Untitled

India’s New Independent Cinema
This book breaks new ground in what has become a field of cliché: Indian
Cinema. It is an insightful peek into what Parallel cinema in India has
evolved into. A must read for anyone studying the subject, or just passionate
about cinema.
—Renji Matthews, University of Sharjah, UAE
This is the first-ever book on the rise of the new wave of independent Indian
films that is revolutionising Indian cinema. Contemporary scholarship on
Indian cinema so far has focused asymmetrically on Bollywood, India’s dom-
inant cultural export. Reversing this trend, this book provides an in-depth
examination of the burgeoning independent Indian film sector. It locates the
new ‘Indies’ as a glocal hybrid film form – global in aesthetic and local in
content. These films critically engage with a diverse socio-political spectrum
of ‘state of the nation’ stories: from farmer suicides and disenfranchised
urban youth and migrant workers to monks turned anti-corporation animal
rights agitators. This book provides comprehensive analyses of definitive
Indie New Wave films, including Peepli Live (2010), Dhobi Ghat (2010),
The Lunchbox (2013) and Ship of Theseus (2013). It explores how subver-
sive Indies, such as polemical postmodern rap-musical Gandu (2010), trans-
gress conventional notions of ‘traditional Indian values’ and collide with
state censorship regulations. This timely analysis shows how the new Indies
have emerged from a middle space between India’s globalising present and
traditional past. This book draws on in-depth interviews with directors,
actors, academics and members of the Indian censor board; it is essential
reading for anyone seeking an insight into a current Indian film phenome-
non that could chart the future of Indian cinema.
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram has a PhD from Heriot-Watt University,

Edinburgh. He is currently Programming Adviser for the London Asian
Film Festival (LAFF) and Creative Director of the festival’s expansion to
other cities in the UK.
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India’s New Independent
Cinema
Rise of the Hybrid
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

First published 2016
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel.

Title: India’s new independent cinema: rise of the hybrid / by Ashvin
Immanuel Devasundaram.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2016 | Series: Routledge advances in
film studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003977
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture industry—India. | Independent films—
India. | Motion pictures—India.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.I8 D485 2016 | DDC 791.430954—dc23LC
record available at HYPERLINK “https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/
lN5JBRUazbLgum” http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003977
ISBN: 978-1-138-18462-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-64501-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For John, Mum, Dada, and Family
Contents
List of Figures xi
List of Interviewees xiii
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: Setting the Stage 1
PART I
Enter India’s New Indies
1 Bollywood and the Cinemas of India: The Story so Far 15
2 The Meta-Hegemony: Leviathan Bollywood and

Lilliputian Indies 32
3 The Anatomy of the Indies 60
4 Avenues of Indie Funding, Distribution and Exhibition 80
5 Interstitial Indies Interrogating India’s Double Narrative 109
6 Running with Scissors: Censorship and Regulation 125
PART II
Case Studies
7 Rapping in Double Time: Gandu’s Subversive Time

of Liberation 149
8 Dhobi Ghat: The Marginal in the Mumbai Mainstream 180
9 Peepli Live: Neoliberal Capital, Media ‘Knowledge’

and Political Power 201
x Contents
10 All the World’s a Ship: Broken Binaries and Hyperlinked
Heterotopias in Ship of Theseus 226
11 A Cinematic Quartet Conjuring Ghosts of Nation:

Harud, Haider, The Lunchbox and I Am 250
Conclusion: Charting the Ship’s Course 271
Index 279
List of Figures
2.1 ‘Vamp’ Helen in the 1970 film, The Train. 44

2.2 Katrina Kaif’s item number, ‘Chikni Chameli’,
in 2012’s Agneepath. 44
2.3 Miss India training session. 46
2.4 Marc Robinson examines ‘hot legs’. 47
3.1 The Ship of Indian Cinemas. 63
7.1 The vox populi. 151
7.2 Scrolling subtitles. 171
7.3 Gandu and Ricksha’s POV. 173
7.4 View of Q filming. 173
7.5 Second camera revealed. 174
7.6 Mise-en-abyme diptych. 174
7.7 Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, Prado Museum.
Source: Google Earth. 176
8.1 Shai’s wide shot of windows in Dhobi Ghat. 185
8.2 View from Jeff’s window in Rear Window. 185
8.3 Shai’s ‘stakeout’. 186
8.4 Her object of scrutiny – Arun. 186
8.5 Arun looking into the camcorder while playing
Yasmin’s video diary. 187
8.6 Shai interrupted by a phone call from her father. 187
8.7 Shai spying through her camera. 188
8.8 Jeff indulging in the pleasure of looking. 188
8.9 Arun: seeing himself in the other. 190
9.1 Natha and Budhia: Isolated long shot. 204
9.2 Rakesh’s encounter. 217
9.3 The vacant pit symbolising Mahato’s absence. 217
9.4 Mahato in the midst of the media circus. 218
9.5 Ineffectual offerings: The Lal Bahadur Shastri
hand pump and untouched television. 220
10.1 Butades’s ‘blind tracing’ of her lover.
Source: Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Invention of the Art of Drawing
(1791) © Groeningemuseum, Bruges. Image appears in
Blocker, J 2007. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis. 233
xii List of Figures
10.2 Spiritual and material in Mumbai. 239
10.3 Karma and commerce in contemporary India. 239
10.4 Through winding alleys. 240
10.5 The museum-cinema heterotopia. 244
10.6 Heterogeneous assemblage: The organ recipients. 244
10.7 Looking into time. 246
10.8 Presence and absence coterminous in the cave. 247
11.1 Boy frisked during stop-and-search. 252
11.2 Haider frisked by security forces. 257
11.3 Army audience reterritorialises Faraz cinema. 259
11.4 Bollywood ‘applauds’ hegemonic power. 259
11.5 Confronting the wall of the past. 263
11.6 Police officer’s assault on Jai, with Indian flag
in the background. 264
List of Interviewees
Bashir, A. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai, 18 July

2013.
Belawadi, P. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Bangalore,
28 July 2013.
Bhaskar, I. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], New Delhi,
30 June 2013.
Bose, R. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai,
17 July 2013.
Ghosh, S. 2011. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], London,
21 October 2011
Kumar, P. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Bangalore,
2 August 2013.
Nag, A. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Bangalore, 5 July
2013.
Nambiar, B. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai,
23 July 2013.
Onir. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai, 12 July
2013.
Q (Qaushiq Mukherjee). 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person],
Mumbai, 27 July 2013.
Raghavendra, K M. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Bangalore,
2 July 2013.
Rao, K. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai, 20 July
2013.
Ravindran, N. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Bangalore,
5 July 2013.
Rizvi, A. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Bangalore,
29 June 2013.
Swaroop, K. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai,
20 July 2013.
Acknowledgements
This book started its life cycle as doctoral research conducted in 2011–2014
at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in the Department of Languages and
Intercultural Studies. I was ever mindful that I was embarking on a corpus
of work that would entail the first published academic work on new, inde-
pendent Indian cinema. This ethos has informed the book at every milestone
of its development and metamorphosis into the monograph you now see
before you.
I am very grateful to Maggie Sargeant and Chris Tinker at Heriot-Watt
University for their help and support. Interminable thanks to my family for
always being a bastion of strength: my mother and father for being a peren-
nial source of inspiration, my sister Bina for animating my love for reading,
and brother Avinash for his abiding support. Most of all, I am grateful to my
creative muse John Field for ‘being and being there’.
I am thankful to everyone in Bangalore and Mumbai who supported
me through the fieldwork journey I am especially grateful to Suneil and
Kiran Ramakrishna for their indefatigable and unwavering assistance
during the Bangalore segment of my research. Thanks to Sukhbir Kalsi
and Steve Lewis for their help in connecting Edinburgh to Bangalore
and Mumbai. I am grateful to all the respondents in Bangalore, Delhi,
Mumbai and elsewhere who gave graciously of their time despite their
busy schedules: Aamir Bashir, Kiran Rao, Onir, Anusha Rizvi, Q, Rahul
Bose, Prakash Belawadi, Pawan Kumar, Kamal Swaroop, Ira Bhaskar,
M K Raghavendra, Arundhati Nag, Suman Ghosh and Nirmala Ravindran
inter alia. I am particularly thankful to the managers and agents of the
filmmakers and actors interviewed for this book for their help with con-
sent forms. I am deeply grateful to Professor. Renji Mathews, Head of
Digital Media at the College of Fine Arts and Design, University of S harjah,
for his wonderful design and creation of a state-of-the-art Ship of C inemas
diagram. Thanks to Shreya and Ria Mathews for designing the website
linked to the book.
I would like to acknowledge Media in Australia journal (MIA) for per-
mitting the use of sections from a previously published article. I am also
thankful to The South Asianist: Journal of South Asian Studies, University
xvi Acknowledgements
of Edinburgh, for granting permission to re-use excerpts from one of my
articles. All film still images used in this book are screenshots. Thanks to
Taylor & Francis for allowing use of a previously printed image.
I am very grateful to Felisa Salvago-Keyes and Nicole Eno at Routledge
for their assistance and support through the editorial process.
Introduction
Setting the Stage
I want this to be mainstream. I want the frivolity, the silliness, the

regressiveness to be alternative.
—Anand Gandhi, on new independent Indian cinema (Naqvi, 2013)
Indian cinema is undergoing a foundational transformation through the

emergence of a new wave of urban independent films since 2010. The
growth and development of this new filmic form, currently alluded to as
new Indian ‘Indies’, is raising fresh awareness of Indian cinema in the public
sphere. The paucity of directly related academic literature on this contem-
porary form of independent cinema also presents an opportunity for this
book to question a majoritarian bias in scholarship. Contemporary critical
writing on Indian cinema has so far focused on Bollywood, India’s dominant
cultural signifier. The absence of a comprehensive, dedicated and up-to-date
analysis of the new Indian Indies appears all the more anomalous in light of
their burgeoning popularity. The credo of this critical analysis is to address
this key knowledge gap. In this regard, this book constitutes the first com-
prehensive academic investigation of the ongoing cinematic phenomenon
that is new independent Indian cinema.
As an au courant analysis, this book will adopt a multi-angle, pluralistic
and intercultural approach, featuring a diversity of voices and perspectives.
As part of this strategy, I have undertaken in-depth interviews in three Indian
cities, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, with several independent film direc-
tors and actors, whose works are either analysed at length in this book, or
have played pivotal roles in the ascendancy of the new Indies. In a bid to
address the predominantly northern Indian focus of academic literature on
Indian cinema, I have incorporated a broad-sweep approach that includes
voices from Bangalore, Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi. Interview respondents
include renowned independent cinema actor, Rahul Bose, acclaimed inde-
pendent directors Kiran Rao, Anusha Rizvi, Aamir Bashir, Onir, Kamal
Swaroop, Bejoy Nambiar, Pawan Kumar, Prakash Belawadi, Suman Ghosh
and Q (Qaushiq Mukherjee). This book is also informed by interactions
with former members of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC)
(some are anonymised), leading film scholars and representatives from the
2 Introduction
arts, culture and journalism spheres in India. These include Ira Bhaskar from
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; M K Raghavendra; Arundhati
Nag and Nirmala Ravindran from Bangalore.
The importance of a timely scholarly study of the new Indies is empha-
sised by these films intertwining with metamorphosing Indian socio-political
structures. The nation is currently undergoing a tumultuous neoliberal
restructuring characterised by a commitment to consumer capitalism, for-
eign multinational investment and an inexorable thrust towards a global
free market economy. These liberalisation-induced vicissitudes in the Indian
nation-state are punctuated by a paradoxical retrenchment of right-wing
Hindu religious and nationalist ideology. It is therefore pertinent that this
book is born into an extant socio-political Indian milieu that is fraught with
escalating intolerance towards rationalism and increasingly inimical to secu-
lar and libertarian free expression, particularly concerning the creative arts.
This is attributable in large measure, as Diana Dimitrova (2014: 86) cogently
points out, to the obsessive thrust by religious nationalist power structures
towards a return to ‘Aryan roots’ and the idea of a ‘modern Hindu-Indian
nation from which Muslims, other religious minorities, women’ and Dalits
are excluded.
In this milieu of undecidability, the new Indie films with their topical
narrative themes and issues constitute intersectional sites of contemporary
Indian discourse. They appear to reflect multifarious dimensions of the
above-mentioned fractures and socio-economic schisms in multilayered
modern Indian society. In essence, the new Indies narrate micro-narratives –
the minority and alternative stories of nation excluded from Bollywood film
representations. An examination of the new Indies, therefore, will reveal
the discursive contexts and subjective voices in contemporary India, largely
elided in academic literature’s preoccupation with the majority narrative of
Bollywood.
Recent literature, such as Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood (Dwyer &
Pinto 2011), alludes to non-Bollywood Indian cinema, but either fails to
affirm these films as a distinctive and de facto modern Indian cinematic
discourse or obviates the specificities and nuances that are integral to the
individuality of new independent Indian cinema. Adrian Athique has con-
ducted erudite and percipient analyses of one important facet that influences
new Indie cinema – the growth of The Multiplex in India (Athique and
Hill, 2010). Monika Mehta’s Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
(2011) extends an insightful perspective on censorship and regulation, albeit
focusing on Bollywood. New Indian Cinema in Post-Independence India
(Needham, 2013) presents a rigorous appraisal of 1970s and 80s Parallel
cinema auteur Shyam Benegal’s oeuvre. Despite the book’s title – New
Indian Cinema – its content exhibits the common symptom of scholar-
ship on Indian film studies. This involves the seemingly inevitable recasting
and reinscribing of dominant paradigms, such as Bollywood, or a restric-
tion of research focus to 1970s and 80s Parallel Indian cinema. In general,
Introduction 3
academic engagement largely continues to either perpetuate the dichotomy
of Bollywood/Parallel, or nostalgically recall hoary historical achievements
in a unilinear, uncritical and often mythologised construction of Indian
cinema historiography.
Indeed, some contemporary scholars go so far as to invest Bollywood with
‘divine’ authority, seeing in the commercial film industry a new-age avatar of
ancient mythological texts. They proclaim ‘Bollywood cinema has assumed
the mantle of upholding a distinct moral code, just as the pauranic kathas
[ancient Hindu mythological stories] once did’ (Kishwar, 2013: 95). These
scholars extend an undifferentiating adulation predicated on the notion that
Bollywood has been ‘obsessive in teaching young people the value of sac-
rifice, commitment to family well-being and respect for elders’ (ibid., 97).
Such expressions are symptomatic of current transdiscursive attempts to
formulate a ‘constructed notion of history that can be traced back from the
present day to the Vedic age in one continuous unbroken line’ (Dimitrova,
2014: 86). This book momentarily halts this linear national narrative in its
tracks, stopping to consider whether there is space left for alternative voices
and counter-narratives in the seemingly all-encompassing brand-building
exercise of bolstering the myth and monolith of nation.
Whilst the transglobal perpetuation of Bollywood as shorthand for Indian
culture ostensibly augments India’s ‘global street credibility’, it arguably
obfuscates the nation’s current socio-cultural and religio-political frictions.
These tensions are exemplified in escalating levels of religious intolerance,
violent attacks on minorities, and transgressions on freedom of expression,
all largely met by the ruling state’s policy of silence.
India’s current global image has been corroded in relation to a raft of
incidents involving religious antagonisms and the suppression of expres-
sion. Prominent among these events was the recent Hindu mob lynching of
a Muslim man over his alleged consumption of beef, which is forbidden in
the Hindu religion. The nation is also countenancing an assault on expres-
sions of free speech and rationalism, with three prominent proponents of
rationalism and science murdered by religious radicals in different regions
of the country. In light of these events, it could be stated that the nation’s
outward-facing narrative of economic ascendency appears antithetical to
this tumultuous internal geopolitical configuration.
This is magnified in recent events, where Bollywood star Aamir Khan was
pilloried for publically expressing his apprehension about rising intolerance
in India (‘Aamir Khan’, 2015). A barrage of vituperation from the religious-
nationalist domain of the political and public sphere followed Khan’s state-
ment, including abusive directives urging him to convert to Hinduism or
relocate to Pakistan with his filmmaker wife, Kiran Rao (Bhatia, 2015).
These events could be perceived as a predictable iteration of earlier belli-
cose reactions to other high-profile individuals from the arts and culture
spheres, including Bollywood’s Shah Rukh Khan, upon vocalising similar
concerns. In this environment, myopically laudatory academic analyses that
4 Introduction
shore up the majoritarian national status quo, as cited earlier, are prototypi-
cal of the reluctance displayed by several sections of Indian scholarship to be
perceived as ‘disloyal’ to the nation-state. It could be argued that the refusal
to acknowledge and address endemic socio-political issues for fear of being
labelled ‘anti-national’ panders to the uncontested ratification and reproduc-
tion of hegemony.
There is a growing mobilisation of the Indian intelligentsia and the arts
and culture community, manifested in the returning of national awards by
prominent Indian writers, artists, filmmakers, historians and scientists. In
this germination of a collective counter-narrative spearheaded by artists,
liberals and the progressive-minded, it is worth locating and interpreting
the role of alternative narratives cinematically and self-reflexively emerging
from the new Indies acting as specular interrogative instruments of India’s
ongoing transformations.
Analysing the emergence of this new independent Indian cinematic form
that at present is marginal to Bollywood and represents alternative socio-
political micro-narratives necessitates the adoption of congruent philo
sophical and theoretical frames of reference. It will be demonstrated that a
postcolonial, postmodern and poststructural approach that problematises
grand narratives, such as Bollywood, and facilitates the emergence of multi-
ple subjectivities, is appropriate to this book’s main arguments. In addition,
my theory of a ‘meta-hegemony’ forms one of the core contributions of this
book on the new Indian Indies. I have devised this paradigm to explain the
historical hierarchy of dominance in Indian cinema. Examining the inner
workings of Bollywood’s meta-hegemony within Indian cinema will assist
in contextualising the emergence of the new Indies, mapping their quest for
representative space and their thrust towards a dedicated ‘Indie’ funding and
distribution infrastructure in India’s Bollywood-dominated cultural domain.
Concomitantly, this book seeks to ascertain whether the Indies’ divergence
from Bollywood’s representations of a normative patriarchal national meta-
narrative could be indicative of an urban Indian socio-cultural and cinematic
‘time of liberation’ in a ‘time of cultural uncertainty’ (Bhabha, 1995: 155).
In this context, I will address the important question of whether the Indies
constitute a counter-narrative to Bollywood’s appropriation of the nation’s
cultural narrative.
Expanding on the conceptual framework, this book locates the new Indies
in a median space that signifies the nation’s ‘agonistic’ (Bhabha, 1994: 38, 41)
dialectical arbitration between its traditional national past and neoliberal
present. One of the main aims is to ascertain how the Indies negotiate and
frequently destabilise this national binary whilst diverging from dominant
Bollywood norms in terms of form, style and content. In view of their rising
popularity, particularly in the urban space, it is worth examining whether the
hybridity of the Indies, their positioning in an ambivalent interstitial space
and their alternative narration of nation can be posited as a cinematic narra-
tive of resistance to mainstream socio-cultural and political discourses.
Introduction 5
At this stage, it is worth mapping the main themes that will serve as
guidelines for this exploratory journey into the heart of new Indian Indie
cinema. In this regard, I pose several questions. How are the alternative
narratives emerging from the interstitial representative space of New Wave
independent films influencing a current transformation in Indian cinema?
What modes and strategies do the new Indies use to represent alternative
articulations and marginalised narratives of the nation? How do their dis-
courses evoke censorship and address the dominant national metanarrative
in a changing socio-political landscape? What is the historiographical con-
text of the emergence of the Indies? That is, are they fundamentally a ‘glo-
cal hybrid’ of India’s mainstream and marginal cinematic forms? How do
the New Wave Indie discourses address the existing hegemonic Bollywood
superstructure?
Stemming from these questions, the book’s various chapters will exam-
ine to what extent the new independent films amalgamate heterogeneous
cinematic influences and are glocal in their ‘globalisation of the local and
the localisation of the global’ (Marramao, 2012: 35). In essence, I raise the
proposition that the new Indies combine a universal aesthetic with locally
specific stories, circumventing ubiquitous Bollywood ‘song and dance’
sequences and stereotypical storylines. This study also considers whether
the new films draw from India’s multiple contemporary socio-political real-
ities to espouse everyday human narratives, often focussing on marginalised
individuals and communities. In this regard, I will appraise a variegated
array of seminal independent films, including Gandu (2010), Dhobi Ghat
(2010), Peepli Live (2010), The Lunchbox (2013), Harud (2010), I Am
(2010) and Ship of Theseus (2013) – all films that represent themes and
issues that discursively engage with the contemporary ‘state of the nation’.
The main focus, therefore, is on how the emergence of the Indian Indies
from an in-between space enables them to represent alternative stories
whilst simultaneously gaining popularity in urban India. This middle Indie
space could be located between the two enduring Indian cinema traditions,
Bollywood and Parallel arthouse, and in India’s current tryst between glo-
balising modernity and traditional past.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I presents a background insight
into the emergence of the new Indies, appraising their characteristics,
modes of dissemination and delving into the socio-political discourses that
inform these films’ thematic content. Part II undertakes a practical case-
study approach through close textual readings of the aforementioned
independent films. Data from fieldwork interviews, evaluations of news
articles and reviews in the public sphere and the case-study film analyses
will be examined through the lens of existing theoretical frameworks and
the self-devised model of a meta-hegemony expounded in this book. The
intention of this syncretic paradigm is to bring a refreshing and revitalis-
ing perspective to the broader realm of modern Film Studies and World
Cinema(s). My aim is to widen transdisciplinary horizons in an effort to
6 Introduction
decompartmentalise and destabilise parochial borders that have often
resulted in self-contained or repetitive epistemological and philosophical
approaches to Bollywood-dominated scholarship. Breaking these barriers,
I will deploy an intercultural approach, one that does not recoil from draw-
ing on a global palette of analogies or cognate disciplines. This comparative
pan-global frame is commensurate with the network society in which we
find ourselves inextricably immersed; constantly colliding in a sea of cul-
tural and information interflows.
The book’s first chapter traces the evolutionary timeline of new indepen-
dent Indian cinema. It maps the genealogy of the new Indies, ostensibly as
a hybrid ‘mutant’ synthesis of their cinematic ‘parents’, Bollywood and Par-
allel arthouse cinema, but revealing numerous other cinematic overlaps and
influences. Reiterating the diffuse composition of the Indies as an amalga-
mation of various Indian (and, as detailed in later chapters, global) cinemas,
this chapter traces the Indies amorphous antecedents, subsequently disman-
tling the binary conception of Indian cinema as either Bollywood or Satyajit
Ray. Encapsulating a post-independence timeline, this overview charts the
influences of other cinemas on the current Indie New Wave, including urban
‘Hinglish’ cinema – cosmopolitan films with a mixture of Hindi and English
dialogue.
Chapter 2 explicates my theory of a ‘meta-hegemony’, which is one of
this monograph’s original contributions to scholarship. This paradigm has
been devised to explain the historical hierarchy of dominance in Indian and
global cinema and how this impacts the new Indies. The concept asserts that
Bollywood dominates Indian cinema and culture whilst being subservient to
a larger global Hollywood hegemony. In the context of this study’s focus on
new independent Indian cinema, the paradigm of a global meta-hegemony
will focus on its Indian inner-workings – Bollywood’s hegemony in modern
Indian cinema in relation to the new Indies. The meta-hegemony has three
distinctive facets within the contours of Indian cinema. The first feature is
Bollywood’s monopoly over the Indian film industry’s modes of production,
distribution, exhibition and capital generation. In this regard, Bollywood
films largely dominate Indian urban multiplex cinema screens, leading to the
new Indies being locked in a disproportionate struggle for space and having
to seek alternative avenues of exhibition. The second facet is Bollywood’s
ideological propagation of a post-globalisation master narrative through
its role as national cultural signifier of India’s neoliberal economy. This
section contends that Bollywood has melded neoliberalism, patriarchy and
religion in its articulation of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ national narrative. It argues
that several mainstream Bollywood films validate a majoritarian ethos,
both in terms of the state’s thrust towards market liberalisation and a stan-
dardisation of ‘traditional’ Hindu values and ideology. This proposition
is contextualised through the new Indies’ divergence and contestation of
normative national discourse, often through polemical, self-reflexive and
sometimes transgressive narratives. This segment of the chapter also looks
Introduction 7
at Bollywood’s narration of a patriarchal, postcolonial, national narrative
through gendered and stereotypical representations of women. It inspects
Bollywood’s ‘gendering of the nation’, particularly through the industry’s
normalisation of sexualised song and dance sequences known as ‘item num-
bers’. Bollywood’s patriarchal representations of gender seem amplified
in comparison with the increasing number of female directors and strong
female roles in several new independent films. The third dimension of the
meta-hegemony is the state’s endorsement of Bollywood as an instrument of
soft power, signifying Bollywood’s branding as a national and global com-
modity. Soft power, a term coined by Joseph Nye (2004), is a strategy for
nations to gain global influence through cultural and political ‘attraction’
rather than military ‘coercion’. This portion of the chapter argues that the
state and Bollywood fold into the new Indian neoliberal national narrative,
and their political and cinematic discourses converge in the rhetoric of soft
power. Demonstrating how Bollywood is validated at the highest levels of
executive power, this section contextualises the arrival of the new Indies
and the challenges they face in the subsuming discourse of Bollywood’s
soft power.
Following Chapter 2’s contextualisation of the Indies’ emergence in a
Bollywood meta-hegemony, Chapter 3 presents an overview of the new
Indies’ general characteristics. It details attempts to define and classify them
and the features that distinguish them from the mainstream. Presenting the
new Indies as a postmodern hybrid film form emerging from a middle ‘third
space’, this chapter effectively dismantles the longstanding Bollywood/
Satyajit Ray binary model perpetuated both in Film Studies scholarship and
in mainly Western perceptions of Indian cinema. This section investigates
whether the blanket-term ‘Indie’ can be superimposed on the new wave of
independent Indian films, acknowledging the American associations of this
appellation. I consider whether it is more accurate to perceive the Indian
Indies as a glocal mélange of heterogeneous Indian and global cinematic
influences hybridising under the monolith of Bollywood’s meta-hegemony.
I use an inventive diagrammatic model of the Ship of Theseus, (an ancient
Greek philosophical paradox and title of a globally successful Indian Indie),
in order to trace the evolution of the Indies from a ‘Ship of Indian Cinemas’.
Exploring the various modes of defining and categorising the new Indies,
this section therefore constructs a template to chart the course of the Indies
in their attempt to create a new cinematic space. This sets up the next chap-
ter, which will elucidate the channels of dissemination available to the new
Indies.
The fourth chapter analyses the practical mechanisms of prolifera-
tion available, afforded or accessed by the new Indies. It delves into the
Indies’ paradoxical reliance on Bollywood producers, stars and corporate
production houses for funding, distribution and exhibition. In this regard,
the Indies’ alternative content often proves an Achilles heel whilst sourc-
ing mainstream funding and exhibition opportunities. This chapter reveals
8 Introduction
alternative mechanisms adopted by young Indie filmmakers to either mit-
igate or circumvent reliance on Bollywood infrastructure. These include
international co-productions, social media and the Internet, ‘instant
cinema’, video on demand, film festivals and crowdfunding. Importantly,
this segment analyses the growing migration of urban film consumption
to pirate spheres, where young urban Indians gain free access to new Indie
films through torrent downloads on peer-to-peer file-sharing websites. This
displacement to cyberspace is largely a legacy of the Indies struggling to
find mainstream space in overpriced Bollywood-dominated multiplexes, as
mentioned in Chapter 2.
It was mentioned in Chapter 4 that the Indies’ unconventional content
entails limited avenues of funding, distribution and exhibition. Acting as
a bridge to Chapter 6, which is on censorship and regulation, Chapter 5
deals with the Indies challenging the status quo of Bollywood’s linear narra-
tion of nation. The Indies exhibit postmodern traits in their sometimes con-
troversial representations of India’s socio-political tryst with tradition and
modernity. Indie films often feature fragmented time and space, non-linear
narratives, cultural heterogeneity, stylistic hybridity and pastiche. Locating
the Indies in a hybrid, in-between space, this chapter reveals how the Indie
New Wave raises questions about India’s progression into postmodern con-
nectedness and consumer hyperreality whilst the nation holds on to tradi-
tion and religiosity. Presenting this as the ‘double narrative’ of nation, this
portion of the chapter argues that the Indies subvert Bollywood’s normalised
meta-hegemonic homogenisation of an integrally heterogeneous nation. The
Indies perform this function cinematically by splitting this grand unifying
master narrative to reveal multiple layers in India’s current navigation of
spiritualism and materialism, neoliberalism and nationalism.
Chapter 6 examines how the new Indies are often subject to stricter cen-
sorship and regulation parameters than Bollywood, owing to their critical
representations of topical themes and national issues. This section presents
an incisive argument, drawing from the views of former representatives
from the CBFC, commonly referred to in India as the Indian Censor Board.
In the past, scholarship has been preoccupied with sex and violence in rela-
tion to censorship in India. Often the focus has been on Bollywood films.
This chapter centres on the new Indies, adding a third dimension to the
examination of censorship – films representing contemporary political dis-
course. This portion of the book reveals the Indies’ navigation of a discrep-
ant state-controlled censorship system prone to nepotism and bureaucracy,
largely bereft of systemic guidelines and codes of practice. In this configura-
tion, the state either directly or by proxy of the CBFC, encroaches frequently
on free filmic expression of political commentary or censure. One of the
propositions of this chapter is that the Bollywood meta-hegemony largely
bestows on the mainstream industry’s mainly non-polemical films the ability
to surmount censorship hurdles with greater ease than Indies. This chapter
suggests however, that censorship in India transcends top-down government
Introduction 9
control, unveiling the practice of moral policing by extreme religious fun-
damentalist and political groups, who frequently turn to vigilantism in their
role as self-appointed censors. Providing topical examples, this chapter
demonstrates how several Indies have been prescribed cuts, denied a certif-
icate of exhibition (Gandu, for example, based on profanity) or have been
banned outright (Kaum de Heere, Unfreedom) because of ‘taboo’ topics
relating to traumatic episodes in India’s national narrative. Themes include
state complicity in the 1984 anti-Sikh killings (Amu, Kaum de Heere), the
2002 state-supported massacre of Muslims in Gujarat (Final Solution),
caste-based oppression of minorities (Papilio Buddha), far-right Hindu reli-
gious fundamentalism (The World Before Her) and same-sex relationships
(I Am, Unfreedom). The aim is to demonstrate how independent Indian
films have consistently evoked turbulent debates with right-wing religious
groups and state censorship.
As mentioned earlier, Part II of the book is dedicated to film case studies
and provides in-depth close readings of several ground-breaking new Indie
films, from multiple analytical and epistemological perspectives.
The case studies commence with a close reading of Bengali Indie Gandu
(‘Asshole’, 2010), an explicit, controversial and iconoclastic Indie rap-musical
set in Kolkata, with themes of urban decay, alienated youth, drug abuse and
repressed sexuality. I argue in Chapter 7 that Gandu’s defiant questioning
of Indian ‘traditions and values’ signifies a post-liberalisation rupture in
the linear narrative of nation. Mentioning the absence of a popular youth
counter-culture in post-independence urban India, this section argues that
Gandu epitomises the globalisation-induced mosaic of modern urban youth
culture. Exploring the film’s cinematic attributes, this analysis contends that
Gandu typifies the Indies as ‘hybrid mutants’, with its experimental post-
modern pastiche of film form, style, music and mise-en-scène.
Framing Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat as a postmodern ‘city film’, the next
case study (Chapter 8) examines the film’s juxtaposition of a local Mumbai
context with global cinema audio-visual codes. This chapter demonstrates
how Dhobi Ghat’s triple-narrative, multi-strand story reveals hierarchical
layers in urban Indian society, foregrounding the metropolis’s marginalised,
including migrant workers, whose contribution to the city’s construction is
often left out of the neoliberal master narrative of progress. Dhobi Ghat’s
representations of marginality and alterity will be examined in relation
to the thesis of fragmentary narratives and cultural difference emerging
from an interstitial space. This case study will also incorporate the impli-
cations of globalisation on India’s changing cultural, socio-economic and
spatio-temporal constellation. In this regard, this close analysis of Dhobi
Ghat will evaluate inter-relations between the nation’s transformations,
subaltern figures, cultural difference and the urban space as a site for post-
modern intersections.
Chapter 9 provides an analysis of Peepli Live, directed by Anusha Rizvi, and
one of the pioneering films of the Indie New Wave. This close textual analysis
10 Introduction
delves into the film’s themes of farmer suicides and media misrepresentation,
revealing wider contexts of India’s transition from past social democracy
towards present free market system privileging multinational corporate invest-
ment. Observing the ternary convergence of capital, knowledge and power, this
study reveals that Peepli Live’s indictment of post-liberalisation state apathy
towards farmer suicides has intertextual links to previous post-independence
Indian art films and classical Hindi literature.
Chapter 10 contains a critical analysis of Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus,
widely acknowledged as a watershed in Indian cinema and included in a
global list of life-changing films by the Critics Circle UK. Scrutinising the
glocal elements in the film’s diegesis, including transnational co-operations
in the film’s sound design, music, dialogue and locations, this study sees Ship
of Theseus as blurring India’s binary between ancient religious ritualism and
postmodern urban hyperreality. This chapter reads this portmanteau film’s
multi-linked narratives as a representation of the nation, not as a binary, but
as a heterotopia, which is a syncretic space where majority and minority
discourses coexist, comingle and confront each other on a daily basis.
The final chapter, Chapter 11, presents an anthologised analysis of four
Indie films with similar and different themes, all invoking past events in
India’s national trajectory that still haunt its present. Aamir Bashir’s Harud
and Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, engage with issues of alienation
and territoriality in the volatile Kashmir region. Onir’s film, I Am, is a four-
story anthology dealing with women’s rights, child abuse, Hindu-Muslim
discord in Kashmir and criminalised same-sex relationships in India. This
chapter also looks inside The Lunchbox (directed by Ritesh Batra), which
evokes themes of memory and nostalgia for India’s unified socialist narra-
tive prior to 1990s globalisation, unpacking the state of a nation as it rap-
idly transits from tradition to cosmopolitan post-modernity.
Summarising the main points raised in the book, the Conclusion raises
ramifications of the Indies’ advent in a cultural landscape overshadowed by
Bollywood’s meta-hegemony. It presages future scenarios where the Indies
establish an autonomous space or create a fusion with Bollywood. The Con-
clusion foresees more Indie international co-productions, alternative arenas
of Indie exhibition and increased Indie presence on the global cinema circuit.
The closing segment of the Conclusion also identifies strategic and logistical
changes that may be necessary to envision an independent infrastructure
where the Indies could avail themselves of funding, distribution and exhibi-
tion avenues, decoupled from the strictures of the current system. Overall,
the book’s Conclusion boldly augurs the new Indies as future bellwethers of
Indian cinema.
As mentioned in the above chapter summaries, this book is dedicated to the
formulation of a holistic, intertextual and intercultural analysis of a new filmic
phenomenon that is transforming contemporary Indian cinema. Ultimately,
the book endeavours to tread the unbeaten path, making first steps into a
cinematic terrain that could well chart the future course of Indian cinema.
Introduction 11
Note
For more information and more images, visit the website www.IndianIndieCinema.com.
References
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Part I
Enter India’s New Indies

