA
with his mother (Reema Lagoo) and lives with his uncle, Chadha
(Dara Singh) in Naina’s neighbourhood. Aman takes it as his mission
to lighten Naina’s load, to make her enjoy life and, finally, to find love
for her by bringing her together with Rohit. The catch is that Naina
falls for Aman. When she decides to declare her love for him, Aman,
forewarned by Rohit, preempts her by indicating that he is already
married by leaving the photograph of a mysterious other woman lying
around. After a crestfallen Naina leaves, an exchange between Aman
and his mother reveals that Aman is not married, that he loves Naina,
but that he is afflicted with a heart disease which will shorten his life.
After this revelation, and the interval, a comedy of the male adoles-
cent know-all type ensues, with Aman guiding Rohit through the steps
that will win him Naina, involving cellphone prompting, the stag-
ing of chance meetings, and even a timeline for securing Naina’s love.
While the ploy seems to be working, at a crucial moment Naina comes
to know of the game, and is angrily going to terminate her relationship
to Rohit, when Aman intercedes, and reads a passionate letter of love
avowedly penned by Rohit from a blank sheet of paper. This mends the
impending breach, but also discloses to Rohit the depth of Aman’s feel-
ings for Naina. The engagement goes ahead, but a final twist emerges:
Aman’s claims to being married are exposed when Naina comes up-
on the woman whose photograph Aman had passed off as his wife’s.
In fact, she is his doctor, and now both Naina and Rohit situate earlier
events differently. Aman’s fabrication of a wife, his eloquent and pas-
sionate assertion of love in Rohit’s name, but using his own words, all
of these elements are now seen as proofs of Aman’s love. Naina runs
off in disarray, and Rohit feels cast into the role of a secondary figure,
supporting cast and prop for the real love story. An infuriated Aman
assails Rohit for thinking of giving up that which, if Aman were to live,
he would never relinquish. The climax of this movement is reached
when Aman finds Naina at the riverside, returning to the inaugural
space of the film. A broken-hearted Naina asks Aman why he loves
her so much, the sequence ending in Aman’s paroxysmic denial that
he loves anyone. A deathbed scene has Naina leave quickly, unable to
endure the grief, and Aman declaring to Rohit that he has given Naina
to Rohit in this life, but she will be his in the next. The coda takes place
many years later, the film concluding with Naina’s voice-over just as it
had started. The greying couple have a teenage daughter, and Naina
notes that this is the end of the story, and that she will never forget her
first love.
KHNH signals a symbolic shift in the structure of the diaspora
family movie. For, unlike DDLJ, Pardes, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi
Gham (Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad; Karan Johar, 2003),
KHNH unsettles the apex position in the structure. The paternal en-
tity who had such power in these other films is rendered a dark, suici-
dal figure in this one. The back story of KHNH is a startling one, it
is only revealed gradually, and its punchline comes as a genuine sur-
prise. Indeed it exceeds the normal range of narrative denouement
in popular Hindi cinema, its story of paternal suicide perhaps more
reminiscent of the confessional ‘middle’ cinema of a Mahesh Bhatt.11
The father had an extra-marital relationship, and Gia was born out of
wedlock. The relationship did not work, the father returns, and Jenni-
fer takes him back and accepts Gia as her daughter. Lajjo’s anger against
her Christian daughter-in-law and her child is exposed as a way of sup-
pressing the fact that it was her son who was primarily responsible for
the breakdown of all conventions. It should be noted that the narrative
acquires a topical edge here. By addressing the ‘contamination’ of
community and family identity in terms of Hindu–Christian relation-
ships, and asserting the validity of Indian Christians as part of the na-
tional fabric, the film parallels and implicitly challenges the violent
attacks taking place at the time against Christians in India by the ideo-
logues of right-wing Hinduism.12
11
Films by Mahesh Bhatt such as Janam (Birth; 1985), Naam (Name; 1986), and
Zakhm (Wound; 1998) recurrently address the ramifications of illegitimate birth and
the challenges it poses not only to ideas about family norms, but also to destabilize the
certitudes and prejudices associated with clear-cut sectarian identity. See above, ch. 9,
for an analysis of Zakhm.
12
There were regular attacks on Christian missionaries, schools, and tribal groups,
especially in Gujarat and Orissa in 2002 and 2003, and the more recent resurgence
It is Aman who offers something akin to a psychotherapeutic release
of this suppressed narrative, speaking out the truth in front of the as-
sembled family group, apportioning guilt and innocence, extolling
Jennifer’s virtue and her husband’s weakness. Ironically, this ‘weakness’
is what has set up an entirely different content to family structures, the
father’s marrying of a Christian augmented by his subsequent relation-
ship outside the Indian community as a whole. Thus the ‘weakness’ of
the father has opened up possibilities of permeability to the normally
rigid contours of the Hindu family in the diaspora movie. In a peculiar
sense, even with the father apparently absent from the scene, he leaves
his imprint on the symbolic structure by scattering a trail of identitarian
problems behind. And ironically Aman denounces the very figure into
whose space he arrives and whose unfulfilled functions he assumes. For
the primary object of his attention is Naina, the one who feels the ab-
sence of the father most. Her question at the climax of the film, ‘Why
do you love me so much?’ refers to a love of a very specific type, which
loves beyond death, by setting up the conditions for the beloved’s
future happiness. The fact that this utterance takes place in the very
place, and through the image of the father lifting the daughter in a
warm embrace, suggests the transactions and compensatory functions
layered into Aman’s character.
From the outset spectatorial expectations are built around him, as
our view of him, his back turned to the camera, is interspersed amidst
the narrative of everyday strife that governs the heroine’s world. Father-
substitute, impossible, unattainable lover, deus ex machina who solves
family problems (he even gets the restaurant going by getting Jennifer
to switch to Indian cuisine), exposes festering secrets and heals linger-
ing wounds, Aman is also visually scaled up to assume the proportions
of a figure of destiny. There is an epic, operatic quality to the way
Nikhil Advani positions him in the approach to New York, in his first
appearance at the railway station overseeing Naina’s expression of frus-
tration with her life, and as he bestrides the city from a lofty eleva-
tion above the Brooklyn Bridge. The approach shot should be placed
in a historical database documenting the moment of arrival of migrant
of Hindutva parties after the 2007 Gujarat elections again saw the resurfacing of
organized attacks in Orissa. See www.secularindia.com, consulted 18 September
2008.
populations in America, dating back to Chaplin’s Immigrant (1917).
Something of the exhilaration of America as an experience of spectacle
had earlier been captured in Pardes, in the imaging of New York, and
particularly in the subsequent trip to Las Vegas.13 But KHNH’s sense
of the city is more engaged, at a street level, in terms of participation
in crowded pedestrian movement and shooting inside buses, railway
stations, and inducting iconic features of street life such as food ven-
dors into the mise-en-scène of the song sequence, ‘Kuch To Hua Hai’.
The film makes the new space for the migrant over into a space of
easy habitation, so that s/he is no longer migrant but part of the multi-
cultural design of the city. This is perhaps best indicated in the film’s
presentation of the neighbourhood the Indian characters live in. Here
Aman’s performance of the song ‘Pretty Woman Dekho Dekho Na’ arti-
culates the space through multi-cultural musical performance, mobi-
lizing pop, rap, gospel, and bhangra. Aman and bhangra enunciate
the other elements, and build a rhythm of song and dance that culmi-
nates in SRK being imprinted on the US flag as a new ethnic insignia.
Aman’s body is inserted on the flag and at its edge, drawing on Richard
Gere’s placement in Pretty Woman (Garry Marshal, 1990) and evoking
the position of an MC or disc jockey.14 (Fig. 65, p. 376.)
Arguably, all this would suggest that the film projects a newly con-
fident situation for the diaspora audience. As I have noted KHNH also
unsettles the more restrictive identitarian logic presented by the genre,
at least allowing for the possibility of the family structure relating
fluidly to the ethnic environment it inhabits. The film therefore offers
a more ‘liberal’ position to the spectator in its presentation of prob-
lems arising from identity conflicts. However, it is also suggestive that
the story-telling outlines a certain crucially liminal position for its star
13 This is in the song sequence ‘Deewana’, and its ride across the desert, excitement
arising from the thrill of untrammelled movement and anticipation of the cityscape,
rather than the actual view of the city itself.
14
In contrast to a long history in which Bombay films have drawn freely on Ameri-
can and other cinemas for plot elements and music, the new globalizing drives of the
industry today seek legitimate avenues for the protection and exploitation of intellectual
property. So the filmmakers of KHNH paid for the rights to use ‘Oh Pretty Woman’,
a song originally sung by Roy Orbison. The music directors of the film, Shan-
kar, Ehsaan, and Loy, said they insisted on this, and also that they added their own
original lines and musical elements to this version. See Rajiv Vijaykar interviews
Shankar Ehsaan Loy, Screen, 27 January 2006, http://www.screenindia.com/old/
archive/archive_fullstory.php?content_id=11871, visited on 7 May 2009. For further
discussion of intellectual property conflicts, see the Conclusion and Afterword, below.
performer in its construction of the film’s emotional world. Aman’s
position here echoes the performative iterations and role playing of Raj
in DDLJ while assuming a superior narrative function.
Along with the imagery of destiny associated with Aman in his ele-
vation in the cityscape, this liminality, this undecidability of character
perspective underneath an excess of histrionic expressions suggests a
figure who comes from a space outside the narrative world. I find this
particularly suggestive for unravelling the mode of address of films de-
signed for diversely located audiences. It is as if the mobility of the film
into different markets requires a superordinate figure who is not root-
ed in one place, and can accommodate himself to new places, or can
indeed refashion these spaces in terms of his objectives. However, the
issue here is not only one of mobility and narrative dexterity, but also
one which makes character subjectivity itself displaced as a coherent
or desirable goal. This offers the viewer a distinctive perch from which
to view the unfolding and indeed the manipulation of story events
happening to someone like Rohit or Naina who may be like ‘us’. This
dual position made available to spectators provides for a situation at
once internal and diegetically liminal, and outlines a distinctive stra-
tegy of narrative engagement.
It is possible to carry this reflection further, to consider other filmic
levels which are marked as performative. Thus scenes in which Rohit’s
housekeeper, Shantaben (Sulbha Arya), thinks she is witnessing a
gay liaison between Rohit and Aman punctuate the film and act as a
running gag. Shantaben’s unsophisticated response is encoded as
comic misunderstanding of innocent male bonding. However, the
intimacy of the men, their willingness to discuss the beloved as a po-
tentially manipulable object suggests the traces of an older convention
of dosti, of male bonding that sidelined the beloved. I say trace because
this does not carry the weight of films such as Namak Haraam (Trai-
tor; Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1973) or Qurbani (Sacrifice; Feroz Khan,
1980). Rather, it remains ‘light’ and yet thereby adds to the image
of Khan as adaptable, his flexibility now extending into the realm of
androgynous attraction. It is significant that the sequence acquir-
ed considerable off-screen play, with Shah Rukh and Saif Ali Khan
extending it in the Filmfare Awards ceremony,15 and gay lesbian groups
referencing it as part of an ongoing exploration of homo-erotic
15 See Shah Rukh Khan@ Filmfare on http://www.youtube.com for this scene,
consulted on 17 January 2008.
subtexts in Hindi cinema.16 But what I find particularly suggestive is
how such a malleable, performative personality charts a new con-
text which actively unsettles identity issues of various types, including
those of coherent fictional character, ethnic type, and sexual disposi-
tion. In a sense, the element of play and distance observed by ethno-
graphers of audience reception may not be as contrary to on-screen
narration as we might at first glance believe. Perhaps the screen itself
captures the mutability and multiplicity of identities and dispositions
to identity that is observable in the audiences that it addresses. 17
Whether such formal elements of manoeuvrability and play tip over
into knowingly ironic modes of self-presentation in the films is an-
other matter. Rather, we return here to those particular tropes of the
melodramatic mode that are at once archaic and strangely contempo-
rary in their articulation. The histrionics of the Shah Rukh Khan
persona is both reminiscent of an older melodramatic emphasis on a
spectrum of coded gestures and facial expressions, and wilfully exces-
sive of these. As a result, a question mark is placed over how we are be-
ing asked to respond to the performance, especially when the persona
alternates his ‘act’ between the registers of heightened emotion and
those of the playful tease. What is particularly intriguing here is that
the ambivalences of this performance do not go against an overall
emotional engagement, at least when the narration successfully enga-
ges us through the pathos arising from misunderstandings and
misperceptions. Here, despite the fluidity of performative and expres-
sive drives in this cinema, it is suggestive that the old diptych between
melodrama and realism continues to exercise a hold in contemporary
global cultures. The pathos of realistically evoked situations continues
to engage audience empathy, especially for the women characters of
DDLJ and KHNH.
16 See the website, ‘Queering Bollywood’, http://media.opencultures.net/queer/,
consulted 20 January 2008; and the work of Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Queering Bolly-
wood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema’, in Andrew Grossman, ed.,
Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, Binghamton, The Haworth Press, 2000,
283–98.
17 Raminder Kaur observes that young professional filmgoers in the United
Kingdom do not take the over-the-top melodrama of ‘Bollywood’ movies ‘straight’,

and perhaps Shah Rukh Khan’s characteristic performances mirror exactly this play-
ful disposition and response. Raminder Kaur, ‘Cruising on the Vilayati Bandwagon:
Diasporic Representations and Reception of Popular Indian Movies’, in Kaur and
Sinha, eds, Bollyworld.
2. Narrative Form in the

Contemporary Epoch—II: The Emergence
of Genre Cinema
I have dwelt on the high-end family movie associated with Bollywood
so far, but the contemporary industry is marked by substantial dif-
ferentiation. Rajadhyaksha in fact suggests that a large number of films
were never ever intended to fit the ‘Bollywood’ label. By this he implies
a film’s ability to address the family and cultivate ‘family values’; to
inculcate a certain civil discipline; and, perhaps most important of all,
that it provide a platform, launching pad, window and mise-en-scène
for a wider commodity universe. The validity of the first criterion, that
Bollywood addresses the family, appears confirmed by the emergence
of a counter-rhetoric in a sector of the industry. Thus figures such as
Ram Gopal Varma insist that they have nothing to do with sentimen-
tal movies produced by people such as Karan Johar.18 And arguab-
ly, Varma has consciously circumvented conventional family films
from the beginning of his career, starting with films such as Shiva (Ram
Gopal Varma, 1989) and moving onto gangster movies and the new
genre films associated with his production company The Factory. The
families in gangster films such as Satya (Ram Gopal Varma, 1998) or
Company (Ram Gopal Varma, 2002) have accommodated themselves
to the world of crime and the possibility of their bread earners’ anni-
hilation; and in others, young people, couples on the edge, loners, out-
siders, and single women assume centrestage.
Varma’s productions have since their inception also been strongly
associated with narrativizing city experience, not only in his gangster
movies such as Shiva, Satya, Company and D (Vishram Sawant, 2005,
produced by Ram Gopal Varma), but also in women-centred narrat-
ives. These traverse a variety of genres, from the popular format of Ran-
geela (Colour My World; Ram Gopal Varma, 1995), through to the
more focused and streamlined thriller Ek Hasina Thi (There Was a
18 Recently, Ram Gopal Varma created a farcical flutter by announcing he was
looking forward to KANK because he loved horror films. Karan takes a deep breath.
‘I’ll speak on this for the last time and then move on. In my opinion Ram Gopal Varma
is one of the finest filmmakers of our country. His Satya, Company, and Sarkar make
a trilogy of terrific gangster films. When he has so much work on hand I wonder why
he keeps obsessing with what I do! I know he doesn’t respect my work. But could he
please keep quiet about what I do.’ From Subhash K. Ghai, ‘I will not marry: Karan
Johar’, http://123india.santabanta.com/cinema, consulted on 18 January 2008.
Pretty Woman; Sriram Raghavan, 2004), and the horror movie Bhoot
(Ghost; Ram Gopal Varma, 2003). In fact, the particular transforma-
tion of film form is well indexed by juxtaposing Rangeela on the one
hand, and Bhoot and Ek Hasina Thi on the other.
Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995)