1 Bollywood and the Cinemas
of India
The Story so Far
Bollywood says you don’t have your own identity – it shows the psyche
and inferiority complex of our film industry. For decades we were content
just making films for our own audience. That’s why the current changes are
looking really promising and exciting.
—Irrfan Khan, on Bollywood (Verma, 2013)
Indian Cinema is a growing global phenomenon, particularly as a resilient

competitor to Hollywood (Raghavendra, 2009: 15). Originating in Mumbai,
commercial Hindi cinema, better known as Bollywood, is the most wide-
spread proponent of Indian Cinema. Bollywood has emerged as a syno
nym for Indian culture, with financially successful proliferation around the
world. These films are popular not just in India, but amongst the South
Asian diaspora in the UK, US, Canada and Australia (Gowricharn, 2003;
Mishra, 2014: 196).
India contains the world’s largest film industry (Shoesmith, 2011: 246;
Thussu, 2008: 98). Jyotika Virdi (2003: 1–2) deems Bollywood the nation’s
most dominant cultural commodity, serving as a medium of entertainment
to a primarily but not exclusively urban audience. Although Virdi consi
ders Bollywood to be the predominant form of entertainment in terms of
market share, it accounts for only around a third of the total number of
films made in India (Raghavendra, 2009: 15). In a polyglot milieu of more
than 22 national languages, ‘local and vernacular-based industries compete
in a highly regionalized market’ (‘Can the Indian Film Industry’, 2011).
Bollywood accounts for only about 200 of the 1,000 films produced annu-
ally, the rest emerging from ‘regional or non-Hindi productions’ (ibid.).
However, Bollywood’s dominance in terms of reach and revenue is reflected
in a statement by Jehil Thakkar, consulting firm/consultancy group KPMG’s
Head of Media and Entertainment, noting that Bollywood generates 46 per-
cent of the total Indian film industry revenue (ibid.).
Selvaraj Velayutham (2008) highlights the often-overlooked diversity of
Indian cinema, attributing this to a general preoccupation with Bollywood.
Velayutham extends this proposition to academic scholarship, which he
argues, is discrepantly orientated towards ‘Hindi cinema / Bollywood’, under-
scoring Bollywood’s ‘cultural dominance and hegemony’ that has obliterated
16 Bollywood and the Cinemas of India
the ‘rich complexities and ethnolinguistic-specific cinema traditions of India’
(Velayutham, 2008: 1). A Bollywood-centric approach has largely contri
buted to the preclusion and elision of several alternative forms of Indian
cinema in academic literature (Gokulsing and Dissanayake, 2009: 10). The
most conspicuous absence in recent scholastic appraisal relates to the lack
of a comprehensive and dedicated analysis on the emergence of a new wave
of independent Indian cinema – a gaping hole that this book intends to fill.
Despite Bollywood’s cultural and commercial pre-eminence, the het-
erogeneity that ‘Indian Cinema’ traditionally entails causes Gokulsing and
Dissanayake (2009) to consider the alternative term, ‘Cinemas of India’, a
more suitable moniker for the encompassing Indian film industry (ibid.).
As a first foray into a blossoming field, this book’s focus is firmly fixed on
the emergence of new independent Indian films since 2010, from the afore-
mentioned diversity of the Cinemas of India.
The New Urban Independent Films since 2010

Rahul Verma states that ‘a new wave of Indian independent film is breaking
the all-singing, all-dancing stereotype of Bollywood via low-cost, offbeat
movies and edgier subject matter’ (2011). Many consider 2010 to be a
watershed year for independent Indian cinema. Verma observes that the new
‘Indies’ broke into the mainstream, with films such as LSD (Love, Sex aur
Dhoka [‘Love, Sex and Double-Cross’]) and Peepli Live, featuring in India’s
top ten most profitable films of 2010. Other new independent films, such
as Dhobi Ghat (2010) and the satirical comedy Tere Bin Laden (‘Yours
Bin Laden’, 2010), received critical acclaim and box-office success in the
nation’s top five metropolitan cities (ibid.).
The growth and development of these new independent films have been
significant enough to galvanise various forms of the media to herald their
arrival and underscore their propensity to catalyse debate in the public
sphere. For example, expanding awareness of the new Indies informs an
article in the Hindu that states:
The first half of 2011 saw filmmakers trying new themes, focusing on
fresh issues without pandering to the box office demands. With the
audience becoming highly stratified, very few are targeting a family
entertainer. Till last year, who thought a Hindi film with two female
actors can score at the box office, but Raj Kumar Gupta’s ‘No One
Killed Jessica’ shattered the long-standing stereotype that you require
a male star to draw the audience. If Kiran Rao’s perceptive ‘Dhobi
Ghat’ showed Mumbai in a new light … Onir impressed with his
measured audacity in ‘I Am’ … Similarly ‘Shor In the City’ nailed the
cacophony of corruption. It is no longer about, hero, heroine, villain
and five songs.
(Kumar, 2011)
Bollywood and the Cinemas of India 17
This increasing cognisance of the independent new wave is not restricted
to the Indian cinematic domain. The World Cinema Film Festival 2011
in Amsterdam adopted a ‘Soul of India’ theme, including ‘eighteen Indian
features, short and animation films, that focused on independent films,
rather than Bollywood’; amongst these were the Indies Peepli Live, Gandu
(‘Asshole’, 2010) and Dhobi Ghat (‘Peepli Live’, 2011). Cary Sawhney,
director of the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF), describes the focus of
the festival in 2010:
Rather than the standard Bollywood audiences across four genera-

tions, we’re aiming for the younger generation, who are disenfran-
chised by [the] Bollywood of their parent’s era and want something
more cutting-edge.
(Verma, 2011)
Suman Ghosh, director of the Bengali film Nobel Thief, screened at the
London Film Festival 2011, echoes Sawhney’s emphasis on ushering in a
new generation of Indian cinema. Ghosh is of the opinion that the recent
films are a new development in terms of identity and socio-cultural percep-
tion. They are ‘packaged differently, combining mainstream Bollywood and
Parallel arthouse production values’ (Ghosh, post-screening conversation
and e-mail correspondence, 2011). He considers this ‘a good way forward
for Indian cinema’ (ibid.). This assertion of the new Indies’ concatenation
of formal and stylistic attributes from India’s two enduring film traditions
raises the notion of hybridity in the new wave of Indian Indies. The corollary
would be to ascertain to what extent these contemporary non-mainstream
films delve into topical social, cultural and political issues and themes that
are analogous to earlier postcolonial Indian arthouse and Parallel films.
It would also be pertinent to investigate how the new Indies engage with
socio-political themes whilst relying on their being saleable through contem-
porary Bollywood production, distribution and marketing channels.
Ravi Vasudevan’s (2000: 40) assertion that for the most part several per-
spectives in the study of Indian cinema remain unidentified and unexcavated
is attributable to the rapid reorganisation and reorientation of the modern
Indian cinematic domain. Arguably the labile nature of the contemporary
Indian cinemascape resonates with broader transformations in the socio-
economic, geopolitical and cultural Indian landscape. In this shape-shifting
environment, postmodern simulacra, media hyperreality, sexual liberation
and middle-class consumerism are becoming increasingly pervasive (Mishra,
2014: 195–197). The immediate manifestation of this postmodern milieu is
an accentuated awareness and wider involvement amongst digital citizens
in the Indian public sphere, concomitant with greater access to technology
and communication, particularly social media (Devasundaram, 2014: 109).
In order to understand the current metamorphosis in modern Indian
Cinema and its relation to the nation’s transforming socio-cultural and
political discourse, it may prove useful to contextualise the rise of the new
wave of independent Indian films through some of the nation’s earlier cine
matic traditions that contain genealogical, morphological and temporal
links to the new Indies.
Postcolonial Social Realism 1947–1960: India’s

Early Art Films
Indian cinema is often dichotomised into its main enduring traditions –
the popular (Bollywood) and the art film (Kabir, 2001: 5). Art films made
between the 1940s and the early 1960s were trenchant expositions on social
issues and themes. These included the exploitation of farmers by landlords
(Do Bigha Zamin, 1953), destitution and privation in the metropolis (Boot
Polish, 1954), untouchability (Sujata, 1959), the urban-rural schism (Shree
420, 1955) and materialism against destiny (Pyaasa, 1957).
These films exhibited a complexity of plot, character and content that
set them apart from commercial Hindi cinema (Hood, 2009: 4–5). The art
films made immediately after India’s independence were significantly influ-
enced in form and style by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave
(Shoesmith, 2011: 251). Filmmakers like Satyajit Ray in particular drew
inspiration from the works of neorealist European directors such as Vittorio
De Sica and Jean-Luc Goddard, with Ray distilling these influences into realist
hermeneutics of postcolonial rural India in films such as Pather Panchali
(‘Song of the Road’, 1955) (Majumdar, 2012: 179; Shoesmith, 2011: 251).
Contrary to the bewildering Western reduction of all non-commercial
Indian cinema to the works of one director (Satyajit Ray) – a convenient,
stand-alone signifier – post-independence art cinema was populated by a
plethora of influential directors, including Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.
A reincarnation of India’s post-independence art cinema of the 1940s and
50s subsequently appeared in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s as
‘New Indian cinema’, better known as ‘Parallel cinema’, which also derived
inspiration from a neorealist ethos (Ganti, 2013: 25).
Parallel Cinema: 1970s and 80s

Sumita Chakravarty (1993) describes the emergence of Indian ‘Parallel cinema’
in the late 1960s as a reaction by filmmakers and critics to ‘contest the
hegemony of a commercially based, profit-driven, popular cinema’, and to
establish an alternative cinema (Chakravarty, 1993: 235). Parallel cinema
was largely a continuation of the art films of the earlier 1940s and 50s,
albeit with the explicit and overt intention of forming a concerted and orga
nised socio-political film movement (Needham, 2013: 2). This alternative
cinema was referred to interchangeably as ‘Parallel cinema’, ‘art cinema’,
the ‘Indian New Wave’ or simply ‘regional cinema’ (Chakravarty, 1993:
235–236; Hood: 2009: 5). Brian Shoesmith (2011) observes that ‘this
alternative cinema, often called Parallel or art, defined itself in opposition
to Bollywood’1 (Shoesmith, 2011: 251). The raison d’être for this incho-
ate movement was to develop a ‘new tradition of filmmaking’; to construct
‘authentic’ portrayals firmly grounded in the credo of realism (Chakravarty,
1993: 236; Vasudevan, 2000: 123).
One of the first films in the Parallel cinema movement was Bhuvan
Shome (1969), directed by Mrinal Sen (Gopal, 2011: 8). This film and oth-
ers, including M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (‘Scorching Winds’, 1975) and
Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (‘A Day’s Bread’, 1970), were showcased under the
aegis of the Indian government (Chakravarty, 1993: 236). In general, the
Indian government financially backed this attempted thematic and stylistic
rejuvenation of earlier post-independence Indian art cinema of the 1940s
through the 1960s (Athique and Hill, 2010: 192).
Parallel cinema in India was generally targeted at an educated, middle-class,
urban viewership. The Parallel wave was decidedly not monolithic and was
textured with varying gradations. On the outer precincts of the Parallel was
‘middle cinema’, synonymous with directors, such as G ulzar, Basu Chatterjee
and Hrishikesh Mukherjee (Donner, 2011: 189). This group of films sought
to forge a middle ground between populist appeal and social realism in
contrast with the more radical, firebrand end of the Parallel spectrum, epi
tomised by Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani. Overall, the new crop of Parallel
films continued the tradition of earlier art cinema, adopting storylines that
mirrored social conditions prevalent at the time (Hood, 2009: 5). In stark
opposition to commercial Hindi cinema that sought to homogenise and
fantasise depictions of India, Parallel films were ‘India’s purest forms of
Third Cinema’ and were streamlined towards highlighting the diversity in
region, culture, language and customs (Guneratne, 2003: 21). Several of
these films were made in regional languages and received financial support
from the government-run National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)
(Athique, 2012: 46).
Philip Lutgendorf perceives Parallel Indian cinema as heralding the
arrival of directors like Shyam Benegal, whose films Ankur (‘The Sprout’,
1974), Nishant (‘The Calm’, 1975) and Manthan (‘The Churning’, 1976)
grappled with themes of subaltern oppression and the rural-to-urban
exodus (Lutgendorf, 2007: 20). Parallel films were labelled by urban critics
at the time as worthy proponents of an Indian ‘New cinema’ (Athique and
Hill, 2010: 192) for abjuring the clichés and romanticism of commercial
Bombay Hindi cinema (later popularised as Bollywood) (Desai and Dudrah,
2008: 10). The cinematic Parallel New Wave dispensed with song and dance
routines (Chakravarty, 1993: 239) and engaged with a ‘progressive leftist’
perspective of social issues through realist representations (Lutgendorf,
2007: 20). The ‘middle-cinema’ appellation was applied to Parallel films at
a later stage in the 1980s (Guneratene, 2003: 21), largely due to these films
continuing to forge a middle path between entertainment and the avant-
garde whilst targeting an educated urban middle class (Lutgendorf, 2007: 20).
However, by the mid-1980s, it was evident that the majority of Indians pre-
ferred big-budget Bollywood melodramas, leading to the marginalisation of
the Parallel movement (Athique, 2012: 46, 47; Athique and Hill, 2010: 192;
Lutgendorf, 2007: 20).
Concurring with Chakravarty, Vasudevan attributes the Parallel c inema
movement’s provenance to the post-independence film society and art cinema
cognoscenti, such as the Calcutta Film Society and film critic C hidananda
Das Gupta. These groups expressed their vehement preference for an alter-
native cinema with its foundations rooted in realist themes and authentic
representations of Indian culture (Vasudevan, 2000: 7). Although deeming
this an ‘elitist’ stance, Vasudevan concedes that the Parallel movement, while
it lasted, exerted a persuasive and prominent influence in ‘public discourses’
and government policies (ibid.).
Vasudevan’s acknowledgement of the socio-political discourse raised
by earlier Indian Parallel cinema serves as a useful point of comparison,
despite his coeval allegations that these films constitute an ‘elitist’ mediation
of Indian ‘authenticity’ by the art cinema literati. This is with regards to
ascertaining the hybridity and the discourse-generating aspects of the new
wave of independent Indian cinema since 2010. In other words, it is worth
considering whether the new Indies manifest some atavistic traits of their
Parallel cinema predecessors.
Hinglish Films: The 1990s and Early 2000s

The vestigial remains of Indian Parallel cinema are intermittently identi-
fiable in India’s post-globalisation 1990s and early 2000s, in low-budget
independent urban films labelled ‘Hinglish’, owing to their combination of
English and Hindi dialogue (Roy, 2013: 27, 28). These films were limited in
their success and largely confined to sporadic exhibition (Dwyer, 2006: 364)
in India’s main cosmopolitan cities. Hinglish films such as English August
(1994; Jury prize, Torino International Film Festival), Split Wide Open
(1999), Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002; Best Film at the Hawaii International
Film Festival), Everybody Says I’m Fine (2001) and Being Cyrus (2005),
despite being moderately well received in a few Indian metropolitan centres
and the overseas film festival circuit, were perceived as the preserve of the
English-speaking Indian elite (Roy, 2013: 28, 29, 31). This is reminiscent of
the compartmentalisation and rejection faced by earlier Parallel cinema as
elite middle cinema for the middle class.
Identifying characteristics (albeit in a variant form) of earlier Indian
cinematic genres, including Hinglish films, in the current new wave of
Indies, bolsters perceptions of hybridity in the Indies. For example, several
new Indies use a combination of Hindi and English dialogue amongst other
languages. The Indies also broach similar topical themes and issues promi
nent in Hinglish films, such as the Mumbai water riots and child prostitu-
tion, explored in Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open, and fragmented urban
identities in Rahul Bose’s Everybody Says I’m Fine. This thematic influence,
to a degree, is reflected in 2010 Indies Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat. The
major distinguishing factor between the current Indies and their Parallel
and Hinglish forebears is that the latter genres remained at the periphery
of Indian cinema, debilitated by the lack of an ‘alternative exhibition infra-
structure’ (Athique and Hill, 2010: 192) and eclipsed by commercial Hindi
cinema that would eventually become rebranded as Bollywood.
In general, Parallel and Hinglish cinemas’ relegation to the margins was
largely due to the films being seen as catering to a niche audience, having
low-budgets, containing region-specific characteristics and having restricted
distribution (being urban-centric in the case of the Hinglish films). These
were overall symptoms of a limited national market. In contrast, the New
Wave Indies, since 2010, have relied on ‘different packaging’ (Ghosh,
post-screening conversation and e-mail correspondence, 2011) and better
marketing strategies in order to ensure commercial success and wider audi-
ence reception.
Consideration of the Indies’ ‘different packaging’ also leads to considering
whether a hybrid amalgamation of form, style and content equips the new
Indies with the ability to attenuate an imaginary yet widely perceived ‘high’
and ‘low’ art schism that previously prevailed in the form of a Parallel/
commercial Hindi cinema binary (Chakravarty, 1993: 242). This dialectic
has enduringly typified conceptions of Indian films, particularly in the West,
eventually resulting in the simplistic and restrictive classification of Indian
cinema as Bollywood/Satyajit Ray (Harper, 2001: 181). The growing popu-
larity of the current Indies (Francis, 2014) could be one of the factors facili-
tating the Indies’ erosion of the established high/low art antinomy.
Changing social attitudes, especially in urban India, sets the new Indies
apart from earlier esoteric Parallel cinema. The assertion that undifferen-
tiating Indian audiences jettisoned ‘serious’ Parallel cinema in preference
for popular melodramas is incompatible with the current scenario, where
contemporary urban Indian viewers exhibit heterodox cultural tastes and
are largely governed by a wider globalisation-induced access to media
(Devasundaram, 2014: 113).
The failure of 1970s and 80s Parallel cinema to assimilate a broader
audience and its consequent marginalisation by the masses in favour of
Bollywood emphasises the new Indies’ heuristic adoption of available
resources and strategies to ensure the avoidance of a similar predicament.
Confronted by the lack of an autonomous ‘Indie infrastructure’ to facilitate
production, distribution and exhibition, several new Indies, such as Peepli
Live, Dhobi Ghat and The Lunchbox (2013), have aligned with mainstream
Bollywood producers (Aamir Khan, Karan Johar) and corporate production
houses (UTV Motion Pictures), suggesting an anomalous interweaving of
the mainstream and marginal in modern Indian cinema.
Summing up the above points, a blurring of boundaries between earlier
Parallel cinema and mainstream Bollywood is perceivable in India’s new
independent films and necessitates a re-imagining of established norms of
classification, content and audience reception. The box-office success of
several of these new films, including Peepli Live, The Lunchbox and Ship
of Theseus (2013) (Khanna, 2014) suggests a swing in socio-cultural atti-
tudes and entails a break from the Parallel cinema past. This is signifi-
cantly attributable to the disjuncture of India’s early 1990s globalisation
(Appadurai, 1990), its reverberations swelling to the current crescendo of
hyper-connected, consumer-driven cosmopolitan urbanscapes. These propo
sitions present an intriguing area for further analysis in subsequent stages
of this book, reinforcing the notion of the new wave of Indian Indies as a
hybrid cinematic form.
Rise of the Hybrid Mutant

S Sharma, J Hutnyk and A Sharma (1996) locate hybridity as the wellspring
of new and dynamic cultural forms. This could be related to the new wave
of Indies as a ‘hybrid synthesis’ of India’s two main cinematic traditions –
Bollywood and Parallel (Ghosh, post-screening conversation and e-mail
correspondence, 2011). Independent filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia notes
that several new Indian Indies, located in a space between the Parallel and
the commercial, can diverge from and subvert the two cinema traditions
(Ahluwalia, 2014). With the new Indies’ situated in this in-between space,
it could be argued that their hybridity stems from their heterogeneous global
and local cinematic influences (see Chapter 3), as well as their ability to
encapsulate divergent content in commercially marketable films.
In this context, the new Indies could be figuratively termed as ‘hybrid
mutants’ that breach several genre conventions epitomised by their cinematic
‘parents’. Such subversions of ‘filial’ morphology exhibited in several Indies
include the jettisoning of ubiquitous Bollywood song and dance sequences
and the propagation of topical content with the paradoxical adoption of
exoteric and aggressive Bollywood-style marketing strategies. This amal-
gamation of polemical and popular – socio-political themes in films that
are often marketed and distributed through mainstream channels – is a
distinctive feature of the new Indies.
Tejaswini Ganti (2004: 84) considers songs to be a vital constituent of
Bollywood films to ensure their popularity and marketability. She argues
that a film bereft of song and dance is indicative of its positioning outside
the mainstream Mumbai film industry (ibid.). In marked contrast to Ganti’s
assertion, several new Indies have been commercially successful despite dis-
pensing with de rigueur song and dance sequences. In this regard, Rahul
Verma (2011) cites the film LSD’s titular allusion to both sex and drugs as
confronting quotidian notions of Indian cinema as ‘tear-jerking’ Bollywood
song and dance routines. LSD also had several scenes excised by the Indian
censoring authority – the CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification) –
including some containing explicit sex and a reference to the Indian caste
system (ibid.). At the outset, this scenario significantly gestures towards the
larger propagation of divergent and often polemical content by several new
Indies.
Despite the above impediments, LSD made £1.25 million from its small,
£200,000 budget and opened the first London Indian Film Festival in 2010
(Verma, 2011). Low-budget political satire Peepli Live – the first ever Indian
film to be screened at the Sundance Film Festival (Times of India, 2012) –
received both commercial and critical acclaim, being screened at 600 cine-
mas in India and 200 abroad, with a worldwide gross box office of around
£9 million (‘Peepli Live’, 2011). Promotion and marketing across diverse
media platforms, specifically targeted at a social media–savvy young Indian
demographic (especially within the growing middle class), has contributed
to the increasing mass appeal of these new films.
Gangs of Wasseypur (GOW, 2012) and Paan Singh Tomar (2012) are recent
film examples of multimodal and multi-platform marketing strategies. Paan
Singh Tomar premiered in 2010 at the BFI (British Film Institute) London Film
Festival, but was only released in 2012, in India. This delayed domestic release
was due to production house UTV’s marketing strategy of initially focusing
on Paan Singh Tomar’s exhibition at international festivals, capitalising on the
overseas appeal of main actor Irrfan Khan (The Namesake, 2006; A Mighty
Heart, 2007; Life of Pi, 2012) (Dutta, 2012). Subsequently, a 2011 release
was deferred due to the prospect of competition raised by the simultaneous
exhibition of several commercially successful Hindi films in India that year
(ibid.). Following its late release, the film was a national box office success,
making 384 million rupees (around £ 4 million) from its 80 million rupees
(around £850,000) budget (Times of India, 2012). The above points empha-
sise the thesis that although the Indies perpetuate socio-political themes, they
seek a wider audience, often through an assiduous focus on promotion and
marketing. In this context, Ghosh considers the patronage of Bollywood stars
like Aamir Khan and the financial investment of corporate media and enter-
tainment companies to be important factors in the dispersion of new Indies
(Ghosh, post-screening conversation and e-mail correspondence, 2011).
A good example of these two factors is Aamir Khan’s capitalisation on his
Bollywood star status to rigorously promote Peepli Live, eventually ensur-
ing its commercial success, both in India and abroad. The film’s marketing
strategy in India ran the gamut of advertising across TV, print, radio, social
media and reality shows (Shah, 2010). This included a 45-second teaser
aired on television and in cinema halls, lampooning the film’s own promo-
tional tactics (Rizvi, personal communication, 2013; Shah, 2010).
Steve Rose’s (2013) article in The Guardian notes Gangs of Wasseypur’s
innovative and effective marketing, declaring it a successful ‘anti-Bollywood
film’ and positing director Anurag Kashyap to be ‘leading India’s rising indie
movement’ (Rose, 2013). In the article, Kashyap expresses to Rose his view
that Bollywood’s opiate effect on the Indian masses is ‘part of India’s inabi
lity to deal with its reality’ (ibid.). Kashyap’s assertions did not hinder him,
however, from soliciting the marketing power of Viacom 18, one of the first
studio-model production companies in India and a distributor of several
mainstream Bollywood films. A 2012 article in the Times of India commences
with an insight into the conventional perception of Bollywood marketing:
We are all familiar with the over-the-top promotions that precede the
release of a Bollywood film – stars making multiple public appear-
ances, life-sized movie posters hung everywhere, umpteen media inter-
actions and, of course, rumours of the lead actors being linked.
(Budhraja, 2012)
The above summation of Bollywood marketing strategies again magnifies

the notion of hybridity in the new Indies. A case in point is the association
of Kashyap’s violent and unflinching GOW, about gang warfare in the rural
Indian heartland, with Viacom 18, a production-house better known for
Bollywood blockbusters such as Jab We Met (‘When we Met’, 2007) and
Namastey London (2007). Whilst exemplifying the notion of the new Indies
as ‘hybrid mutants’, films such as GOW, with their commercial and corpo-
rate allegiance, exhibit an ambiguity of classification. As will be examined at
a later stage, this syncretism often can be a characteristic feature of the new
wave of independent Indian cinema. At this preliminary stage, suffice it to
say that clues to deciphering complexities in the categorisation of the new
Indies could lie in case-specific hybrid strategies deployed in the film-making
process.
Vikram Malhotra, founder of Viacom 18, describes the marketing
approach used for Anurag Kashyap’s film:
With GOW we have stayed completely true to the fact that the film is
unconventional, its storytelling is of a very different nature. We knew
we could not reach out to millions in a conventional manner because
this movie doesn’t have big stars or candy floss visuals or any of the
trappings of a conventional Hindi film. (Times of India, 2012)
Unconventional marketing ploys included a team of dancers in ethnic garb

taking to the streets after the film’s screening at the Cannes Film Festival,
the publication of an ersatz online newspaper called the Wasseypur Patrika
(‘Wasseypur News’) and promotional wall paintings across twenty cities
(ibid.). Commenting on how the film’s overseas reception overrode national
concerns about the film’s visceral and graphic content, director Kashyap
reflects that the reception at Cannes and social media played a prominent
role in shaping public opinion (Dhaliwal, 2012). He claims these factors
assisted in silencing ‘the moralists’ and highlights how ‘social media has
brought a lot of things out into the open in India’ (ibid.).
Ravi Vasudevan (2011) perceives a shift in modern Indian cinema, where
even established art film directors from the heyday of Parallel cinema
such as Shyam Benegal and Sudhir Mishra have turned towards corporate
production houses such as Pritish Nandy Communications (PNC) and
Sahara (Vasudevan, 2011: 345), usually associated with the production of
Bollywood films. The interfusion between Bollywood and Parallel, com-
merce and art, in the context of the new Indies, emphasises a blurring of
boundaries. Similarly, Suman Ghosh comments on the transforming terrain
of Indian cinema, where established veteran arthouse directors associate
with Bollywood distributors:
You see, in the 70s and 80s even when arthouse cinema in India was at
its zenith, I thought there was a distinct lack of production values. But
recently there is an interesting trend, namely the infusion of people like
Aamir Khan and the corporate houses into so-called art house cinema.
Thus, we see that UTV [Motion Pictures] is producing Shyam Benegal
films and other films under the banner of UTV Spotboy, and of course,
Aamir Khan is producing films like Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat. So
I think this is a healthy amalgamation that is taking place. Previously
a lot of the arthouse cinema was state-sponsored and thus they lacked
such infusion.
(Ghosh, post-screening conversation and
e-mail correspondence, 2011)
These alignments with the corporate mainstream appear obligatory in the

absence of a dedicated Indie funding, distribution and exhibition infrastruc-
ture. However, later chapters in this book will reveal how several indepen-
dent films, despite associations with corporate companies, are endeavouring
to include topical and sometimes controversial content in a style that enter-
tains. In essence, several Indies attempt to strike a balance between corpo-
rate funding and unconventional content in order to facilitate distribution
and enhance the likelihood of wider visibility and commercial success. One
of the key contentions discussed in this book relates to how the new Indies
through self-reflexive representation are enmeshed in discourses relating to
censorship, sexual liberation and political corruption. Importantly, the New
Wave films signpost the subaltern condition – minority groups marginalised
and pushed to the periphery by dominant discourses and power structures.
In summary, it could be argued that emerging Indian Indie filmmakers
are consciously creating a hybrid juxtaposition of social realism and enter-
tainment, forging a dynamism that appeals to a broader demographic whilst
simultaneously addressing the ‘state of the nation’.
The New Political and Sexual Liberation

Indian films that are overtly political in content, offering critiques of politi
cal leaders or systems, are rare, given the censorship imposed by the state-
controlled censoring authority, the CBFC (Bhowmik, 2013; Mehta, 2011).
There are numerous other restraining forces inhibiting the exhibition of
certain films, including socio-religious strictures, right-wing fundamentalist
political groups and the police (Pendakur, 2003: 79). An example often cited
in academic literature on Indian cinema is the destruction by right-wing Hindu
political party activists in 1998 of cinemas screening the film Fire, which por-
trays a lesbian relationship (Vasudevan, 2011: 346). The new Indian Indies
constitute a much more recent constellation that consistently bears the brunt
of a discrepant and often tendentious censorship system, one that often turns
a blind eye to Bollywood whilst directing a steely intolerant gaze towards
expressions of socio-political critique in non-mainstream Indies.
As mentioned earlier, an engagement with socio-political issues is one
of the conspicuous features of new independent films, such as Peepli Live
(about farmer suicides) and Jayan Cherian’s Papilio Buddha (2013) (addres
sing the marginalised Dalit community struggling against the caste divide).
The ongoing cinematic engagement with the Indian political arena is again
reminiscent of earlier Parallel cinema. This link to a Parallel cinema past
underpins the notion of the emergence of a hybrid cinematic form from a
historiographical evolutionary pattern, inclining towards a ‘return to roots’
of socially conscious post-independence arthouse and Parallel cinema, albeit
with ‘new packaging’. In this context, it is pertinent to set the stage for a
more thorough later examination of how the new Indies’ polemical and
alternative content often interrogates the normative national narrative and
sometimes invokes discourses of state control through censorship.
Ravi Vasudevan (2011: 345) sees censorship as ‘a crucial regulatory drive’,
arguing that Indian films with trenchant socio-political narratives have been
the greater focus of regulation rather than commercial films engaging with
lurid representations of sexuality. Vasudevan highlights thematically left-
of-centre films: Zakhm (‘Wound’, directed by Mahesh Bhatt, 1998) for its
commentary on the Hindu right; Black Friday (directed by Anurag Kashyap,
2007), about the Mumbai bomb blasts in 1993; and the documentaries,
War and Peace (directed by Anand Patwardhan, 1998) on India’s nuclear
bomb and Final Solution (directed by Rakesh Sharma, 2004), about lethal
attacks in 2002 on Muslims in Gujarat by right-wing Hindu groups (ibid.).
Far from diminishing over time, the censoring of films with political con-
tent appears amplified in the current context of new Indies such as Papilio
Buddha, Gandu and Kaum de Heere (‘Diamonds of the Community’, 2014).
Gokulsing and Dissanayake (2004) emphasise the vagaries of an irreso-
lute CBFC that has attained notoriety in India for ‘double standards’ and for
assuming the role of moral police (ibid., 124). The authors castigate what
they consider the board’s duplicity, where ‘lascivious, lewd song and dance
sequences and gratuitous violence in Bollywood films routinely escape the
censor’s scissors, and Hollywood offerings with torrid sex scenes get the
Universal or U rating’ (India Today, 2002: editorial cited in Gokulsing and
Dissanayake, 2004: 124.). This statement and Vasudevan’s earlier assertion
about Bollywood films with sexual content largely escaping excision evokes
ramifications of the aforementioned discrepant censorship parameters on
the Indies in light of their ascendency since 2010. The paring faced by LSD
is only a drop in the ocean of proscription faced by a multitude of other
Indies. As will be shown in later chapters of this volume, these scenarios
serve as touchstones to further scrutinise the inconsistencies and vagaries of
the CBFC, which have sometimes become intertwined with religious nation-
alist politics.
To illustrate the historically retrenched nature of the reactionary poli-
cies of the ruling right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
towards non-mainstream arts and culture, I allude to their previous stint
in power. In 2002, the incumbent CBFC chair, BJP MP Arvind Lankesh,
stated that he was deeply invested in preserving the ‘sanctity’ of Indian cul-
ture, asserting ‘films are our Gangotri (holy river Ganges); don’t soil them’
(Martyris, 2002). With a more contemporary outlook, the question to be
raised is whether new independent urban films like Gandu (screened at the
London Film Festival 2011, but not certified for general release in India),
with often politically and sexually explicit content, are subversive signifiers
contesting religious, social and cinematic norms in India. Gandu’s rapid
proliferation in India across the Internet through ‘BitTorrent’ (peer-to-peer
file sharing) downloads and YouTube (Devasundaram, 2014), prompts fur-
ther exploration pertaining to the efficacy of film censorship and regula-
tion in the face of new media. An excerpt from an interview with Qaushiq
Mukherjee (known as Q), director of the controversial Gandu, throws more
light on this area. Q states:
Two days back, I found that a preview copy [of the film] had got
leaked online. It’s a miracle that we have been able to contain the leak
till now despite people in India wanting to watch it for so long. We are
lucky that our fans are mature and hadn’t uploaded it earlier. Legally,
we can’t do a thing about this leak. We have tried our best to conform
to rules even while knowing that they are so draconian. We have faced
many roadblocks while screening this movie in India but as responsi-
ble producers, we have not broken any laws. Now that the movie is
available online, I only hope that it doesn’t become just another film
that can be downloaded and watched. One has to keep the idea of
protest alive.
(Dasgupta, 2011)
Wider issues of censorship stemming from Gandu were debated on a prime-

time television talk show, We the People, on India’s premier news channel,
NDTV, under the theme Love, Sex and Cinema (referencing the Indie film,
LSD) (Dhingra, 2011). The programme involved a cross-representational
panel from the Indian cinematic sphere, including directors, actors and aca-
demics who fielded questions from the public. To some degree, this reflects
the exigency of the discourses emerging from within new Indian cinema.
Prominent amongst these is a sexual consciousness amongst the young
urban Indian middle class that is often muffled and undercut by the subor-
dinating spread of nationalistic religious fundamentalism in modern India.
Q comments on the broader representation of sexuality in Indian cinema:
Cinema is seen as a commodity. I am seriously scared of the kind of

movies that are being made. The idea of cinema as a capitalist tool is
that it should not provoke the audience, but just provide entertain-
ment … [about representations of sex] What is there to deal with
homosexuality? It’s not something different. Every one of us is poly-
sexual. It is in our culture. Take Kamasutra, Upanishads, Vaishav
Bahabali, Shaivak logic, sexuality is mellifluous … the sexual move-
ment has to start rolling again.
(Shetty-Saha, 2011)
Contrary to the conservative views expressed by the BJP politician men-

tioned above, open depictions of sexuality and socio-political critique in
new urban independent films could themselves be cinematic indicators of
a wider new urban social consciousness. To a large degree, the Indies as
representative and interpretive filmic intermediaries attempt to address the
sexual repression, pre-eminence of political power and censorship that have
persisted in Indian cinema and culture. To a significant extent, this asser-
tion resonates with one of the book’s main themes about the Indies’ dis-
courses deviating from the Bollywood norm, often contesting the traditional
national narrative and hence evoking censorship. Re-orientation of Indian
socio-cultural mores, increased participation in the public sphere, the Indies’
espousal of libertarian narratives that ultimately fall foul of censorship and
Bollywood’s overarching omnipotence are all interpenetrating themes that
this book will now proceed to examine at length.
Note
1. Bollywood as a term had not yet come into being during the 1950s and 60s.
What Shoesmith refers to is actually commercial Hindi cinema which would
later become popularised as Bollywood in the post-liberalisation early 1990s.
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2 The Meta-Hegemony
Leviathan Bollywood and
Lilliputian Indies
This chapter introduces an original system that will be referred to as a

‘meta-hegemony’, with the aim of facilitating a deeper understanding of the
underlying historical hegemony involving Bollywood, other forms of Indian
cinema, such as the new Indies, and Hollywood. One way to interpret the
concept of a meta-hegemony is to imagine a hegemony within a hegemony.
This proposition is conceptualised through the assertion that Bollywood
dominates Indian cinematic culture whilst itself being subservient to a larger
global Hollywood hegemony (Hirji, 2005, 2010). Hollywood’s ownership of
close to 90 percent of the films exhibited across the globe underpins its per-
vasive power as a dominant proponent of globalisation (Jess-Cooke, 2009:
118). Bollywood, often considered a ‘Third World imitation’ of H ollywood,
has witnessed enhanced levels of global visibility through corporate branding
strategies (R Roy, 2011: 99).
Alessio and Langer (2010) argue that Bollywood is currently contesting
Hollywood’s homogenisation and hegemony of ‘cinematic production, both
economically and ideologically’ (Alessio and Langer, 2010: 168). Adrian
Athique considers Bollywood’s new corporate model to be ‘still well short of
anything comparable to a Hollywood studio’ (Athique, 2012: 141). However,
Bollywood’s growing global influence is characterised by accentuated exoteric
marketing strategies that incorporate new agreements with Hollywood. This
includes the sharing of filming locations and co-productions, suggesting aug-
mented co-operation between these two global cinema industries (‘Hollywood,
Bollywood’, 2010; Thussu, 2013: 146).
The investment of $500 million by Indian industrialist Anil Ambani’s
company, Reliance Entertainment, in Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks – a
partnership that co-produced 2012 Oscar-winner Lincoln – reflects increasing
Indian corporate investment in Hollywood (Thussu, 2013: 147). Hollywood’s
intensifying interest in the Indian market is visible in Sony Pictures and
Warner Bros recent investments in Bollywood (‘Hollywood Meets’, 2009).
These vicissitudes in the ongoing Hollywood/Bollywood arbitration, man-
ifested in contestations and collaborations, forms the outer layer of the
meta-hegemony. In the context of this book’s focus on new independent
Indian cinema, the paradigm of a global meta-hegemony will focus on its
Indian inner workings – Bollywood’s hegemony in modern Indian cinema.
The Meta-Hegemony 33
The Indian dimension of the meta-hegemonic configuration has evolved
historiographically over India’s postcolonial cinematic timeline, with
Bollywood gaining pre-eminence in the post-globalisation Indian cinemas-
cape. As mentioned above, the outer layer of meta-hegemony involving
Hollywood and Bollywood is undergoing a transformation due to current
reorientations and intensifying interrelations between the two indus-
tries against the backdrop of globalisation. The meta-hegemony’s inner
contours – Bollywood’s dominance over other forms of Indian cinema – is
also in a contemporary state of flux. The emergence and growth of the new
Indies since 2010 in the Bollywood-dominated terrain (Verma, 2011) forms
the linchpin of this realignment within Indian cinema.
The Indian context of the cinema meta-hegemony contains three dimen-
sions. The first aspect is Bollywood’s monopoly of the Indian film industry’s
modes of production, distribution, exhibition and capital generation. This
monopoly has occurred with the marginalisation of other alternative forms
of Indian cinema, including the new Indies. The second feature implicates
Bollywood in the ideological propagation of a monolithic post-globalisation
national master narrative of consumer capitalism and affluence whilst
retaining gendered roles and ‘traditional Indian values’. This juxtaposi-
tion of globalisation and tradition is commensurate with Bollywood’s role
as national cultural signifier of India’s neoliberal turn. The third facet of
Bollywood’s role in the meta-hegemony is its validation as a state-endorsed
instrument of national soft power, signifying Bollywood’s branding as a
national and global commodity.
In relation to the first feature of meta-hegemony – the dynamics of fund-
ing, exhibition and economic returns – Bollywood generates almost half
of all capital revenue in India’s filmmaking industry (see Chapter 1). This
is despite the relatively small proportion of Bollywood releases in com-
parison with the multiple regional vernacular film industries in Andhra
Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala (Kaminsky and Long, 2011:
247–248). Bollywood also monopolises the urban multiplex cinema space
(Athique and Hill, 2010: 203) constricting the pathway to exhibition
of independent films. Bollywood’s strategic alliances with multinational
media production houses (Athique, 2012: 141) such as Viacom 18 and
Fox Star Studios, indicates the mainstream film industry’s greater access
to and mobilisation of capital. These factors demonstrate Bollywood’s
dominance, particularly in light of the industry’s concentration within the
contours of one city (Mumbai), and its exclusive use of the Hindi language
(in a polyglot nation), a strategic ‘political statement’ in line with ‘Nation-
alists committed to Hindi as a national language’ (Kaminsky and Long,
2011: 247).
The cultural composition of the Indian national metanarrative is largely
framed by Bollywood, in contrast with the often polemical and multifari-
ous content of the Indies. This configuration involves Bollywood’s adoption
of audio-visual strategies containing ideologies of ‘nation, communalism,
34 The Meta-Hegemony
religion, gender and sexuality’ (Dudrah, 2012: 7) that has intensified in the
face of the dominant industry’s post-globalisation focus on cultivating the
interest of diasporic Indians (Gopal, 2011b: 18). Bollywood’s ascendancy
and, ultimately, its apotheosis have occurred in conjunction with and often
at the behest of state-sanctioned neoliberal strategies. The Indian state in its
thrust towards a free market economy has perceived the capital-generating
potential in Bollywood’s global branding and affirmed the industry as an
ambassador of Indian cultural soft power (Thussu, 2013: 131). In eluci-
dating the Indian cinema context of the meta-hegemony, it is possible to
start with an ostensibly rudimentary, yet perennial, source of polemic – the
antecedents of the term ‘Bollywood’ itself.
Melding Neoliberalism and Religion in the National Narrative

The genesis of the term Bollywood continues to constitute a site of con-
flicting views, opinions and debate. Bollywood can be broadly described
as Hindi films targeted at the ‘commercial mass-market and produced in
Mumbai’ (Alessio and Langer, 2010: 168). Several scholars concur that
‘Bollywood refers to the popular Hindi film genre associated with the
now-globalised Mumbai’s Hindi film culture industry’ (Desai and Dudrah,
2008: 2). Although the moniker ‘Bollywood’ has traditionally been co-opted
to refer to popular Hindi cinema, it is suggested that ‘Bollywood’ has actu-
ally delinked from serving ‘as a reference to Mumbai cinema’ and instead
‘has almost universally been adopted as a convenient label’ to refer to the
entirety of Indian cinema (A G. Roy and Chua, 2012: iv).
Florian Stadtler (2014: 10) contends that ‘Bollywood’ is commonly
used ‘as a blanket generalisation’ to subsume the multifarious forms of
other Indian film, including ‘arthouse, regional and middle cinemas’. Satel-
lite television channels aimed at the Indian diaspora disseminate the term
Bollywood, as do terrestrial television channels, such as the UK’s Channel 4,
in its annual Indian film season (ibid.). Contemporary scholars of Indian
cinema suggest that this umbrella use of the term as a metonymic refer-
ence to the multiplicity of Indian cinema has since been superseded and
Bollywood now encompasses the Indian entertainment and media industries
as a whole (Dudrah, 2012; Rajadhyaksha, 2003). This contention confirms
Bollywood’s current dominance in the field of Indian entertainment and
indeed in national culture.
As mentioned earlier, the establishment of Bollywood’s supremacy,
cementing its position as national cultural arbiter, has been concurrent with
Bollywood’s articulation of the national narrative, particularly its conspic-
uous role in the scripting of a post-liberalisation paradigm. For the sake
of clarity, this book locates the term ‘Bollywood’ as emerging concomitant
with India’s 1991 shift towards neoliberalism, primarily because this period
witnessed the permeation of ‘Bollywood’ into common parlance (Gopal,
2011a: 14).
Dudrah (2012: 5) observes that Bollywood’s enunciation of ‘Indian
c ultural nationalism in and through entertainment’ intensified in the post-
globalisation milieu, reaching a crescendo in 1998 when it received official
industry status from the Indian government. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2003)
cites ‘Bollywoodization’ as a significant development in the transitional
process of India’s globalisation during the 1990s, through which popular
Hindi cinema gained predominance as the hegemonic epicentre of Indian
cinema. A term now used transglobally to signify the national cinema of India,
Bollywood represents a mode of cultural production across the national and
international contexts that is ‘inextricably linked to the Indian nation-state
and the postcolonial economy of liberalization’ (Dudrah and Desai, 2008: 2).
The state’s incorporation of Bollywood as an ally in the thrust towards
a capitalist economy signifies the state’s perpetuation of a ‘pedagogical
mission’ (Rajadhyaksha, 2003: 36), a proposition that resonates with the
thesis of a homogenising pedagogical narrative of the nation. Rajadhyaksha,
with some percipience, presages a sustained neoliberal cinematic turn.
He describes the profusion of product placement in post-globalisation
Bollywood films in the 1990s as a harbinger of future funding strate-
gies and multinational corporate alliances in commercial Indian cinema.
Rajadhyaksha states:
the range of consumables increasingly visible on film screens – Stroh’s