Rangeela could be considered part of the older popular format. The
film is defined by a number of song-and-dance sequences, tends to be
‘loud’ in its characterization, and is digressive, highlighting performative
and dialogue-driven encounters. Its story revolves around two charac-
ters, Mili (Urmila Matondkar), a hard-working film extra, and Munna
(Aamir Khan), a streetwise conman or tapori involved in black mar-
ket activity, including the sale of cinema tickets. Mili and Munna grew
up together, and it is only when Nimmi comes to the attention of a
major male star, Kamal (Jackie Shroff), and makes it in the movies,
that Munna comes to realize he is in danger of losing her and that he
loves her. Aamir Khan communicates energy and playfulness in this
and other tapori roles such as Ghulam (Slave; Vikram Bhatt), elaborat-
ing his repertoire from the sophisticated urbanite to the city’s ‘lumpen’
denizens. The point of the performance is the broad caricatural strokes
and a certain vulgar jouissance in the use of costumes, crotch-clutch-
ing dance moves and a cock-of-the-walk confidence. Mili, on the other
hand, works with a more plausible range of realistic effects to evoke
a struggling lower-middle-class character, and conjures up a sense of
ordinary, hard-working life, as in a scene showing her involved in
sweaty physical exercise on an isolated stretch of Bombay beach. She
could obviously try various ways of improving her situation and
achieving acknowledgement, but the film introduces the possibilities
of self-reflexivity by making her a film extra with ambitions to succeed
as an actor.
This self-reflexive ambition is announced at the outset of the film.
The ordinary and everyday rhythm of the city is both gestured to and
worked over in the inventive opening credit and first sequence of the
film. City sounds—cars, motorbikes, film music amplified by public
speakers—provide the soundscape for the titles, which also capture the
history of the Bombay cinema through snaps of iconic stars. At the
conclusion of the credits, what we have seen and heard is retrospect-
ively situated as emerging from the street of the film’s narrative world:
a young woman steps away from a bioscope, a peep show mechanism
of archaic vintage, which in turn accounts for the slide show of star
images we have just witnessed. (This also initiates the narrative the-
matic of actor/extra, which, unusually, is quite carefully carried on in
the body of the song sequence.) The young woman is Mili, and we
move with her through the syncopated, stop-start, abrupt tonal shifts
of the song ‘Rangeela Re’. Different ‘types’ compose the scene, some
quite recognizable as part of everyday urban life, such as the uniformed
office worker in pants, white shirt and tie, workers at a construction
site, and young men and women in casuals. But as the song builds we
have a series of interesting cut-aways and new types of body forma-
tion. These include militarized units, women in tartan carousing in a
scene meant to evoke a Scottish countryside perhaps, and an assembly
of taekwondo or judo practitioners. All of these constitute shifting
components of the massified ornament. There is no irony in any of
this, and if there is a consistent theme, it is the premium being placed
on physical fitness, crucial to Nimmi’s job as extra but also her sense
of self. She is the lead dancer in all these formations, and is arraigned
in a series of large-scale, but thinly populated spaces, for example a
large warehouse, somewhat denuded streets, and perhaps most strik-
ing of all, an empty railway platform. Here Mili is placed at the fore-
front of a group of girls positioned on railway tracks, their hand move-
ment suggesting an assembly line. The ‘Let’s dance!’ refrain of the song
is here punctuated by a reprise/reply to the original star/spectator-fan
relationship signposted by the slide show, with Mili imploring that
her name acquire fame, that she not be consigned to anonymity.19 Here
and elsewhere the lyrics function in counterpoint to the lightness of
Urmila Matondkar’s presence.
The female protagonist engages a cityscape which seems open and
available to her, though the incursion of a scarred street tough into
the gallery of types causes the free-flowing girl to momentarily flinch.
Urmila’s pixie-like looks suggests a gamine who presents herself unself-
consciously in a wardrobe of tight fitting clothes. The childlike star
appears natural representative, didi or fond elder sister, to a gaggle of
kids and playfully orchestrates them to take on a pile of commandos
who accommodatingly back down and slither away. Characteristic
19
‘Itne chehron mein apne chehre ke pehchaan oh ho pehchaan oh ho, Bade bade
naamon mein apna bhi naamonishan oh ho pehchaan oh ho.’
fantasy inversions of entertainment formats pace Dyer facilitate the
upstaging of military logistics and state form by a regime of play. Spec-
tators attuned to the South Asian regional tussles of the 1990s, to cul-
minate in 1998 with India’s explosion of a nuclear device and followed
swiftly thereafter by Pakistan’s riposte, might be quite relieved to see
the dispersal of military force within the popular assemblage. Topical
and prescient too is another articulation of childhood, presented as a
condition targeted not by parents or teachers or other disciplinary
entities but by the market. A child performs in rap style, complaining
of his being assailed by multiple advertisers and competing brand
names, mentioning Horlicks, Complan, Cadbury, and Amul by name.
Varma has distanced himself now from the film, despite the fact
that it was a great success at the time. Presumably this is due to the
fact that the film looks a little dated because it is so much part of the
older song dance format, less streamlined in its rhythm, a little choppy
in its pacing and cutting of shots. However, it is an index of the rapid
changes of the contemporary period that the film can at once feel dated
and, at the same time, quite novel, in that its collage of images addres-
ses so many of the impulses that define the present. These include
female professional mobility; intimations of the city as a space of flows
and transformative energies; playful invocations of militarized cul-
tures and their contest; and, through the segments involving child per-
formers, a sense of the looming presence of the market, commodity
elaboration and, as the child says, the tension arising from ‘choice’. It
is even transitional from the point of view of the city of Bombay. Thus
it was shot in the Central Business District of Belapur, part of the Navi
or New Mumbai, which was designed to take off some of the weight
of business and government transactions in the main city. The parti-
cular empty look to the city scenes that I have remarked upon is indi-
cative of this transitional moment in the life of the city, as a not yet
occupied city space provides the stage for the figuration of new ener-
gies and vistas in the cinematic imagination of the city.
I have spent some time going over this opening to indicate the
contrast it offers to Varma’s later, technically accomplished and narrat-
ively streamlined work. This too is extremely recent, and arises from
work undertaken under the rubric of the Factory, the company Varma
set up to generate new genres and deploy new talent. Perhaps for the
first time in the Bombay film industry this new genre production ap-
pears strongly oriented to reproducing a Hollywood standard in terms
of narrative integration, character-driven, point of view story-telling,
and even, occasionally, the elimination of the ‘distractive’ features of
song, dance and comedy sequences. However, one should also note
that its reference point is not only the Hollywood film. David Desser,
for example, has emphasized that South East and East Asian horror
films have been an important resource for contemporary Bombay
genres.20 What is suggestive here is not merely the impacting of novel
global configurations on the local cinema, but the ways in which such
models are crucially related to a reflection on the very conditions of
their emergence. High-end genre production is critically related to the
development of the new urban vistas, the mall, the multiplex, and new
lifestyle cultures that are burgeoning forth in sectors of Indian cities.
They are niche-oriented, especially seeking to capture teenagers and
young professionals as audience. Rather than being domestically ori-
ented in a conventional sense, as in repeating the earlier format of the
cinema as an omnibus attraction, they often consciously steer clear of
such a model. Ironically, one could argue that the Bollywood family
movie hones closer to the traditional format, not only in terms of its
emphasis on morality and family values, but also in continuing to offer
attractions such as comedy sequences along with their continued in-
vestment in elaborate song-and-dance scenes. As I have suggested,
though it keeps to the overall parameters of the melodramatic mode,
even the ‘Bollywood’ family movie has exhibited a certain dynamic.
Bhoot (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003)

Two films from the Factory indicate the shift in form. Both Bhoot
(2003) and Ek Hasina Thi (2004) feature Urmila Matondkar, the hero-
ine of Rangeela. Both, however, work with a very definite sense of the
modernized, mediatized, and consumer-driven city. In Bhoot Vishal
(Ajay Devgan) takes a condo in a high rise Bombay apartment block.
Our first view on his wife, Swati (Urmila Matondkar), takes place at
the very moment that she is looking upwards, at the extending vertical
vista provided by the high-rise. (Fig. 66, p. 388.)
Clear orientation of vision, and of the narrative field, becomes cru-
cial here, quite in contrast to the dispersed, multi-sited engagements
20
‘Globalization Across Asia’, paper presented at ‘Globalism and Film History: A
Conference’, Insitute of Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2006.
Fig. 66: Bhoot, Ram Gopal Varma, 2003, Vertical Engagement.
the heroine of Rangeela has towards her city. As the film proceeds we
will observe that the spatial frame introduced by the high rise consti-
tutes a form of separation from the city and even a mode of entrap-
ment. The couple’s entry into the high-rise requires the negotiation
of a surly guard, akin to some kind of lumpenized boundary entity.
The modernist abstraction of the flat, defined by clean lines, split-level
flooring, and an expansive view, meets with Swati’s approval, but the
idyll of the yuppie couple is swiftly infiltrated. An eerie, off-balance
maid, Kamla Bai (Seema Biswas), arrives, seeking employment. None
of this seems to unsettle the couple, and later, as they make love in the
stairwell, we experience a rhythm of discontinuous perception. As
the light from the TV screen reflects off the lovers’ bodies, shifts in
time are relayed to us by a montage of abrupt sound transitions in the
television news programme. Having separated themselves from the
world in the apparent security of the highrise, the world is now
available in televised format. The initial sense of foreboding is aug-
mented by unmotivated camera placements characteristic of horror
films. Finally, we are given narrative ‘pay-off ’ when the camera turns
from Swati, making her way up the stairs after a drink of water, to catch
the image of an apparently malevolent female spirit who looks at her
receding figure.
The abstraction of the couple from the city sets the terms for a
narrative involution. If the mid 1990s Rangeela presented a city and
a woman character on the cusp of new forms of experience and modes
of engagement, these new films capture a substantially altered vista and
subjectivity. The narrative carries us away from the city into an appa-
rently desirable isolation. But this freestanding vector of experience
has already developed a history, one of previous occupants, their vio-
lent deaths and traumatic spirit activity. The ‘return of the repressed’
scenario is suggestive, as if addressing the perils of the urban form so
rapidly re-fashioned in the last decade, and subjecting it to a narrative
probing and a disinterring of buried histories. Varma’s film seems to
participate in a particular circuit of horror films here, originating in
Japan, as in films such as Dark Water (Hideo Nakata 2001) and reso-
nating with them rather than their Hollywood versions (whatever the
source of his inspiration). The resonance lies specifically in this itine-
rary of dying cities or new cities that are already shrouded in death and
a history of violence.
Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003)

This was not just a one-off effort, and was carried in a different direc-
tion in Ek Hasina Thi (EHT), directed by Sriram Raghavan for Varma
productions and the Factory. If Bhoot was centred on the high-rise
condominium, then Ek Hasina Thi takes us in the direction of the
‘bhk’, the bedroom-hall-kitchen dwelling associated with young single
professionals. Contra the collage effects of Rangeela, EHT’s city has a
realist veneer, if one cleaned up and shot through with a certain ideal-
ized rendering of modernized office, market, and residential dwell-
ings. Its protagonist, Sarika Vartak (Matondkar), is a modest employee
in a travel agency, whose everyday life is composed of travelling to work
by an autorickshaw, shopping in grocery stores retailing the modern-
ized end of consumer choices, and returning in the evening to her tiny
but well managed bhk. (Figs 67–69, pp. 390–1.)
Sarika’s parents are a lower middle class couple who live in a smal-
ler town, and she navigates the normal irritants of single living for a
woman, especially intrusive male neighbours. The film operates a
fairly rigorous narrative economy, with no performance sequences
distracting our attention from the story of how the girl’s innocent
desire for the attractions of a dashing Karan Rathore (Saif Ali Khan)
leads to her manipulation, framing, and incarceration. This dark story
converts into one of a character discovering unknown resources to
Fig. 67
Fig. 68
Fig. 69
Figs 67, 68, 69: Ek Hasina Thi, Sriram Raghavan, 2004, Sarika’s Life.
turn the tables on her oppressor. However, the new lifestyle is realis-
tically evoked and suggests a more adventurous, sexually curious en-
gagement with the city by the film’s woman protagonist. Romance,
noir and female revenge stories converge in a narrative amalgam which,
novel as it is for Indian film circumstances, may appear somewhat
predictable to Euro-American audiences used to melodramas of plot
reversal of the Sydney Sheldon type and elements of the ‘erotic thril-
ler’.21 For this reason, this new genre cinema may be generating a
very specific and contextual engagement with new urban condi-
tions in Indian metropolises. Ironically enough, in films such as Bhoot
and EHT, this cinema reflects in its diegetic space the very conditions
that have produced it: the cleaning up of residential areas and the
gene ration of new consumer experiences, of which the mall-multi-
plex is a prime example. But the reflection hardly comforts the newly
21
Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 2005, for a diagnosis of a current in present-day cinema
which is strongly related to direct-to-home broadcasting and the DVD market.
mobilized spectator of these films, generating an uncanny sense of
the layered histories, and the danger, which surround these new forms.
In terms of melodramatic forms, while the diaspora family movie
retains many of the overt features of melodramatic narrative structures
and melodramatic publicness, I have suggested that a new type of play
and performativity, represented in the narrative functions and perfor-
mance style of actors like Shah Rukh Khan articulates these con-
ventions in novel ways. The spectator too is offered a more complex,
liminal or external position to the story world’s affective dimensions,
rendering not only emotional but also sexual dispositions ambiguous,
and thereby problematizing a clear identity-driven engagement. Along
with this position of play, s/he is simultaneously offered the reassuring
and conventional emotional orientations normally available through
the love story and the story of the family. I have suggested that such a
reconfiguration allows for a new sense of urbane mobility in the move-
ment of this cinema amongst audiences both at ‘home’ and in the cine-
ma’s global circuits. The new genre cinema also offers a particular spin
on melodramatic modes. While abiding by many of the conventions
of Hollywood genre cinema, it also charts an interesting pathway in the
renegotiation of public and private parameters so crucial to the struc-
tures of melodrama. Thus, we notice the way the household is proble-
matized by the new genre cinema, refusing any sense of autonomy or
security from the turbulence of the social sphere, from previous hist-
ories which underlie the household and, in the case of the Tamil films
we have looked at, from the sphere of politics and the nation-state
form. Any proper separation then seems subject to (generic) instabil-
ity, and yet resolution lies neither in a public redressal of wrong,
as would have been the case in the cinema of the 1950s, nor in inter-
nal familial resolution. In fact, whatever the solution, whether effected
through the individual or the couple or some entirely different and
supernatural agency, the law is inevitably shown to be inadequate to
the task. The symbolic structures of melodrama’s vertical axis are refer-
red to only to be denied any significance.
Beyond or Within Bollywood?