beer in DDLJ, Coca-Cola in Taal, Swatch watches in Phir Bhi Dil
Hai Hindustani – are symptomatic of the nature of funding that the
cinema increasingly depends upon. If so, it would be the final irony
of the Bollywoodization of the Indian cinema that the very demand
that the industry has sought for from the government for so many
decades could be the reason for its demise. The arrival of corporate-
industrial-finance capital could reasonably lead to the final triumph of
Bollywood, even as the cinema itself gets reduced only to a memory, a
part of the nostalgia industry.
(Rajadhyaksha, 2003: 37)
Whilst the legacy of the above events elaborated by Rajadhyaksha has not
entailed the annihilation of Indian cinema per se, it has significantly led to
Bollywood becoming indistinguishable from the brand it has come to repre-
sent. Therefore, the neoliberal project endorsed by India’s post-globalisation
governments has segued into the successful commodification, branding
and global franchising of Bollywood itself as India’s predominant cultural
export.
Rajadhyaksha perceives the post-liberalisation Bollywood narrative as
the enduring articulation of the postcolonial Indian nation-state and its
grand narrative. He discerns ‘ghosts of past trends’ in modern Bollywood
blockbuster narratives with their ‘claims of commitment to family values’
and ‘feel-good-happy-ending’ romance that carries the tag of ‘our culture’
(Rajadhyaksha, 2003: 36). In this context, the hegemonic dominance of
commercial Hindi cinema traces back to the Bombay film studio produc-
tions in the 1950s, with films underscoring the ‘authenticity’ of culturally
specific, indigenous, socio-religious tropes.
Popular Hindi cinema has traditionally propagated nationalist ideology
(Alessio and Langer, 2010: 168), from films such as Awara (1951) and Shri
420 (1956) to Mother India (1957) (Chakravarty, 1993: 134, 149, 152).
Faiza Hirji (2010: 14) argues that the nationalist discourse in early Indian
popular cinema largely remains intact in contemporary popular Indian films.
Whilst concurring with Hirji’s assertion, it could be argued that there has
been a reconfiguration of the postcolonial nationalist narrative’s traditional
or indigenous focus mentioned above to accommodate India’s neoliberal
turn of the early 1990s. This transmuted traditional-neoliberal narrative
combines nationalist Hindu ideology and consumer capitalism; legitimised
and proliferated in several Bollywood film representations.
In effect, the nation’s current neoliberal national narrative is a legacy of
the 1990s globalisation-induced disjuncture, a fissure that also punctuated
and realigned Bollywood’s narrative towards the neoliberal. India’s current
dyadic traditional/neoliberal national narrative reflects contradictions
produced by the globalisation template of ‘American-style cultural impe-
rialism’ – open market economy and democratic rule (Lechner and Boli,
2010: 415). These co-existing components of liberalised free market and
democratic governance ‘[encourage] the unregulated pursuit of self-interest’,
and simultaneously ‘[stress] deliberate collective control of social affairs’
(ibid.). In India, the democratic state’s uniform application of a neoliberalis-
ing agenda through deregulation and exhortations to foreign multinational
investment has spilled over into the common social goal of urbanisation,
enterprise and economic mobility.
Essentially, the dichotomising effect of globalisation in India into
domains of the ‘material and spiritual’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5) characterises
Bollywood’s shift from ‘postcolonial form’, articulating national values and
traditions, to its current role as transglobal emissary of India’s ‘new con-
sumer community’ (V. Mishra, 2014: 198). This cinematic shift is cotermi-
nous with India’s journey from postindependence Nehruvian socialism to
present Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of neoliberalism.
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, (2011) states that mapping the forty years of
postcolonial India’s construction of nation presents a labyrinthine propo-
sition. She broadly traces the shifting dynamics of nation building, from
the purportedly socialist credo of the postindependence Nehruvian era that
nevertheless suppressed calls for land reforms and the equitable distribution
of resources, to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian quelling of
leftist movements in northeastern states like West Bengal in the late 1960s
and early 1970s (R B Mehta, 2011b: 4).
The preclusion of India’s constitutional postcolonial socialist ideals rein-
scribed a legacy of alterity, marginalisation and disparity in Indian society.
This was manifested in the economically impoverished ‘lumpenproletariat’
in rural and urban areas, subaltern farmers and in general those at the
bottom rung of the caste system, including the tribal Adivasis and Dalits
(R B Mehta, 2011: 4; Rycroft, 2012: 257). These groups and their con-
cerns remained largely unaddressed by the nation’s investment in economic
liberalisation in the 1990s, owing to the state’s tendentious privileging of the
entrepreneurial elite and the ascendency of an Indian bourgeois consumer
class. Narrative themes portraying the socio-economic divide pervading
various sectors of Indian society were a characteristic feature of the Parallel
cinema of the 1970s and 80s.
Commercial Hindi cinema in the 1970s and 80s that would later become
popularised as Bollywood occasionally attempted to couch portrayals of
marginalised individuals contesting unjust systems in the grammar of enter-
tainment, encapsulating all the human emotions and providing ‘value for
money’. For example, the ‘angry young man’ personified by Bollywood star
Amitabh Bachchan (Schaefer and Karan, 2013: 93) in films such as Deewar
(1975), Zanjeer (1973) and Coolie (1983) represented main characters
or ‘heroes’ whose low income and social anomie precipitated sometimes
violent and radical action against the system and its injustices. These films
often represented disenfranchised maverick, working-class crusaders whilst
sanctifying and nurturing a national narrative that preserved a traditional
Indian moral and value system. Hirji points out that whilst Bollywood films
may occasionally engage with socio-cultural concerns, these issues will
almost always be resolved without jeopardising ‘the societal status quo’
(Hirji, 2010: 30). Hirji’s observation of the genre’s sustenance of status quo
alludes to the ideological dimensions of Bollywood’s meta-hegemony.
An addendum to Hirji’s assertion is that Bollywood, whilst reiterating
the status quo, simultaneously fortifies the status quo ante. This is in terms
of some Bollywood films’ invariable restoration of a hoary ‘historic’ shared
value system steeped in mythologised traditions and family values that are
encoded into neoliberal lifestyles, particularly in post-liberalisation films
such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun …! (1994) and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayega
(DDLJ, 1995), popularly known as HAHK and DDLJ (Ganti, 2013: 100).
This imagined historic commonality could be related to Bhabha’s mythic
time or to the pedagogical shared narrative of the nation’s past.
Bollywood, in its meta-hegemonic role, also reinforces pedagogical
nationalist ideology through a cinematic conventionalising of patriarchal,
heteronormative and gendered idioms. Components of this national narra-
tive include the fetishisation of partisan nationalism and adherence to tra-
ditional ‘rules of Indian/Hindu culture’, such as deference to parents and
elders and the primacy of marriage and family (Hirji, 2005, 2010). Hum
Aapke Hain Koun …!, one of the most successful Bollywood films of the
globalisation decade of the 1990s, is a case in point. Patriarchal dominance
is uncontested and formalised in the film, whilst aspirational, opulent con-
sumer lifestyles are upheld as the benchmark for the average urban Indian
family (Hirji, 2010; Chatterji, 1998: 6). In films such as Karan Johar’s
Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham (2001), diasporic Indian identities collapse into
Bollywood’s representations of inviolate Indianness.
Raminder Kaur (2005: 326) argues that Bollywood propagates the
notion of India as the hegemonic nucleus of ‘authentic’ Indian identity,
where the ‘metalanguage’ of Bollywood is imperative in identity formation.
India then assumes the form of an all-encompassing central figurehead –
the fountainhead of all Indian identities – where diasporic Indian is sub-
servient to ‘authentic’ Indian (ibid.). This leads to the reestablishment of
orientalist hegemonies that in this instance are the result of an overarching
self-orientalising (Kaur, 2005; 324; Mazzarella, 2003: 138, 178), under the
meta-hegemonic Bollywood superstructure.
India’s tryst with globalisation in 1991 marked a transformative transi-
tion in the trajectory of commercial Hindi cinema, with Bollywood’s focus
shifting from aam aadmi (a common person) to amir aadmi (a rich person) –
a member of the aspirational, affluent Indian middle-class. R B Mehta argues
that Bollywood redefined its narrative, aligning itself with this period of
neoliberal economic expansion, ‘naturalising the free-floating non-resident
Indian (NRI) as an essentialist cultural signifier’ and disseminating ‘various
capital-driven phenomena in India’ (including basketball and Valentine’s
Day). (2011: 4–5) In effect, the Bollywood prototype of traditional ‘Indian’
morals and values transmogrified into a conduit for the celebration of nou-
veau riche ostentation and opulence – a new global Indian identity.
Globalisation in the 1990s witnessed the denationalisation of Indian tele-
vision and its hitherto sole representative, the state-run TV channel Doordar-
shan. The democratisation of the Indian airwaves in the early 1990s led to
an inundation of corporate-owned satellite TV channels (Punathambekar,
2013: 94). At the forefront was Rupert Murdoch’s STAR TV network, ush-
ering in an era of CNN and Fox TV in India that according to R B Mehta
led to the ‘drowning of legitimate political discourses on the ground’ (2011: 5).
This deluge of media overwhelming urban India and either suppressing or
misrepresenting marginal narratives is a theme broached in Peepli Live, one
of the independent films analysed in this book (See Chapter 9).
Some scholars suggest that capital interests, particularly those of corporate
TV news channels, precipitate skewed representations that appease political
and elite classes, consequently smothering dissent by creating ‘a niche where
anti-government, or anti-populist may actually mean anti-people’ (ibid.).
Bollywood emerged in recent years as a strong ally of corporate media such
as Sony, Fox and Star (Kaur, 2005: 326). Alongside alliances with multina-
tional corporates, in a preponderance of post-globalisation Bollywood films
‘affluence rising out of globalisation and India’s presumed role in it became
the diegetic signifier for national value or pride’ (R B Mehta, 2011: 5). This
incipient prosperity for privileged sections of Indian society lay in stark con-
trast with the spiralling socio-economic disparity evident in the lack of basic
amenities, access to drinking water and crumbling infrastructure, leading
to the further degradation of an already impoverished Indian underclass
(Gokulsing and Dissanayake, 2009: 4; R B Mehta, 2011: 4).
Whilst elucidating Bollywood’s collaboration with corporate media and
the former’s encomium of India’s burgeoning bourgeoisie affluence, it is
important to note that this engagement with capitalism is at the behest of
and in collusion with political and ideological power structures (Kaur, 2005:
326). Concurrent with India’s engagement with globalisation in the early
1990s was an upsurge in Hindu nationalism, particularly with the grow-
ing prominence of the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata
Party). Ideological adjuncts to the popular rise of right-wing Hindu poli-
tics included the twin notions of Hindutva (Hinduness) and ‘Hindu rashtra
(nation)’ (Rycroft, 2012: 256). These propositions justify Étienne Balibar’s
assertion that ‘nationalisms of liberation’ have transformed into ‘national-
isms of domination’ (Balibar, 1991: 46). Relating Balibar’s proposition to
the historiographical context of this study, the ‘nationalism of liberation’
accompanying India’s post-independence nation-building exercise has trans-
formed into the present post-globalisation domination of Hindu nationalist
ideology, neoliberalism and Bollywood.
Mita Banerjee (2011) argues that Bollywood is a ‘deeply Hindu scenario’,
aligning itself with the majority Hindu ideology and propagating an almost
fundamentalist Hindu vision of nationalism. This has transpired under the
thinly veiled ‘lip service’ to the ‘idea of India as a multi-ethnic society’ (ibid.).
For example, the Bollywood science-fiction film Koi Mil Gaya (‘I Found
Someone’, 2003), strategically conceived to contest Hollywood’s hegemony of
the sci-fi genre in India, was also a vehicle to promote Hindu iconography and
ideology, underscoring the theme of India’s unadulterated Hindu identity
(Alessio and Langer, 2010: 168). According to Alessio and Langer, Koi Mil
Gaya ‘openly celebrates the country’s indigenous Hindu identity – at the
expense of other imported religions such as Islam and Christianity – and depicts
the image of an advanced, middle-class and prosperous India’ (ibid.). This
assertion captures the general mainstream cinema milieu in post-globalisation
India, where films articulate a national identity that is predominantly ‘upper-
caste, upper-middle class, Hindi-speaking, and Hindu’ (Hirji, 2010: 31;
Alessandrini, 2003: 323). The above arguments and assertions encapsulate
Bollywood’s conjoining of majoritarian religio-economic interests.
The mainstream cinema industry’s alignment with Hindu nationalist
ideology and politics was marked by the association of several Bollywood
stars with the BJP and the extreme-right Shiv Sena in the late 1990s (Ales-
sio and Langer, 2010: 164; Banker, 2001: 68; Gangadhar, 1999). Banerjee
(2011) mentions the ambivalent dilemma faced by the traditionalist Hindu
right, under the banner of the BJP, of negotiating the proliferation of ‘prof-
ligate’ yet lucrative ‘Western capitalism’ in India, but still preserving the
notion of Hindu national purity. This quandary resulted in the Hindu polit-
ical right perceiving the economic benefits of this late capitalism and under-
taking a ‘wooing’ of diasporic or ‘non-resident Indian’ investment, although still
preserving the notion that diasporic or NRI investment, in general, was
‘contaminated by the West’ (Desai, 2004: 184).
Irrespective of polarised perceptions, the liberalisation of the 1990s
witnessed a plenitude of NRI investment in the Indian economy, with net
‘NRI inflows rising from 1.5 billion dollars in 1990–1991 to 3.6 billion in
2003–2004’ and ‘total NRI deposits at 33 billion in March 2005’ (Nayak,
2008: 156). Bollywood in tandem with presiding political forces capital-
ised on the commercial possibilities in this ambivalent zeitgeist of consumer
capitalism and cultural conservatism. Bollywood accomplished this by
crystallising narratives that posited an inviolate and unadulterated Indian
authenticity as emerging from within the geographical demarcations of
India, and through the privileging of ‘Hindu’ as metonymic of India.
Bollywood’s role as cinematic motor for nationalist narratives is con-
comitant with the broader, post-liberalisation rise of religio-political inter-
ventions in cultural production. Desai (2004) observes that although the
mainstream Hindutva political groups, such as the ruling BJP, perceived
monetary advantages in their dalliance with globalisation and late capital-
ism, several of the BJP’s hard-line fundamentalist ancillaries adopted a more
virulent and incendiary anti-liberalisation and anti-Western posture (Desai,
2004: 182–183). The BJP’s intransigence is pertinent to new independent
cinema, particularly in relation to their evoking discourses of regulation and
censorship.
Also relevant is the vigilantism gratuitously exercised by organisations
such as the aforementioned far-right Shiv Sena, who act as moral police,
incorporating violent methods to proscribe cinema they deem contrary to
Indian values (Desai, 2004: 151; Gopinath, 2005: 130). Echoes of past inci-
dents, such as the disrupted screenings of Fire, a film depicting a lesbian
relationship, reverberate in the recent banning of films, such as Unfreedom
(2015), also portraying lesbianism, Papilio Buddha (2013), about the Dalit
minority community, and disrupted public screenings of Gandu (2010) (see
Chapter 6).
Even Bollywood’s meta-hegemony is not immune to internal divisions
commensurate with the current upsurge of religious nationalism under the
Modi government. A case in point is the vituperation directed at Aamir Khan
and his wife, Kiran Rao, by senior Bollywood BJP affiliates such as the actor
Anupam Kher in reprisal for Khan’s public expression of concern about
rising intolerance in India. In addition to the abuse Khan received from con-
servative political parties and right-wing Bollywood figures, the aftermath
of his statements saw a call amongst sections of the public to boycott online
e-commerce web portals and products endorsed by the actor. This could be
seen as a form of capitalistic retribution against a figurehead of the com-
mercial Indian cinema industry. During an NDTV live debate, prominent
writer Shobha De classified this economic ostracism of Aamir Khan as ‘com-
mercial terrorism’ (Dutt, 2015). This imbroglio is highlighted by the almost
instantaneous political and public denunciation of Aamir Khan, irrespective
of his status as Bollywood brand ambassador for the Indian government’s
international Incredible India tourism campaign. Current divisions within
Bollywood can be framed by the sudden drawing of differentiating lines
around Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, two Muslim actors, as a reac-
tion to their public expressions of uneasiness about rising intolerance. These
events may prove a litmus test of the veneer of neutrality and masquerade of
apolitical benignity that Bollywood seems compelled to adopt in the face of
its larger capital interests.
The ascendancy of Hindu nationalism also has a correlation to the
suppression of female subjectivities in film representations (Gopinath, 2005:
130). This is particularly the case in the arena of lesbian identities that are
subsumed in a general normativising of women in Bollywood’s ‘sanitizing of
“home” space’ (Gopinath, 2005: 130).
Gendering the Nation

This section argues that Bollywood has inscribed its meta-hegemony
through reductionist representations of women and patriarchal imaginings
of nation, which seems in accordance with the state agenda. Bollywood’s
patriarchal imaginings of gender emphasise the new Indies’ divergence from
normative/heteronormative representations and, by that token, their devi-
ations from the national narrative. They also highlight the prominence of
female directors and film protagonists in the Indies, most recently in Leena
Yadav’s Parched (2015) and the first all-female ‘buddy’ film, Angry Indian
Goddesses, directed by Pan Nalin (Aigthefilm.com, 2015). In this context,
the directors of two key Indie films, Dhobi Ghat and Peepli Live (anal-
ysed in Chapters 8 and 9 of this volume), are women. Faiza Hirji (2005,
2010) analyses the gendering of roles for women in Bollywood narratives.
She argues that this gendered imagination of the nation restricts women to
the function of marriage, childbearing and the imparting of national ideals
and traditions to offspring (Hirji, 2010: 15). Hirji identifies the trope of the
‘Mother figure’, and sees Bollywood’s strategy of reinforcing the deifica-
tion of the Mother and the ‘protection’ of women in general as symbolic of
the nation as ‘feminine’, thus creating a space for ‘inevitable return’ (ibid.).
Hirji’s reading of the Mother as metaphorical of India is reminiscent of a
similar theme in Mother India (1957), often cited as ‘India’s most revered
film’ (Creekmur, 2007: 178). Mother India’s title character, eponymously
inspired by Hindu mythological mother goddess ‘Radha’, is figurative of the
newly liberated Indian nation (ibid.).
Affixing a monadic, intemerate Hindu identity to an originary point
or logos of newly emerged nation is baseless, incompatible and incongruous
with the integrally heterogeneous composition of pre- and postcolonial
India. Hirji cites Shahnaz Khan’s (2009: 87) assertion of a general ‘linear
narrative of Hindu supremacy’, which Hirji argues is perpetuated by
Bollywood in effacement of ‘India’s historic pluralism’ (Hirji, 2010: 14).
Nandini Bhattacharya (2012) also perceives the coterminous presence of
patriarchal primacy and Hindu fundamentalist ideology in post-globalisation
Bollywood films. She observes a ‘violently gendered Hindutva’, paradoxi-
cally steeped in India’s neoliberal consumerism that has shaped a modern
Hindu identity – one that functions as the engine for Bollywood’s globali-
sation aesthetic (Bhattacharya, 2012: 136).
Bollywood’s gendered design appears congruent with the state’s larger
patriarchal imagining of nation and India’s current socio-political entrench-
ment in a dominant, right-wing Hindu identity. The trope of traditional
rectitude manifested in the sexually pure and morally inviolable Indian
woman – the personification of ‘Mother India’ – continues to be articulated
in several modern Bollywood films, including Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (‘Run
Milkha Run’, 2013), a biopic about Olympic athlete Milkha Singh.
Monika Mehta (2011) points out a dual dilemma, asserting that Bollywood’s
perpetuation of sexualised and objectified women disguises the equally discon-
certing, yet often overlooked portrayals of ‘the good self-sacrificing wife, the
long-suffering mother or the dutiful daughter’ (M. Mehta, 2011: 55). This con-
tention is perceptible in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, where female characters either
represent paragons of Indian virtue or s exual objects – obstacles for the film’s
hero to hurdle in his unswerving path towards attaining athletic apotheosis for
the nation.
M Mehta perceives in the retrenchment and recurrence of implicit
stereotypical representations of dutiful women the designs of the postcolonial
state in encouraging the ‘reformation of patriarchal alliances in the Indian
nation-state’ (M Mehta, 2011a: 55–56). This strategy was amplified during
the post-globalisation period, ‘when the Indian family was assumed to be
under threat’ (ibid.). The state’s ‘hidden agenda’ of normalising patriarchy
is explicitly articulated in the Bollywood family sagas of the 1990s men-
tioned earlier. It is also embedded in Bollywood’s enduring credo of pro-
viding ‘wholesome family entertainment’, despite the prevalence of violence
and sexuality, that is visited particularly on women in popular films (Hood,
2009: 4). The significance of Bollywood’s rendering of patriarchy folds
into the tripartite facets of Bollywood’s meta-hegemony. Bollywood’s male-
dominated narrative is particularly relevant to the industry’s mirroring of the
state’s pedagogical national narrative, in addition to the two other features
of meta-hegemony: the state’s validation of Bollywood as soft power, and
the mainstream industry’s monopoly of entertainment in India.An on-screen
privileging of masculine roles co-exists with Bollywood’s disparate remuner-
ation system (Hirji, 2010: 27), where female lead actors receive a tenth of
the fee commanded by Bollywood’s male stars (‘Bollywood Women’, 2014).
Such systemic irregularities aside, the female figure (the female body, not the
female pay-scale) has undergone a makeover, congruent with the uninhib-
ited proliferation of consumer capitalism.
Female ‘heroines’ appeared in obligatory sexualised song and dance
sequences in several Bollywood films in the 1970s and 80s, including
Zeenat Amman in Qurbani (1980), Parveen Babi in Shaan (1980) and
Rekha in Jaanbaaz (1986) (S. Mishra, 2013: 185). Lead actresses (hero-
ines) who featured in sexually suggestive sequences retained their moral
legitimacy by dint of their association with an incorruptible male hero.
A heroine’s momentary indulgence in such forms of moral turpitude as
the song and dance routine was exculpated in the minds of the audience
by her eventual return to the sanctum sanctorum of ‘traditional’ Indian
purity and moral probity. This was a distinction not afforded the femme
fatale or ‘vamp’ figure – the stylised seductress who, along with the ‘her-
oine’, populated song and dance set-pieces of pre-globalisation popular
Hindi cinema.
Smeeta Mishra asserts that the ‘vamp’ in Bollywood cinema often
embodied the somatic ‘site for stereotypical portrayal of minorities, espe-
cially minority women’, reflecting Bollywood’s orientalist othering of its
own minorities (2013: 185). Mishra foregrounds this contention with the
example of Bollywood’s enduring ‘vamp’ – the actress Helen, who appeared
in several Bollywood films as a perpetually exoticised figure – the archetypal
‘vamp’. Mirroring her own hybrid Anglo-Indian parentage, Helen’s onscreen
personae were invariably ‘outsiders’ from India’s marginal communities –
tribals, Christians and Anglo-Indians (ibid.). In this regard, vamps were
often named Rosie or Mary and prominently displayed dissolute ‘Western
vices’ of sexual promiscuity, smoking and drinking (Gokulsing and Dissan-
ayake, 2004: 79).
Early commercial Hindi films’ vamp/heroine dichotomy concealed
ideological bifurcations, where the female body became the battleground
of virtuous ‘Indianness’ versus Westernised vice (Mazumdar, 2007: 80;
S. Mishra, 2013: 182;). The transformative potency of India’s neoliberal
turn in the 1990s is epitomised by the refashioning of the earlier vamp trope
into an updated readjustment to match India’s globalising, capital-oriented
milieu. In effect, the faultlines of India’s liberalisation spawned the meta-
morphosis of the pre-globalisation vamp into the post-globalisation ‘item
girl’. It turned earlier commercial Hindi cinema’s cabaret- style song and
dance sequence (Gopal, 2011a: 40) into the modern pièce de résistance
‘item number’.
The item number is a sexualised stand-alone musical set-piece, largely
unrelated to the film’s plot and primarily aimed at arousing the male voy-
euristic gaze (S. Mishra, 2013: 185–186; A. G. Roy, 2011: 42). Conventions
of the item number position the hypersexualised item girl as the centre of
attention, encircled by a plethora of men. The item girl’s body is strategically
located as the sexualised object of an exclusively male scopophilic desire (see
Figs. 2.1 and 2.2).
Figure 2.1 ‘Vamp’ Helen in the 1970 film, The Train.
Figure 2.2 Katrina Kaif’s item number, ‘Chikni Chameli’, in 2012’s Agneepath.
In essence, the transition from risquée vamp to hypersexualised item

girl – femme fatale to female sex object, involved the repackaging, produc-
tification and subsequent showcasing of the female form. A. G. Roy (2011)
argues that the item number is Bollywood’s strategy to capitalise on latent
prurient desires ‘to generate publicity, to guarantee the film’s box office
success and [to] ensure repeat viewings’ (A. G. Roy, 2011: 42). This agenda
has resulted in the item number becoming an obligatory and indispensible
facet of modern Bollywood.
In an interview, independent filmmaker Onir problematises Bollywood’s
current fetishisation of the item number, perceiving it as a manifestation
of the nation’s entrenched misogynistic attitudes towards women (Onir,
personal communication, 2013). He questions the normativisation of
Bollywood’s item numbers in a nation beset with the problems of rape and
violence against women and argues:
In India there are societies where a woman’s only job is to dance at

weddings and then they are raped. So what is shown in an item num-
ber is actually the profession of those women. So this furthers the
notion that women are meant to be items for money, to be dancing
like that … you throw money and touch them whenever you want to,
and an 8-year-old boy or girl seeing this grows up accepting that as
the norm.
(Onir, personal communication, 2003)
Onir’s assertion carries the undercurrents of a national discourse surround-

ing the spate of recent rape cases in India. This in turn implicates the com-
mercial cinema industry’s passivity towards the reality of rape, elided by
larger capital interests (Mangalwala, 2013). This preoccupation with eco-
nomic and entertainment interests encompasses social attitudes. Prominent
Indian film critic Rajeev Masand extolled hit item number Shiela ki Jawani
as ‘a sight to behold’, whilst leading daily The Times of India conferred on
it the ‘hottest item song of the year’ award, based on 343,000 readership
votes (S. Mishra, 2013: 187). A recent worldwide UN study on women
in popular cinema places Indian films at the top of a global list in terms
of representing ‘attractive women’, out of which 35 percent are depicted
with ‘some nudity’ (Singh, 2014). The study also indicated magnified levels
of popular Indian films exhibiting sexualised female characters, contrasted
with diminished depictions of ‘women in significant speaking roles and as
engineers and scientists’ (ibid.). Bollywood’s lack of proportional female
representation is in sharp contrast with several new Indies, including I Am,
Parched, Ship of Theseus, Dhobi Ghat and Peepli Live, with prominent
female roles.
Inferring from the above points, the commercial value of the item num-
ber seems to take precedence in Bollywood. This can be calibrated by this
musical motif’s reception amongst national and diasporic Indian audiences
as a celebratory gesture of ‘Indianness’. This laudatory reception has largely
contributed to the serialisation of the item song in contemporary Bollywood
films. The new Indies’ circumvention of the item number is a relevant fea-
ture of their positioning in the interstices, outside some of the obligatory
cinematic conventions of the mainstream.
The Bollywood phenomenon of (product) placing exoticised female
figures on display, folds into the metanarrative of neoliberal consumerism.
The item girl in her encompassing item number appears to be packaged and
propagated as a globalised product. Recent films have augmented the mar-
ketability of item numbers, enlisting the services of Canadian-Indian por-
nographic film actress turned Bollywood star, Sunny Leone, in item numbers
such as ‘Pink Lips’ from the film Hate Story 2 (2014). Recent big-budget
blockbuster Dhoom 3 (2013) features a pole-dance by British-Indian
Bollywood star Katrina Kaif in an item number entitled ‘Kamli’. Kaif per-
forms the sensual pole-dance, incrementally divesting herself of her clothe,
and pleasuring the male gaze in the form of actor Aamir Khan’s character,
seated directly in front of the dancing Kaif (Fig. 2.3).
Canadian-Indian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja’s documentary, The World
Before Her (2013), could be adopted as a touchstone to compare the pro-
lific supply of Bollywood item numbers proportional to the demand for
sexualised female representations from Indian audiences. One sequence in
The World Before Her portrays a group of young urban middle-class ‘Miss
India’ beauty pageant contestants at a boot camp in preparation for the
final event. Pageant director Marc Robinson reveals how he has nurtured
an enduring ‘vision of putting cloaks on women, so we can’t see their faces
and only their legs and then decide who has the best pair of legs’. Fulfilling
his fantasy, Robinson presides over the ‘hot legs’ training session, where he
commands the Miss India contestants to show off their legs. The subsequent
shots capture the women with heads and torsos covered in linen sacks, leav-
ing only their legs exposed, as they ‘catwalk’ down the ramp for Robinson’s
viewing pleasure (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5). One of the girls makes an ironic remark
about ‘escape from the Taliban’, referring to the participants’ shrouded faces.
Figure 2.3 Miss India training session.

Figure 2.4 Marc Robinson examines ‘hot legs’.
Robinson’s misogynistic objectification of the female participants reflects

the wider prevalence of a patriarchal psyche. The endemic commodification
and sexualisation of women in Indian popular culture blurs the distinction
between representation and reality – between the Bollywood item number
and the stark actuality of gender-based repression in India.
In order to infuse a transglobal exoticism to the item number, Bollywood
has solicited guest appearances from global artistes such as Samantha Fox,
Denise Richards and Kylie Minogue (Ramesh, 2009). Overall, it is fair to state
that the female figure in modern commercial Hindi cinema, like Bollywood
itself, appears suspended in a limbo, between materialism and tradition.
The discussion thus far has related to the theoretical proposition of a
totalising pedagogical national narrative that marginalises the mosaic of
multifarious other discourses in India. The arguments raised up to this point
implicate Bollywood’s role and indeed its complicity in reinforcing a homo-
genising master narrative.
Recent developments, including Bollywood’s investment in several new
Indies, suggest Bollywood is shedding the skin of its enduring monolithic
form and is hybridising itself in order to present an au courant commer-
cial package, commensurate with its broader global/local industry ambi-
tions. This thesis seems plausible, considering statistical extrapolations of
the burgeoning Indian media and entertainment industry, which stood at
584 billion rupees in 2008 and was forecasted to grow at 12.5 percent to
reach 1,052 billion rupees in 2013, according to a media and entertainment
industry joint report (‘Hollywood Meets’, 2009), prepared by the Federa-
tion of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and KPMG,
a consultancy group. In this context, Bollywood’s involvement in the new,
independent Indian Indie sector indicates the mainstream industry’s forays
into emerging prospective capital markets.
Bollywood and Other Stories of Soft Power
Bollywood’s contemporary fortunes could be mapped in terms of the indus-
try’s entwinement with the Indian state’s entry into the free market system
and subsequently the state’s valorisation of Bollywood as an instrument
of national soft power. It is within this ambit that India’s cinematic meta-
hegemony continues to reverberate, with state conferment of soft power
constituting an important dimension whilst addressing the new Indies’ quest
for space in the Bollywood superstructure.
The legitimisation provided by state authority to Bollywood must not be
solely, and therefore simplistically, conflated with and restricted to the deter-
ministic directives of the state apparatus per se and Bollywood’s responsive
underwriting of it. The ‘new’ authority gestures towards the Indian state’s
capital agenda, its investment in the national neoliberal project, which has
become the reified form of state authority. Bollywood’s enduring articula-
tion of the national narrative collapses into the proposition that ‘parochial
content is actually subservient to neoliberal practice’ (Blum, 2007: 48).
Therefore, both the state and Bollywood are co-opted in the new neoliberal
national metanarrative and their political and cinematic discourses converge
in the rhetoric of soft power.
Bollywood is endorsed at the highest level of executive power as an
uncontested manifestation of Indian cultural soft power. Soft power is
a term coined by Joseph Nye, Harvard academic and former Assistant
Secretary of Defence in the Clinton administration. Nye broadly defined soft
power as a strategy for the United States to gain global influence through
‘attraction rather than coercion’, integrating the soft approach of ‘culture,
political values and foreign policies’ with the hard power of military force,
to legitimise America’s policies across the globe (Nye, 2004: x). Interna-
tional relations and coeval disciplines of scholarship have been punctuated
by the discourse of soft diplomacy. In an Indian context, Congress party
leader Shashi Tharoor has been a particularly vociferous political proponent
of Indian soft power (Schaefer, 2013: 66, 82). Tharoor’s bombastic exposi-
tions on the benefits of Bollywood’s ‘soft power’ appear to be an emulation
of Joseph Nye’s prior bestowment of global soft power status to Hollywood.
This reinforces the proposition of Bollywood’s secondary status within the
global political dimensions of meta-hegemony.
Daya Thussu (2013: 148) observes that the Indian government includes
Bollywood in its diplomatic relations strategy to forge stronger bonds with
the United States in a bid to ‘benefit India’s creative and cultural industries’
(ibid.). This observation recalls then-incumbent BJP Union Minister of Infor-
mation and Broadcasting Sushma Swaraj’s follow-up to her government’s
conferral of industry status on commercial film production in 1998. Swaraj
declared her party’s unbridled solicitation of diasporic Indian capital invest-
ment, positing ‘each entertainment and media icon of the Indian diaspora’
as India’s ‘unofficial ambassador abroad’, promising policies beneficial to
the interests of these ‘overseas emissaries’ (‘Ethnic Media’, 2003). Erstwhile
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s acknowledgement of Bollywood as an
implement of India’s soft power in ‘foreign policy’ (Athique, 2012: 115;
Thussu, 2013: 134) was stimulated and underwritten by the mainstream
film industry’s capital-generating potential.
It could be argued that the Indian state’s promulgation of Bollywood
as soft power implies the consolidation of Bollywood, both as hegemonic
national cultural arbiter and as global cinematic agent of India’s neoliberal
turn. Aswin Punathambekar (2013) astutely traces the Indian state’s agenda
in strapping Bollywood onto the bandwagon of its national journey from
social democracy to neoliberal free market economy:
Bollywood’s presence in settings such as the World Economic Forum

and Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Day of the Diaspora) was not just a
reflection of the growing economic importance of the culture indus-
tries. Rather such events reveal that the transformation of the Bombay
Film industry into Bollywood was caught up in a larger process of the
state realigning its understanding of ‘culture as resource’ away from
well-worn developmentalist paradigms towards meeting the demands
of new circuits of capital.
(Punathambekar, 2013: 49)
In essence, Bollywood’s narration of new neoliberal discourse gains legiti-

macy through the sanctioning imprimatur of Indian state authority. Bhabha’s
notion of ‘authority’ being normalised through homogenising cultural icons
and signifiers (Bhabha, 1995: 206) could be reconceptualised in light of
the contemporary constellation of Indian culture and cinema dominated by
Bollywood stars. The integration and normalisation of Bollywood into the
Indian socio-politico-cultural fabric is manifested in the pervasive presence
of Bollywood personalities in politics, advertising and nation branding.
Athique observes Bollywood’s multinational sponsorship and its profusion
of global product placements, including Coca-Cola and Mercedes, high-
lighting Bollywood’s blurring of boundaries between advertising and enter-
tainment (Athique, 2012: 112). The standardisation of Bollywood is also
exemplified in the showcasing of its stars at the 2010 New Delhi Com-
monwealth Games, as well as Bollywood actors doubling as quasi-official
politico-cultural representatives during state visits by foreign dignitaries
(‘Aamir Khan Meets’, 2013).
The imperative of capital has led to global cinematic leviathans
Hollywood and Bollywood being ratified by their respective nation-states
as almost self-contained agents of soft power. This suggests a postmodern
reinscription of homogenising grand narratives on the transglobal neolib-
eral canvas that now seems to subtend cultural production. Joseph Nye’s
prescription of soft power as an alternative approach to the overt aggression
of military might and economic dominance belies the deceptive benignity
he affords to the ‘soft power’ of dominant cultural products. Nye displays
a startling naïveté in stating ‘soft power does not depend on hard power’
(Nye, 2004: 9). It is possible to contest Nye’s assertion, raising Antonio
Gramsci’s notion that coercion and co-optation are mutually inseparable,
and as such, soft power is a surreptitious device to ‘sustain hegemonic dom-
ination’ (Hayden, 2012: 39).
Propagating Bollywood indiscriminately as soft power fails to acknowl-
edge its innate power/economics relationship, where enterprise and eco-
nomics conjoin with state power to construct a realm of capital-based
ideological dominance. This is in congruence with Martin Jacques’ observa-
tion that emerging global powers such as China and, in this book’s context,
India, could use their ascendant economic power to attain ‘political, cultural
and military ends’ (Jacques, 2009: 12). Arguably, this is already visible in
current assertions of ‘a golden age for Chinese cinema’, with Chinese films
starting to ‘tell a universal story’ and the Chinese government seeking ‘to
renew its film industry to challenge Hollywood’ (Yueh, 2014). These sce-
narios could ultimately lead to the hegemonic systems envisaged by Gramsci,
where coercion and co-optation combine, America being the archetypal
contemporary example of this fusion of military force and consumer
culture. The soft power rhetoric privileging dominant cultural products
such as Hollywood and Bollywood to the exclusion of others thrives in
the oxygen of pervasive universalising neoliberal systems. The legitimisation
afforded Bollywood by state power, in line with the putative primacy of
capital in the nation’s current free market system, has leveraged Bollywood’s
cultural hegemony and concretised its custodianship of the Indian cinematic
superstructure. This proposition is important whilst considering the ramifi-
cations for the new Indies in terms of envisioning an autonomous space or
an ‘Indie’ infrastructure independent of Bollywood.
Adrian Athique observes that India’s new ‘globalized social imagination’
is mirrored in a ‘pluralized mediasphere’ which seems equipped to tran-
scend ‘ethnocultural barriers as well as state authority’ (Athique, 2012:
130). However, Athique soft-pedals on nationalist elements of the state,
vehemently proclaiming Bollywood’s soft-power credentials. He attempts
to downplay Bollywood’s politico-ideological associations by labelling the
dominant cultural form an innocuous ‘choice of entertainment’ or a ‘source
of gratification’ (Athique, 2012: 130). In the process, Athique inadvertently
naturalises the state-sanctioned Bollywood grand narrative as purportedly
anodyne and benign entertainment for the ‘masses’ – an essentialising met-
anarrative that for the most part has been legitimised and reinscribed in
previous and current academic engagement with Indian cinema.
In so doing, Athique fails to acknowledge the continuing symbiotic rela-
tionship between the nationalist state and Bollywood at the deeper struc-
tural level, unveiled in this study’s concept of meta-hegemony. This relates to
the state and Bollywood’s ideological and economic intertwining under the
banner of neoliberalism. John Hood (2009) illustrates the short-sightedness
of banalising Bollywood as lucrative mass entertainment that is ‘only giving
the ordinary people what they want’ (Hood, 2009: 4). He claims that
‘successful capitalist marketing thrives by creating a popular need and culti-
vating a belief in people that that, in fact is what they want’ (ibid.).
In addition, Athique, like the majority of scholars on Indian cinema,
appears not to have accounted for the rapid recent realignments in modern
Indian cinema, with the new Indies at the vanguard of this reconfigura-
tion. In actuality, the new Indies are more apropos candidates for Athique’s
notion of the new globalised Indian mindset ‘transcending state authority’,
if the examples of polemical Indies Harud, Gandu and Papilio Buddha are
anything to go by. Overall, it seems fair to state that the trivialisation of
Bollywood films as emissaries of entertainment paradoxically falls prey to
the universalising strategies utilised by hegemonic structures to legitimise
and sustain their dominant metanarratives.
Richard Devetak (1996) argues that a postmodern approach in interna-
tional relations exposes strategies (such as those of the neoliberal Indian
state and Bollywood) through which ‘a perspective produces representa-
tions which attain dominance and monopolise legitimacy by marginalising
others’ (Devetak, 1996: 185). The above elucidation directly informs the
proposition that the unisonant affirmation of Bollywood as soft power by
the Indian state is exercised in conjunction with the disavowal or exclusion
of other heterogeneous Indian cinematic forms, such as the Indies.
Extending Devetak’s above assertion, Bollywood’s meta-hegemony could
be viewed through a postmodern genealogical perspective. The genealogical
form of history is invested in ‘writing counter-histories’ revealing ‘processes of
exclusion’ and domination that construct the illusion of history as being a sin-
gle linear narrative (Devetak, 1996: 184). To a significant extent, this volume
already adopts the historiographical approach whilst locating the Indie inter-
stitial space and its alternative narratives in Bollywood’s larger dominant field
of a linear national narrative. Delving into the power/knowledge nexus, a gene-
alogical paradigm attempts to dismantle the unified grand narrative of history,
revealing an underbelly of multiple, suppressed other stories (Devetak, 1996:
185). This proposition could be applied to Bollywood’s enduring articulation
of mythic time and its homogenising national narrative as an undifferenti-
ated through-line of historical traditional (Hindu) ‘Indian’ values – mentioned
earlier as a ‘linear narrative of Hindu supremacy’ (Khan, 2009: 87).
Bollywood, since India’s globalisation of the 1990s, has transmogrified
this linear traditional narrative into the neoliberal grand narrative, one that
collapses ‘traditional’ Indian probity and rectitude into the more immediate
and urgent pursuit of capital assets. This is the process of exclusion and
dominance mentioned above that overwrites multiple narratives in the
scripting of nation. In this regard, the meta-hegemony is sustained by eco-
nomic and ideological networks of state power that are themselves compli-
ant to a universalising neoliberal system.
Thussu argues that with Bollywood’s current globalised focus, represen-
tations of India’s huge demographic of impoverished people are mediated by
‘a Westernized sensibility and aesthetics, reinforcing a reconfigured h
egemony
that legitimizes the neoliberal agenda’ (Thussu, 2013: 148). Thussu men-
tions Slumdog Millionaire as an example of Western patronisation, where
this small-budget film with Bollywood codes only gained a theatrical release
through an alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation affiliate,
Fox Searchlight. (Thussu, 2013: 148–149). Following its rich dividends at
the box office, the film’s subsequent designation as a template for further
commercially successful film strategies has been attributed to Bollywood’s
soft power, despite polarised views amongst Indian audiences and scholars
(ibid.). Slumdog Millionaire’s global success, attained through marketing
it as a Bollywood film, precipitated Indian ‘scholars and public intellectu-
als’ to exhort the government towards an intensified exploitation of ‘soft-
power potential’ (Schaefer, 2013: 72). Slumdog’s capital gains also spurred
Bollywood filmmakers to design similar content, appealing to the overseas
Bollywood soft-power stereotype (ibid.). This is indicative of the oriental-
ist zeal with which Bollywood willingly absorbed Slumdog Millionaire’s
reductionist rendering of its own codes and emulated them. Bollywood’s
mimicry is the counterpoint of a ‘continuing cycle of orientalism’ witnessed
in the Western repackaging of commercial Bollywood films such as Baz
Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) or Slumdog Millionaire’s bowdlerised
refashioning of Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988) (Athique, 2012: 123).
In essence, globalisation’s influence on the meta-hegemony is perceptible in
its effects on Bollywood’s modes of cultural signification.
David Schaefer’s (2013) in-depth research into popular post-globalisation
Hindi cinema between 1991 and 2007 notes an increase in what he terms
‘exogenous predictors’ or ‘cinematic references that emphasize non-Indian
socio-cultural-political themes and traditional practices’ over ‘indigenous
predictors’: cinematic signifiers that engage with national classical, tradi-
tional and culturally specific themes (Schaefer, 2013: 69–70). Schaefer con-
siders whether the shift within Bollywood towards exogenous strategies is
designed to appease westernised audiences. He analyses future ramifications
of this shift on Bollywood’s soft-power credentials if this trend is accompa-
nied by a declension in indigenous content. Schaefer’s study, intensive in its
quantitative depth and positivist precision, asserts that Bollywood’s para-
digm shift towards Western modes could ‘serve the needs of multinational
corporations rather than the Indian government’ (ibid.: 75). This is perti-
nent to the earlier mentioned accentuated levels of Bollywood branding in
commercial advertising and the suffusion of product placement in films.
The latency in Schaefer’s 1991–2007 research timeline axiomatically
entails the non-inclusion of key developments from 2007 to the present. In
addition to this time lag and despite its erudition and insight, the research’s
sole focus is on popular Hindi cinema or Bollywood. Again, this is symp-
tomatic of Bollywood’s pervasive (meta)-hegemonic presence in academic
scholarship on Indian cinema and scholarly literature’s reciprocal overem-
phasis on Bollywood, with the marginalisation of India’s cinematic others.
It must be mentioned that Schaefer acknowledges that his research does
not include alternative forms of Indian cinema. In this regard, one of his
claims is pulled sharply into focus: that his research has provided ‘empir-
ical evidence that filmmakers have developed and deployed a successful,
hybridized model of presentation that holds indigenous content while
simultaneously increasing exogenized elements, thus inviting Westernized
awareness of Bollywood and Indian culture’ (Schaefer, 2013: 76). This is
incontrovertibly true of Bollywood’s attempts to articulate the nation’s
neoliberal national narrative whilst sanctifying mythic traditional ‘Indian
values’, which is explained in this book as the double time of the nation (see
Chapter 5).
The absence of new independent Indian cinema is starkly evident in Schae-
fer’s inference, although he could hardly be held accountable for not presag-
ing their emergence. That said, there were several intermittent ‘predictors’
of the new Indies during the 2000s, with notable films, such as Amu and
Firaaq (2008) – precursors to the comprehensive pullulation of Indie films
since 2010. The new Indies also satisfy Schaefer’s above-paradigm, in that
they are increasingly visible in India and abroad, as well as being hybrid in
Schaefer’s sense of coalescing exogenous and indigenous, albeit in divergent
modes from Bollywood.
The main limitation of Schaefer’s research is its restriction to Bollywood
and its reliance, by its own admission, on ‘binary-style dialectics’, exoge-
nous and indigenous, to map Bollywood’s concerted thrust towards exoge-
nous strategies (Schaefer, 2013: 72). Schaefer extends the binary paradigm
presenting a case scenario that is antithetical to the above proposition of
Bollywood’s outward projection. He theorises that growing ‘glocalisation’
may precipitate Indian audiences to ‘demand more localized fare to balance
the perceived foreign influence of external content, leading to a counter-
indigenous wave’ [emphasis mine] (ibid.: 72).
Within the larger context of this study, it is fair to state that Schaefer’s
use of the term ‘counter-indigenous wave’ more aptly describes the 2010
emergence of the new wave of Indian Indies. This is to a significant degree,
a discerning extrapolation of future trends, and an accurate prognostica-
tion within the constraints of Schaefer’s 1991 to 2007 temporal specificity.
However, Schaefer’s retrenched binary modes remain inconsistent with a
poststructural emphasis on multiplicity and difference.
Again, Bollywood’s folding of binaries into its cinematic narrative relates
to Partha Chatterjee’s notion of the postcolonial Indian nationalist narra-
tive endeavouring to stimulate modernisation whilst retaining tradition by
mixing materialism and spirituality (Chatterjee, 1989: 623). However, the
exogenous and indigenous domains cited by Schaefer, two terms largely inter-
changeable with Chatterjee’s materialism and spirituality, are not mutually
separated realms. Instead, they are overlapping matrices influenced by the
global economy’s ‘increasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market
competition and weak or fractured social institutions’ (Gray, 1998:76).
A splintering of the exogenous/indigenous divide is perceived in the new
Indies that have significantly broken this binary by presenting multiple
overlapping contexts and heterogeneous narratives. In essence, the Indies
resonate with Bruce Bennett’s reading of Rancière (2006: 22), which main-
tains that by ‘focusing on subaltern figures or on border spaces that are
typically excluded from view or at the blurred peripheries of our vision’,
alternative films can ‘contest dominant aesthetic regimes’ by constructing
multiple imaginings or narratives of resistance (Bennett, 2014: 1). The alter-
native discourses emerging from the new wave of Indian Indies in an inter-
stitial third space are characterised by the imbrication between exogenous
and endogenous elements. The larger point to emphasise is that the Indies
reflect multifarious contemporary Indian narratives through the very lens of
globalisation-induced hybridity. However, the Indies are less constrained in
comparison with Bollywood’s ‘duty’ to the double dimensions (modernity
and tradition) of the national neoliberal metanarrative. In this regard, the
Indies are better equipped to enunciate multiple hybrid dimensions.
Summing up the above points, the Indies manifest two core elements of
Schaefer’s thesis. They are exemplars of the glocal, through their ‘globalisa-
tion of the local and the localisation of the global’ (Marramao, 2012: 35).
The Indies are a ‘counter-indigenous wave’, exhibiting exogenous global
aesthetic influences, modes, idioms and indigenous local content expressed
through multiple, heterodox narratives. Could these dual attributes of
the Indie New Wave prescribe realignments in the internal dimensions of
Bollywood’s meta-hegemony?
Metamorphosis in the Meta-Hegemony

The arrival of the Indies since 2010 has necessitated change in the inner
dynamics of the meta-hegemony. The growing popularity of ‘localised fare’
encapsulated in hybrid productions such as The Lunchbox and Ship of
Theseus problematises Bollywood’s monopoly. In general, the era of global-
isation has decentred ‘dominating or controlling’ centres in current times
leading to a more intersectional network, encompassing diverse nodes of
media production in a relatively egalitarian and reciprocal exchange of
such ‘media artefacts’ (Sparks, 2012: 240). Arjun Appadurai in particular
dethrones the US’s dominance as the ‘puppeteer of a world system of
images’, reassigning America as one of many sites in the crisscross of trans-
global exchange (Appadurai, 1996: 31).
The above transformations open up a complex set of propositions for the
meta-hegemonic structure, with contradictions that are symptomatic of and
endemic in both the neoliberal project as well as globalisation per se. As Colin
Sparks argues, there is no single unifying commonly accepted theory of glo-
balisation (Sparks, 2012: 238). Hannerz (1996 cited in Sparks, 2012: 240)
asserts that rapid advances in technology and communication have facili-
tated a world that is currently ‘one single field of persistent interaction and
exchange’. In reality, this global field is splintered into multiple geopolitical
contexts and sites of overlaps and contestation in a universalising globalisa-
tion that ‘is a domestic as well as a transnational and international process’
(Cerny, 1996: 91).
Constantly expanding networks of commercial collaborations are exem-
plified by the 2010 co-operation pact signed between Hollywood and
Bollywood with the objective of annealing commercial links between the
two industries (‘Hollywood, Bollywood’, 2010). It may be fair to argue
that although ‘hegemony’ in the form of overarching structural and eco-
nomic dominance remains an integral principle of the current global cine-
matic meta-hegemony, the tectonic shifts of globalisation have necessitated
reorientations and overlaps, such as the above-mentioned Hollywood/
Bollywood co-operation pact. In this context, it may be useful to consider
Bollywood’s future ascendency as a global Indian franchise rivalling
Hollywood. This might not seem as inconceivable as it did decades ago,
with Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan recently surpassing Tom Cruise as
the world’s wealthiest actor (Ellis-Petersen, 2014), also pulling into focus
the heterodox market shares Bollywood possesses, particularly in Africa
and the Middle East.
These changes are symptoms of India’s ‘new role as a democratic, mod-
ernizing, capitalist society amenable to incorporation into a new world order’
(Athique, 2012: 113). The above scenarios involving Hollywood and Bollywood
also reiterate that global metanarratives are rescripting themselves under the
auspices of nation-states invested in neoliberal capital interests.
Globalisation – unpredictable, indefinable and multifarious in its trans-
formational effects – is affecting an interpermeation in the cultural domain
between hitherto definable, distinct and often stereotypical global genres
of cinema, such as Hollywood and Bollywood. One of the most important
de facto effects of globalisation on Indian cinema within the boundary of
nation is a complex realignment, a continual hybridity in the Indian cine-
matic superstructure. The rise of the independent Indies, since 2010, is an
example of this process of hybridisation, where the Indies themselves are
hybrid filmic ‘mutants’, partly through their financial and artistic dialogic
with Bollywood. Dominant Bollywood in turn, is witnessing its own market-
driven makeover in terms of audio-visual filmic attributes. In this milieu, it is
fair to infer that the meta-hegemony itself seems to be undergoing a process
of hybridisation, moulding itself according to the neoliberal mechanisms
that legitimise and sustain it.
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3 The Anatomy of the Indies
This section presents a general appraisal of the new Indies, touching on

attempts to define and classify them, mechanisms of funding, distribution
and exhibition and the content that distinguishes them from the main-
stream. Whilst exploring the various modes of defining and categorising the
new Indies, this chapter also constructs a template to chart the course of the
Indies in their attempt to create a new cinematic space.
One of the fundamental areas this book addresses is the problem of iden-
tifying and classifying new Indies in the existing hermetic categorisation
of Indian cinema. In this contemporary analysis of new Indian cinema, the
goal is to destabilise the old binary mode of reducing Indian cinema to Bol-
lywood and Satyajit Ray. Therefore, the focus is on avoiding rigid compart-
mentalisation and formulating a more flexible signification template – an
adaptable classificatory scheme.
In this regard, a perpetuation of existing classificatory dualisms, such as
Bollywood and Parallel, which have been normalised in a significant propor-
tion of scholarship on Indian cinema, would be antithetical to the postmod-
ern philosophical basis of this study. In the restrictive dyadic breakdown of
Indian cinema, legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray stands in as shorthand for
various terms and categories, such as Parallel, arthouse, middle, regional
and vernacular cinema, to name a few (Hood, 2009: 5). This ossified and
reductionist morphology seems anachronistic in light of the current trans-
formations in new Indian cinema.
Bollywood has broadened its influence, particularly since the inception of
liberalisation and market deregulation in 1991. Through its meta-hegemony,
Bollywood is now a unitary connotative term that not only circumscribes all
forms of Indian cinema but also subsumes the general terrain of the Indian
media and entertainment industries. A good practical example of this is the
11 July 2014 screening of the independent Tamil language Indie Ilai (‘Leaf’)
in a Cineworld multiplex cinema in London as part of the London Indian
Film Festival (LIFF) 2014. Ilai (‘Ilai’, 2013) is a small-budget independent
production from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The film is far
removed from Bollywood in its portrayal of an impoverished little migrant
girl who arrives in a metropolis and seeks out similar young displaced sub-
alterns in order to survive. Cineworld’s website, which provides screening
The Anatomy of the Indies 61
details for Ilai, cites the film’s genre as ‘Bollywood’ (Cineworld, 2014).
This lumping of new, amorphous forms of Indian cinema into Bollywood,
especially when they are shown in the West, demonstrates the overriding
symbolic capital and ideological dominance of the commercial Hindi film
industry in India and abroad.
Sangita Gopal (2011) observes that ever since film historian Ashish
Rajadhyaksha’s tongue-in-cheek division of all Indian films into the Bollywood/
Ray binary, this dichotomy has engendered several reinterpreted neologisms
‘by the popular press, and by fans and bloggers’, such as ‘hat-ke’ versus KJo
(Gopal, 2011: 15). Hat-ke literally means ‘off-center’ and KJo’ is short for Bol-
lywood director Karan Johar’, who is synonymous with sweeping Bollywood
blockbuster melodramas, such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (‘Some Things Hap-
pen’, 1998) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (‘Sometimes Happy, Sometimes
Sad’, 2001) (Gopal, 2011: 16). The persistence of the binary in Indian cinema
has accompanied Bollywood’s post-liberalisation ascendency, albeit in new
typologies, such as the above hat-ke (from the non-mainstream) and KJo (from
Bollywood). In particular, Karan Johar’s diasporic family sagas dominated the
cinematic timeline of India’s post-globalisation 1990s, propelling forward the
term Bollywood as shorthand for the entirety of Indian cinema. Gopal observes
that these were a part of ‘seismic changes that the Indian film industry has been
undergoing since the 1990s – changes that have led to the transformation of
popular Hindi cinema into Bollywood’ (Gopal, 2011: 16).
The problem of binary classification is re-emphasised by the emergence of
new independent cinema since 2010. The Indies’ internal diversity stresses
the need to regard them as a multilayered cultural entity. It also entails tak-
ing into account their relative positioning in relation to Indian cinema’s most
puissant proponent, Bollywood. Situating the Indies in their larger land-
scape must also acknowledge the growth of other regional and vernacular
cinemas of India, particularly the prolific independent sectors of the Tamil
and Marathi film industries (Belawadi, personal communication, 2013).
It may prove useful to use the title and theme of Indie film Ship of Theseus
(2013) as a self-referential touchstone to frame the relative positioning of
the new Indies in the broader bulwark of Indian cinema in general and dom-
inant Bollywood in particular. This analogy directly relates to the premise
of the Indies’ emergence from the interstices and their possible creation of
a new space. In this regard, the insertion of the interstitial Indies into the
current Bollywood-dominated Indian cinematic space resembles Foucault’s
notion of ships as heterotopia. A heterotopia could be described as a space
where parallel discourses and the dominant superstructure are contiguous
and the former ‘constantly unsettles an acceptable spatial ordering’ of the
latter (Thacker, 2003: 29). Therefore, the heterotopia’s spatial (re)configu-
ration opens up the possibility of affirming difference and articulating mul-
tiple identities.
Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus takes its premise from Greek his-
torian Plutarch’s conundrum: does a ship retain its authenticity if its old,
rotting constituent parts are incrementally removed, and replaced by new
ones? This motif permeates the minutiae of Ship of Theseus’s narrative con-
struction and informs the film’s three perceptibly self-contained stories that
are ultimately interlinked.
Postcolonial Indian cinema, akin to the Ship of Theseus, was set afloat
on the currents of newly gained independence in 1947 and faced the choppy
waters of imagining a new national cinema. The ‘planks’ that comprised this
cinematic ship were multifarious, including the post-independence art cin-
ema stalwarts Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak. Popular Hindi
cinema concurrently gained momentum in the 1950s and 60s with directors
such as Raj Kapoor (Mishra, 2002: 105). The late 1960s saw the emergence
of Parallel cinema with its main proponents, Mani Kaul, Shyam Benegal and
Kumar Shahani.
Various regional vernacular cinema industries that had their own Parallel
cinema movements were intrinsic to the composition of the Indian cinematic
vessel. This was particularly the case in South India, where art cinema in the
state languages – Malayalam (Kerala), Tamil (Tamil Nadu) and Kannada
(Karnataka) – flourished in the 1970s (Shoesmith, 2011: 251). By the early
to mid-1970s, Parallel cinema was upended by commercial Hindi cinema,
granting the latter pre-eminence amongst the cinema-viewing Indian popu-
lace. The watershed of India’s globalisation in the 1990s steered the Ship of
Indian Cinemas into the mainstream, where the growing Bollywood mono-
lith transformed the ship from its diverse composition – the Cinemas of
India – into a Bollywood Behemoth.
This Bollywood Behemoth is still comprised of different parts; the afore-
mentioned original ‘planks’ have been present since the ship’s 1947 inception.
In other words, the Bollywood Behemoth consists of components integrated
into the ship’s bulwark along the diachronic evolution of Indian cinema
since independence (see Fig. 3.1). This condensed historiography of Indian
cinema, from its postcolonial roots to its present manifestation as dominant
Bollywood, undergirds the ship’s complex construction over the years.
All the individual composite parts of the ship for the most part occupy
peripheral spaces in the superstructure of the current Bollywood Behemoth
that now constitutes and represents the various cinemas of India. This cine-
matic allegory of the Ship of Theseus paradox raises questions about what
happens to the current Bollywood-dominated superstructure when new
individual parts, such as the post-2010 Indies, are introduced into the Bol-
lywood Behemoth in the form of the Indies’ hybrid collaborations with the
mainstream. What occurs when the Indies start to expand in an attempt to
gain more space in the ship’s superstructure or endeavour to extricate them-
selves from the Behemoth and demarcate a more indigenous space?
In a similar vein, are the Indies drawing from a plethora of Indian and
global cinematic influences to espouse a glocal, hybrid form, style and con-
tent? Are they in the process relying on the Bollywood superstructure as a
springboard to launch themselves into the wider public sphere?
Parts within the

Superstructure
1 Post 1947 Art Films-

Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy,
Ritwik Ghatak
2 1960s POPULAR AND THE

PARALLEL
3 1970s - 80s PARALLEL

CINEMA – SHYAM
BENEGAL, MANI KAUL,
MIDDLE CINEMA –
GULZAR, CHATTERJEE
4 1990s-2000s - HINGLISH
FILMS
5 REGIONAL or
VERNACULAR FILMS
6 THE 1990s RUPTURE!