At this point, it is tempting to argue that the high-end family film, with
its emphasis on production values, fashion design, marketing and ad-
vertising campaigns, and its generation of virtual diegetic spaces—
varying between a no-place space of the metropolitan universal, or
the bombastically scaled interiors of the traditional household—is
part of what Rajadhyaksha refers to as the anti-cinematic dimensions
of contemporary Bollywood as commodity constellation. Its primary
function is to provide a launching pad, mise-en-scène and seductive
allure to mobilize the spectator into a wider spectrum of consumer
desire. Above all, this cinema is subject to corporate investment, regu-
lation and diversified investment profiles in an entirely novel way.
But where does that place the new genre cinema? I believe we should
problematize the opposition produced within industrial discourse.
Here we will observe that Varma’s Factory, the diaspora film’s self-pro-
claimed other, is shot through with Bollywood corporate and com-
modity form. In 2003, the Factory struck an extensive deal with Sahara
Manoranjan, a major corporate firm, to produce ten films under con-
tract.22 The film company’s budget, product plans, technical hiring
and casting were organized by the firm K Sara Sara, originally started
by non-resident Indians based in Hong Kong and New York. As Varma
put it at the time: ‘These NRIs are interested in putting money in idea-
based film projects. Projects where every component, including the
22
From the promotional introduction to the Sahara One website: ‘The Indian
Movie Industry is on the threshold of a revolution with a major shift in the business
model—financing, production, distribution and audiences to corporates [sic]. Sahara
One Motion Pictures . . . is in the business of producing, marketing and distributing
feature films. We have produced 35 films in various genres—comedy, action, thriller,
romance, animation, etc. since inception in 2004. Award winning directors like
Madhur Bandharkar, Shyam Benegal, Nagesh Kukunoor and commercially acclaimed
directors like Ram Gopal Varma, Boney Kapoor, Priyadarshan, Anees Bazmi, Neeraj
Vohra has [sic] been on our panel. The Company has won 5 National Awards—The
Prestigious recognition in Indian Cinema for Shyam Benegal’s Bose—The Forgotten
Hero and Madhur Bandharkar’s Page 3.’ See http://www.sahara-one.com/somp.htm,
consulted on 25 October 2007. This blurb captures a mix of the motives in current
industry-speak, including corporate culture, but also a gesture to the world of the arts,
still distinguished from that of commerce. Pritish Nandy Communications, which has
become known for Bombay English films, also supported those associated with the
art cinema world such as Sudhir Mishra in Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi and Chameli.
Here too the possibility of generating artistic excellence within a commercial model
is emphasized in the company’s promotional discourse: ‘Even though it functions
clearly in the domain of commercial cinema, its films have won some of the highest
awards in the world. It is also the first production house to make global coproductions
and use international crew to make Indian films.’ http://www. pritishnandycom.com/
pnc-moviezone.html, consulted on 25 October 2007.
budget and cast, is determined by the plot rather than the other way
around. These three NRIs—from Hong Kong and New York—func-
tion according to the same corporate discipline that I believe in. So we
are having a new love affair with films.’23
K Sara Sara in turn had a deal with Cinemaya Media to facilitate
distribution of Factory films in the United States. Varma’s EHT was
co-financed by 20th Century Fox.24 And, as for entanglement with
product placement and the wider commodity imagination, Varma’s
Road prominently featured a Tata Safari as part of a promotional deal
with the automobile company in its bid to cultivate public interest
in the new sports utility vehicle (SUV).25 Priya Village Roadshow, the
major player in the contemporary transformation of cinema spaces
into multiplex-cum-malls, also had an agreement with K Sara Sara and
Varma Productions to undertake distribution of Factory films for its
multiplex network.26 Clearly, in terms of industrial form, commodity
enterprise, and contemporary niche marketing the Varma output is as
much part of corporatization as any diaspora-oriented film. And,
23 Subhash K. Jha, ‘Ramu’s K Sera Sera’, http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/jan/
21news.htm. Varma and K Sera Sera parted ways in 2006. ‘I’ve parted ways with K
Sera Sera But I’m Not Bankrupt: Varma’, 26 August 2006: http://news.webindia123.
com/news/Articles/Entertainment/20060826/433276.html, consulted 17 January
2008.
24 This was scheduled to be the first of a three-part deal, but was finally the only
film made due to Fox’s differences with Varma. For an account of Hollywood
collaborations with Bombay film, see ‘A Passage to India: Par Curries Favour Bolly-
wood’, Variety website, 22 March 2006, http://www.variety.com/article/
VR1117940214.html?categoryid=13&cs=1, consulted 20 December 2007.
25
The product placement deal also facilitated ‘cross promotional publicity’, giving
Varma access to commodity-advertising slots and Tata association with the glam-
our of the cinema world. ‘Tata Engineering takes the Road Less Travelled’, Business
Standard, 21 September 2002, featured on the Indica/Tata Motors website, http://
www.indica.co.za/tata_motors/media/20020921.htm, consulted 18 January 2008.
26
‘Delhi-based Priya Village Roadshow (PVR) Pictures has entered into a joint
venture with Verma Corporation Ltd and K Sera Sera’s production company, Factory . . .
The new venture, called PVR / Factory, will have exclusive distribution rights in Delhi,
Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal for the upcoming films of Factory. Factory will produce
and release nine movies in the next 18 months. The new company will also distri-
bute films of other producers as well. The three companies will have a profit-sharing
relationship between them on the distribution of a list of films such as Ab Tak Chappan,
Murder at 2 o’clock, Vishnu Prasad Gayab Ho Gaya, Darna Zaroori Hai, James, Vastu
Shastra, Naach, Time Machine and D.’ http://www.domain-b.com/marketing/general/
2004/20040227_marketing_review.html, Marketing Review 27 February 2004,
consulted on 25 October 2007.
while consciously marketing a different type of product from the out-
put of a Karan Johar or Aditya Chopra, his films aim to crossover into
foreign theatrical distribution as well. Here, the self-proclaimed de-
sign is to show that Indian films have greater variety than what has been
on offer so far, even while they maintain a distinctive worldview and
storytelling style.
The irony is that financiers and corporate groups with shadowy
histories have undertaken many of the crucial moves here.27 The por-
ousness between corporate firms, apparently defined by transparent
financial protocols and audit, and a world of illicit deals suggest the
complications concealed by contemporary discourses of financial
probity and industrial regularity. This rather more complicated pic-
ture suggests how practices opposed at the level of product output and
public self-presentation may in fact overlap at the level of corporate
practice, including perhaps the shadowy other side of corporate prob-
ity. Further, research into the contemporary industry indicates that
many production practices have not altered, including the notional
function of a finished script.28 However, there are other points at
which the distinctions made by industrial players also signal signi-
ficant changes. Here, Varma’s enterprise appears to have opened up a
different network of industrial access than those controlled by film-
making dynasties, their families, business partners, hangers-on and
protégés. The audaciously named Factory appears to fly in the face of
the cultural prestige and singularity of dynastic capital. Gesturing in
its name to a high turnover of product and serial manufacture, as
well as a relentless will to product differentiation, the Factory has also
27
Thus Sahara India Limited, a corporate firm which has been crucial to these
recent developments, and a major financial player and mediator in the political world,
as for example via its role in the development council of Uttar Pradesh (India’s most
populous state with the highest representation of parliamentary seats), had had an
earlier controversial history in public chit funds, popular investment forms which
were used to finance large ventures. Bharat Shah, the diamond merchant who financed
a number of major Hindi film successes at the cusp of the millennium, was arrested
for his links with the underworld, and is still under investigation. In another context,
T Series, the major corporate firm of the contemporary music industry, owed much
of its success to an earlier history of illicitly manufacturing and distributing music
cassettes.
28
This refers to ongoing work conducted by Ankur Khanna for the Sarai pro-
gramme, in interviews with new industry practitioners such as scriptwriter/director
Jaideep Sahni. See also Khanna, ‘The Censor Script Writer’, in ‘Complicating the
City’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 264–8.
been the harbinger of a sense of possibility for new entrants in the
industry.
In turn we may observe how a systematic elaboration of financial
strategies and revenue streams cut across different types of film-mak-
ing practice. While corporate groups such as UTV and Pritish Nandy
Communications have supported offbeat ventures and the new Eng-
lish language Bombay cinema, small players too have initiated film
projects on a mix of personal finance, bank loans, state film finance,
and independent financiers. These include film institute graduates,
modest theatre professionals who bring with them a new investment
in scripts and performance, as well as media professionals of differ-
ent types. As with the high-end players, a crucial exhibition site is
the multiplex: for them, not because of a context in which expensive
tickets are part of an escalating consumer imaginary, but because of
niche marketing, which may capture audiences which the rundown
cinemas with poor maintenance, low financial resources and reliant on
cheap rentals and reruns are unable to provide.29 Further, the question
of an elaborate regime of rights provides the basis for multiple reve-
nue streams, involving music, DVD, satellite premiere and broadcast
rights, and video-on-demand. Here, the foreign market is important
to film-makers across the board. While the proliferation of box office
evaluations in websites and trade papers needs to be treated with great
caution, we will notice much of the genre cinema I have referred to get-
ting foreign distribution. While their performance might be modest
in comparison to the spectacular hits such as Hum Aapke Ke Hain
Kaun, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, or
Kabhit Alvida Na Kehna, these returns matter given the differential
in ticket costs and exchange rates. Further, the DVD and video-on-
demand side of the market is not estimated in these accounts. As early
as 2003, the trade magazine Screen noted the conflict between produc-
ers and distributors over the timing of the video release of a film. This
obviously related to the losses producers would sustain if the sale of
video rights, especially in foreign markets, was stalled to extend thea-
trical runs. The paper reported that this was also crucial for small- and
29
This argument draws on work in progress by Debashree Mukherjee, a research
associate with the Sarai programme who has conducted extensive fieldwork and parti-
cipant observation in tracking a small budget independent film venture from
conception through finance and shooting. See, for example, her entry in ‘Complicat-
ing the City’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 259–60, 261–2.
medium-budget films.30 The moves of key players such as Eros Inter-
national in this sphere have involved tie-ups with significant video-on-
demand companies catering to markets in Hollywood and the Asia
Pacific region, and facilitated access to new audiences, even within the
diaspora. 31
The picture that emerges here is that the transformation of the in-
dustry has signalled a number of developments, of product dif-
ferentiation, varied forms of finance mobilization, the entry of new
directors with diverse professional backgrounds. This is rather more
complicated than the picture of a high consumer orientation at home
and abroad, and the subordination of the cinema to a spectrum of
culture industries. It suggests an elaboration rather than a stifling of
cinema as a cultural institution. In fact, we perhaps need to look to
the complex articulations of film in the media constellation to get a
sense of the true axis of contemporary conflicts. This lies in the area
of video formats which, since the early 1980s, have signalled a crisis
for the cinema industry, and a substantial change in the imagination
of cinematic publicness.
30 Screen, 23 May 2003.

31 http://www.erosplc.com/eros/news/ for details of deals with cable companies in
the USA and the UK, consulted 19 January 2008.
Conclusion and Afterword
1. The Cinematic Public—I: Melodrama
T
his collection of essays has sought to draw out a thread of argu-
mentation about the relationship of Indian cinema to the forms
of melodrama and the idea of publicness. In this concluding
section, I want to reprise some of these arguments, and also to essay a
brief exploration of what publicness after the digital moment means
for film as a mode of social and cultural investment and imagination.
To say that the cinema is public might sound like a redundancy,
for surely, in social, cultural and institutional terms, the cinema visibly
draws audiences into a public context for the purpose of viewing films.
However, that did not just happen, as if a particular medium and its
mode of use arrived, fully formed, at a certain moment in time. The
cinema’s emergence was predicated on several moments and transfor-
mations, in the itinerary set by a history of technologies, of contexts
for the presentation of images, sounds, and performances, and of view-
ing protocols.1 The cinema as we know it also came about through
legislative and administrative frameworks relating to the manage-
ment of crowds in closed spaces, involving the handling of fire hazards,
dangers to health, and anxieties about how to shore up the moral well-
being of the public through censorship.2 While such a history is only
1
For example, Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, Early Cinema: Space/Frame/
Narrative, London, British Film Institute, 1990; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Louis Lumiere,
the Cinema’s First Virtualist’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, eds, Cinema
Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, Amsterdam, Amsterdam
University Press, 1998; Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer edited, The Silent Cinema
Reader, Part One, ‘Film Projection and Variety Shows’, London, Routledge, 2003. For
the Indian case, see the excellent work of Kaushik Bhaumik on early Bombay cinema,
‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry’.
2
For example, in the Indian case, Stephen Hughes, ‘Policing Silent Film Exhibition
in Colonial South India’, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.
being reconstructed—and enacted—now, I have chosen to look at cer-
tain features of this publicness as it came to characterize cinema’s
institutional frame, the nature of popular film form, cinematic modes
of address, and a discourse of public significance. The latter was, from
early on in the career of post-Independence cinema, a critical discourse
produced by public opinion makers, community leaders, and those
who would wax eloquent at the slightest opportunity on the baleful ef-
fects of cinema on Indian youth.
While suspicion of the cinema’s bad influence was more generally
observable in cultures across the world, there were specific features to
the Indian and colonial context, as, for example, the colonial govern-
ment’s anxieties about the effects of western films on white race autho-
rity.3 Overall, such anxiety continued after Independence, if now re-
framed by newly defined national imperatives, as in the cultivation of
‘national’ traditions, cultural heritages, and social customs in ways
which did not ape Western modernity.4 Here, as before, the untutored
mass public, unable to distinguish screen reality from social reality in
the opinion of elite reformers, were liable to fall into moral turpitude
if screen contents were not subject to careful monitoring.
The illegitimacy of the cinema public was critical to the cultural and
regulatory policies of a succession of governments, and signified a pub-
lic presence and influence beyond acceptable or desirable limits in
terms of social and cultural order. Of course, whatever the stridency of
discourses which assailed it for its cultural inferiority or inadequacy,
the cinema was part and parcel of life, especially in towns and cities.
The government recognized this popularity not only by regulating its
contents but by seeking to use it instrumentally, by making it compul-
sory to show state-produced newsreels and documentary films. Fur-
ther, the government sought to reshape cinema contents by indicat-
ing legitimate directions for filmmakers through national awards and
3
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and
India, Durham, Duke University Press, 2006; Poonam Arora, ‘“Imperilling the
Prestige of the White Woman”: Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British
India’, Visual Anthropology Review 11 (2), September 1995.
4
For the motivations structuring cultural policies and institutions after Independence,
see for example Aparna Dharwadkar, Theatres of Independence; Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post Colonial India;
Jyotindra Jain, ‘India’s Republic Day Parade’, in Jyotindra Jain, ed., India’s Popular
Culture: Iconic Space and Fluid Images, New Delhi, Marg Publications, 2008.
400 Conclusion and Afterword
certificates of merit and the waiving of entertainment tax for films
considered beneficial to the social and national good.5
In contrast to statist views, a generation of cultural studies scholar-
ship has been concerned to understand cinema as an ideological appa-
ratus that seeks to provide a coherent position to audiences caught
up in the dynamics of social and political transformation. Madhava
Prasad has made the most systematic attempt of this sort, generating
a number of important formulations about the ideological functions
of film narratives and of the institution of cinema. He has also argued,
if more implicitly, how such ideological formations could be destabil-
ized by new elements, as with certain works of the new ‘mass’ cinema
of the 1970s such as Deewar (1974). Such analysis challenges state and
art cinema critiques of the popular, and their assumption that the
mainstream commercial cinema made audiences culturally inferior
and uncritical. For the cinema is a powerful cultural institution that
mediates modernity for the socially complex audiences it gathers and
addresses.6 While Prasad’s is an ambitious formulation, a host of
less elaborate writings aim to show how the popular cinema works to
serve the interests of changing dominant interests and ideologies.
For example, in the recent past, critics have noted the way the cinema
privileges a high-caste Hindu nationalism, underwrites modern profes-
sional life and economic forms, and demonizes Muslims as a backward
and fanatical community that hinders India’s access to modern nation-
hood.7 Within the parameters of such ideological analysis, one could
argue that even the most sophisticated, such as Prasad’s, does not ad-
dress key dimensions of popular film form such as the pleasures of
comedy, role-play, and romantic dalliance, and the significance of
music, lyrics, and performance in song-and-dance sequences. Prasad
himself has contributed a crucial formulation about popular film’s
‘heterogeneous’ form, how it assembles independently manufactur-
ed elements such as songs, dances, stunts, and dialogues, and how
the popular cinema does not seek to integrate these on the basis of a
central narrative logic and narrative causality. However, despite this
5
See above, Introduction; and Madhava Prasad, ‘The State in/of the Cinema’, in
Chatterjee, ed., The Wages of Freedom.
6 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film. I have tried to suggest where resistance
or critique emerges in Prasad’s account of the cinema in my review of his book, Jour-
nal of the Moving Image 1, Jadavpur University, 2001, 117–27.
7
See the debates described in ch. 7 around Mani Rathnam’s Roja (1994).
important insight, his film analysis tends to follow a logic of narrative
integration, rather than explore the possibility that the cinema offers
a host of different and discontinuous modes of engagement and mean-
ing making.
What if we were to suspend, for a moment, this regime of state
policies, discourses, and practices? What if we were to suspend the pos-
sibilities of ideological functioning, where narrative endings, in parti-
cular, serve to tie up various loose strands, neutralize certain narrative
drives, and subordinate non-narrative energies? What if we were to
look at the experience of cinema from another point of view, from
within the imaginary, and discontinuous, worlds produced by it. This
was a world audiences were invited to enter, not only to view and to
hear, but to become an imaginary part, a critical reference point in the
unfolding of the represented world, its rhetorics, moral stances, its
romantic and erotic solicitations. While I have pointed to the range of
state policies, aesthetic stances, public discourses, and ideological ana-
lyses which positioned the cinema in distinctive ways, one of my
attempts in this collection has been to look at this structure of il-
legitimacy and/or ideological operation inside-out. That is, I have
sought to understand how various constitutive elements in discourses
on the cinema—state and nation-state, law, family, gender, tradition,
heritage, morality, reality—were reconvened and redeployed on the
imaginative ground provided by the cinema. I have done this by look-
ing at the cinema’s narrative structures and performance idioms, its
modes of staging and its orchestration of a complex and yet discontinu-
ous address to the cinematic public. To say this is not to sidestep the
significance of the cinema’s ‘outside’, but to suggest that it is relayed
through its own distinctive modes of engagement. It was the cinema’s
generation of a specific axis of knowledge, perceptual engagement, and
discontinuous, non-coherent attraction that set it apart from the dis-
courses produced by the state and civil society. Unlike the atmosphere
of suspicion and scorn generated by governmental and public elites,
and often responded to defensively and with anxiety by people from
the film industry, let us say that the cinema’s own imaginary was indif-
ferent to such a lofty regard. Further, in its very discontinuity of narrat-
ive discourses and performance idioms, the cinema put a brake on
any systematic, single-toned ideological exercise. In turn, I would even
hazard that publics who were otherwise professionally and politically
disposed to be critical of the cinema were themselves likely to respond
in a rather different way when removed from their official habitat,
whether governmental or aesthetic, and brought in front of the screen.
It is possible, of course, that I stretch this logic of difference, for
surely the cinema also reiterates, whether directly or allusively, many
of the public discourses that are the concern of the formal pub-
lic sphere and, indeed, of the ideological components of that sphere.
However, it is the form, sequencing, and disruption of the represent-
ation which is crucial here. Here, one of my concerns has been to
understand not only or specifically the popular heterogeneous form,
but how melodrama as a particular mode has altered or reframed it
and, in turn has offered a broad structuring logic to emplot the move-
ment of public discourse. Melodrama substantially orders (and displa-
ces or even sidesteps) the broader universe of public discourse through
a specific mise-en-scène, involving speech, bodily expression, décor,
and the building of a certain spatial and temporal ordering in its prod-
uction of meaning. However, there is nothing orderly about its forms
of narrative and performative relay. Here, I have laid stress on a certain
excess and even visceral attraction in the way melodrama often ab-
ruptly braids domestic and public spaces to complicate and unsettle
identity and disrupt the security (and oppression) of home, hearth,
and lineage. As I have argued in Chapter I, melodramatic film form is
distinguished by its manoeuvring of private and public levels. While
my overall concern has been with exploring melodrama as a public
fictional form, a domestic melodrama that elides representation of the
public realm was also available in Indian popular cinema. In my argu-
ment, these different forms of melodramatic engagement were not
nationally or culturally specific. Cinema at large inevitably draws up-
on specific and ‘local’ narrative, performance, and musical traditions,
but these do not inflect the methods of melodramatic form in the
direction, say, of ‘national’ melodrama.
There were, however, distinctions of film form between cinematic
cultures. In Indian cinema, frontality of presentation and directness of
address, with characters speaking directly into the camera, constituted
a distinct imaginary geometry of the cinema, and produced the idea
of audience as imaginary element of the fictional field (which is not the
same as the audience actually watching the movie!). Such ‘imaginary
direct address’ has been observable elsewhere, including the American
cinema. However, overall, Hollywood codes oriented spectators through
a different, broadly classical armature that privileged character-driven
narrative causality and an individuation of perspective. These differen-
ces should not be underestimated. It is suggestive that even when con-
temporary film cultures in India started approximating the Holly-
wood norm in terms of story-telling, older forms persisted or, perhaps
more accurately, were reinvented. Thus we observe the persistence of
song and dance, and of the symbolic economy of public engagement
that holds the story world together.
Melodrama’s manoeuvring amongst the intimate and the social
realm is relayed through a sensationalized, heightened form of narra-
tion. Its methods involve a dizzying density of plot shifts and reversals,
emotional peripeteia and a mode of address scaled up in presenta-
tion of body, gesture, and speech. In this sense, and reading back over
the materials assembled in this collection, we should stress a certain
architectonic logic to the melodramatic mode. Here, movement be-
tween different layers of the story world is not based on a consistent
logic, certainly not a linear-causal one, and these layers rest in unstable
equilibrium with each other. Cinematic movement brings out the
volatile relation of these different fields, and the production of new
ones within which an ideal form can be posited. Discordances of
character articulation derive from such layered patterns of difference
within the story world. As we have observed in a host of films, from
Awara through to Roja and Hey Ram!, characters are defined by dif-
ferent rhythms and iconographies of representation. In these films
characters such as Raghunath, Rishi Kumar, and Saket Ram do not so
much assume a different identity, as traverse different aesthetic and
political grounds for the production of identity.
Story-telling has to be able to manoeuvre amongst the discordances
of differentially structured story worlds. This is captured in the work
of Mani Rathnam, where the old melodrama centred on direct address
and a figuration of character personality scaled up in terms of gesture,
speech, and iconography, is intercalated in a textuality of the ordi-
nary and the everyday.8 Of course, everyday life is hardly ordinary in
a cinematic world whose shifting rural vistas and modernized urban
homes and office settings are pictured as ethnically ornate and socially
glamorous. In this sense, the image tracks are not intelligible simply in
terms of the personal/political, private/public registers characteristic
of melodramatic narrative. For they provide a heightened relay of the
8 See especially chs 6 and 7.
ordinary through and as the world of the commodity, thereby multi-
plying the forms of attraction mobilized to address audiences. In Mani
Rathnam’s melodramas this movement between lifestyle, romantic
narrative, and political engagement, appears driven both by social and
political ambitions. His films render the new romance narratives and
lifestyle ambitions as part of a contest with older feudal and clan ord-
ers (themselves remade as ethnically ornate), but then enframes their
conditions of possibility as ultimately dependent on securing an ade-
quate national-political form for the very survival of these newly con-
ceived lives.9 In chapter 11, I have suggested that even Hollywood
style genre films of recent years present privatized resolution as un-
viable. Films deploy intercessions of various sorts, ranging from the
state and other ethical public forms to suture the inabilities of a more
classically organized story-telling protocol centred on individualized
interactions.
To talk of film form and the congregation of audiences is a com-
plicated task, and requires us to travel amongst a number of different
and interconnected histories. While not all these can be understood
through the rubric of melodrama’s narrative manoeuvres and sensa-
tional logistics, I suspect the question of public address has a wider
purchase. As I have suggested in Part II, a stylized musical performat-
ive cinema has a long history that traverses a wide territorial arc, from
North Africa through the Middle East, India and on to South East
Asia. In this ‘arc’, music and lyrics, and the wide purchase of certain
narrative cultures built around the conventions of love forbidden by
clan or tribal differences, provided the attractions for audiences wide-
ly dispersed in terms of language and territorial location. We need
research of a multi-sited and transnational kind to classify these films,
and what their relationship to the melodramatic mode might be.
Melodrama’s presence in Indian cinema is hardly total. For example,
a recent survey by the business magazine Screen indicates that come-
dies were most popular with its readership, a tradition that goes back
a long way, to the work of Master Vinayak in the 1930s and 1940s,
through to Kishore Kumar in the 1950s and 1960s, to films with Dev
9 As Madhava Prasad has shown, there is a process of segmentation and enframing
involved here, whereby the romance narrative is preceded and comes to become a
subset of a larger political narrative of national conflict in Kashmir. Ideology of the
Hindi Film, Epilogue.
Anand such as Paying Guest, and down to contemporary comedies fea-
turing Govinda, Sanjay Dutt, and others.10 While these films have a
skeletal manichean narrative structure, to call them melodramas
would not be particularly illuminating. And melodrama also seems
inadequate to define the more general structures of popular cinema’s
heterogeneous form. I have pointed out how this works in the case of
films such as the devotional, Sant Tukaram, where narration and
character construction appear indifferent to exploring a main narrat-
ive momentum based on a singular objective such as, for example,
romance, the reconciliation of families, or the recognition of inno-
cence and virtue.
The tradition of the stunt film, going back to the 1920s, and ana-
lysed by Kaushik Bhaumik and Rosie Thomas,11 could, on the other
hand, be referred to as melodrama, if we follow common usage in des-
cribing the universally available action serial form of the 1910s and
1920s.12 As I have pointed out in chapter 1, I think it analytically use-
ful to address this cultural etymology separately from the one that
developed around the emotionally charged narrative forms more con-
ventionally addressed by melodrama criticism. This is because these
different modes configure sensation in distinct ways, the first oriented
to the thrills of kinesis, the second to sensations of emotional reversal,
and symbolically intractable narrative obstacles. These various distinc-
tions serve to underline that the study of melodrama does not cover
Indian film practices as a whole, though it does address a crucial di-
mension of it.
Large-scale melodramatic constructions of the type I have discussed
are also based on an epic conception of the cinema, involving the capa-
city to aggregate spectacular audiences, and exercise a powerful com-
mand over the imagination. Associated with the cinema palace of yore,
this function may have been displaced or, more complicatedly, distri-
buted into the media sphere. As I have shown, the cinema itself has
become substantially differentiated, not only in terms of exhibition
10 Screen, October 2008.

11
Bhaumik, ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry’; Thomas, ‘Not Quite
[Pearl] White’: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts’, in Kaur and Sinha, eds,
Bollyworld, 35–69; and Thomas, ‘Miss Frontier Mail’, Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers,
294–308.
12
For the American case, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensa-
tional Cinema and Its Contexts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001.
site but in terms of the media forms through which it is delivered to
audiences. Crucial here is the transformation wrought by the emer-
gence of digitized video as a critical format for the distribution, deli-
very, and consumption of film content. In the final section of this
book, I now want to leave its main thematic focuses behind to look at
the nature of film as a public form after the advent of recent changes.
2. The Cinematic Public—II: Cinema and

Film After the Proliferation of
Copy Culture
Global circuits of new media networks refract the nature of film
experience today. These include pirate economies which, despite the
development of substantial legislation, legal apparatuses and policing
to protect intellectual property right, continue to flourish and are a
crucial component of everyday film consumption. They rest alongside
the differentiated circuits of the cinema, ranging from the continued
presence of degraded cinema sites for reruns in plebeian neighbour-
hoods, and the formation of a mall-multiplex culture. This new phe-
nomenon seeks to braid the spectator into a network of branded con-
umer culture characteristic of the contemporary, multinational-driven
constellation of the commodity world. However, as we have observed
in chapter 11, in the Indian context it also offered avenues for the
exhibition of a much more differentiated range of output and thereby
a new lease of life for cinema as a public form. The pirate circuit, ac-
cessible in neighbourhood markets, appears, at first glance, to be in
direct competition with the mall-multiplex, as along with media hard-
ware and software, customers can buy electronic goods, clothing,
footwear, and other merchandise which closely follow the movements
in fashion and design generated in the branded economy. However, is
the parallel video circuit in competition with cinema, and does it pose
the cinema its gravest challenge, as the film industry claims? What
theoretical problems does this pirate economy pose for a socially and
politically embedded theory and history of the cinema, and of cinema
publics?
The pirate economy provides an alternative picture of globalization
from that provided by the spectacular end of the economy. Inhabit-
ing an overlapping imaginary and circuit of desire, it constructs a dis-
tinct sphere, defined by access to copies of goods, images, and sounds.
Further, it emphasizes not only access to content, but to the very tech-
nologies of listening and viewing, as in the case of cheap cassette,
cd and vcd players, the everyday presence of the cable operator, and
soft-wares for copying and downloading film and music content.
Along with the broader availability of technologies of communication
in neighbourhood call offices and internet cafes, and the prolifera-
tion of mobile telephones in popular work cultures, there is a strong
sense here of unprecedented technological presence in the everyday life
of ordinary consumers.
We are dealing here with a culture of the copy which is distinctive
from earlier histories of the copy in regimes of mechanical reproduc-
tion. Walter Benjamin was dealing with a rather different constellation
than the one we are confronted with. Benjamin looked to the copy as
disrupting the aura and sacred status of the authentic and irreproducible
image, whether that engendered through ritual forms or cultures of
art, and he saw this shift facilitating possibilities of access that would
transform political and social conditions, and bring the mass as sub-
ject into history.13 Here, the mechanically reproducible object, such as
film, is itself subject to a second-order copy that moves it from physical
into immaterial object, cheap both in terms of copying costs but also
in terms of substituting digitized delivery for the infrastructurally ela-
borate and expensive transportation of the film print.
The public congregational dimensions of the cinema have been
displaced in this enactment, as have viewing circumstances that invite
immersion in the screen. This circuit of film viewing takes place at
home or in the slum settlement, is subject to the distractions of domes-
tic circumstances and ambient noise, and the interruptions of adver-
tising that are more generally the condition of the domestic apparatus
of television. While the possibilities of access were initially bought at
the cost of the degradation of, to use a neologism, the original copy,
much higher quality pirated copies are now commonly available.14
13 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
Illuminations, translated by H. Zohn, ed. Hanna Arendt, New York, Shocken, 1969.
14
Sarai research into the culture of the copy, its technologies, modes of circulation
and its involvement in contests over intellectual property has laid out this new terrain
of research. For example, the following work, all from media researchers@sarai,
‘Complicating the City’, in Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts: Bhagwati Prasad, ‘Culture of
the Copy: Publics and Music’, [Commons-Law list] 271–3; Khadeeja Arif, ‘Pop In’,
273–4, for costs of copying, and changes in the organization of copy cultures. For
Nevertheless, the film copy, circulating outside the standard formats
of public congregation presents us with a somewhat ambiguous ver-
sion for the contemporary of Benjamin’s reflections on the copy. It
would be problematic to consider such transformations in the sphere
of media access as ‘resistance’. However, in its very existence as tech-
nology and circuit for the movement and consumption of cheap
commodities, the digital video exposes the limits, problems, and fears
of the dominant institutional format and its modes of profit-making.
And it also engenders ways of rethinking the functions and possibili-
ties of new technologies of sound and image.
I offer some very tentative suggestions about these here, deriving
from the relationship of old and new forms of film experience to the
culture of the copy. Earlier histories of global connections in popular
culture have signposted the importance of the version and the copy in
the attractions offered by cinema. Dubbed cinema and local film ver-
sions suggest something of the porosity facilitated by the movement of
the cinema, and how it unsettled local cultural conventions, hierar-
chies, and genres, as in the case of the action and stunt film.15 The re-
lationship between spectator and star indicates another very specific
and important instance in the culture of the copy. S.V. Srinivas has
written extensively on the relationship between fan and star, in track-
ing the obsessive circuits of fan engagement, including the aggressive
protection of star image and status in contests between fan clubs. Of
paramount significance is the desire of the fan to freeze the heroic
image of the star, trying to prevent the alteration of screen roles from
a normative cluster, as if wanting to fix and give back a stable aura to
his persona.16
If this is an instance of the bid to assert the uniqueness of the per-
sona, on the other hand, there is the apparently commonplace issue of
star imitations, featuring mimics of stars from Dev Anand down to
indicators about the copying network, Anand Taneja, ‘My Friendly Neighbourhood
Video Pirate’, 275–6. For the movement in property forms and the legal contests
involved, Lawrence Liang, ‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation, Sarai
Reader 05: Bare Acts, 6–17; and Ravi Sundaram, ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban
and New Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), 3 January 2004, 64–71.
15 See for example S.V. Srinivas, ‘Hongkong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’,
40–62, on Jackie Chan films and their circulation in Andhra; and Rosie Thomas’s
work on Fearless Nadia—the Greek Australian stunt actress Fearless Nadia.
16 S.V. Srinivas, ‘Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’, in Vasudevan, ed.,
Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.

Shah Rukh Khan, often in parodic ways. There are now however
instances of an emergent anxiety about the status and integrity of the
star image. As Lawrence Liang has shown, this anxiety derives from the
way intellectual property discourses have penetrated a series of new
cultural spaces and offered new ways of thinking about profit realiza-
tion. The major Tamil matinee idol, Rajanikant, insisted that he would
prosecute imitators who sought to draw upon his medley of manner-
isms in their imitations. He sought to ‘patent’ the image. It has been
argued that the unprecedented anxiety of the star involved circumstan-
ces where his image had gained increased global circulation (his film
Muthu had been a surprise hit in Japan). If there was an enhancement
of the value of his image in the potential reach of its cinematic circu-
lation, a different type of value accrued in terms of his much-anti-
cipated move into the political sphere.17
There is obviously a fine line being negotiated here, addressing the
possibilities of the ‘original’ not only being subverted but perhaps even
being upstaged by the copy. Intimations of the uncanny and the al-
legorical may emerge in the act not only of copying and degrading but
exceeding the original. I would like to turn back to the new media con-
stellation of film to carry on this reflection. The question of the illicit
copy gains a particular charge because of the simultaneous release and
exhibition of celluloid ‘original’ and digital copy. Here, let us think
about the temporal linkages between the movement of the theatrical
film and the video copy. The main threat to the theatrical property is
the simultaneous release of the video through cable broadcast and
in video markets. To extend our analogy of the copy, we can see the
cinema as event—the point of the first release, a critical moment for
its gathering of audiences and actualization of the value of novelty—
being split into theatrical and domestic viewing situations. (The latter
term is used loosely, for it is common to use video copies for collective
viewing situations, whether this is inside or outside the home. This re-
quires the binary of cinema theatre vs home viewing to be reconsid-
ered.) The position of the cinema spectator is as it were copied and
distributed from its legal locale into a host of dispersed and unregu-
lated spaces. Public congregation gives way to the order of a public
dispersed in space but unified by the time of cable relay.
The question of the simultaneous availability of the copy makes
time critical to the movement of the film commodity. This has been
17 Lawrence Liang, ‘Conceptualizing Law and Culture’, Seminar 525, May 2003.
realized in the production sector, where there is an anxiety to disburse
video rights at the same time as theatrical rights, in the knowledge that
the theatrical life is limited, and that the profits to be had from video
sales will diminish in the wake of the pirated copy’s release. Trade in-
formation in fact suggests that the production sector may even be com-
plicit with the release of pirate videos to get around this problem.18
Legal initiatives also suggest the importance of timing; with produc-
tion companies now regularly anticipating pirate cable relays by seek-
ing injunctions against the major cable network suppliers. A case in
point was the application for an injunction by Mirabai Films Pvt. Ltd
against the Hathway Cable Network to prevent the screening of Mon-
soon Wedding.19
Global and regional circuits of film copying and digital transmis-
sion inundate the unofficial market, challenge the theatrical trade, and
reconstellate publics, copying and dispersing viewing from its desired
temporal sequence into a simultaneity produced through a new regime
of technological relay and access. Difficult to monitor or regulate, the
challenge of the elaborate networks of copy culture threaten to upstage
the cinema’s integrity. Industrial strategies have sought to mobilize
video itself to undercut the sway of illicit networks by reformatting
cinema theatres in the B circuit for projection of digitized video.20 The
effectiveness of this strategy is yet to be gauged. But what is surpris-
ing in the wake of these transformations is the continued significance
of cinema as a public form. This is observable not only in the niche
marketing of the multiplex cinema, but also in the continued hold of
B theatres retailing reruns and cheaper productions. Further, even the
informal networks of video circulation acquire audience congregat-
ive functions. Thus, small, informally run video theatres cater to slum
clusters and marginal urban spaces outside the official grid of cinema
theatres.21
18
Such a view was often voiced in Sarai researchers’ informal interviews with film
industry people and detective agencies.
19 Hathway Cable & Datacom Pvt. Ltd. and ANR vs Mirabai Films Pvt. Ltd.,
Supreme Court SLP © No. 14566 of 2003, posted by Jawahar Raja for Sari Media
City Project. The research of Jawahar Raja, a lawyer and Sarai research associate, has
drawn out the importance of the injunction in the bid by film distribution companies
to stop the simultaneous cable relay of films.
20
Digital Cinema News: ‘Digital Film Projection, Good and Bad News’, The
Hindu, 7 February 2005, posted by Ankur Khanna for the Sarai Media City Project.
21 Madhavi Tangella, ‘Sagar Cinema: A Poor Man’s Multiplex’, Sarai Independent
Fellowship Project 2005, postings available on Sarai Reader List. See also Working
Perhaps we can get a grasp of these transformations and their signi-
ficance by moving to another locale, one which has historically lacked
substantial film production. To return to Brian Larkin’s research into
the Hausa community of Northern Nigeria, we should note the im-
portance of copy and version cultures in the emergence of the powerful
video film industry that has developed in the area. In a country lacking
its own (celluloid) film industry, the main object of film consumption
was Indian popular cinema rather than American films. While Indian
films were not dubbed, in Larkin’s account they appeared more readi-
ly accessible to local audiences in terms of stories that addressed the
dilemmas experienced by modernizing societies, and also in the emo-
tionality of their portraiture of characters and situations. A local argot
developed around this cinema, with popular stars being given local
names conveying their particular appeal to audiences, and reiterating
the importance of the version in a global history of the cinema. As we
have seen in chapter 10, Larkin’s exploration of Bandiri music indi-
cates the complex, and ambiguous, terms of a culture of the copy and
the version. Equally suggestive is the new media context of film culture
that characterizes the contemporary situation in Nigeria. As elsewhere,
networks of illicit video copying and distribution have developed,
challenging cinema exhibition. What is fascinating is the emergence of
a legal video film culture on the ground of these illicit networks. For
the first time, substantial local production of feature-length films has
emerged, avidly consumed not only in households but also in video
theatres. Characteristic narratives include parables about modernity,
its dilemmas and pressures, but include the mobilization of cultures of
magic and witchcraft to resolve conflicts and problems. Here the local
vividly raises its head as narrative traditions and, perhaps, allegorizing
impulse.22
Similar currents are now observable in India. Thus, work on Mum-
bai, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Manipur, indicating perhaps just the
tip of the iceberg, points to a developing production of digital films,
largely drawing upon local resources and circulated by video CDs for
Questions: The Sarai-CSDS Fellowship Programme 2002–2007, eds Debjani Sen-