LIBERALISATION
BOLLYWOOD
7 2010 - THE NEW INDIES
Figure 3.1 The Ship of Indian Cinemas.
Two propositions arise from the above questions, in keeping with the Ship
of Theseus analogy. Both are directly relevant to the question of how the new
Indies address the hegemonic Bollywood superstructure. The first perspective
ponders whether the insertion of the Indies into the Bollywood Behemoth has
triggered a reconfiguration and reorganisation of the ship’s structure. It asks
whether this restructuring within the modern Indian cinematic timeline,
spurred by the contemporary exigencies of a disjuncturing globalisation, could
create a new and distinct autonomous space for the Indies in the Bollywood
Behemoth. The second scenario considers the possible reorientation of the
Bollywood Behemoth’s totalitarian dominance by presaging increased hybrid
collaborations, a coalescing between Bollywood and the new wave of inde-
pendent Indies on an equal footing, in effect imagining a new ship.
A combination of these two scenarios may assist in forming an accurate
assessment of the current transformation in Indian cinema. This is because the
rupture of 1990s globalisation, swelling to its current crescendo of neolibera
lism in India, has affected both Bollywood and the Indies. This underscores
the fact that in a transforming milieu of reclassification and reconceptualisa-
tion of ostensibly impermeable, self-contained genre boundaries, a system of
signification relating to the Indies must be fluid and context based. It must also
be contingent on the immediate infrastructural practicalities that affect the local
contexts of Indie films’ conception, production and distribution. Ultimately,
it could be stated that the new Indies’ intervention in the heterotopic space of
the Bollywood Behemoth has introduced flexibility as well as a sense of ‘poten-
tial instability’ (Thacker, 2003: 29) in the ship’s hegemonic superstructure.
Funding mechanisms for Indian independent films are a key point of
departure from traditional Western conceptions that regard ‘Indies’ as
funded and filmed outside dominant mainstream studio systems. However,
as this book will reveal, the singular feature of the Indian Indies is their
hybridity; partly reflected in these films’ malleability and willingness to align
with mainstream Bollywood producers and distributors. In this context,
Jawaharlal Nehru University Film Studies professor Ira Bhaskar de-links
the new wave of Indian independent films from ubiquitous or indeed stereo-
typical pre-conceptions of generic Indie cinema. In an interview, she asserts
that the Indian Indie films are ‘offbeat, different from mainstream’, and this
is valid, even if the Indies are supported by ‘mainstream financial struc-
tures; irrespective of funding strategies, the content and style remains non-
mainstream’ (Bhaskar, personal communication, 2013).
As mentioned earlier, some Indies assiduously solicit the gravitas of
Bollywood-oriented production companies or sometimes enlist a Bolly-
wood star to accentuate a film’s visibility. In most cases, the disequilibrium
in India’s cinematic structure, skewed towards Bollywood, has rendered
associations with the mainstream industry almost imperative for some Indie
filmmakers to fund and distribute their work. Films such as Peepli Live
(2010) and Dhobi Ghat (2010), drawing from the resources of Aamir Khan
Productions (AKP) and UTV, had available greater budgetary resources in
terms of actors, locations, production, sound and set design, in addition
to augmented levels of advertising, promotion and marketing. Bollywood’s
totalitarian dominance on the one hand and its role as a facilitator for the
Indies on the other presents a complex and contradictory dialogic that con-
fronts the new Indian Indies.
Indeed, success or failure in securing capital investment from a
Bollywood-oriented production house is sometimes a crucial consideration
for some Indies. This is particularly the case in a filmmaking firmament
where financial logistics are largely governed by immediate circumstances
and situational requirements (at various stages) that eventually dictate the
fate of an Indie project. These financial vicissitudes are determining factors,
ranging between an Indie film’s feasibility in the first place to whether it can
be completed and exhibited.
In this context, it is important to mention ongoing alternative avenues,
such as crowdfunding, currently being explored by the Indies to circumvent
the Bollywood studio system. There are a growing number of situations
where independent filmmakers, after being excluded from the big studio
system, have had no recourse but to solicit crowdsourcing. New funding
and distribution strategies adopted by the Indies will be discussed in greater
depth in Chapter 4.
Another distinguishing facet of the Indian Indies is their bilingual or
sometimes trilingual dialogue, amalgamating Hindi, English and sometimes
regional languages. Peepli Live, for example, contains Awadhi (a region
specific dialect) dialogue in rural segments of its storyline, then switches to
English and Hindi when the narrative focus shifts to urban locations. The
new Indies’ bilingualism is reminiscent of the Hinglish films of the 1990s and
early 2000s (see Chapter 1), with their melding of mainly Hindi and English
in films such as English August (1994), Bombay Boys (1998), Split Wide
Open (1999) and Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002). However, this bilingualism is
not de rigueur amongst the new Indies, notable exceptions being the Bengali
film Gandu (subtitles in English), the Marathi film Court (2015), and Lucia
(2013), a film in the Kannada language (spoken in the southern state of
Karnataka), set in Bangalore. So what distinguishes these Indies from cinema
in regional languages or in a vernacular that is specific to each Indian state?
The new Indies transcend the borders of state and region and are usually
accessible to national audiences (through multiplex releases, film festivals
and nationwide DVD releases) and international audiences (albeit mostly
restricted to the global film festival circuit). In comparison, regional ver-
nacular films, particularly of the commercial variety, tend to be released
within the borders of a state and district and contain dialogue almost exclu-
sively in the corresponding state language. Veteran independent filmmaker
Kamal Swaroop, director of the avant-garde postmodern film Om-Dar-B-
Dar (1988), mentioned in an interview that the current Indies’ interspersion
of English with Hindi dialogue, amongst several other languages, is largely
ascribable to the New Wave films being a primarily urban phenomenon
(Swaroop, personal communication, 2013).
Former India Today journalist Nirmala Ravindran states in an inter-
view that ‘the new films appeal more to younger people, particularly in the
20–30 age group’ (Ravindran, personal communication, 2013). The films
therefore address the polyglot and pluralist composition of cities such as
Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, with their rising young middle-class demo-
graphic, although the films themselves often engage with rural themes; per-
tinent examples are the aforementioned Peepli Live (about farmer suicides),
Fandry (2013) and Chauranga (2016) (about young love across the rural
caste divide).
Although the new Indies bear thematic, formal and stylistic similarities to
earlier post-independence arthouse, Parallel cinema and Hinglish films, the
distinctive feature of the new Indies is their adaptability. The new wave of
Indian Indies’ enhanced, unequivocal thrust towards visibility and broader
commercial acceptance distinguishes them in the enduring historical field of
commercial Hindi cinema and Bollywood dominance. Ira Bhaskar considers
the mainstream’s economic impetus to the new Indies as being vital to their
survival. She states:
Without the commercial push and without the budgets for publicity
and release, this cinema would not exist. I think that is absolutely
crucial and this is the big difference between the situation today and
earlier.
(Bhaskar, personal communication, 2013)
Actor/director Aamir Bashir observes in a conversation that several new
Indie directors are from the post-liberalisation generation ‘and therefore for
them the economics of it is as, if not more, important than the content’
(Bashir, personal communication, 2013). Bashir’s independent film Harud
(2010) is a good example of how several independent films are still self-
funded through the director, producer or actor(s) personal funds. Recount-
ing his experience of funding Harud, Bashir reveals, ‘we borrowed money
and we are paying back still’, despite gaining some funding from the Hubert
Bals Fund to assist with Harud’s post-production (ibid.).
The advent of globalisation and the state’s ratification of industry sta-
tus for cinema production in 1998 hastened the decentralisation of the
state-supported National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), formerly
the main recourse to film funding for Indian art cinema. With comparatively
wider access to capital circulating in the modern cinematic sphere, albeit
under the leviathan shadow of Bollywood and corporate production com-
panies, Bashir considers distribution a greater obstacle to Indie filmmaking
than funding (ibid.).
Another marked feature of the new Indies is their increasing box-office
success despite their small-budget status. In addition to gaining higher bud-
gets, Indies involved in filmmaking contracts with corporate houses have
the added advantage of wider distribution channels, which to some degree
enhances their prospects of financial success (Nambiar, personal communi-
cation, 2013).
However, this should not be construed as a rule. There are examples
of films made on meagre budgets, such as Pawan Kumar’s Lucia, filmed
with 5.1 million rupees (around £54,000) crowdfunded rupees; it went on
to become a financial success (‘Mumbai Police’, 2013). Similarly, BA Pass
(2013), a film made with a modest 20 million rupees (£200,000) went on
to regain three times its capital investment (Khanna, 2013). The Hindustan
Times, when announcing ‘the brave new world of indie films’ noted the
success of several independent films, including Ship of Theseus and BA Pass
‘with minimal budgets, no stars and no big-ticket directors released in con-
secutive months’ (ibid.); these films gained theatrical releases and proceeded
to outdo several commercial films at the box office (ibid.).
The array of variables informing the production and distribution of the
new Indies makes it all the more unrealistic and inaccurate to try to com-
partmentalise these films into one undifferentiated block. Whilst the term
‘Indies’ may be useful to describe the general growth and popularity of new,
alternative, non-Bollywood urban cinema it is essential to highlight the het-
erogeneity in these films whilst still acknowledging their coterminous emer-
gence since 2010. This simultaneously composite and contemporaneous
development singles out the new Indies as an important new phenomenon
in India’s cinematic terrain.
In relation to classifying this new cinematic form, Ira Bhaskar visualises
two general category of Indies within the broader general categorisation.
The first category directly displays some traits of the late 1960s and the
1970s Parallel films, such as Saara Akash (1969) and Bhuvan Shome (1969),
in terms of their realist, satirical critiques of state policies (Bhaskar, per-
sonal communication, 2013). These elements are identifiable in Peepli Live.
According to Bhaskar, the second form of contemporary Indian Indie is
more experimental in its fragmentation of narratives, rupture of linear time
and space, inventive use of music and editing (ibid.). Ship of Theseus and
Gandu resonate with the latter description of Indie filmmaking strategies.
Bhaskar’s insightful differentiation of the new Indies into two typological
hemispheres is useful in formulating a more representative understanding of
the Indies. However, it is possible to argue that even this broader dichoto-
misation of the Indies must be superseded in order to explain the multifari-
ous composition of this modern Indian cinematic form. The mechanisms of
funding, distribution and exhibition differ from Indie to Indie, as do their
form and style. It is possible to argue that there is an increasing stratification
in the constellation of new independent Indian films, largely due to a process
of economic hierarchisation. This is enacted through a form of cinematic
engineering, where an Indie that secures the financial support of a big cor-
porate producer benefits most and ascends to the top of the table (Q, per-
sonal communication, 2013). In principle, the latitude afforded by corporate
budgets – wider distribution networks and marketing in addition to financial
input – would be almost inconceivable for primarily self-funded Indie films.
Bhaskar’s above dichotomy of traditional/experimental Indie could be
examined in the context of new bifurcated categorisations emerging from
the public sphere in India. These include the self-funded ‘“true indie”’ that
has to compete with the ‘blockbuster’ Indie, which is ‘currently in vogue
and supported by marquee names like Studio 18 and directors like Anurag
Kashyap’. Whilst the notion of ‘true’ Indie in itself seems simplistic and
incongruous in the hybrid postmodern domain of the Indian Indies, it would
seem ironic (being akin to the Bollywood/Ray divide) that a dyadic true/
blockbuster ‘class division’ within the Indies could be evolving, owing to
discrepancies or exiguities in Indie funding and distribution. Notable exam-
ples of box-office success gained by ‘true’, self-funded or crowdsourced
films, such as BA Pass and Lucia demonstrate that Indian Indies, at least in
their current juncture of development, often avail themselves of alternative
routes to funding and dissemination.
In an interview, Prakash Belawadi, director of the Suchitra Cinema and
Cultural Academy in Bangalore and winner of the National Award for the
independent English film Stumble (2003), expresses his ternary formulation
of how Indies in India are ‘trying to be independent’ (Belawadi, personal
communication, 2013). Firstly, they seek independent funding. Secondly,
they endeavour to distribute through independent means – which Bela-
wadi considers ‘very hard to break through’ and in most cases to result
in failure. The third aspect of an Indie is it ‘tries to talk to its market with
independent appeal … saying something new’ (ibid.). In essence, Belawadi’s
three-pronged proposition cites funding, distribution and content as dis-
tinctive markers of new Indian Indies. The ripple effect of India’s globalis-
ing systems reverberates in the Indies’ cinematic influences, which in turn
inform their formal and stylistic hybridity.
In this regard, the Indies are increasingly influenced by World Cinema,
in addition to drawing from established Indian cinematic traditions
(Raghavendra, personal communication, 2013; Rao, personal communica-
tion, 2013; Swaroop, personal communication, 2013). This is largely due
to India’s globalising process, catalysing wider avenues of access to World
Cinema, particularly through expanding spheres of broadband Internet and
new media (Devasundaram, 2014: 113). In this regard, one of the defining
aspects of the new Indies is the articulation of the local whilst narrating
these stories though a global or universal cinematic grammar, particularly
when compared to codes deployed by Bollywood films. The recent global
approbation received by The Lunchbox (2013), culminating in the film’s
nomination for a BAFTA award, is illustrative of the above description of
the Indies as glocal (Marramao, 2012) cinematic forms. The Lunchbox nar-
rates the serendipitous encounter of an ageing government clerk, trapped in
the repetitive inconsequentiality of his bureaucratic tasks, and a disillusioned
young housewife, the victim of a cheating husband. The mutual odium and
tedium of their everyday routines is alleviated when lunchboxes delivered
by Mumbai’s world-famous and usually infallible dabbawallahs (lunchbox
deliverymen) are swapped. This oversight initiates interaction between the
unlikely couple via daily messages secreted in one such lunchbox.
In addition to a broader universal aesthetic, The Lunchbox underscores
the proposition that the most conspicuous marker of the new wave of
Indian independent films is their divergent content. The Indies’ cinematic
themes and issues, unrestrained by Bollywood’s ‘institutionalised formula
elements’ (Hood, 2009: 4), provide a glimpse into the cauldron of changes
typifying a transforming modern nation. In this regard, their narration of
everyday local stories, often involving ordinary characters and marginalised
subalterns, is indexical of their departure from mainstream Bollywood. This
validates the perception of the new Indies as articulators of alternative sto-
ries through content that diverges from hegemonic Bollywood’s rendering
of the national narrative.
In an interview, Peepli Live director Anusha Rizvi affirms that the pri-
mary marker of an Indian Indie is ‘content of an independent nature that
is original, that is not formulaic’ (Rizvi, personal communication, 2013).
Kiran Rao concurs with this view, citing the diverging content of her own
film Dhobi Ghat as a demarcator of its independent arthouse credentials
(Rao, personal communication, 2013). Filmmaker Onir highlights the
aforementioned fluidity in the definition of Indian Indie cinema, neverthe-
less affirming his view of independent cinema as outside traditional studio
systems of production but still stressing the importance of unconventional
content as a defining marker (Onir, 2013). In this regard, there appears to
be an overriding consensus across this book’s sample of interview respon-
dents affirming alternative stories or unconventional content as the common
defining thread that runs through the new Indian Indies. This juxtaposed
with all the points raised thus far in this overview of the new Indies charac-
terises them as a distinctive emerging form of new Indian cinema.
The Indies as a New Wave

The arrival of a multitude of independent Indian films, particularly from the
watershed year 2010, has led to the declaration of a ‘new wave’ of Indian
cinema. Rahul Verma (2011) announced in the Guardian the arrival of a new
wave of independent Indian Indies, contesting the ‘all-singing, all-dancing’
Bollywood stereotype. The Hindustan Times highlights the Indies usurping
the ‘limelight’ from ‘many star-studded movies’ (Khanna, 2013). It appears
incontrovertible that the new Indies have risen in prominence and visibil-
ity at home and abroad since 2010. However, it is worth investigating the
claims that there is a ‘New Wave’ that carries with it notions of a collective,
concerted cinematic movement analogous to Indian Parallel cinema in the
1970s, or on a global level, something akin to the French Nouvelle Vague of
the late 1950s and 1960s, or post–World War II Italian neorealism.
During an interview, one of the pioneers of independent Hinglish films,
actor/director Rahul Bose (personal communication, 2013,) describes
the new Indies as ‘alive and kicking’ but has reservations about labelling
them a consolidated movement. Bose’s view gestures towards a perception
expressed by Onir; that there are current independent Indian filmmakers
creating cinema in disjointed, individual spaces, which marks a departure
from the filmmaking collectives of earlier Parallel or arthouse cinema (Onir,
personal communication, 2013). Kiran Rao affirms Onir’s statement about
individual voices emerging from Indian cinema being a reflection of more
‘personal standpoints’ (Rao, personal communication, 2013). These mul-
tiple perspectives emanate from a diversity of experiences that are spread
across the Indian polity and demographic. Rao considers these subjective
voices contributing factors to a ‘different cinematic language and narratives’
emerging from outside the mainstream of Indian cinema (ibid.). This state-
ment informs Rao’s perception of the Indies as too varied to be lumped into
a single appellation.
Aamir Bashir (personal communication, 2013) problematises the notion
of an Indie collective, attributing his scepticism to the lack of an ‘Indie alli-
ance’ that could collectively challenge mainstream dominance. His view
appears not to take into account instances of collective action, for exam-
ple when independent filmmakers/actors across the nation united under the
common banner of the 2013 ‘Save the Indies’ campaign (‘Onir, Anusha’,
2013). The campaigners supported by approximately 20,000 signatures
(Dhar, 2013) presented their demand to the government for more Indie
exhibition spaces, exemption from entertainment tax and a screening slot
for Indies on state-operated television channel, Doordarshan (ibid.). To a
significant degree, this demonstrates the potential of the independent film-
making domain to mobilise and congregate in order to address a common
cause. On a filmmaking level, the 2015 film, X: Past is Present is a distinc-
tive collaborative effort featuring a team of eleven independent directors,
each of whom directed allocated segments of this seamless non-anthology
film. As a predominantly non-Bollywood ensemble of filmmakers, includ-
ing Q (Qaushiq Mukherjee) from West Bengal and Tamil cinema director
Nalan Kumarasamy, this unconventional collective endeavour underscores
increasing co-operation, experimentation and growing cohesion within the
Indie sector.
Bashir (personal communication, 2013) underlines another key distinc-
tion between the current crop of Indies and their New Wave Parallel cinema
forebears in the 1970s and 80s. He perceives the 1990s disjuncture in the
chronology of postcolonial Indian cinema as a displacement from the tradi-
tional Indian national narrative, both in its socio-economic and cinematic
contexts. As mentioned above, increased hybridisation and multiple cine-
matic influences on independent filmmaking are two profound reverbera-
tions of the globalisation-induced rupture in the Indian cinematic timeline.
Bashir (personal communication, 2013) asserts that the hybridity of
the new Indies is necessitated by contemporaneous contexts and economic
realities and that it would be inaccurate to draw a simplistic through-line
between the New Wave films of the 1970s and 1980s (by archetypal art-
house directors such as Shyam Benegal and Mani Kaul) and the new Indies.
Along the lines of Rahul Bose’s assertion that the creation of new Indies
may not be motivated by a common cinematic goal, Bashir notes that the
new post-liberalisation cohort of filmmakers affords equal importance to
the money-making stimulus of filmmaking and creating new, divergent film
content (ibid.). Bashir also identifies the advent of satellite television as an
artefact of India’s economic liberalisation that is contributing to a Western
influence on new independent Indian cinema (ibid.). The process of post-
globalisation hybridisation opening up new access, not just to cinema but
also to digital cameras and editing software (Chatterjee, 2012), has contrib-
uted to decentralised, region-specific production as demonstrated by Gandu,
Lucia and Kerala filmmaker Anjali Menon’s Malayalam film Bangalore Days
(2014). In this respect, the thesis of postmodern splintering in current modes
of independent Indian filmmaking significantly addresses filmmakers’ Rao,
Onir, Bashir and Bose’s earlier-discussed observations of fragmentation –
individuals creating cinema simultaneously across a diverse demographic.
As Bashir rightly points out, it would be ludicrous to disregard the
fragmenting effects of India’s globalisation and the concomitant multi-
dimensional, transcultural influences that have permeated the Indian cin-
ematic sphere. This is precisely why the contention that there is an Indie
New Wave has to be scrutinised through a new lens, taking into account the
modern context of what constitutes a new wave of cinema.
Differing perceptions of the Indies as constituting a New Wave in some
measure reveal the wider subjective dimensions that inform new indepen-
dent filmmaking in India. Onir considers the generic label ‘New Wave’ to be
synonymous with earlier European Cinema’s content and form and hence
describes the term ‘New Wave’ as something ‘that has already been done’
(Onir, personal communication, 2013). Onir’s analogy restrictively and
anachronistically frames European Cinema as the touchstone for any subse-
quent global new wave of cinema. In essence, his assertion fails to take into
account India’s current multidimensional post-liberalisation cinema context.
Comparisons akin to Onir’s could be drawn to earlier bellwethers of
global cinematic movements, such as the French Nouvelle Vague or the ear-
lier wave of Indian Parallel cinema, in order to suggest the paucity of a
collective esprit de corps amongst the current Indian Indies. However, it is
worthy to note the profusion of Indie productions since 2010; a surge in the
number of Indie films increasingly populating the Indian cinema production
roster. The year 2012 was cited as a ‘landmark year for the Indian indie’
and ‘the new wave of Indian cinema’, with fourteen films gaining multiplex
releases in major cities and surpassing statistics over the previous five years
(Chatterjee, 2012). The year 2013 in particular was highly productive for
Indies, with a slew of productions not only gaining national and interna-
tional visibility but also box-office success (Khanna, 2013). DearCinema.
com, a website dedicated to new independent Indian films, terms 2013 an
‘unprecedented year for Indian Indie films’, with swelling Indie numbers
significant enough to generate a top-ten list (DearCinema.com, 2013). The
Lunch Box and Ship of Theseus took the lead for the Indies of that year’s
national and international successes (ibid.).
However, the ability of ‘local’ Indie films such as the Kannada film Lucia
and the Marathi film Court to penetrate the national (and international) cin-
ematic space, underscores the growing ascendancy of the Indies in general.
Lucia went on to gain international film festival accolades, including Best
Film at LIFF 2013 (Kumar, personal communication, 2013). Director Pawan
Kumar subsequently gained a profitable all-India release, also selling the
film rights for a Hindi language remake to Fox Star Studios (Bagdadi, 2014).
Another example from 2013 is the national release of India’s ‘first martial
arts comedy’ Local Kung Fu, an Indie from the northeastern state of Assam,
by debutant director Kenny Basumatary, made on the paltry budget of one
100,000 rupees (around £1,000) (Bhumika, 2013). The film features local
non-professional actors; it gained screenings in the PVR multiplex chain’s
‘Director’s Rare’ segment in several cities, including Bangalore, Mumbai,
Ahmedabad, Chennai and Pune (Bhumika, 2013; ‘India’s Gets’, 2013).
The above examples gesture towards shifting attitudes and growing cog-
nisance of the market potential presented by the new wave of Indies by the
hitherto indifferent PVR multiplex chain and media corporates such as UTV
and Fox Star. Ira Bhaskar affirms the current crop of Indie films as a con-
solidated and ever-increasing corpus ‘when you think of independent films
as a movement, the time is now; there are more films now. It is the volume
of production; it is not just the stray film here and there’ (Bhaskar, personal
communication, 2013). The advancing numbers of Indie productions across
a broad spectrum of India’s regional demarcations juxtaposed with their
increasingly successful reception by an urban spectatorship strengthens the
contention of a New Wave.
The points raised thus far highlight the Indies’ hybrid coalescing of
(alternative) culture and (corporate) commerce into films increasingly con-
sumed by an expanding urban Indian audience. Aseem Chhabra, Director of
the New York Indian Film Festival, describes this expanding urban viewer-
ship as ‘people who are looking for something new and then supporting inde-
pendent cinema’ (Shankar, 2014). This equation in the form of an increasing
number of Indie productions met with a growingly receptive urban Indian
audience on the lookout for new alternative content further assists in pos-
iting the current Indies as a new wave of urban independent Indian cinema
that is distinctive from its Parallel cinema progenitors.
To sum up, the current Indie New Wave stands significantly apart on
the basis of several factors. These include a wider contemporary ambit of
funding (corporate funding, crowdsourcing), relative democratisation of
the filmmaking process through augmented access, increasing avenues for
urban exhibition, such as the multiplex (although this is still problematic, as
Chapter 4 will reveal) and an increasingly receptive urban audience.
India’s Parallel films in the 1970s and 80s were even more strictured
in terms of exhibition and funding, relying mainly on the state-sponsored
NFDC (Athique and Hill, 2010: 192). Parallel films were often rejected by
a preponderance of India’s populist viewership as arcane and elitist, eventu-
ally leading to the petering out of the movement (ibid.). Later manifestations
of alternative cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s – harbingers of the new
Indies – were so intermittent in their releases and so tenuous in their audi-
ence reception that they could never mobilise themselves into a consolidated
genre. They instead manifested in fits and starts and the odd release – films
such as Satya (1998), Amu (2005) and Firaaq (2008) being good examples.
This illustrates precisely why the thesis of a current New Wave is valid:
sporadic instances of alternative films appearing intermittently from the
1990s to the early, mid and late 2000s have transformed into a full-fledged
emergence – a new wave of independent Indian cinema since 2010.
Convergences and Divergences from the Western Indie

Archetype
In order to understand the multiple contexts that inform the current new
wave of Indian Indies, it is necessary to identify specific characteristics that
delineate them as distinct from Western understandings of ‘Indie’ cinema.
Concomitantly, it may be interesting to identify commonalities between
the new Indian Indies and their Western Indie cinema contemporaries,
particularly American independent films. This is because the overarching
meta-hegemony may be extended to Hollywood’s own encompassed other –
new self-reflexive and topical American Indie cinema; films such as Martha
Marcy May Marlene (2011), Compliance (2012), The East (2013), Night
Moves (2013) and The Sacrament (2013). These alternative American films
could be placed in context with the new Indian Indies that are contained
within the superstructure of the Bollywood Behemoth. Both variants of the
independent film genre across the East/West divide seem to share a mutual
negotiation of dominant systems – Hollywood/Bollywood, globalisation and
the neoliberal imperative. In this regard, overlaps between current Indian
and American Indies could possibly constitute an area for future research.
In an interview, Anusha Rizvi problematises the standardisation of the
term ‘Indies’ that she argues is an American scenario, universally inscribed
as films with ‘less than 50 percent studio funding’ (Rizvi, personal com-
munication, 2013). Rizvi states that this normative definition of indepen-
dent films is a Western construct and cannot necessarily be superimposed
on the Indian Indie domain. One of the key observations about the new
Indian Indies is their ability to mould themselves according to the circum-
stantial particularities and situational immediacies governing their creation.
This includes sometimes aligning with Bollywood stars or relying entirely
on big corporate production houses in order to finance and distribute some
of these independent projects. This facet appears to distinguish the Indian
Indies from the putative Western definition. In addition, Rizvi reiterates a
recurring theme in this present study of new Indian Indies. She considers
‘content of an independent nature that is original and not formulaic … orig-
inal style, storytelling, characterisation and the vision of the director’ to be
the combined facets that formulate a loose specification as far as the current
Indian Indies are concerned (Rizvi, personal communication, 2013).
Rizvi’s caveat against categorising Indian Indie cinema according to
Western paradigms is as valid as it is important in light of the heteroge-
neous terrain of not just subcategories within the Indies themselves, such
as traditional/experimental or true/blockbuster, but also India’s ethnolin-
guistic diversity and regional specificities. However, Rizvi’s assertion does
not address several overlaps in filmmaking modes and themes between the
current Indies in the US and those in India.
This is particularly pertinent whilst taking into account the premise that,
at least in terms of form and style if not funding, distribution and content
(which arguably is immersed in local contexts), the Indian Indies are infused
with influences from both Indian film traditions and global cinema. This
hybridity could be viewed as a development coeval with India’s widening
access to cultural flows in the form of transglobal cinema, across expanding
‘mediascapes’ (satellite television, multiplexes) and ‘technoscapes’ (Internet,
new media) (Appadurai, 1990: 296).
A new cohort of independent Indian filmmakers including Anand
Gandhi, Kiran Rao, Ashim Ahluwalia, Ritesh Batra, Q, Chaitanya Tamhane
and Anusha Rizvi, have emerged with the germination of the new wave
of Indian Indie cinema. These new filmmakers can be compared with the
American independent cinema space, often considered a launch pad for
young filmmakers after graduation from film schools. In the latter system, it
is viewed with inevitability that corporate production houses will invariably
subsume the young American filmmaking talent pool in the corporates’ bid
to reinvigorate their own product and imbue it with the cultural capital of
an association with ‘critically celebrated cinema’ (Berra, 2008: 110). John
Berra highlights ‘deals that are brokered’ between the mainstream Holly-
wood studio system and independent filmmakers as mutually symbiotic
strategies to gain access to wider audiences. This American scenario is appli-
cable to several new Indian Indie filmmakers’ desire for broader visibility
and strategic corporate alliances to assist funding and distribution, includ-
ing Peepli Live (AKP, UTV), Dhobi Ghat (AKP, UTV), Gangs of Wasseypur
(Viacom 18) and The Lunchbox (international co-production).
The blurring of funding and production boundaries between Bollywood
and new Indian Indie cinema has led to Bollywood producers and their
associated production companies being increasingly cognisant of future eco-
nomic opportunities and symbolic capital associated with the new Indies.
The most pertinent example is Bollywood producer/director Karan Johar’s
decision to personally promote debutant Indie filmmaker Ritesh Batra’s The
Lunchbox after being impressed by the film’s unconventional content, lead-
ing to Johar wishing his ‘name was associated with it’ (IANS, 2013). Johar
has also made recent forays into the Indie space, directing one of the four
stories in the anthology film Bombay Talkies (2013).
Bollywood actor John Abraham has made inroads into the Indie domain,
producing and appearing in the film Vicky Donor (2012) and more recently
starring in and producing Madras Café (2013), a mainstream Bollywood
film with an Indie aesthetic. As mentioned above, the films produced by
Aamir Khan are probably the most enduring example of Bollywood’s invest-
ment in non-mainstream content. Khan’s involvement in and support of the
Indie sector under the auspices of his production company AKP has man-
ifested in a plethora of productions, including two of the films analysed in
this book, Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat. In some measure, on a smaller finan-
cial scale, some Indian Indies invoke parallels with American directors, such
as Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, and Spike Lee, ‘whose works
exhibit an independent sensibility, yet are frequently funded and distributed
by several major corporations’ (Berra, 2008: 110).
Several new Indian Indie filmmakers cite the larger interests of securing
funding whilst negotiating contracts with corporates, although they acknowl-
edge that their alignments with the mainstream runs the risk of their having
to relinquish creative autonomy. Peter Biskind (cited in Berra, 2008: 111)
observes that the jeopardy of creating independent films endogenously from
within the American studio system lies in surrendering creative control in the
realms of casting, scripting and production design. Berra posits the formation
of a system of production involving ‘independent graduates’ that solicit the
financial investment from large corporates but still strive to retain creative
autonomy, ‘progressive and free of compromise’ (Berra, 2008: 111–112).
This bears a close resemblance to the Indian context, where resistance to
interventions from the corporate chain of command and preservation of the
director’s vision of a film are identifiable markers of an Indian Indie. Anusha
Rizvi and Kiran Rao, the respective directors of Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat,
affirm autonomous creative agency in addition to unconventional content as
distinctive indicators of Indian Indie filmmaking.
Biskind also states that ‘film graduate’ American directors who ‘churn
out’ films targeted at the Oscars are incompatible with the lower-budget
films he considers bona fide Indies, which are possessors of a greater degree
of autonomy (Biskind cited in Berra, 2008: 111). This paradigm appears
to resonate with the previously mentioned true/blockbuster Indian Indie
dichotomy, where ‘true’ self-funded Indian Indies seem to have more cre-
ative autonomy than the ‘blockbuster’ Indies that face prospective encroach-
ments by corporate interests on creative control.
These similarities and distinctions informing overlays and disjunctures
between Indian Indies and the Western conception of the genre lends cre-
dence to the Indies’ multiple and heterodox dimensions. Emerging from the
interstitial space of India’s post-liberalisation milieu, as discussed above, the
Indies exhibit a sense of connectedness with the transglobal dynamics of
World Cinema.
Glocal Indies: Hyperlinking India and the World