gupta and Vivek Narayan, Delhi, CSDS, 2007.
22
Brian Larkin, ‘Bollywood Comes to Nigeria’, Samar 8, Winter/Spring 1997, and
http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=21, consulted 18 September
2008; ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of
Piracy’, Public Culture 16 (2), Fall 2004, 289–314.
local audiences. Interestingly, such circuits are not always completely
distinctive from those of the larger film industry. In some instances,
field research has shown that actors and film technicians are caught in
the circuit between Bombay and the new local set-ups, ever looking for
the possibility of moving to the industry. Nevertheless, these currents
have their distinctive engagement with their specific markets and audi-
ences, and point to the complex entanglement of cinema and cheap
digital forms in the remapping of film publics.23
These new energies, centred on the culture of the copy and new
production and consumption patterns have thus provided for a re-
newal of the cinema in a host of avatars. They also complicate existing
formulations about the concept of the public. For too long there has
been a tendency to hold onto the idea that the Habermasian public
sphere has a conceptual power to capture the full dynamics of dis-
courses, discussions, and practices which function in a relationship of
critical reason to frameworks of power and authority, and of inclusion
and exclusion in the sphere of rights and citizenship. Despite bids to
expand the terms of the public sphere to encompass lives and cognitive
forms neglected in its original formulation, for example to women and
working class people, social and sexual minorities, such exercises fail
to contend with the body of practices, cognitive fields, and perceptual
engagements which fall outside the ken of rational-critical discourse.24
These include not only discourses which fail to abide by the modes of
reason required to participate in discussion in the public sphere, but
also practices which may exceed the legal, normative, and even ethical
frameworks legitimated by a critically oriented public sphere. One
of these practices is surely the media sphere driven by the culture of
the illegal copy, of the illegal internet download, and of the variety of
spaces, including video markets, internet cafes and the neighbour-
hood cable operation room through which these cultural practices
have developed.
23 A number of Sarai independent fellows have been working on this reconfiguration
of film cultures. Daljit Ami, ‘Celluloid and Compact Disks in Punjab’, 2006; Anil
Pandey, ‘Desi Filmon Ka Karobar’, on Meerut, 2006; Ranjan Yumnam, ‘Imphalwood:
The Digital Revolution in Manipur’, 2006. For their postings, see Sarai Reader List,
and for summaries of Pandey and Yumnam’s work, Working Questions: The Sarai–
CSDS Fellowship Programme 2002–2007.
24
For a revision of the original public sphere idea, see Craig Calhoun, ed.,
Haberman and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993.
Both in terms of contents and technologies, this media sphere ex-
ceeds laws, conventions, and the possibilities of regulation, so cheap
and portable is the equipment involved. Even before the contempo-
rary dynamics opened up by digital technologies, the cinema, based as
it was on a regime of mechanical reproduction, was implicated in a
longer history of contests over the copy, starting from the earliest per-
iod.25 At this time equipment and film content circulated without the
hinder of property regulations, and it was in the second decade of the
cinema’s existence that patent and copyright law was deployed to regu-
late the trade. Apart from these legal issues, early cinema in most coun-
tries was subject to deeply ambivalent public attitudes to film’s status
as an art, an intellectual scepticism and moral criticism that was fuelled
by perceptions that this new entertainment form was given to parasit-
ism, cheap imitations, and that its practitioners lacked aesthetic dis-
cernment in what they put together.
Addressing these features, Miriam Hansen argued for the idea of an
industrial commercial public sphere, given to hybridity, indiscrimi-
nate assembly of contents from ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ forms, and
a porous relationship to other entertainments in dance and music
halls, popular theatre, and radio. This conceptual move sought to re-
plenish and extend public sphere theory. This was primarily by show-
ing that rather than flatten audience engagement into one uniform
aesthetic and perceptual relationship, as was to be argued of the clas-
sical phase of Hollywood cinema, the cinema in fact generated the
vernacular forms of engagement that could draw on a diversity of
audiences and audience dispositions. She argued that this was espe-
cially notable in the cinema’s cultivation of a distinct tactile involve-
ment of audiences through its body genres, speech codes, performance
conventions, and the rhythms of perceptual engagement.26
25
For example, Andre Gaudreault, ‘The Infringement of Copyright Laws and Its
Effects (1900–1906)’, Framework 29, 1985; also Jane Gaines, Contested Cultures: The
Image, the Voice and the Law, Durham,University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
eds, Reinventing Film Studies; and ‘Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons:
Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism’, Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn 2000,
10–22. For a summary of this argument, see above, ch. 1. On the question of the
industrial-commercial public sphere and alternative public sphere, Miriam Hansen,
Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1991, 10–11.
While Hansen, drawing on Alexander Kluge, went on to work with
the idea of an alternative public sphere, her observations about cinema
as an industrial commercial public sphere appears to me to be pro-
ductive, and perhaps signals the limits of public sphere theory. For this
is a publicness which is not constituted by reasoned discourse but
rather by body, rhythm, ethnic distinction, including typage, and the
sheer diversity of audience presence. It is cinema as a technology of
mass exhibition, public circulation, and public access which provides
these possibilities, and with an unprecedented potentiality in terms of
the extent and inclusiveness of public engagement. As of now, and
perhaps in a more diversified set of formats than in the past, the post-
digital cinema reiterates this function, if through very different modes
of distribution and delivery. In this framing, the public sphere remains
relevant as a category, but now acknowledged as inadequate to com-
prehensively engage the range of public forms available to us both
historically and in the contemporary world. It is in fact part of a much
wider engagement, in which issues of public access and public practice
acquire greater significance, practices which include contests over pro-
perty rights. The possibilities that have opened up here impact not
only the conditions of film circulation and reception, but also herald
new dynamics in the field of film and media production and creativity.
Bibliography
INDIAN CINEMA: GOVERNMENT REPORTS

Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, New Delhi, Government of India
Press, 1951
Report of the Film Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship, New Delhi, Gov-
ernment of India, 1969
Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–28, Calcutta, Govern-
ment of India, Central Publications Branch, 1928
Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy, New Delhi, Govern-
ment of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1980
NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

(SELECT ISSUES)
Business Standard
Economic Times
Hindustan Times
Frontline
Indian Express
Pioneer
Sunday
Times of India
Vanity Fair
FILM PERIODICALS, INCLUDING

TRADE MAGAZINES (SELECT ISSUES)
Filmindia
Filmfare
Indian Film Quarterly
Indian Film Review
Indian Film Quarterly
Screen, Indian Express Publications
Screen International
Screen Digest
416 Bibliography
WEBSITES
Government Institutions
www.lalitkala.gov.in (Lalit Kala Akademi)
www.sahitya-akademi.org (Sahitya Akademi)
http://www.gopio.org (People of Indian Origins)
Educational Institutions
http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Online Film Content

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/03/12/coventry-ritz-cinema
Nirmal Puwar’s film Coventry Ritz Cinema, produced by AV Frontline
http://www.youtube.com
Online Periodicals and Entertainment-Related

Journalism
http://www.variety.com (Variety Entertainment Weekly)
http://123india.santabanta.com/cinema (Indian-Punjabi website for enter-
tainment services)
http://www.rediff.com/movies/(portal for online service)
www.screenindia.com (Screen magazine, Indian Express Publications)
Business Sites and Journalism

http://www.indica.co.za/tata_motors (Tata Motors)
www.thehindubusinessline.com (Hindu Business Line Internet Edition)
www.yorkshire-forward.com (to promote regional economic strategy for
Yorkshire)
Entertainment and Film Associations and Companies

http://www.erosplc.com (Eros International, video distribution)
http://www.ficci-frames.com (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce
and Industry, entertainment sector)
http://www.iefilmi.com (promoting Indian film business ties with Europe
and European Union)
http://www.pritishnandycom.com/pnc-moviezone.html (Pritish Nandy, film
producer)
http://www.sahara-one.com (Sahara Manoranjan, film producer)
Bibliography 417
Websites Promoting Academic, Critical, and
Oppositional Cultures
http://media.opencultures.net/queer/(queer cultures)
http://jupiter/ucsd.edu/-manovich (Lev Manovich’s site devoted to digital
theory)
www.secularindia.com (critique of sectarian and majoritarian politics)
Court Cases
Hathway Cable & Datacom Pvt. Ltd. and ANR vs Mirabai Films Pvt. Ltd.
Supreme Court SLP © No. 14566 of 2003
BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Abbas, K.A., ‘The Importance and Significance of a Good Film Story—Its
Power with the Masses’, in R.M. Ray, ed., Film Seminar Report, Delhi,
Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1956, 245–6
Abelman, Nancy, ‘Melodramatic Texts and Contexts: Women’s Lives, Mov-
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Index
Aadmi (1939) 203 Alvi, Abrar 45n

Aaghat (1985) 313 Amanat 35
Aar Par (1954) 87, 88, 89, 150 Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977) 156,
Ab Tak Chhappan (2004) 302 327
Abbas, K.A. 4, 5n, 104n, 342n American cinema 26, 29, 56–8, 68,
Abbas-Mustaan 320, 371n 74, 79, 100, 105, 125, 134, 204,
Abelman, Nancy 30n23, 353n 298, 353, 360, 402, 411; early
Abrahani, Yusuf 243n 126; appropriation from 87; and
Achut (1939) 203 bourgeois address 125; and
Achut Kanya (1935) 203 cinematic spectatorship 87; as
action films 19, 24, 27, 93; serials classical cinema 9, 32; codes of
33, 297 83, 86; dominating the world
actor-politicians, of South India 106 market 360; family melodrama
Advani, L.K. 236, 319 in 9, 19; features of 353, 402;
Advani, Nikhil 338, 375, 376, 379 and film-viewing audience 87, 88,
advertising, and popular print culture 391; and film industry 5; and
41; and visual practices 12 genre 29; and melodrama 9, 31;
aesthetics, articulation of 20; hierar- and film noir 87, 88; spectacle
chies 9; theorization of realism 23; and drama in 19; textual trans-
western canons and 164 formation in 25; see also
African viewership 68, 99, 336, 358, Hollywood
404 American identity 60–1; see also
Ahmad, Rashmee Z. 244n white American identity
Aiyar, S.S.A. 238, 239 American theatrical studies 16, 17,
Akhtar, Farhan 328, 377 21
Akhtar, Javed 137, 246n, 364 Amin, Shimit 302n
Alapalayuthey (Tamil, 2002) 211 Amrohi, Kamal 209
Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? Anand, Chetan 52, 87
(1980) 318 Anand, Dev 44, 342, 363, 404–5,
allegory 62, 63 408
Allen, Woody 284 Anand, Tinu 243, 245
Altman, Rick 27n, 94n Anandmath (1950) 140
Altman, Robert 63 Andaz (1949) 45n, 83–5, 86, 87,
Alvarodo, Manuel 100n 122, 124
438 Index
Andaz Apna Apna 327 environment of auspiciousness
Anderson, Benedict 41, 219n for 38; as a familiar community
Andhra Pradesh, film production in 123; favouring melodrama 79;
102 female 20; as imaginary element
Angaar (1992) 157, 240 402; lower-class 103; melodrama’s
Ankush (1986) 157, 159, 313–16; address to 43; plebeian 297, 298;
male bravado in 315 redefining character of 79; types
Anveshi 204n 32, 78–9; ‘yuppie’ 328
Aparajita (Bengali, 1956) 173–6, 181 auditory address 121, 131
Apu triology 14 audio-visual technology 13, 321,
Apur Sansar (Bengali, 1959) 176–80, 349; privatization of 135
181; eroticism in 178; narrative of author cinema 1, 306, 348, 350
176; use of iconographic instru- Awara (1951) 4n, 53, 54–5, 88,
ment in 178 90–2, 104n, 124, 150–2, 154,
Arabic/Arabian culture 207; ‘Arabian 155, 403
night’ stories, market for 352; Azmi, Kaifi 320
Arabic/Persian/Urdu narration 36,
207 B films 33
Aranyer Din Ratri (Bengali, 1969) Baazi (1951) 88, 150
191, 192–7; issues of repression Baazigar (1993) 320
and desire in 192; representation Babb, Lawrence A. 91n, 114n
of tribals in 194 Babri Masjid, demolition of 159,
Ardh Satya (1983) 313 235–7, 242, 244, 268; and
Arendt, Hannah 407n violence over 229–30, 319; status
Arif, Khadeeja 407n of 244
army, representation of 214; in Roja Bachchan, Amitabh 156, 245, 308,
224, 225–6 309, 310, 326, 327, 363, 366n;
Arora, Poonam 399n and national imaginary 311;
art cinema 1, 11, 67, 34, 75, 97, 173, screen persona of 300, 313
313, 343; critic/criticism 6, 163, Bachchan, Jaya 376
400; NFDC funding for 345; in Balayogini (Tamil, 1938) 203
1950s 99; and public discourse 8; Bandini (1963) 45n
realism in 163; art tradition, in bandiri music 355, 356, 411
India 4, 164 Bandyopadhyaya, Samik 132n
Arvindswamy 229 Bangsawan theatre 207
Arya, Sulabha 381 Barker, Adam 125n, 133n, 398n
Asian video shops, in the UK 359 Barnouw, Eric 3n, 7n, 102n, 202n
audience, for action serials 297; Barthes, Roland 82, 111, 121; and
appeal 12, 104, 126; for art ‘hermeneutic code’ 86
cinema 75, 328; Bengali 169; Barua, Pramathesh 45, 51
cross-class nature of 74, 347–8; Baskaran, Theodore 209n
diasporic 340, 380; disposi- Bassnet, Susan 220n
tion 80, 82, 104, 374, 413; Basu, Tapan 144n, 319n
Index 439
Baul folk performance/philosophy Balzac 19
322–3 The Blue Angel (German, 1931) 144
bazaar, culture 297; economy 296, ‘Bollywood’, category 301–2, 304,
300 328, 334, 339, 340, 346, 383,
Bazin, Andre 168 392–7; Ashish Rajadhyaksha on
Bazmi, Anees 393n 340, 341, 342, 343; diaspora
Bend it Like Beckham (2002) 329 academic use of 348–50, 352,
Bendre, Sonali 251 354; family film and 361, 387;
Benegal, Shyam 1, 224, 345, 393n film industry’s use of 347–8;
Bengal, art cinema in 74, 95; cinema and Hollywood 352, 360; in the
in 8, 51, 52, 169; emergence of image-business spectrum 353–4,
bourgeois melodrama in 52 multi-sited reception of 355–60;
Benjamin, Walter 407, 408 and transnational film history
Besant, Annie 40 351–2
Betaab, Narayan Prasad 36, 38 Bombay 35, 159, 203, 294, 300,
bhakti 128 303, 315, 331, 349, 386; cityscape
Bhandarkar, Madhur 393n of 309; cognitive map of 317;
Bhargava, Rajeev 130n disturbances in 212, 230, 241,
Bharucha, Rustam 216, 220n 319–20; ethnic narratives of 316,
Bhasin, Kamala 152n 317, 318; squatters and pavement
Bhaskar, Ira 317 dwellers in 295–6; theatre 35;
Bhatia, Nandi 46n urban space of 159, 303, 309,
Bhatt, Mahesh 320, 321, 345, 327, 312, 313–14, 315
378 Bombay (1995) 11, 212, 229–58,
Bhatt, Vijay 153n, 154 264; communal violence in
Bhatt, Vikram 328, 384 241–2; community and sexuality
Bhattacharya, Aditya 327 in 245–51; debate on Muslim
Bhattacharya, Sougata 299n aggression in 235, 241, 242;
Bhatti group, in Lahore 209 decommunalization in 251–3;
Bhaumik, Kaushik 205, 206, 296, Hindu aggression in 234–6, 243;
297, 359n, 398n, 405 inter-communal conflict/relation
Bhoot (2003) 302, 387–9, 391; in 233–5, 237, 238; male self-
depiction of female spirit in 388 sacrifice in 253–4; melodramatic
Billimoria, M.B. 99n identification in 253–8; modern
Birth of a Nation (1915) 58 identity in 231–3; Muslim identity
Biswas, Chhabi 181 of heroine in 247–8; villainous
Biswas, Moinak 8, 30n, 51, 52, Muslim characters in 240;
104n, 133n, 150, 156n, 197n, 363 narrative discontinuity in 230,
Biswas, Seema 388 244, 245, 253, 258; nationalistic
Black British Cultural studies 358, rhetoric in 255; plot synopsis of
359 229–30; public events in 234–45;
Black Sunday (2007), censorship of public response to 244; romantic
345 Muslim social in 249
440 Index
Bombay cinema 52, 56, 82, 99, Butalia, Pankaj 264
101, 106, 157, 205, 223, 240, Butler, Judith 370
304, 313, 317, 347, 387; English
language use in 396; export- Calcutta Film Society 8n, 75, 76,
oriented 337–9, 355; and film 105
industry 102, 206, 209, 355, Calhoun, Craig 412n
359; focus on family in 106; and camera movement 26, 51, 52, 115,
Hollywood codes 56; Muslim 119, 329
villains in 157–8, 240; as national Capra, Frank 58, 59, 69, 133n
cinema 101–2; social film genre in Carney, Raymond 60n
82; social and cultural history of caste 64, 135, 138, 203, 263, 265;
205, 384; success of 336; and anti-caste movement, in Tamilnadu
‘transitional societies’ 99; as trans- 262, 277; hierarchy 140; histories
regional format and production 140; identity 14; imagination of
centre 209; and transformation of 135; lower 140, 263; mobilization
film economy 339–46; urban 319; system 214
thriller in 52; see also ‘Bollywood’ censor board/censorship 5, 230, 341,
and Popular Cinema, Indian 344, 352; on Bombay 241, 243; on
Bombay Hamara Shahr (1985) 312, The Final Solution 345; on Fire
313 346; by Hindu Right 245;
Bombay Talkies Studio 51, 104; regulations 345
social films from 342 Ceylon/Sri Lanka, trade with
Bordwell, David 26, 27n, 32, 88n 208
Bose, Kaberi 192 Chabria, Suresh 132n
Bose, Subhas 285 Chadha, Gurinder 329, 337, 338
Brahman(ical) 139, 262; caste Chakravarthy, Venkatesh 221n
control, films challenging 39; Chan, Jackie 408n
category 139; identity 265; and Chandra, N. 157, 240, 313, 314,
non-Brahmins 40, 49 315, 317
Brajbhasha 35 Chandragupta (1945) 145
Brando, Marlon 316 Chandralekha (1948) 203
Breman, Jan 325 Chandrashekhar, Indira 316n
Bride and Prejudice (2004) 338 character, articulation 43, 403;
British culture 328, 329, 359 attitudes 122; construction 43,
British films 204, 296, 300, 329 45, 67; subjectivity and narration
Brooks, Peter 18, 19, 41, 42, 51, 122, 402–3; iconization of 43;
82n, 88n, 94, 95n, 108, 111, 253n individuated characterization 56,
Brosius, Christiane 355 109, 115, 135, 212; in popular/
Browne, Nick 62n melodramatic format 44;
Buckland, Warren 23n subjectivity 83, 122
Buddha, legend of 5 Charulata (Bengali, 1964) 73,
Burch, Noel 85n, 167 177, 183–91, 192, 195, 198;
Burke, Peter 96n colonial modernity in 184; folk
Index 441
performance in 189; reformist comedy/comic functions in cinema
tradition in 184 33, 39, 43, 52, 55, 16, 192, 273,
Chatterjee, Gayatri 366n 306, 329, 343, 371, 387, 404
Chatterjee, Partha 8n, 71, 128n, 183, communal violence/conflict 230,
263n, 305n, 341n 233–5, 237, 238, 245; see also
Chatterjee, Sarat Chandra 115 Hindu community; Muslims
Chatterjee, Soumitra 194 community: authority 123, 127;
Chattopadhyaya, Bankimchandra identities and forms 70; and
160 solidarity 137; representation
Chaudhury, Shoma 35n 141, 152, 233–4; and sexuality
Chaudhuri, Sukanta 294n in Bombay 245–51; typology
Chhalia (1960) 152–4 and popular cinema 131–6,
chiaroscuro effects 52, 53, 88 141–5
Chiranjeevi 299 compact discs (CDs) 12; see also
Chisty, K.R.S. 206 Video-CDs
Cho, Eunsun 29, 30n Company (2002) 383
Chopra, Aditya 367 Confederation of Indian Industry
Chopra, Vidhu Vinod 157, 316, 317 (CII) 3
Chopra, Yash 156n, 273n, 308, 309, Congress Party 277, 305; and secular-
310, 320, 365, 371n ism 263
Christian(s), attack on 378; Coolie (1982) 156, 307
characters in films 156, 327; Coomaraswamy, A.K. 164
repression of Hinduism 271 Cooper, Frederick 352
Chupke Chupke (1975) 327 Coppola, Francis Ford 60, 61, 63,
CID (1956) 87, 88, 89, 150 316, 332
Cinematograph Act, 1952 7 copy culture 406–14
Cinemaya Media and K Sara Sara Corleone, Sonny 61
394 Corleone, Don Vito 60, 316
city: as material context for film costume films 12, 103
culture 12, 15, 15n; in 1950s crime films 52, 88, 150, 313
Hindi cinema 46, 52, 55, 56, 136, Creekmur, Corey 46n
150–1, 152, 158; in Satyajit Ray’s
films 182, 191, 192, 195; in urban Dalit: critiques 138; politics 295;
planning and under globalization subordination of 263
295, 296, 299; and body in Damle, V. 39, 49, 50, 129
post-1970 popular cinema 300–3, Dark Water (Japan, 2001) 389
364, 366, 374, 375, 379, 380, Darr (1994) 320
381, 387–91 darshan/darshanic 68, 91n, 114–15,
colonial/colonialism, cinemas under 117–19, 124, 128, 129, 370,
298; modernity 184; national 370n, 376
and 201, 202 and post-colonial Das, Vasundhara 259
history 11; social reform under Das, Veena 128n
203 Das Gupta, Chidananda 8n, 67, 80,
442 Index
81, 94, 105, 106, 107, 108, 132n, Dil Chahta Hai (2001) 328, 377
179n, 244, 343 Dil Hai ke Manta Nahin 327
daastan tradition 35, 37 Dilip Kumar 45, 83, 246n
Date, Keshavrao 143, 144 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayange (1995)
de Palma, Brian 63 337, 338, 340, 367–76, 378, 396;
Deewar (1974) 308, 313, 316, 364, diaspora-themed cinema 369,
366, 400 373–4; stunt sequence in 371
Deleuze, Gilles 25n, 92n Dimendberg, Edward 353n
democracy/democratic 75; and affect Disha 157
222n, and community 137n; and discontinuity 40n, 171, 230, 244,
post-colonial theory 127, 128n; 245, 253, 258, 401
and viewership 197n, 340n, 341, Dissanayake, Wimal 105n, 207n
341n Do Bigha Zameen (1953) 6, 7
Desai, Jayant 145 documentary film 1, 312–13, 321–4,
Desai, Manmohan 152, 156, 307 399
Desai, Manoj 374, 375 Don (1978) 327
Desser, David 387 Doraiswamy, Rashmi 240n
Destry Rides Again (1939) 57 Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) 289
detective films 33 Dravida Kazhagam, in Tamilnadu
Devdas (1935) 45n, 51 214, 262
Devdas (1955) 6, 115–17, 118, 204 Dravida Munnetra Kazhgam, in
Devgan, Ajay 387 Tamilnadu 214; anti-Brahmanism
Devi (1960) 177, 180, 181–3 stand of 209; anti-caste national-
Devika Rani 297, 342 ism of 277; influence on Tamil
devotional/bhakti tradition 118 cinema 123, 264
devotional/saint films 39–40, 103, dubbed films 203, 207, 213, 221,
128–9, 204 224, 408; Hollywood films and
Dharamputra (1961) 320 33
Dharwadkar, Aparna 399n Dudrah, Rajunder 349, 350, 356,
dialogue 12, 19, 165, 227, 231, 242, 357, 358, 359, 360
243, 270, 303, 374, 384, 400; Dupont, Veronique 294n
delivery 157; and music 12, 36, Dutt, Guru 44n, 45, 47, 52, 70, 87,
44; writers 36 88, 97, 118, 121, 150, 232n, 363
diaspora/diasporic, community 348, Dutt, Sanjay 405
353, 355, 358, 378; film Dutta, Madhushree 319
culture 357, 376 Dutta, Pradip 144n
Dickens, Charles 19 DVDs (Digital Video Disks) 15, 396
Die Hard 23, 24n Dwyer, Rachel 35n, 311n
digital technology 2, 15, 212, 259, Dyer, Richard 101n, 326n
261, 277, 296, 398, 408, 409,
410, 411, 413; in Hey Ram 285 East is East (1999) 329
Dika, Vira 63n Eck, Diana L. 91n
Dil (1990) 327 Eco, Umberto 244
Index 443
economic liberalization 299, 305, Federation of Indian Chambers
334 of Commerce and Industry
Egyptian cinema, on Laila-Majnu plot (FICCI) 3
207 feminist scholarship 184
Ek Hasina Thi (2004) 302, 383–4, ‘feudal family romance’ 48, 108, 109,
389–91; melodrama in 391 182, 343, 366
Elaan (1948) 203 Film Enquiry Committee 1951 5,
Elefthioritis, Dimitris 355n 7n, 344
Eleven Miles (1991) 322 Film Finance Corporation 7n
Elsaesser, Thomas 18, 19, 23n, 57, film industry, Indian: analysis of
63n, 100n, 125, 133n, 398n audiences 103; communist
‘Emergency’ of 1975–7 300, 305, presence in 104n; contemporary
312; impact of 295 transformation of 334–7, 392–7;
Engineer, Asghar Ali 258n in Bombay 205n, 297n, ethno-
Eros International 397 graphy of 12; export market for 3,
Euro-American cinema/theatre 13, 30, 68, 98, 206, 301, 304, 336,
100, 103, 109; melodrama in 339, 346, 396; finances for 2, 4,
17–21 12, 206, 224, 310, 395, 397; and
exhibition, circuits of 32; film 5, intellectual property rights 300;
103, 126, 205, 296, 297, 358, Lahore in 209; reforms in 5, 7,
357–9, 374, 406, 409, 411, 414 344
film journals 67; Filmfare 6, 75;
factory, film company 393 Filmindia 75; Indian Film
family/familial, affiliation in melo- Quarterly 76; Indian Film Review
drama 42, 393; and domestic 76; Screen 396, 404
sphere 9; dramas 95, 96; film Films Division 7, 312
genre 301; home as space of The Final Solution (2003) 345
victimhood 57; as narrative Fincher, David 278n
locus 89; paternal authority and Firdausi 35
its displacement 46, 48, 51; ‘social’ Fire (1996) 346
films 343; social network and its First Blood 24n
subordination 52; space, new Fleming, Victor 27n
configuration of 51; ‘values’ 383 folk: culture 52; aristocratic paradigm
Farocki, Harun 310n for 164; forms in India 35, 306;
Farooqui, Mehmood 37 paintings of Krishna legend 80;
fashion, forms of 2, 12, 100; photo- performance 189
graphy 12 Ford, John 57
father, multicultural 375–82; and Forrest Gump (1994) 284, 285
social order 366–7; symbolic Fouquet, Gerard 100n
function of 367–75 FRAMES 4
Fattelal, S. 39, 49, 50, 129 Frankenburg, Ruth 62n
‘Fearless Nadia’ 296n., 297, 405n, The French Connection (1971) 331
408n Friedberg, Anne 353n
444 Index
frontality 38, 45, 110–12, 118, 133, 328, 334, 339, 346, 352, 355,
402 362n
Godard, J-L 73
Gaines, Jane 27n The Godfather (1972) 60, 61, 63,
Ganashatru (1989) 97 316
Gandhi, Indira, declaration of The Godfather Part Two (1974) 61–2,
‘Emergency’ by 305 332
Gandhi, Mahatma 141, 259–61, Gomery, Douglas 299n
263, 265, 266, 269, 275, 276, Gone With the Wind 27n, 58
278; assassination of 262, 284, Goodfellas (1990) 331
286; ideology of 164; life story Goodness Gracious Me (TV comedy,
of 5 1997–2000) 329, 337
Gandhi, Rajiv 214; assassination of Gopalakrishnan, Adoor 1
215, 222, 265n Gopalan, Lalitha 316n
Gandhiok, Kawal 311 Gopinath, Gayatri 382n
Gandreault, Andre 413n Govinda 44, 327, 405
Ganesan, Sivaji 316 gramophone 12
gangster movies 383 Gray, Hugh 168n
Ganguli, Sunil 195 Grieveson, Lee 398n
Ganti, Tejaswini 348n Griffith, D.W. 58
Gardish (1993) 240, 320 Grimsted, David 22n
Garewal, Simi 194 Grossman, Andrew 382n
Gazdar, Mushtaq 208, 209 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati 188n
G.D. Khosla Report of 1969 344 Gujarat 137
Gelder, Sicco Van 372n Gulzar 318, 319
Gemini International 78, 203 Gunning, Tom 87, 100n, 126, 196n
genre 3, 19, 23, 38, 57, 166, Gupt, Somnath 35n
383–97 Gupta, Dhruba 132n
Gere, Richard 380 Gupta, Hemant 146
Ghai, Subhash 347, 348, 383n Gurata, Ahmet 355n
Ghatak, Ritwik 1, 30, 156n, 283n,
306 Habermas, J. 412n
Ghosh, Parto 157 Halstead, Narmala 355
Ghosh, Robi 309 Hansen, Kathryn 32–3, 35n, 36n,
Ghulam (1998) 328 37, 38
Ghulam e Mustafa (1998) 157, Hansen, Miriam 31, 32, 33n, 125,
158–9, 160 126n, 353, 354n, 413, 414
Gillespie, Marie 355 Hansen, Thomas Blom 294n, 314n,
Ginzburg, Carlo 96 358
Girni Kamgar Union, Bombay 359 Harper, Sue 101n
Gledhill, Christine 17n, 19, 20, 22, Harvey, Sylvia 87
23, 24, 26, 32n, 96, 168n, 222n Hay, James 101n
globalization 1, 11, 15, 299, 304, Hayward, Susan 101n
Index 445
Heath, Stephen 83n 254–5, 257, 258, 272, 320;
Hey Ram (1999) 161, 212, 259–89, society/hierarchy/family 127, 137,
403; characterization in 276, 277, 138, 140, 141, 146, 156, 157,
284–5; controversy over 260; 158, 159, 161, 203, 214, 247,
digital modes in 262; and 250; tolerance and multi-
Hindutva masculinity 269–71; culturalism 214, 253, 378, 379;
and iconic history 266; melodrama visual culture 91n
in 272–89, 275; modes of Hindustani 161n, 272, 274, 277,
representation in 273; morphed 284–6
character in 284–5; narrative form historical film genre 72, 103, 135,
of 260, 261, 268–9; plot synopsis 145–9
of 259–62; ritual identity in 275; Hoffman, Kay 398n
storytelling in 269; sutradhar in Hollywood 5, 10, 302, 352, 387,
276; 3-D art and video-game 403; action serials 103; cinematic
rendering in 284, 285; as form 31; ‘classical’ 25, 27, 133;
unofficial history 266–8, 284, 286 and vernacular modernity 32, 56;
Hill, Mike 62n continuity editing 100; and
Hindu/Hinduism: authority/power genre 55, 56, 392, 404; hegemony
of 138, 144, 145, 148, 149, 160, of 99, 354; melodrama in 17, 22,
249, 272; community 38, 40, 56–64; as model 6, 74; narrative
144, 145; Hindutva/Hindu construction in 56, 122; success of
majoritarianism, Right, Political dubbed 33
Hinduism 137, 144, 149, 157, Hopper, Dennis 63
159, 160, 161, 229, 230, 234n., horror films 332, 389; of South East
236, 245, 246, 259–70, 275–6, and East Asia 387
278, 280, 287, 314–15, 319–21, Howarth, Alexander 63n
328, 332, 345; identity 102, 158, Hughes, Stephen P. 33, 40, 103,
161, 235, 252, 263, 266, 271; 129n, 296, 297, 351n, 356n,
identity, gendered 112, 137n, 398n
160n, 161, 250, 267, 269; and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994) 337,
middle-class modernity 156, 157, 342, 396
160, 203, 216, 220, 229, 245, Humayun (1945) 146
247, 253, 257, 258; Muslim Hyun-Mok, Yu 29
relations and 137, 141, 149, 154,
156, 158, 209, 229, 231, 232, I Live in Behrampada (1993) 319
234, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242, icon/iconic/iconicity, aesthetics
243, 245, 246, 247, 251, 259, of 110–12; articulation 93, 136;
321; nationhood/nationalism/ of family space 232; figure 20, 67,
nation-state 38, 138, 140, 144, 68, 69; history 266; mode 82;
154, 160n, 203, 213, 246, 253, reconstruction of 112–13, 115;
276; religion/religious culture 40, and tableau 96; transactions
114, 142, 149, 217; self-alienation 89–93
and critique of 236–7, 241, 245, iconography, of community 233–4
446 Index
identity, conflicts 3; politics of Jhansi ki Rani (1953) 146
219–21; see also Hindu/Hinduism Jhoola (1941) 366
Ilayaraja 210 Jinnah, Direct Action call of 259
imaginary direct address 14, 43, 56, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar 327
72, 402 Johar, Karan 358, 376, 378, 383
Imperial Studios 206 John, Mary E. 124n
Indar Sabha (Parsi theatre play) 35, Joshi, Manohar Shyam 266
36 Joshi, Namrata 237n
Indian Cinematic Committee, 1928 Joshi, Ruchir 322
132n Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Bengali) 306
Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) Jurgensmeyer, Mark 140n
215
Indian People’s Theatre Association K Sara Sara, film company 393, 394
(IPTA) 52, 104n, 342 Kaarsholm, Preben 15n, 304n, 340n,
intellectual property rights 2, 300 367n
interior design 12, 347, 354 Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna 396
International Film Festival of 1952 Kabhi Kabhi (1976) 310
77 Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham 378,
Irani, Ardeshir 206 396
Islamicate culture 205, 206 Kabir, Alamgir 208n
Kajol 368
Jaffrelot, Christophe 319n Kal Ho Na Ho (2004) 337–8,
Jaglom, Hank 63 375–82; diaspora family in
Jagte Raho (1956) 150, 323 378–80; Hindu–Christian relation-
Jaikumar, Priya 399n ship in 378–9; melodramatic
Jain, Jyotindra 399n mode in 382; storytelling in
Jain, Kajri 41 375
Jalal, Farida 369 Kali image 182
Jameson, Fredric 61n, 62 Kalia, Ravi 294n
Jana Aranya (Bengali, 1975) 191, Kalidasa 4
192, 195, 309 Kamalahasan 14, 161, 259, 260,
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983) 310 261–2, 271–2, 276, 279, 285,
Jancso, Miklos 194n 286, 287, 316
janeu (sacred thread) 264 Kangan (1939) 366
Japan, film audience, and demand for Kanwar, Amar 321, 322
Tamil films 350 Kapoor, Boney 393n
Jari Mari—of Cloth and Other Stories Kapoor, Prithviraj 53, 206
(2001) 324, 326 Kapoor, Raj 42n, 44, 45, 53, 54, 71,
jatra 189 88, 90, 104n, 136, 150, 151–7,
Jayamanne, Laleen 100n 342, 363
Jehangir (Mughal emperor) 146, 148 Kapoor, Rishi 156, 311
Jha, Bhagishwar 206n Kapur, Anuradha 37, 38, 161n, 234,
Jha, Subhash K. 394n 268n
Index 447
Kapur, Geeta 81n, 82n, 110, 111n, Krishen, Pradip 109n
133n, 141n, 164, 170, 177, 183n, Krishna Studios 206
188n, 198n, 307n, 368n Krishnan, L. 207
Kapurush (Bengali, 1965) 191 Krishnaswamy, S. 3n, 7n, 102n,
Kashmir, as favoured location for 202n
Bombay films 223; and Tamilnadu Kshatriya category 139
in Roja 213–19, 223; separatism Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) 358
257 Kukunoor, Nagesh 393n
Kashyap, Anurag 345 Kumar, Ashok 342
Kathavachak, Radheshyam 36 Kumar, Indra 327
Kaul, Mani 1 Kumar, Kishore 44, 404