The heterogeneity of cinematic influences is one of the distinctive attributes
mentioned in this analysis of new independent Indian cinema. The com-
pression of time and space through technics (Stiegler, 1998) in the form of
electronic devices and technoscapes (Appadurai, 1990: 296) – expanding
broadband Internet access in particular – has paved the way for increased
accessibility to World Cinema in India (2013 personal communications with
Bhaskar, Q, Rao, and Swaroop). The dimensions and implications of these
developments have been manifold for the new Indies. This section addresses
the proposition that the Indies are postmodern cinematic exemplifications
that epitomise Marramao’s perception of the glocal as ‘the global produc-
tion of the local’ (Marramao, 2012: 35).
The emergence of hybrid cultural forms is largely attributable to the ero-
sion of the notion of self-contained nation-states by the glocal (Marramao,
2012: xii). The new Indian Indies fall into the crucible of Marramao’s (2012:
35) thesis as glocal cultural products – global in form yet local in context.
The first scenario reflecting the above proposition of ‘glocality’ addresses
Indie filmmakers such as Onir and Pawan Kumar adopting new and inno-
vative modes of distribution and exhibition. These methods include crowd-
funding via social media, blogs and websites, which is proving a popular
transglobal trend in sourcing funding for cultural production (Lee, 2013).
Indian Indie filmmakers have suggested the need to conceive independent
video on demand platforms, along the lines of global film streaming portals
Netflix (now available in India) and LoveFilm (personal communications
[2013] with Bose, Nambiar and Rao). Pawan Kumar’s indigenous pay-per-
view film website, Home Talkies, exemplifies the application of similar sys-
tems (Kumar, personal communication, 2013). Strategies such as Kumar’s
are often necessitated by the lack of viable alternatives in the form of dedi-
cated and consistent mainstream multiplex Indie films screenings.
Dilemmas of funding and exhibition apart, the new Indies are exhibit-
ing a growing trend of multilayered collaborations with foreign film com-
panies and artistes. For example, the musical soundscapes layered over
Dhobi Ghat’s narrative emanated from the guitar strings of Oscar-winning
composer Gustavo Santaollala (Motorcycle Diaries, Brokeback Mountain),
whilst the ethereal sound design in Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus was
conceived by Gabor Erdelyi, a regular sound engineer in Hungarian auteur
Bela Tarr’s films (Variety, 2013). Variety’s review affirms the film’s glocal
ethos, observing that although ‘“Ship of Theseus” doesn’t shy away from its
Western-inspired influences, the film fully embraces its Indian roots’ (ibid.).
Indian/British composer duo Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor, who
composed Ship of Theseus’s music (Chandavarkar, n.d.), assert that their
‘alternative and unconventional compositional style’ has found an ideal envi-
ronment ‘within emerging contemporary cinema and new music movements,
both within India and internationally’ (ibid.). This context of growing hybrid
cross-genre and cross-cultural collaborations interweaving music and film
especially inflects the new Indian Indies. Chandavarkar and Taylor also com-
posed the music score for earlier Indian Indie Harud and more recently for
Avinash Arun’s independent Marathi feature film Killa (‘The Fort’, 2015),
which won the Crystal Bear Award at the Berlinale Film Festival 2014 (ibid.).
Cross-national filmmaking co-operations are not a new phenomenon
in the cartography of Indian cinema, from its founding father Dadasaheb
Phalke’s interaction with British filmmakers in London to Godard, Renoir
and Pasolini’s filmmaking sojourns in India (Jhaveri, 2009). Collaborations
also span Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) to more recent crossover films
by NRI (Non-Resident Indian) filmmakers, Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta.
However, the point of interest in contemporaneous interpermeations
between Indian Indie and global cinema is their teleological effect on the
final form and style of the Indie films themselves. The thesis of postmodern
fragmentation and an amorphous mix of styles in this new form of Indian
cinema has been emphasised in this book. A mélange of transglobal filmic
influences has moulded the Indies into a variegated palette of film form, style
and narrative that differs from Bollywood’s formulaic uni-dimensionality
and its ubiquitous filmmaking conventions and grammar.
The interleaving of minutiae from global cinema into the Indies has
sculpted the aesthetic of films, such as Harud and Ship of Theseus, into
more universal, culturally transcendent cinematic texts. Harud’s inclusion
of veteran Iranian actor Reza Naji and the film’s languorous pacing led to
several film critics in the mainstream press (Times of India, IBNLive) com-
paring the film’s aesthetic design to archetypal Iranian art cinema (Malani,
2012; Vats, 2014).
Such comparisons notwithstanding, the film’s wide-angle shots, metic-
ulous framing and composition, slow-paced narrative, realism and formal
minimalism contribute to its global ‘arthouse’ sensibility. Similarly, Ship
of Theseus employs several experimental aesthetic techniques that exhibit
diverse stylistic attributes including wide-angle tracking shots, long and sin-
gle takes, aesthetically framed shots often filming a subject through people
and objects and the creation of depth of field and space through mise-en-
scène. Leena Yadav’s visually evocative Indie, Parched (2015), was filmed
by Hollywood cinematographer Russell Carpenter, whose previous oeuvre
includes Titanic (1997) and True Lies (1994). These films’ varied World Cin-
ema aesthetic appears almost antithetical to Bollywood’s theatrical address,
where the action is usually restricted to the foreground along a 180-degree
line (Vasudevan, 2000: 105), almost like a two-dimensional tableau.
Although there is a growing transglobal cinematic aesthetic in the art and
production design, editing, music and cinematography in Indian Indie films,
cinematic content in the form of themes, issues and storylines for the most
part remain firmly rooted in a local Indian context. For example, the port-
manteau or hyperlink narrative structure – disparate stories in a single film
that are eventually connected by a common thread – has been adopted and
localised by Indies and Indie/mainstream hybrids such as Bombay Talkies,
David (2013), I Am (2010) Island City (2015), Teenkahon (Three Obses-
sions, 2014) and Ship of Theseus. Another example of this ‘indigenisation’
is the transmutation of the global film noir genre into Hindi neo-noir by
low-budget Indie BA Pass.
The Indies’ multi-form, multi-style and multi-narrative composition
articulating heterogeneous local contexts also reflects these films’ differ-
ent regional points of origin. For instance, production of the Kannada film
Lucia was influenced by regional and global dynamics in terms of support
received from local and diasporic Kannadiga funders, from film director
Pawan Kumar’s southern Indian home state of Karnataka (Kumar, personal
communication, 2013). Lucia’s content also engages with the socio-cultural
context of Karnataka state and delves into the everyday lives of ordinary
denizens in the state capital, Bangalore. Similarly, Ship of Theseus, Island
City and Dhobi Ghat are examples of urban postmodern city films, invok-
ing local narratives of Mumbai as filmic motifs.
These examples illustrate the glocal aspect of the Indies and segue into
the thesis that characters, themes, issues, moral dilemmas, conflicts and
anxieties in many Indies focus on marginalised sections of Indian society.
Socio-political issues, such as political corruption, child abuse, farmer sui-
cides in Peepli Live, the disenfranchised existence of Kashmiri civilians in
Harud, stigmatisation of a single-mother opting for IVF and the brutalisa-
tion of India’s gay community by police in I Am, present a cross-section of
discourses firmly tethered to their autochthonous Indian geopolitical loca-
tion. All the above contributing factors coalesce to justify the location of the
new Indies as glocal contemporary cinematic forms. The new Indian Indies’
hybrid acculturation involves a simultaneous accretion of global cinematic
influences and the Indie New Wave’s reliance on mainstream B ollywood’s
economic and symbolic capital. This latter facet will be explored in C hapter 4
on avenues of funding, distribution and exhibition.
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4 Avenues of Indie Funding,
Distribution and Exhibition
The Indispensability of Bollywood

Bollywood’s pre-eminent shadow looms large over the topography of Indian
cinema through its meta-hegemonic custodianship of the dynamics of pro-
duction and distribution in Mumbai cinema. This overweening presence
means that Bollywood can intervene at various stages of the filmmaking
process. This is especially the case in hybrid ‘collaborations’ such as Peepli
Live (2010) and Dhobi Ghat (2010) – films conceptually independent, yet
reliant on Bollywood-affiliated production houses for funding. The first
section of this chapter examines the proposition that Bollywood currently
appears indispensable to the Indies – a thesis that consequently validates the
concept of meta-hegemony as well as affirms the hybridisation of modern
Indian cinema.
Anusha Rizvi’s (personal communication, 2013) assertion that Indie
filmmakers need to retain creative control to justify their Indie credentials
forms a good starting point whilst considering Bollywood’s indispensability
to Indie funding, production and distribution. Rizvi’s caveat seems incon-
gruous with Aamir Khan Productions’ deployment of rigorous mainstream
advertising and marketing strategies to promote her film Peepli Live, in the
public sphere (see Chapter 1). Aamir Khan’s aggressive corporate-model
marketing compared with Rizvi’s commitment to directorial autonomy
illustrates the ambiguities of the new Indian Indies with relation to the con-
ventional conception of independent films standing apart from the unbri-
dled dynamics of market promotion. Rizvi (personal communication, 2013)
admits, ‘it is a whole new world out there … marketing is now the big thing,
as in you cannot make a film without first having your marketing’. Simi-
larly, Kiran Rao affirms the unorthodox content of Indies as an indicator of
their independence, but attributes their frequent alignments with the larger
Bollywood studio system to the reality of the production and distribution
structure in Indian cinema. In the Indian system, where dominant Bolly-
wood and peripheral Indie vie for visibility in the same space, Rao observes:
This is different because we [the makers of Indies] are both, looking

at new stories, but fall within a studio system, which in a sense is the
reality of how we all exist. There is currently no alternative to the
Avenues of Indie Funding, Distribution and Exhibition 81
mainstream structure. That’s where Dhobi Ghat was firmly situated –
within the same distribution structure as the other [Bollywood block-
buster] films of the day. Dabangg, Welcome, Ghajini or any other film
use the same system, methods and channels – that’s the reality of film-
makers today.
(Rao, personal communication, 2013)
Although Rao’s assertion that there are ‘no alternatives to the mainstream
structure’ could be placed in the context of emerging alternative conduits
of funding and distribution (see later in this chapter), the Indies’ hybridity
index appears to have intensified since 2010, particularly through increasing
interactions with Bollywood. This cinematic interpenetration is not restricted
to the Indies’ drawing from Bollywood’s superior resources of capital, mar-
keting and distribution. It also extends to Bollywood’s magnified perme-
ation into the creative process of Indie filmmaking. As mentioned earlier, the
increased investment in the Indie sector by archetypal Bollywood directors
including Karan Johar – the paladin of post-globalisation Bollywood family
melodramas – is a case in point.
Whilst Aamir Khan1 set the precedent for Bollywood stars supporting or
aligning with non-mainstream cinema, the current inroads made by Bollywood
producers and directors into the Indie domain is mirrored by the appearance
of Bollywood actors in Indies. This is another strategy deployed by big corpo-
rate production companies to raise the profile of an Indie film and augment
its saleability. Director Onir highlights the infusion of mainstream agents into
Indie films by stating that ‘all the definition of how good or bad it [an Indie
film] is fringes on how well it does, and with corporate studios coming in, is
dependent on stars – either a star director or a star in your film (Onir, personal
communication, 2013).
The casting of Aamir Khan as a central character in Dhobi Ghat, reframes
notions of the Indian Indie as an inviolable and clearly delineated segment
of Indian cinema. Recent examples of either mainstream or established
actors appearing in new Indies include Irrfan Khan – known globally for
his roles in The Namesake (2006), A Mighty Heart (2007) and Life of Pi
(2012) – in Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox (2013), Juhi Chawla and Manisha
Koirala in I Am (2010), John Abraham in Vicky Donor (2012) and Madras
Café (2013), and Amitabh Bachchan in Anurag Kashyap’s instalment of the
Bombay Talkies story quartet (2013).
In some cases, the enhanced marketability that forms the raison d’être for
the inclusion of Bollywood stars ostensibly dissolves the distinction between
Indie and Bollywood. Anurag Kashyap, widely regarded as ‘the godfather’
of independent Indian cinema (Khanna, 2013), includes a plethora of Bolly-
wood stars, such as Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma and Raveena Tandon,
in his film Bombay Velvet (2015), also incorporating an acting role for afore-
mentioned Bollywood impresario Karan Johar (Goswami, 2014). Bombay
Velvet is co-produced and distributed by Indian-based Fox Star Studio, an
82 Avenues of Indie Funding, Distribution and Exhibition
offshoot of Rupert Murdoch’s STAR television network and 20th Century
Fox, with the involvement of Phantom Films, co-owned by Anurag Kashyap
(‘Bombay Velvet’, 2013). Kashyap’s gravitation towards the Bollywood
space whilst presiding over the new Indie domain as patron to ‘aspiring
filmmakers’ (Khanna, 2013) illustrates the shape-shifting aspects of modern
Indian cinema.
The increasing presence of Bollywood stars in Indies leads to hypothe-
sising about the implications of Bollywood interventions in ubiquitous or
commonly identifiable Indie filmmaking codes and strategies. This scenario
raises the prospect of an overall diminishing of independent influence in an
increasingly corporatised structure. There is a clear and present possibility
that the mainstream industry, in its thrust towards forging new markets and
expanding existing ones, could either subsume or co-opt hitherto heterodox
or autonomous forms of filmmaking into the corporate model. This invokes
the concept of a meta-hegemony driven by the impetus of neoliberal con-
sumer capitalism.
As a primarily urban cinematic phenomenon, the new Indies, with
their growing appeal and widening audiences, particularly among urban
middle-class Indian youth, constitute an investment opportunity for
Bollywood to broaden its already dominant base. Consequently, the incen-
tive of delving into new economic opportunities presented by the Indies, has
attracted corporations such as Reliance, Viacom 18 and Fox Star Studios, in
addition to the aforementioned Bollywood producers.
Other perspectives view the involvement of Bollywood in the Indie sector
as a positive development contributing to the growth and distribution of
more independent films. Ira Bhaskar, noting Bollywood’s cross-pollination
with the Indies, attenuates the significance of funding sources, instead
emphasising the teleological importance of corporate capital in facilitating
the production of Indie films.
The difference today is that there is Aamir Khan or Viacom, UTV or

even Yashraj or Karan Johar. All these big production houses have
disaggregated their production budgets into smaller bits so that they
can support new Indies – different kinds of cinema. Peepli Live would
have sunk without Aamir Khan.
(Bhaskar, personal communication, 2013)
Bhaskar’s assertion of the causal link between funding and production is

echoed in my interview with filmmaker Bejoy Nambiar, who declares, ‘it
is a great thing that Viacom, UTV and the corporates are backing proj-
ects’ (Nambiar, personal communication, 2013). Nambiar’s Shaitan (‘Devil’,
2011), is an example of a hybrid film that straddles the Bollywood and Indie
genres. Nambiar locates himself amongst new filmmakers who manage
to ‘do films and say stories that somewhere are cerebral enough, and at
the same time manage to balance this with some amount of commercial
trappings’ (ibid.). In essence, similar to Anusha Rizvi and Kiran Rao, Bejoy
Nambiar stresses the importance of content, irrespective of funding mecha-
nisms, in sculpting the conception of new independent Indian films.
The spotlight on independent content and its connection with the finan-
cial and infrastructural indispensability of Bollywood evokes watershed
Indie film Ship of Theseus (2013), widely acknowledged as setting a new
precedent in Indian cinema. This is particularly due to the centrality of its
distinctive philosophical themes. Film critic Derek Malcolm of the Critics’
Circle (UK), included Ship of Theseus in a transglobal selection of 15 all-
time ‘films that can change your life’ (Maniar, 2013). Nambiar affirms that
Ship of Theseus is ‘as Indie as it gets’ (Nambiar, personal communication,
2013) as far as its content, funding, form and style are concerned. The film
is a case in point in relation to how the mainstream structure nevertheless
has proved indispensable to its proliferation. Nambiar refers to Kiran Rao,
filmmaker and wife of Bollywood star Aamir Khan, who drew on her gravi-
tas and public visibility to promote Ship of Theseus, thereby augmenting the
film’s profile in the public sphere (ibid.). Rao’s support paved the way for the
distribution of Ship of Theseus in the urban multiplex space and subsequent
releases in several smaller Indian cities (Nambiar, personal communication,
2013; Onir, personal communication, 2013).
The importance of Rao’s patronage to the successful dissemination of
Ship of Theseus in India is emphasised by the fact that the film was inde-
pendently funded without corporate support. Stranded in the doldrums of
a financial shortfall, one of the film’s actors, Sohum Shah, injected his own
capital into the production, navigating the film through troubled financial
waters and aiding its successful completion. Shah reveals the circumstances
precipitating his financial involvement to prevent Ship of Theseus from
foundering: ‘A number of things were going against the film commercially.
We had no stars and we were speaking too many languages in the film’
(Dundoo, 2013). Shah’s revelation also foregrounds a common situation
facing the Indies. This is in terms of Ship of Theseus being bereft of recognis-
able stars as well as the film’s polyglot (Hindi, English, Arabic and Swedish
dialogue) divergence from Bollywood’s dominant use of Hindi. Overall, the
points raised so far also underscore the various stages at which an Indian
Indie could become dependent on the prosthetic of augmented publicity or
the Bollywood superstructure.
During our conversation, Bejoy Nambiar hypothesised about motiva-
tions and interests that cause corporates to either align with an Indie project
at different stages or to reject it outright. He asserts that some films are
spurned at the outset – at the ‘concept level’ – on the basis of the film’s
content or premise being deemed unsuitable (Nambiar, personal com-
munication, 2013). Nambiar presents the other scenario, where the final
cut of a film is presented to prospective producers/distributors in a bid to
garner their approval. In most cases, corporate production companies adopt
as their barometer the past record of Indies with particular storylines or
content that identifiably failed to generate sufficient revenue. In essence,
corporates uphold the primacy of a film’s financial viability; its likelihood
of gaining box-office success. Nambiar mentions, there are certain circum-
stances where conglomerations, such as Viacom 18, decide to ‘take a risk’
on certain films, and are sometimes financially rewarded in this stochastic
play-it-by-ear strategy (ibid.).
Aamir Bashir asserts that an Indie aligning itself with a Bollywood-oriented
corporate from the incipient stages of production is distinct from a ‘truly’
self-funded film, such as Ship of Theseus, whose only buttress from Bolly-
wood or mainstream associations is in the form of promotion after the film’s
completion (personal communication, 2013). This line of argumentation
recalls the gradations and subjectivities that inflect varying definitions of
the new Indian Indie. Importantly, the above assertions indicate that despite
variations in sources of funding – independent or corporate, Bollywood’s
presence seems a sine qua non in shaping the contours of and presiding over
the commercial fate of an independent Indian film.
Bollywood’s hegemonic omnipresence is also highlighted in the
recent success of documentary film The World Before Her (2012) by
Canadian-Indian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja. The film, granted a 2014 release
in India, two years after it circulated at international festivals, presents
an armed training camp run by the extreme fundamentalist Hindu group
Durga Vahini, the women’s wing of the extreme-right organisation, the
VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) (Francis, 2014a). With a right-wing Hindu
nationalist BJP government installed in power after commanding an abso-
lute majority in the 2014 national Lok Sabha elections, Pahuja expressed
her trepidation about gaining permission to exhibit the film in India and
indeed, experienced a struggle with ‘big distributors’, film festivals and the
Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) over the film’s controversial
content (ibid.). Anurag Kashyap invoked his credentials as a popular Indie
‘crossed-over-into-Bollywood’ director and promoted The World Before
Her in India, significantly contributing to the film’s nationwide multiplex
release. Pahuja states, ‘having Anurag behind it just took it up a few notches
up for sure. It became much more public’. Kashyap’s intervention recalls
Kiran Rao’s resuscitation of the campaign to raise Ship of Theseus’s profile.
Significantly, The World Before Her went on to become the most lucrative
documentary film ever at the Indian box office (Francis, 2014b). Inferring
from the above examples, it could be stated that these non-mainstream
films’ reliance on patronage to proliferate is prototypical of a wider ‘godfa-
ther’ syndrome in Indian cinema.
The fortunes of the aforementioned independent films bear testimony
to a contingent system that seems predicated on ‘benevolent’ Bollywood –
something that subversive Indian filmmaker Q refers to as the ‘Blessed’. Q’s
satirical classification of the Indian Indies, explicated during an interview,
illustrates the notion that Indie films receiving support from Bollywood per-
sonalities and corporate funding could be considered as being ‘Blessed’.
According to Q, the new Indian Indies in general could be divided into
four categories: ‘Blessed’, ‘Unblessed’, ‘Rickshaw’ and ‘Drain’ (Q, personal
communication, 2013). In the Blessed category, the Indie filmmaker has
either located a corporate donor or a benevolent patron from the main-
stream industry who has agreed to ‘bless’ the film with capital investment or
the symbolic capital of association. In the Unblessed class, the filmmaker has
identified a prospective patron or producer but is still awaiting the conferral
of a ‘blessing’. Q considers the third category, the Rickshaw class, comprised
of what he deems the true or bona fide Indie filmmaking domain in Indian
cinema – documentary production. Owing to the hard work they put in,
Q equates factual filmmakers in India with rickshaw pullers; toiling away
without expectations of substantial returns. At the bottom of the pile are
filmmakers without access to any funding or handicapped by inadequate
insight into the dynamics of filmmaking. Hence, they are consigned to the
Drain category, owing to their overwhelming incompatibility with the three
other classifications. Q’s stratification appears to be an ironic reworking of
the Hindu caste system and its four class divisions – Brahmin (priestly, priv-
ileged class), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (merchants) and Shudra (menial
workers). Q’s idiosyncratic taxonomy nevertheless provides an accurate
insight into the gradations in Indie filmmaking, reiterating the sedimentation
and hierarchisation that seem integral components of the new Indies.
The division between the Blessed and other layers of the Indies also sign-
posts several new independent Indian films’ differentiation from earlier
norms of Parallel cinema. This is in the context of new Indies that forge
mainstream alignments, eventually gaining commercial success. Peepli Live
presents a good example of this assertion. Anusha Rizvi considers the film
to have set a benchmark in terms of being financially successful whilst at
the same time espousing social themes. She states, ‘I think it was Peepli Live
that actually allowed people to believe that a film like that can make money
because it is not a comic film. It is a very serious film and it did make quite
a bit of money’ (Rizvi, personal communication, 2013).
However, as mentioned above, Indie commercial success spawned from
an alliance with corporates raises the prospect of restrictions in creative con-
trol. It entails the independent director’s constant struggle with the main-
stream superstructure for creative autonomy. Rizvi’s description of the new
framework of Indie filmmaking delinks the current New Wave from previ-
ous Parallel arthouse filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and Shyam Benegal,
who possessed a significant degree of tacit authorial autonomy in the film-
making process (Rizvi, personal communication, 2013). In this regard,
Anusha Rizvi attributes the current situation to the notion that ‘the systems
are not really traditional systems where you have independent producers’.
According to her, ‘the independent producer from Bombay has vanished’
(ibid.). Rizvi’s contention informs the present scenario, where even Paral-
lel cinema stalwart Shyam Benegal has solicited the wider production and
distribution power wielded by mainstream production houses such as UTV
and Reliance Big Pictures to finance and disseminate his films, Welcome to
Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba! (2009) (Ghosh, personal communi-
cation, 2011).
In a departure from the scenarios raised up to this point, filmmaker Pawan
Kumar contests the apparent indispensability of corporate alignments or the
presence of recognisable stars in relation to his independent Kannada lan-
guage film, Lucia (2013). Kumar affords equal importance to assembling a
talented cast and crew and the dynamics of funding and distribution, pre-
scribing an equitable distribution of importance to workforce and capital
(Kumar, personal communication, 2013). In this context, he reveals how his
approach diverges from the normative convention of soliciting associations
with recognised actors and crew, stating that this is his deliberate strategy to
encourage new talent:
Ideally, you would go for people who are popular, have a brand name
in all departments, pay them their fee and bring in their work as well
as their names to promote the film. Here, [with Lucia] we got every-
body new; the kind of people who are very talented but otherwise
would not be able to get a foot in the traditional setup or would take
a lot of years for them to showcase their work. (ibid.)
Kumar imputes his casting of a preponderance of industry newcomers in Lucia

to the larger vision of his future filmmaking ventures. Citing Lucia’s modest
budget and his ability to foreground creative content despite monetary con-
straints, he asserts ‘if we make more films it will be [with the reason] to tell a
story and then to figure a way to sell it, not the other way round’ (ibid.).
Kumar’s commitment to content affirms the Indies’ distinctive marker –
non-mainstream narrative themes and issues. Unconventional storylines often
become a drawback in relation to gaining support from mainstream mecha-
nisms of distribution and exhibition such as the corporate multiplex chains
in India. As mentioned earlier, overt political or sexual content often proves
the Indies’ Achilles heel, exacerbating a process of selective absorption and
exhibition that is skewed in favour of commercial films. This tendentious
privileging of the commercial is often exercised both by corporate production
houses (at the funding level) and by mainstream multiplexes such as India’s
PVR franchise (in terms of exhibition). A good example of this unlevel play-
ing field is Harud’s treatment of the taboo topic of Kashmir, a region mired
in instability and territorial disputes between India and Pakistan. The film’s
theme constituted a ‘poisoned chalice’ in relation to attracting mainstream
financing and distribution interest. Bashir elaborates on the quandary facing
his and other independent films with political themes:
Of course, it [Harud] would have proliferated if UTV or Viacom

aligned with it, but UTV or Viacom or anyone else would not want to
tie up with a film like this because of its treatment, the story telling, the
way it is. It is almost made intentionally antithetical to all your tropes
of storytelling as far as Bollywood is concerned. Anything commercial
is plucked out of it. The other reason is Kashmir – it is the politics. You
will not see any mainstream producer or distributor make or promote
a film that is politically anti-establishment, whether they are making
films about Naxalites [Maoist revolutionaries] or any issue-based
thing, it is always nation first, one can never question … patriotism
makes money.
(Bashir, personal communication, 2013)
Bashir’s assertion highlights the discrepancies in status quo between

Bollywood and the Indies. Patriotic Bollywood sagas, such as Mission
Kashmir (2000), have consistently secured the interest of corporate pro-
duction houses, in contrast to the situation faced by Harud (ibid.). These
propositions fold into some of the questions raised in this book pertaining
to the Indies’ location in the dominant national narrative and Bollywood
superstructure.
Apprehensions held by mainstream corporate funding sources about
polemical Indie content often project into the realm of exhibition and dis-
tribution. Indian multiplexes often display a reluctance to accommodate
non-commercial content. In this context, Onir mentions his first indepen-
dent directorial effort, My Brother Nikhil (2005), regarded as India’s first
filmic foray into representing homosexuality. Based on true events, the film
portrays the ostracism and vilification faced by the title character, Nikhil,
who bears the double social stigma of being gay and HIV positive in 1994,
a time when AIDS awareness in India was minimal. In an interview, Onir
states that he was able to gain the participation of two prominent Bolly-
wood stars, Manisha Koirala and Juhi Chawla in lead roles for his sub-
sequent independent venture, I Am, despite the latter film’s small-budget
being equivalent to the capital invested in 2005 in My Brother Nikhil (Onir,
personal communication, 2013). The association of the mainstream lead
actresses notwithstanding, Onir argues that I Am was deemed ‘untouchable’
by mainstream studios and multiplexes (ibid.). He attributes the mainstream
channels’ indifference to I Am’s incisive content and topical narratives, par-
ticularly its portrayal of the systematic victimisation and brutalisation of
India’s gay community by the police (ibid.).
The film’s financial shortfall necessitated Juhi Chawla to invest her own
personal funds to facilitate the film’s print and publicity (ibid.), mirroring
Sohum Shah’s aforementioned role in relation to Ship of Theseus. Overall,
I Am’s case scenario suggests Bollywood star power is not necessarily an
infallible formula or guarantee of wider acceptance and box-office success.
In the complex and uncertain terrain of Indie funding and distribution,
which is often subjected to the caprices of corporate interest and Bolly-
wood star involvement, film content, one way or another, can prove the
game changer.
The inference from the points discussed thus far reiterates the polyvo-
cality and polymorphous nature of the new Indies. It is important to reit-
erate that films such as Lucia, conceived beyond the bounds of Bollywood,
demonstrate that not all independent films are beholden or obligated to the
meta-hegemonic Bollywood imperative. The eschewing of partnerships with
corporate funders, which largely reflects the putative conventional definition
attributed to the global ‘Indie’ genre, is still perceivable in several low-profile
yet successful self-funded Indian independent films, such as Madholal Keep
Walking (2010) and more recently, Court (2015), an internationally lauded
small-budget independent film, selected as India’s official entry in the foreign
language section of the Oscar Awards in 2016.
It could be stated that the lack of an autonomous Indie funding and
distribution infrastructure largely contributes to independent filmmakers’
dependence on the mainstream. The motivation for most Indie directors at
the precarious ‘springboard’ stage of contemplating sources of finance is to
at least break even and recover capital injected into a film. In most cases,
this deterministic goal informs the filmmakers’ pragmatic and pre-emptive
awareness that the recovery of investment is vital to the funding of their
next project. In other words, the box-office proceeds from one film usually
spill over into the director’s next filmmaking venture (Q, personal commu-
nication, 2013).
This is another distinction between Bollywood and alternative Indian
cinema. The former seems almost exclusively driven from the outset by the
profit motive. Proponents of the latter, although seeking wider exhibition
and box-office returns, are attuned to pragmatic realities on the ground.
These practicalities include filmic content, the disequilibrium of a hegemonic
cinematic structure skewed towards the mainstream, paucity of distribution
networks and exhibition spaces. All these elements become mandatory con-
siderations for Indian Indie filmmakers whilst prefiguring the commercial
viability of their films in an unaccommodating paradigm. These obstacles
also become motivating factors. As Pawan Kumar points out, ‘it is the need
to survive that is making us more innovative in the way we make films’
(personal communication, 2013). Sometimes, losses incurred on personal
investments stemming from disproportionate treatment at the hands of
producers and distributors have left several filmmakers apprehensive about
independent filmmaking. In an interview, Onir relates his experience of fac-
ing financial pitfalls whilst making I Am: ‘I put in my own money, time, and
there is a huge difference when you’re doing it with someone else’s money’
(personal communication, 2013).
The meta-hegemony of the mainstream superstructure and the
situation-specific circumstances governing modalities of production and dis-
tribution stimulate the Indies to adopt heterodox strategies. The next sec-
tions of this chapter explore avenues for exhibition afforded to the Indies as
well as new and innovative strategies employed by some Indie filmmakers to
obviate direct competition with Bollywood for cinematic space. Alternative
funding and distribution sites and strategies are examined in the following
sections of the chapter, including crowdfunding; the National Film Devel-
opment Corporation (NFDC) – the traditional bastion of state-supported
film finance; the multiplex space, beset with disproportionate systems yet
increasingly aware of the Indies market potential; and the pirate sphere of
BitTorrent Internet downloads. In addition to these other channels of pro-
liferation, film festivals, both domestic and international, are increasingly
important in providing a platform for Indie exhibition and to some degree
an alternative to Bollywood-dominated conduits of dissemination.
Film Festivals Facilitating an Indie Space