Kaur, Raminder 325n, 349n, 350n, Kumar, Mehul 157
351n, 352, 353n, 355n, 356n, Kumar, Uttam 52
357, 360, 382n, 405n Kumari, Meena 45, 246n
Kaviraj, Sudipta 128n, 137, 180 Kumar, Rakesh 2n, 335n
Khan, Aamir 325–9, 384 Kung-fu film 351
Khan, Mansoor 327 Kunku (1937) 144–5, 203, 204
Khan, Mehboob 45n, 83, 112, 113, Kurosawa, Akira 73
122, 145n, 146, 156n, 203, 274,
307, 363 Lagaan (2001) 328
Khan, Saif Ali 377, 381, 389 Lagoo, Rima 377
Khan, Salim 364 Lahore, films from 206, 208; and
Khan, Shah Rukh 259, 301, 346–9, Bombay industry 209
36, 368, 369, 371, 366n, 375–82, Laila Majnu (Parsi theatre play)
392, 409 36
Khanna, Ankur 395n Laila-Majnu romantic narratives 205,
Khanna, Vinod 156 206, 207, 352
Kher, Anupam 369 Lalit Kala Akademi 4n
Khosla, Raj 87, 150 Lall, Bhuvan 336n, 338n, 345n
King, John 100n Larkin, Brian 351n, 355, 356
King, Noel 63n lavani (dance) 35
Kirby, Lynn 354n Laawaris (1981) 327
kirtan 68 Leftwich, Adrian 128n
kissing, prohibition on 109, 344 Lenseye (film critic) 249n
Klineberg, Eric 62n Lent, John A. 99n
Kluge, Alexander 414 Leslie, Julia 112n
Kocela, Christopher 62n Letter from an Unknown Woman
Kohli, Kuku 221 24
Koirala, Manisha 251 Liang, Lawrence 335n, 408n
Kotcheff, Ted 24n Light of Asia 349
Kramer, Peter 398n location shooting 12, 52, 78, 314,
Krantiveer (1991) 157, 159 339, 360
Krings, Mathias 356n Lopez, Ana M. 100n
448 Index
Loy, Shankar, Ehsaan 380n McTiernan, John 23
LTTE 265n Meet John Doe (1941) 58
Mehra, Prakash 307, 308
Maachis (1994) 318, 320, 321 Mehrabi, Massoud 206n
Madan, J.F. 36 Mehta, Deepa 1, 346
Madhoo 220, 227 Meiyappan, A.V. 209
Madhubala 246n melodrama/melodramatic: of action
‘Madras Presidency’, cinema 203, 207 22; alterity 62, 311; and American
see also Tamil films film trade 9, 21, 21n; and anti-
Mahabharata 38 rationalist ethos 105; and Asian
Mahanagar (Bengali, 1963) 191 Cinema 9; bourgeois forms of 8;
Mahapurush (Bengali, 1965) 185 and Brechtian strategy 17; and
Maheshwari, Uma 204n classical cinema 9, 26, 27;
Majumdar, Neepa 70, 71 character in 225, 261; coincidence
Malayalam films 203 in 95n, 99; and the contemporary
Malaysia, film industry in 207; trade 293, 362; conventional meanings
with 208 of 16; in Euro-American cultural
Malcolm, Derek 346 history 9, 17; and digital culture
Malkmus, Lisbeth 99n 212, 277–87; family and 9, 19,
mall-multiplex 14, 300, 345, 406 25, 30, 201, 210, 301; and female
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance audiences 17; and feminist film
(1962) 57 theory 20; and genre 302; and
Mandal Commission 255, 315, 319 genres of affect 9, 17, 25, 95; and
Mani, Lata 203n Hollywood 17, 31, 32; identi-
Manichaean thrillers 9, 99, 261 fication 253; and Indian theatre
Mann, Anthony 57 studies 35; and interiority 45–6;
Manto, Saadat Hasan 154 modality 24, 57, 58; modified
Manovich, Lev 278n 21, 22; and modernity 72, 105,
Marshall, Garry 380 274; monumental 56; multi-sited
Marshall, George 57 approach to 17, 404; of passion
masnavi literature 35, 205 22; performative features of 20,
Masselos, Jim 294n 311, 382, 403; politics of 109,
Mastan, Haji 316 210–12, 261, 275, 404; popular
Masud, Iqbal 249 forms of 8, 52; and popular Indian
Mathen, John Mathew 328 cinema 14, 39, 43, 44, 402, 405;
Matondkar, Urmila 384, 385, 387, and post-colonial theory 28–30;
389 publicness 8, 10, 16, 43, 56, 59,
Mazumdar, Ranjani 3n, 15n, 316n, 64, 72, 155, 211, 212, 276, 277,
317, 354, 366n, 371n 277, 399, 402, 403; and the public
McCabe, Colin 167n, 268n and private 10, 17, 25, 26, 42, 58,
McHugh, Kathleen 30n, 353n 392, 402; and psychoanalytical
McMahan, Alison 284n semiotics 17, and realism 14, 18,
McNeill, Jean 92n 20, 28, 67, 75, 94, 95, 309, 382;
Index 449
sensational 24, 25; and time 18, Mudaliar, Varadarajan 316
24, 25, 57, 150, 275, 366; and Mukherjee, Debashree 396n
style 19; and thriller and serial Mukherjee, Hrishikesh 381
action films 9, 21, 405; and Mukherjee, Madhabi 191
victimhood 23, 29, 254–5, 274, Mukherjee, Rani 259, 267, 302
312; and woman’s film 20, 25 Mukerji, Gyan 366
Menon, Nivedita 127n Mukti (1937) 45n, 51
Menon, Ritu 152n multi-sited histories 346–61
Menon, Sadanand 249n, 257 Mulvey, Laura 132, 133n, 222n
Metz, Christian 132, 134, 136 Muqaddar ka Sikandar (1978) 308
Meyer, Birgit 40n, 129n, 351n, 356n music(al) 12, 356, 396; dialogue
MGR 255; see also Ramachandran, mixed with 36; hybrid and ‘ethnic’
M.G. forms of 2; performative cinema
‘middle’/middle-class cinema 93, 210, 206, 342, 404; sequence and
298, 305, 378 melodrama 43
Mirza, Aziz 157 Muslim: character in Bombay films
Mirza, Saeed Akhtar 318, 319 158, 234, 320, 400; community,
Mishra, Sudhir 345 cultural stereotypes of 240, 253;
Mishra, Vijay 348n –Hindu relations 137, 158–60,
Mitra, Shambhu 150, 323 229–30, 267, 320–1; identity
Mitter, Partha 188n 247–8; ‘lobby’ on Bombay 241,
modernity 28, 29, 31, 42, 141, 232, 243; ‘Muslim socials’ 203; see also
274; anti-modernist stance 40; Bombay
aesthetics of 51; discourse of 67; Muthu (Tamil film) 409
ideology of 107; imaginary 228; My Son the Fanatic (1997) 329
middle-class 225; in Satyajit Ray’s mythological films 38, 80–1, 132,
work 163–4 204, 205, 297; domination of
Modi, Sohrab 36, 72, 146, 147 103; of 1910s 40
Mohammed, Khalid 249
Mohan, Dinesh 255n Nagraj, D.R. 138n
Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho (1983) 318 Naicker, E.V. Ramaswamy (‘Periyar’)
Monihara (Bengali, 1961) 185 262, 263
Monroe, Marliyn 82 Naik, Ashit 376
Monsoon Wedding 338 Nair, Janaki 124n, 294n
moral occult 18 Nair, Mira 1, 157, 337, 338
mother as centre of narrative 90, 92, Najma (1946) 203
363–6; and community authority Nakata, Hideo 389
363; iconic presence of 51, 90, 91 Namak Haram (1973) 381
Mother India (1957) 112, 113, 115, Nandy, Ashis 67, 86n, 93n, 107,
274, 307 109, 130
Motilal 323 Nargis 45, 71, 83, 84; in Mother
Motilal Chemical Company, Bombay India 363–4
206 ‘narrational songs’ 43
450 Index
narrative: causality 7, 22, 26, 27, 37, Nihalani, Govind 224, 313, 318
196, 226, 243; community 69, Niranjana, Tejaswini 138n, 216,
119, 121, 123, 277; form in 222n, 224, 265n, 368n
contemporary epoch 362–97; Nur Jehan, Mughal empress 146, 148
heterogeneous dimensions of 39; Nutan 45, 97, 153
ideological function of 400; and
performance 10, 352; reform 343; O’Donnell, Damien 329
space 48, 53; structure 401 O’Hanlon, Rosalind 140n
Naseem (1995) 319 O’Hara, Scarlett 27n
nation-state 1, 14, 28, 62, 106, Ophuls, Max 24
155–6, 198, 201, 202; in Orbison, Roy 380n
Roja 217, 219, 222, 223, 227; Orsini, Francesca 36n
formation of 208, 209, 210, 211, Osten, Franz 203, 349, 366
212–22; see also Hindutva/Political
Hinduism Pacino, Al 316
national culture/identity 20, 64, 101, Padmanabhan, Chitra 235n, 237n
102, 163, 340, 342, 348 Painted Face, The 105
National Film Development Corpo- Pakistan cinema 209
ration 224; funding for art Palekar, Amol 157, 311
cinema 345 pan-Indian market 202–5
nationalism: Indian 31, 201, 202, Panchatantra tales 5
225, 318, 320, 347; Tamil 264, Pancholi, Dalsukh M. 206, 209
277; ethnic 300; Pandey, Anil 412n
cultural 304n 347; see also Hindu Pandey, Gyanendra 160n, 240n,
nationalism, Hindutva 268n
natyamantwantar group, in theatre Pandian, M.S.S. 123n, 209n, 221n,
144 264n
nautanki 35 parallel cinema 225, 318, 329
Navketan, film company 342 Paranjpaye, Sai 157
Nayak (Bengali, 1967) 195 Parash Pathar (Bengali, 1958)
Nayakan (1987) 316, 317 185
Nayar, Shashilal 157, 240 Parashar, Archana 127n
Naxalite movement 307 Pardes (1997) 337, 368, 374, 380
Neale, Steve 21, 22, 23, 24n, 25 Parinda (1989) 157, 316, 317
Nehru, Jawaharlal 104n, 307 Parineeta (1955) 6
Nek Parveen (1948) 203 Parsi theatre 35, 36, 37, 38, 207
New Deal, USA 59 Parthasarathy, M.A. 6n, 78, 79
New Theatres, Bengal 104, 206 Partition, of India 71, 208, 259, 260,
Nexica, Irene J. 62n 306; and rehabilitation of women
newsreel, Indian 399 152–4; in Ritwik Ghatak’s
Nichols, Bill 326n films 30
Nigam, Aditya 305n Patekar, Nana 71, 136, 157–62,
Nigeria, film culture in 411 249n, 317, 327; dialogue delivery
Index 451
by 157; screen persona of 157, Pines, Jim 98n, 307n
161–2; and Shiv Sena 157, 158 Pinney, Christopher 35n, 131n
Patel, Jabbar 288 political theory, film and 11
Patel, Sujata 294n popular culture 96n, 46n, 399n; and
Pather Panchali (Bengali, 1955) 6, 8, globalization 352, 408
76, 78, 168–73, 181, 188, 307 popular cinema/film, Indian: critical
pathos and action 7, 19, 23, 27, 174, discourses on 75–81; and dastaan
254, 274, 287, 369, 389 tradition 37; disaggregated form
Patwardhan, Anand 312, 313, 319, of 39, 44; genres 103–4; and
345 globalization 3; heterogeneous
Pavarala, Vinod 312n form of 34–5, 38–40, 43–4, 375,
Payer, Cheryl 2n, 334n 402, 405; Hindu–Muslim relations
Paying Guest 405 in 236, 240, 246; imaginary direct
Pearson, Roberta 45n address in 137–41, 142–5, 146–8;
Peet, Richard 2n mixed codes in 82–8, 90–3,
Pendakur, M. 99n 110–22; new genre cinema of
performance/performative: bodies 383–97; politics of 95–6, 125–9;
303, 304, 311; cinephiliac 329; and popular print culture 41;
codes and conventions 10, 45, post-1970s transformation of
303, 419; culture/traditions 10, 306–17, 320–1; public forms of
18, 27, 35, 37, 38, 205, 251, address of 43; Satyajit Ray on 34;
315n, 352, 355, 402; elements/ the street in 88–9; and tradition-
resources/repertoire 37, 69, 151, modernity debates 67, 106–9; and
251, 273, 303, 401; female 249; urban theatre 35–6; territorial
group 326; folk 322, 323; networks of (Hindi-Urdu) 205–9
identity 300; live 337, 359; male (Tamil) 209–10; see also Bombay
325; melodramatic 261; minor cinema, Bollywood, film industry,
characters and 250; modes of 109, exhibition, icon, tableau
111, 126, 144, 157, 159, 160, Prabhat Talkies 104
161, 189, 194, 196, 274, 341; Prahaar (1994) 157, 159
musical cinema 261, 276; Prakash, Gyan 294, 295
naturalist 276; personality 382; Pran 153
phallic 327; style 369, 376, 392; Prasad, Bhagwati 407n
sequence 10, 31; urban 200 Prasad, Madhava 7n, 44, 48, 49n, 54,
performativity 135, 136, 151, 152, 67, 107, 108, 109, 114n, 123,
162, 189, 225, 250, 251, 261, 167n, 207, 209, 210n, 249n,
272, 276, 277, 327, 337, 362, 261n, 305, 306, 343, 344, 370n,
367, 369, 371, 381, 382, 384 400, 404n
Phalke, D.G. 40, 297, 342; and early Prasad, Udayan 329
Indian cinema 137–41; and Tilak Pratidwandi (Bengali, 1970) 192
138 pre-cinema histories 34–8
Phool aur Kante (1992) 221 Prem Sanyas (1925) 349
photojournalism 12, 353 Premchand 4
452 Index
Prisoners of Conscience (1978) 312 Pukar (1939) 72, 146–8
Pritish Nandy Communications 345, Puwar, Nirmal 358, 359
393n, 396 Pyaasa (1957) 44n, 45, 47, 70, 97,
Priya Village Roadshow 394 118–21
Priyadarshan 240, 320, 393n
public: arts 74; Bengali 165; Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (1988) 327
brahmanic 51; diegetic 41, 44,
45, 46, 70, 129, 146, 155, 159; Raakh (1988) 327
164; elite 64, 134, 315; imperfect Raat (1991) 332
168n; illegal 364n, 371n; and race melodramas 58
interior 46; modernist 14, 163; Rafelson, Bob 63
monitoring/regulation/gaze and Raghavan, Sriram 302, 389
sexuality 109, 126, 249, 250; Rahman, A.R. 210
nationalist 141; popular 164; and Rai, Alok 160n
private 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26, Rai, Amit 356
43, 58, 122, 127, 211, 248, 250, Rai, Himanshu 349
266, 277, 392, 392, 402, 403; railway strike, 1974 304
space 31, 117, 249, 303 Raja Hindustani 327
public-cinematic form/public-fictional Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 30n, 36n, 81n,
form/public form of address/ 110, 121, 132n, 133n, 164n,
publicness of cinematic mode of 197n, 204n, 206n, 304n, 307n,
address 10, 13, 14, 56, 57, 59, 64, 315n, 340–1, 342, 343, 346, 360,
70, 72, 73, 131, 211, 261, 293, 367n, 368n, 383, 393
301, 397, 398 Rajagopalachari, C. 265
public, cinema/film 11, 12: and Rajhans, B.S. 206
Bollywood 72; after copy culture Rajnikant 350, 409
406–12; contemporary 145; and Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1998)
genre 288, 298, 299, and 157
stars 70–1 Rakhee 310
public domain 48, 61 Ram ke Naam (1992) 319
public-family form 42, 48, 51, 52, Ramachandran, M.G. (MGR) 106;
210 see also MGR
public-symbolic authority 48, 49, Rambo films 24n
210 Ramayana 155
public sphere 24, 69, 204, 298, 402, Rangeela (1995) 328, 383–7, 389
412–14; imaginary 244; industrial Rao, D. Bhaskara 204n
commercial 413 Rao, N.T. Rama 106
publicness: mass 7, 134–5, 399; Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
melodramatic 8, 14, 16, 25, 28n, 260
43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 52, 55, 56, 64, Rathnam, Mani 11, 14, 137n, 201,
70, 72, 211, 228, 392, 398; of 210, 211, 218, 220, 222, 229,
character 44, 212; imaginary 135; 264, 315n, 316, 400n, 403;
see also public-cinematic form melodramas of 404; politicized
Index 453
melodrama in 212; symbolic and culture/Tamilness in 221–3; Tamil
territorial itinerary of 213–28 locales in 223–4; use of English
Ratnavibhushana, Ashley 207n in 219–20
Ray, R.M. 5n, 79n Ross, Kristin 354n
Ray, Satyajit 1, 5, 6, 7, 67, 73, 82, Roud, Richard 59n
97, 105, 156n, 307, 309, 342, Roy, Bimal 6, 7, 45n, 97, 104n, 115,
351n; Apu trilogy of 14, 169, 181; 116, 153n, 342
camera deployment 185; category Roy, Nirupa 364, 365
of genre in 165; character-focused Roy, Rahul 325, 326
narration in 172; on contemporary
subjects 191–7; lighting strategy Saaransh 321
of 196; modernism in 163, Sahara India Ltd 395n
168–81; narratives in films of Sahara Manoranjan 345, 393
195–6; naturalism in 168–70; Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1963) 45n
political perspective of 181; Sahitya Akademi 4n
popular genres in 185, 189, 190; Sahni, Jaideep 395n
on popular Indian cinema 34; Saigal, K.L. 206
realism in 166; unfinished agenda Salaam Bombay (1988) 157
of history in 181–3; village life in Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989) 318
work of 190; women characters in Samarth, Shobhana 153n, 154
films of 190–1 Sangari, Kumkum 119n, 184n, 217
Ray, Sukumar 188n Sangeet Natak Akademi 4n
realism, classical 166, 167, 300; Sangh Parivar 266
discourse of 67; melodrama and Sant Dnyaneshwar (1940) 49, 50
18, 28–31, 69, 94–5, 163; realistic Sant Tukaram (1937) 39–40, 41, 49,
cinema 74, 79, 225, 226, 268; 50, 129, 405
anti-realism 67 Santoshi, Raj Kumar 327
regional film history 69 Sarfarosh (1999) 328
regional markets 101–2 Sarkar, Bhaskar 30n
Rehman 154 Sarkar, Kobita 67, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81,
Rehman, Waheeda 45 83, 86, 94
Renoir 100n Sarkar, Tanika 144n, 160n, 184n,
Ritz Cinema, UK 358–9 204n
R.K. banner 82 Sarkar, Sumit 144n
Road (2002) 302, 394 satellite premieres, of films 396
Roja (Tamil, Hindi, 1992) 203, 212, Satya (1998) 329–33, 383
213–28, 255–7, 264, 403; Savarkar, Veer 160
Kashmir and Tamil Nadu in Sawant, Vishram 383
213–19; narrative form of 227; Schwarz, Hans Peter 278n
politics of identity in 219–21; script-writers 104
recalibration of popular form in Season Outside, A (1998) 321, 322
224–8; structural features of secularism 130, 135, 146, 152,
225, 227; success of 220; Tamil 263
454 Index
Seemabadha (Bengali, 1971) 192, Shukla, Jhanak 376
195 Sikh militant movements 318, 321
Selbourne, David 295n, 305n silent cinema 205
Self-Respect movement 214 Silverman, Kaja 92n
Sen, Mrinal 1, 224 Simpson, O.J., trial of 58
Sen, Suchitra 52 Singer, Ben 21, 55, 354n, 405n
Seponta, Abdul Hossein 206, 207 Singh, Bhrigupati 296, 299n
Seth, Sushma 376 Singh, Dara 377
Sethi, Sunil 238n Singh, Tavleen 238n
sexuality, in cinema 40, 122, 344–5; Singh, V.P. 315
community and, in Bombay Singha, Radhika 208n
245–51 Sinha, Ajay 349n, 350n, 351n, 352,
Shafik, Viola 207 353n, 355n, 356n, 360, 382n,
Shah, Chandulal 203 405n
Shah, Kundan 309, 310 Sinha, Mala 232n
Shah, Naseeruddin 278 Sinhala films 207; see also Ceylon/Sri
Shah, Satish 370 Lanka
Shahanama 35 Sirk, Douglas 9, 23
Shahani, Kumar 1, 311, 312 Sircar, B.N. 206
Shakespeare, adaptation of 36 Sivathamby, Karthigesu 341n
Shantaram, V. 141, 143, 144, 203 Smoodin, Eric 59
Sharabi (1984) 327 Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Sharan, Awadhendra 305n, 335n 58, 59
Sharma, Biren Das 132n social film genre 51, 82, 103–4,
Sharma, Rakesh 345 141–5; cultural politics of 95–7;
Sharma, Surabhi 324 forms of 13–14; of 1950s 96;
Shaw, Jeffrey 278n post-Independence 51; realism
Shejari (1940) 141–4 and 52; reform-oriented 106,
Sheldon, Sydney 391 202–5, 297; relationship with
Shireen Farhad (Parsi theatre play) 36, individual 72; typage in 13;
207 victimhood and injustice in 51
Shireen-Farhad romantic narratives song/dance sequences, in films 43,
205, 352 45, 67, 111, 123, 124, 126, 210,
Shiv Sena 157, 159, 314, 295, 315, 403
316, 332; on Bombay 236, 245 Sopranos, The 62
Shiva (1989) 383 soundtrack 10, 46, 119, 142
Shivaji 146 South Korea, ‘golden age’ melodrama
Shorey, Roop K. 206, 209 of 9
Shree 420 (1956) 44, 150, 152, 155 spectator(ship) 13, 118, 174; in
Shree Krishna Janma (1918) 40, American cinema 87; cognitive
138–40 theory model of 32; and commu-
Shroff, Jackie 384 nity 14; dominant 107; framing
Shudra category 139 of 13; imaginary identity of 75;
Index 455
and narrative process 131; 69, 82; time and subjectivity
pre-rationalist 106; –screen 118–25
relationship 70, 133, 136; Tagore, Rabindranath 4, 164, 184
subjectivity 85, 86, 125–9; Tagore, Sharmila 181, 191, 192, 195
see also audience tamasha 35
speech 10, 16, 123, 134, 136, 325, Tamil film 14, 207, 265, 392;
402, 403, 413; forms of 109; in demand for, in Japan 350;
melodrama 43, 44 dubbed 203; of 1930s and 1940s
Sri Lanka, Tamil separatism in 103; industry 201, 208, 209, 264;
214–15, 255 intervention in Hindi market 201;
Srinivas, S.V. 296, 298, 299n, 408 success of 336; traditions 210
Sriram, P.C. 316 Tamil: identity 201, 210, 214,
Staiger, Janet 26 221–3, 264–5; anti-Hindi
star/stardom, discourse and systems of movement 214, 264; and Kashmir
typage 151; Hollywood model of in Roja 213–19; nationalism 14,
70; icon 301; information about 277; politics 316
71; image 135, 408–9; perform- Taneja, Anand Vivek 296, 297n,
ativity 136, 261, 272, 308–9, 335n, 345n, 408n
310–11, 316, 326–8, 369–71, Tangella, Madhavi 410n
375–6, 379–82; screen personality Tarang (1984) 311
70; -politicians in South India 1; Tarlo, Emma 294n
stellar bodies 150–62; as sutradhar tawaif, performance culture of 205
301; system 33 Taxi Driver (1954) 87
Stein, Elliot 59n Telugu films 203
Stewart, James 57 Tezaab (1988) 240, 313, 315
storytelling, in popular cinema 18, territorial imagination, and cinema
80, 131, 197, 260, 403 15, 199, 210, 211, 293
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 27n Thackeray, Bal 241, 245, 246
street: ballads 18; scenes, of 1940s Tharani, Thotta 316
and 1950s Indian cinema 94 ‘third cinema’ 81, 98
Stray Bullet, The (Korean) 29–30 third look, codes of 133
studios, Indian 78, 163; crisis of 51 third world, domestic commercial
stunt films 93, 103, 204, 205, 405 cinema in 98
Subrahmanyam, K. 203 Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye (1990)
Sujata (1959) 97 157
Sundaram, Ravi 2n, 335n Thomas, Rosie 86n, 296, 297, 351n,
‘Swadeshi’ cinema 342 366n, 405, 408n
Syal, Meera 329, 337 Thompson, Kristin 26, 83n
Thorner, Alice 294n
tableau: form 68, 69, 82, 84, 85, 93, Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 40; Kesari of
96, 100, 111, 138, 226, 286; 138
frame 93, 111–12; frontality tradition(al) 7, 32, 42, 68, 80, 81,
and 110; mode of representation 205, 304, 338, 363, 374, 399,
456 Index
413; ideology of 110; identity Varma, Ram Gopal 302, 328, 329,
201, 337; modernity and 67, 72, 332, 363, 383, 386, 389, 393,
93, 232, 275, 301; neo- 265; 394, 395; and Factory 395;
patriarchal 371; social norms 355; Productions 394
society 233, 274 varnashrama dharma 138–9
transcendence, notion of 132; Varadarajan, Siddhartha 138n
through figure of Vishnu 140; Vasan, S.S. 79, 209
tolerance and 130–1 Vasudevan, Ravi 40n, 45n, 52n, 75n,
‘transitional’ cinema 68, 98; societies 86n, 88n, 89n, 91n, 93n, 95n,
100 96n, 102n, 109n, 121n, 122n,
transnational, film circulation 351; 123n, 124n, 129n, 136n, 168n,
vernaculars 33 169n, 209n, 225n, 308n, 309n,
tribals, representation in Satyajit Ray’s 340n, 364n, 366n, 371n
films 194 Vaudeville 125
Trishul (1978) 309, 310 Vidal, Denis 294n
Trivedi, Harish 220n video CDs 14, 396, 406, 411; game
narrative formats 212, 262
Uberoi, Patricia 3n, 45n, 122n Vidushak 124
United Kingdom 3; Indian films in Vietnam war 63
337, 348 Vijaykar, Rajiv 380n
United States (USA) 3; diasporic Vinayak, Master 404
locations of 348; production Vincendeau, Ginette 100n, 101n
code in 5 violence, in films 300, 303, 312, 321;
untouchable category 203; in diagnosis of source of 318–21;
Shree Krishna Janma see also Bombay
139 Virillio, Paul 60n, 354n
universal and national, deconstructing visual: authority 121; forms 12, 68,
the 31–4 100, 115, 226, 356; culture 93,
urban, imagination 293–6; landscape, 183, 297; discourse of 121, 131;
changes in 313, 334–5; planning, and lyric practices 67–8; repre-
and reconstruction 12; spatial sentation 75
practice 12; theatre 36; see also Vohra, Neeraj 393n
city Von Sternberg 144
Urdu genres, modern 205;
Hindi 208–9; playwriting 35, Wadia 36, 297
36n; protest song 46 War and Peace, censorship of 345
UTV, film and television production Watve, Bapu 342n
company 396 West Bengal, Left Front government
in 322
Vaishnavite tradition 140, 204 When Four Friends Meet (2000)
Vaishya category 139 325–6
van der Heide, William 207 white: American identity 60; Anglo-
Varadpande, M.L. 124n Saxon norm 126; race ideology 63
Index 457
Why We Fight 60 Written on the Wind 23
Willemen, Paul 98n, 201, 206n,
307n, 315n Yoshimoto, Matsushiro 28, 29, 105n
Williams, Linda 9, 20n, 21n, 25, Yumnam, Ranjan 412n
26, 27n 28n, 32n, 58, 168n, Yusuf, S.M. 203
391n
women: as film subject 9, 96, 181, Zakhm (1999) 320, 321; censorship
203–4, 383; woman’s film as genre of 345
17n, 20–2, 22n, 57; point of Zanjeer (1973) 307
view and 112–19, 122; and Zelig (1990) 284, 285
family melodrama 25 Zemeckis, Robert 284
Wood, Michael 22 Zinta, Preity 376
World Bank 2 Zohn, H. 407n
Wray, Matt 62 Zutshi, Somnath 138n

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The Melodramatic Public

ISBN 978-1-349-59042-1 ISBN 978-0-230-11812-6 (eBook)

1 The Melodramatic Public 16

3 The Cultural Politics of Address in a ‘Transitional’

4 Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian

6 Voice, Space, Form: The Symbolic and Territorial

7 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 229

10 The Contemporary Film Industry—I: The Meanings

11 The Contemporary Film Industry—II: Textual Form,

Conclusion and Afterword 398

1. Indian Cinema Today . . .

Medianagar, 1 and 2, Delhi, Sarai-CSDS, 2004–5; Sarai Filmcity Broadsheets, 1 and

Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (2), July–December 1998, 305–36.

6 See http://www.ficci-frames.com for information about the activity of this orga-

nization, initiated in 2001.

2. The Thematics of Melodrama

of Cinema’, in Partha Chatterjee, The Wages of Freedom, Delhi, Oxford University

PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002.

3. The Shifting Agenda of Film Studies

The Melodramatic Public

I. DEBATES IN M ELODRAMA S TUDIES

2. Melodrama as Generalized Mode of

3. Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema

4. The Post-Colonial Question: Melodrama

22 Yoshimoto’s analysis deploys the idea of melodrama to capture moments of

5. Deconstructing the Universal and

eds, Reinventing Film Studies, 332–50 (340).

post-colonial India, see my introduction to Part II, below.

Satyajit Ray’s remarks on Indian popular cinema contrasted it unfavour-

Chaudhury, 4 March 2006, www.tehelka.com; also see Farooqui’s continuing research

7. Film Form: The Heterogeneous

41 For further exploration of this mode, see Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Devotional

43Vasudevan, ‘Devotional Transformation’.

Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957).

9. ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ Articulations

Figs 1-2: Pyaasa, Guru Dutt, 1957, Interior and Public.

of popular resistance followed by an exercise in modernizing state authoritarianism

Figs 5–6: Melodramatic mise-en-scène in Awara, Raj Kapoor, 1951.

10. Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood

Narrative Form and Modes of Address

1. Critical Discourses in the 1950s

3 Satyajit Ray, ‘What Is Wrong With Indian Films?’, ibid., 21.

2. Popular Narrative Form

the moral aspects of melodramatic mise-en-scène.

edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into

Fig. 9: Andaz, Mehboob Khan, 1949, Tableau Shot.

Neena’s movement of greeting in shot 2 to her touching this unnamed

The Street and the Dissolution of

50 Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Cultural Space of a Film Narrative: Interpreting Kismet

53 There is a fetishistic aspect to the photograph here, a disavowal of lack in the

3. Redefining the Popular: Melodrama

4. The Popular Cultural Politics of

separation and coincidental reunion of characters is actually motivated by the narrative

The Cultural Politics of Address

1. Indian Popular Cinema Genres and

see Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in

12 Moinak Biswas, ‘Literature and Cinema in Bengal, 1930s–1950s’, paper presented

14 For an exploration of this influential critical tradition, see ch. 2 above.

18 ‘Seeing is Believing’, in Das Gupta, The Painted Face, 35–44.

3. The Politics of Indian Melodrama

23 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

4. Iconicity, Frontality, and the