The growing popularity of new independent cinema could be framed through
the expansion of film festivals across the nation, whose raison d’être is to
showcase alternative Indian films (Gopalan, 2012: 424). Alys Francis’s arti-
cle on the BBC news website observes a ‘boom’ in Indian film festivals that
is proportionally raising the profile of new Indie cinema (Francis, 2014b).
The article observes an ascendency of Indie films with ‘searing portrayals
of real life events and fictional stories that challenge cultural norms and
conservative sensibilities’ (ibid.). The magnified visibility of these films in
smaller Indian towns and cities is largely attributable to the germination of
film festivals across the diverse Indian landscape. The Dharamshala Interna-
tional Film Festival (DIFF), established in 2012 by a couple of Indian Indie
filmmakers, is located in the small town in the Himalayan state of Himachal
Pradesh. DIFF is a good example of the diversification and democratisation
of the non-Bollywood space, reaching out to outlying and peripheral the-
atres of exhibition. Another example of the increasingly itinerant Indies is
the Ladakh International Film Festival (LIFF) in the remote northern state
of Jammu and Kashmir (ibid.). Dharamshala (DIFF) and Ladakh (LIFF)
epitomise the movement of the Indies from major urban centres – officially
ranked as ‘A’ cities - such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolata and Chennai,
into wider territories, especially those classified as ‘B’ and ‘C’ cities (Q, per-
sonal communication, 2013)2.
Ad hoc, informal and idiosyncratic strategies of organisation and exhi-
bition often typify the operational modalities of some of the smaller play-
ers and proponents in the larger theme of burgeoning independent festival
spaces. Logistical, infrastructural and budgetary constraints often moti-
vate inventive, community-based participatory interactions centred on the
screening of indie cinema. The ‘Bring Your Own Film Festival’ (BYOFF) is a
prime example of unconventional yet pragmatic mobilisations of available
resources to facilitate interactions through independent cinema across the
heterogeneous Indian topography. In an interview, director Q reveals that
the first ‘proper screening’ of his film Gandu was at the BYOFF held at
the seaside town of Puri, in the eastern state of Orissa (Q, personal com-
munication, 2013). Q mentions the festival’s minimalist logistical scheme,
consisting of ‘three tents’ on the beach, where films were screened ‘from 4
pm to 4 am’ (ibid.). Q bears testimony to BYOFF’s independent credentials,
mentioning his astonishment at the fact that ‘700 people came from all over
the country to watch Gandu’ (ibid.).
On a global level, growing cognisance of new emerging Indian cinema
has contributed to film festivals featuring exclusively Indian Indie content,
such as the London Asian Film Festival (LAFF), an annual international
event with an eighteen-year history; the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF),
Edinburgh’s fledgling Just Independent Asian Film Festival (JIAFF 2014)
featuring the Scottish premieres of Ship of Theseus, Harud and Q’s doc-
umentary Love in India (2009), and the first-ever Edinburgh Asian Film
Festival (EAFF 2016). In keeping with a focus on the new wave of Indian
Indies, Jasmine Jaisinghani, director of the Indian Film Festival of Los Ange-
les 2014, has expressed her intention to transform the annual event into ‘the
“Sundance of Indian cinema” with films that contrast Bollywood’s often
glamorised escapism with vivid realism’ (‘Move Over’, 2014).
Placed in the context of Bollywood’s meta-hegemony, the creation of dis-
aggregated, multiple, simultaneous spaces for Indie exhibition acts as a cen-
trifugal force, broadening the Indies’ visibility across a wider demographic.
This burgeoning of new independent film festivals that provide alternative
cinematic spaces could be included as one of the features in the ongoing
reconfiguration of the Indian cinema matrix. In this regard, the formation
of new film festival spaces coincides with the notion of interstitial, liminal
spaces springing up between overlapping binaries of past and present nation
and its various cinematic traditions.
This germination of new median sites of cinematic intersection mani-
fests in the Indies culling out exhibition spaces, away from the confines of
the cosmopolis, and venturing into new regional and zonal distributions.
Although the rise of film festivals in India may still be viewed as an incho-
ate phenomenon, the perceptible increase in Indie film productions since
2010 must be assessed in terms of the ramifications on Bollywood’s meta-
hegemonic dominance of the Indian cinema industry. The autochthonous
growth of indigenous Indian Indie film festivals necessitates an appraisal of
Bollywood’s coeval investment and expansion into the global film festival
space, characterised by its obligatory presence in several high-profile Indian
and global events.
The assertion by young filmmakers such as Bhargav Saikia, producer
of debut Indie, Kaafiron ki Namaaz (‘The Virgin Arguments’, 2013), that
‘mainstream festivals overlooked first-time filmmakers’ is echoed by Anurag
Kashyap’s admission that the majority of festivals still privilege popular cin-
ema (Francis, 2014b). Saikia states, ‘if you don’t have a known actor in your
film, even in the independent space, some festivals won’t even watch your
film for the selection’ (ibid.). Saikia’s view reiterates the notion of Bolly-
wood as a dominant imperative even in the independent cinema sector.
Broadening the context to Bollywood’s role and influence in the exogenous
global dimensions of meta-hegemony, Bollywood’s ascendancy as a growing
competitor to Hollywood is to a considerable degree reflected in the indus-
try’s growing presence at international film festivals. The International Indian
Film Academy (IIFA), the equivalent of Hollywood’s Academy of Motion
Pictures, gained a global broadcast audience of five hundred million viewers
in 110 nations at its annual awards festival in 2007 (Chary, 2009: 72).
Actor/filmmaker Rahul Bose observes Bollywood’s gravitation in recent
years towards augmented visibility at the international film festival circuit,
hitherto regarded as an ‘art cinema’ space (Bose, 2013). Bollywood’s brand-
ing as a global franchise raises the question of whether this move towards
the festival sector is catalysed by the cultural capital and marketing oppor-
tunities increasingly being presented by an association with prestigious
international festivals. Pooja Rangan (2012) notes the commonly held con-
ception that film festivals in India serve as portals for commerce. In this
regard, she discerns an intersection of aesthetics, politics and capital inter-
ests as a growing trend in the global festival space at Berlin, Cannes and
Venice (Rangan, 2012: 24).
The conspicuous presence of Bollywood stars such as Aishwarya Rai and
Shah Rukh Khan at the Cannes and Toronto festivals (Chary, 2009: 72),
along with premieres of several Bollywood films such as Imtiaz Ali’s High-
way (2014) at the Berlinale, reiterates Bollywood’s permeation into the
global festival sector. It is worth considering whether Bollywood making
inroads into this arena augurs a diminishing space for Indian Indies in the
abovementioned locations, akin to Hollywood’s dominant presence side-
lining American indies at festivals. The changing cartographies of global
cinematic configurations in the specific context of the international film fes-
tival space also signposts ongoing realignments in the relative positioning
between Indian Indie films and Bollywood. Overall, Indies now countenance
the prospect of having to vie for space with Bollywood at the international
film festival level.
The possibility of heightened competition for visibility at established
global film festivals is crucial to the Indies, bearing in mind their often vola-
tile relationship with India’s discourse of censorship and regulation. Several
Indian independent films with mordant socio-political themes have either
been excluded from public exhibition or denied a certificate of release. The
most illustrative recent examples are Unfreedom (2015), tracing a lesbian
relationship and religious extremism; Papilio Buddha (2013), about the
marginalised Dalit community and Bengali Indie Gandu (2010), containing
images of drug abuse and full-frontal nudity. Denied certificates of release
by the CBFC, a host of independent films are solely reliant on international
film festivals such as the Berlinale for exhibition. This is often the case, even
with politically ‘non-confrontational’ films such as Ship of Theseus, which
won a plethora of international film festival plaudits, but struggled to gain
an Indian release until Kiran Rao arrived on board to promote the film. The
correlation between censorship and the Indian Indies’ exhibition and distri-
bution will be explored at a later stage.
On the outer layers of the meta-hegemony, Bollywood’s growing interest
in the international festival circuit prefigures, if not the de-territorialisation of
the Indies, at least a turbulent arbitration between the two Indian cinematic
forms – a jostling for space on the global film festival platform. On the other
hand, within Indian borders, the amplified interest in films with alternative
content and the emergence of indigenous Indie festivals in new and diverse
locations presages the opening up of some of the Bollywood-dominated cine-
matic spaces; a re-territorialisation to accommodate the increasingly popular
Indies. In other words, the burgeoning growth of Indie film festivals in India
foreshadows heterodox, autonomous spaces of exhibition. In addition to the
practical function of hosting screenings, these events espouse local narratives
and act as microcosmic spaces of resistance to the dominant superstructures
of power.
Pawan Kumar’s explication in relation to the funding and distribution
of his Kannada film Lucia could shed more light on the nuances of Indie
distribution. Kumar mentions the first stage of his ‘low-risk’ approach to
funding, manifested in his asking the film’s cast and crew to invest equal
amounts in the production (personal communication, 2013). Following the
first stage of equal capital investment by Lucia’s creative team, Kumar’s
second stage beckoned to the public sphere. Pawan Kumar used social media
to solicit financial contributions from the global public in an example of
the increasingly popular alternative film-funding strategy of crowdfunding/
crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing
During my conversation with Pawan Kumar, he reveals how he approached
mainstream producers in order to launch Lucia. Disillusioned with their
autocratic approach, Kumar discovered the demotic option of collective
funding. He asserts:
Every time I had a meeting I felt they [the producers] were trying to
tweak my script or bank on a star name and were not banking on the
script. So I wrote a blog about my frustration and it got converted into
support from the people saying “let’s make it ourselves”.
(Kumar, personal communication, 2013)
In his crowdfunding quest, Kumar harnessed the various dimensions of

social media, from blogs to Facebook and Twitter, adopting the approach of
selling online tickets for Lucia even before filming had commenced (ibid.).
The incentive provided to contributors lay in the promise of Lucia’s com-
pletion within six months, the return of their investment and free access to
the film (ibid.). Kumar exhorted public donors to send in their contributions
within a specified timeline. His stipulated budget of 5 million rupees (around
£50,000) was posted as the target amount on his blog along with a time
limit of 100 days for the ‘funding collective’ to generate this amount (ibid.).
Kumar reached his budgetary target (ultimately gaining 5.1 million rupees)
in only 27 days (ibid.) crowd–generated instant cinema. Although Kumar
had written the third draft of his script, he chose to reveal only the project’s
title – Lucia – to his prospective crowdfunders (ibid.). Kumar attributes this
‘leap of faith’ approach to the rapport he had established with his audience
through incessant blog posts and Facebook updates. During our conversa-
tion, the filmmaker ascribes his successful crowdfunding to building trust
across social networks and establishing a sense of connectedness with his
prospective funders through constant updates about the production (ibid.).
Interestingly, Kumar reveals that Lucia’s sophisticated aesthetic pro-
duction values belie its 5.1 million rupee (around £50,000) budget. This is
largely owing to the reception of additional non-monetary crowdfunding
that covered the film’s logistical requirements. Kumar discloses that the pro-
duction team crowdsourced other implements integral to the filmmaking
process including, inter alia, locations, people, cars and costumes. He fur-
ther states ‘we didn’t have to pay for most of it – one could say that this is
a 3 crore rupees [around £300,000] crowdfunded film’ (Kumar, personal
Crowdfunding is an ascendant mode of film finance in the current Indian
Indie context, Onir’s I Am being a good recent example. However, a per-
sonalised version of this strategy has been employed in India’s arthouse
filmmaking past by Shyam Benegal, veteran auteur and one of the pioneers
of the Parallel cinema movement. Benegal traces the origins of crowdfund-
ing to its Communist roots in 1954, when a filmmaking member of the
Communist Party in the United States, after being spurned by traditional
financiers, received funding support from the International Union of Mine
Mill and Smelter Works (‘Milkmen’, 2014; Ross, 1998: 251). The resulting
film, Salt of the Earth (1954) was banned on release by the American state
(‘Milkmen’, 2014).
The Indian crowdfunding journey invokes a flashback to Shyam
Benegal’s 1976 film Manthan (‘The Churning’) about the dairy farmer col-
lective in the western state of Gujarat. The self-financing of this film by the
region’s farmers could be located as the first instance of crowdfunding in
India (‘Milkmen’, 2014). Benegal credits Dr Verghese Kurian, founder of
India’s ‘White Revolution’, conceived to reinvigorate the country’s dairy
farming sector, with spawning the idea of involving the milk co-operatives
in Gujarat as ‘film producers’ (ibid.). According to this plan, the farmers
would retain 6 rupees out of the packet of milk that they usually sold for
8 rupees, with the surplus 2 rupees functioning as their contribution to the
film (ibid.). These Gujarat farmers-turned-producers numbered 500,000,
and in 1976 set a precedent for crowdfunding that Shyam Benegal
would repeat in his future filmmaking endeavours – Susman (1987), and
Antarnaad (1991) (ibid.).
Although Pawan Kumar’s Lucia was the first regional Kannada lan-
guage film to adopt the crowdfunding alternative to orthodox modes of film
financing, Onir’s I Am was the first film to rejuvenate this strategy initiated
by Benegal in 1976. Expanding crowdfunding from a national to a trans-
global scale, Onir infused funds aggregated from 400 donors in 45 different
countries into the production of I Am (Menon, 2011).
The growth of crowdfunding as a means to an end for new independent
Indian cinema raises several propositions. It affirms the atavistic nature of
the new Indies as drawing from their predecessors – Parallel cinema, in this
instance by adopting Benegal’s strategy of crowdfunding. However, the new
Indies hybridise, contemporise and stylise Parallel cinema’s benchmarks,
such as Benegal’s crowdfunding, to suit a postmodern paradigm. This reso-
nates with Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘looking back in order to go forward’
(Bhabha, 1994: ix; Bienal de São Paulo, 2012) – new art forms emerging in
the present drawing from precedents and performing palimpsestic rewrit-
ings of the past in the present, whilst imagining and negotiating the future.
Current shifts in Indian cinema funding strategies, particularly the growth
of crowdfunding, draws into focus disjunctures and deviations in the evolu-
tionary timeline of crowdsourcing itself.
In this regard, it is worth revisiting Benegal’s allusion to the Commu-
nist provenance of crowdfunding vis-à-vis the production of The Salt of
the Earth in 1954. This film, created in the crucible of a leftist collective
ethos, presented a scathing indictment of the Empire Zinc Corporation’s
exploitation of the Mexican-American mining community. The Salt of the
Earth was also a forerunner of feminist socio-political perspectives, driven
by ‘a strong female activist at the film’s center’ (McDonald, 2012: 3). The
above elements are markers that emphasise a transmutation in the crowd-
funding process since 1954. This change involves the deracination or
de-territorialisation of this collective funding mechanism from its politi-
cal, labour-class roots epitomised by The Salt of the Earth. Crowdfunding
has been subsequently re-territorialised in the postmodern age by a disag-
gregated, largely global bourgeoisie, with the dynamics of this collective
strategy predicated on the imperative of the Internet and social media. This
transformation across time and space succinctly captures the impact of glo-
balisation, even on microcosmic models of funding manifested by Indian
Indies such as Lucia and I Am.
Shyam Benegal underscores the disjuncture between his own experiences
of generating film finance prior to the watershed of globalisation. Stating
his apprehension about the current viability of crowdfunding as a stable,
sustainable source of capital, Benegal argues:
The primary purpose of a film is to entertain and make money out

of entertainment. It is business ultimately and everyone wants to put
their money where they will get it back. So, we need a more regular
system of funds to finance our films.
(‘Milkmen’, 2014)
Although Benegal’s assertion of the need for an independent infrastructure

is justified, there appears to be a personal disconnect between the idealism
of his Parallel cinema heyday and his current realist pragmatism. Benegal
observes the shift in perspectives to filmmaking that informs the current
complexities and anxieties countenanced by new Indies struggling for space
in the mainstream. He states that ‘a film maker has to prove that he can
make money. He also has to constantly test the worth of his ideas. The film
industry is littered with corpses of filmmakers and ideas that didn’t make it’
(‘Milkmen’, 2014)
Benegal’s misgivings about the practicability of crowdfunding appear dis-
sonant with what seems to be a recent upsurge in awareness of this medium
in India. Indeed, crowdfunding appears to be gaining popularity with the
germination of organisations such as the National Crowd Funding Associa-
tion of India (NCFA) and more specifically in the filmmaking domain, web-
sites such as Wishberry and Ignite Intent. The Wishberry website appears to
echo Pawan Kumar’s filmmaking sensibilities with its ‘Go Fund Yourself!’
campaign promising potential filmmakers ‘a new risk-free way to raise
funds’ and also claiming to privilege the power of community over ‘financial
return’ (Go Fund Yourself!, n.d.).
The rise of crowdfunding platforms such as Wishberry emphasises the
redefinition of ‘community’ as witnessed in the context of The Salt of the
Earth. This new mode mimics and assimilates some of the skeletal con-
tours of socialist ‘community’ and collapses it into the virtuality and ano-
nymity of cyberspace. In effect, the time-space compression accelerated
by the techno-economy of globalisation presides over the new rhetoric of
crowdfunding. The hybridity of the Indies’ – socio-politically conscious and
commercially aware, renders crowdfunding, with its own juxtaposition of
community and capital, a compatible funding alternative to Bollywood’s
meta-hegemonic monopoly of funding and distribution.
Onir mentions one of the main pitfalls of crowdfunding – India’s tax
and revenue rules. According to the filmmaker, this stems from the Indian
state not recognising cinema as an art form and hence imposing tax levies
on crowdsourced funds (Onir, personal communication, 2013). Onir con-
tends that these state taxation laws caused him to jettison crowdfunding
in his subsequent filmmaking endeavours. He reveals: ‘I realised it was too
complicated, you end up spending too much money on a tax consultant and
lawyer’ (ibid.). He considers this an unviable option ‘unless things change in
India, and cinema begins to be treated as a form of art’ (ibid.).
One of the alternatives to this dilemma involves independent filmmak-
ers turning to foreign financial channels, either through selling distribu-
tion rights to an overseas company or by soliciting a global co-production.
Examples of such arrangements include partial contributions to the funding
of Harud by the Hubert Bals Fund (Bashir, personal communication, 2013),
which also supported the making of Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court, and film-
maker Q’s sale of Gandu’s distribution rights to American (Artsploitation
Films), Australian (Accent Film Entertainment), Netherlands (Filmfreak
Distributie) and German (Bildstorung) distributors. Other permutations of
the overseas option gesture towards new transglobal co-productions, some
envisaged by India’s NFDC as a platform to promote young independent
directors.
The NFDC Refashioning Its Role in a Heterogeneous Terrain

The NFDC, although a pale shadow of its Parallel cinema persona, can
sometimes offer recourse to Indies facing difficulties with restricted fund-
ing systems. Once a pre-eminent pathway to film funding, the NFDC in
its scope of a ‘Government of India Enterprise’ (‘Annual Report’, 2013)
funded and facilitated the production of a plethora of Parallel and arthouse
films. Although its waning influence and potency since the decline of Par-
allel cinema has been further attenuated after liberalisation, the NFDC is
attempting to rejuvenate and reposition itself in the postmodern age. The
organisation claims that it continues to commission ‘the Cinemas of India’
(ibid.), commensurate with its traditional role of promoting alternative films
(Rai, 2009: 118) and debutant filmmakers from across the nation. Some
notable recent commissions include Gyan Correa’s Gujarati film The Good
Road, which was India’s entry to the 2014 Oscars; it was exclusively funded
by the NFDC. The Lunchbox, a globally acclaimed Indie film by first-time
director Ritesh Batra, is an NFDC co-production with Anurag Kashyap
films, ROH Films (Germany), ASAP Films (France), Cine Mosaic (USA),
amongst others (Bhushan, 2013).
The NFDC’s focus on forging global cinematic ties is a strategy that
the organisation claims is reflected in the Punjabi film Qissa (2014), a
co-production with Heimat Films, resulting from India’s co-production
agreement with Germany and akin to The Lunchbox, starring Irrfan Khan
(‘Annual Report’, 2013: 15). The organisation has also enlarged its ambit
of global co-productions with an overseas division, Film Bazaar, that mar-
kets and promotes new Indian films at International film festivals as well as
soliciting international filmmaking partnerships (ibid.: 13, 25). ‘Cinemas
of India’ designed to function as a distribution platform was launched in
2012, with NFDC’s purported rationale of bridging the gap between ‘the
maestros of Indian Cinema and the new age filmmakers’ through ‘Home
Video, theatrical distribution, Video on Demand, and television syndica-
tion’ (ibid.: 22).
The NFDC’s attempted reinvigoration in the present necessitates a
reappraisal of its decline in the past concomitant with the Parallel cin-
ema of the 1980s. With the liberalisation of the Indian economy, the
dominance of Bollywood-affiliated corporate production houses and
alternative routes to funding such as crowdsourcing gaining in popularity,
the NFDC’s current role puts into perspective its failures in the 1980s. Ira
Bhaskar argues that the ‘NFDC collapsed because they agreed with every-
body that these [Parallel cinema] films are not financially viable. But they
never questioned, never tried to identify why this is so’ (Bhaskar, personal
communication, 2013). Despite the attribution, at the time, of de facto
national cinema status to Parallel cinema by the Indian press and the fes-
tival circuit, the state-run NFDC’s laissez-faire attitude to sustaining the
Parallel movement through funding largely contributed to this alternative
genre’s demise.
The NFDC’s new initiatives underscore the shifting contexts in India’s
cinematic timeline. Current reorientations in the NFDC also invoke the
Indies recrudescent traits – their dialogic with certain scenarios faced by
their Parallel cinema predecessors. For example, several of the interviewees
featured in this book view the NFDC’s endeavours as restricted, inconsistent,
parochial and often influenced by the caprices of the organisation’s super-
vening state authority, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. This
has contributed to an imbalance between the number of films sequestered
in the NFDC repository awaiting release, and those that actually manage to
gain exhibition (Bashir, personal communication, 2013). The assertion of
distribution shortfalls assailing the current Indies contains overtones of the
state-supported NFDC’s similar failure in the past to support the dissemina-
tion of Parallel cinema. This is exemplified in the fact that ‘by 1982, 84 of
the 130 films made with funding from the central government had not been
distributed and were “still on the shelf”’ (Chakravarty, 1993: 244). In the
contemporary scenario, prospective release can be so dilatory that it often
results in some non-mainstream films from the ‘Cinemas of India’ never
seeing the light of a cinema hall.
However, Ira Bhaskar affirms a current decoupling from the previ-
ous funding and distribution structure of Parallel cinema. In the previous
system, auteurs including Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul were more or
less anchored to the NFDC in its role as the solitary arbiter of film finance
during the zenith of state-supported Indian art cinema (Bhaskar, personal
communication, 2013). Bhaskar ascribes the decentring of the NFDC to the
advent of post-liberalisation corporate interest in new Indian cinema and a
heightened access to and awareness of global cinema, leading to modified
sensibilities, particularly amongst informed young urban cinemagoers. She
observes:
The situation today is different because of international cinema and

because there is a clear apprehension among production houses that
young people today have access to global cinema. Therefore, their
tastes are different, and that’s why production houses put their money
behind different kinds of cinema. (ibid.)
Bhaskar observes that corporate companies are increasingly amenable to the
idea of infusing what (for them) constitutes smaller sums of money as capi-
tal investments into Indie projects, at relatively mitigated levels of financial
risk and liability, compared to the average Bollywood blockbuster (ibid.). In
this regard, Bhaskar’s observation endorses Bejoy Nambiar’s earlier percep-
tion of the ‘risk-taking’ strategies increasingly being adopted by Bollywood
producers and companies investing in the Indie sector. Bombay Talkies is a
good filmic example, where three of the film’s four directors – Zoya Akhtar,
Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap – have established Bollywood affiliations.
Future ramifications on the role of the NFDC in new Indian cinema bear
scope for future research in light of increasing corporate investment in the
independent film sector. Bejoy Nambiar extends his approbation to the com-
mercial gravitas afforded the Indies through alignments with corporates.
Perceiving this as a beneficial mechanism to disseminate films, he states:
As a filmmaker, our goal is to make sure that our story reaches out.
UTV or anybody is now picking up on these stories. It is very good
progress that they are looking at these films and seeing that they have
marketing potential. I’m using UTV just as an example; even if their
interest is purely business, then [UTV] seeing business in Peepli Live is
a very good development.
(Nambiar, personal communication, 2013)
The ascendency of corporate production houses described above, the dimin-

ished influence of the NFDC and its new initiatives to regenerate itself
illustrate some of the arbitrations, subjectivities and contradictions in the
Indie domain. These propositions underline the proviso that the Indies must
be ‘out there’ and visible in the public domain in order to survive. In this
context, it must be mentioned that a preponderance of Indie filmmakers
interviewed were categorical in wishing their films to reach out to a wider
audience. Arguably, this indicates a delinking of the new Indies from the
purported ‘elitist’ esotericism of earlier Middle/Parallel cinema and its asso-
ciations with ‘high art’. In this regard, the modern Indian multiplex consti-
tutes an important mediatory site in relation to the Indie filmmakers’ wish
for broader visibility and a wider audience.
Multiplex Monopoly and High-Priced Tickets

After India’s 1990s liberalisation, the stronghold of single-screen cinemas,
a resilient thread in the fabric of India’s pre-globalisation cinema narra-
tive began to unravel under the inexorable drive towards mass media and
consumer culture (Athique, 2012: 141). Single-screen cinemas were often
perceived as being biased towards Bollywood in their selection and exhibi-
tion of films. They were also regimented and restrictive in their rigid adher-
ence to a ‘12–3–6–9’ time schedule (Rai, 2009: 145). The rise of multiplexes
seemed to augur well for non-mainstream Indian films, hinged on expecta-
tions of a re-visioning if not a renaissance of extant structures and practices,
such as the single-screen cinemas’ pre-disposition to mainstream Bollywood
blockbusters. The anticipation was that the multiplexes, through heterodox
approaches, would create a more acephalous cinematic space, where com-
mercial and arthouse could co-exist under the banner of a meritocracy and
equitable exhibition.
In essence, independent filmmakers envisaged a new conduit for the exhi-
bition of Indie films in a more egalitarian cinematic structure. However,
what transpired was a disconnection with this optimistic narrative influ-
enced by several contributing factors, including the state’s reinvigorated
push towards consumerism, the privileging of profit by corporate hegemons
and the primacy of capital generation in a milieu of mass culture (Mehta,
2005: 135–138).
India’s new economic ascendency and the burgeoning rise of an aspi-
rational, nouveau riche Indian middle-class presented multiplexes with
overweening opportunities to capitalise on the biggest film industry in the
world. Amit Rai (2009: 141–142) conflates India’s foray into globalisation
and deregulation with the imagining of hybrid postmodern spaces, such as
what he terms the ‘malltiplex’ – a melding of mall and multiplex. Associat-
ing the cinematic experience with retail consumerism became an imperative
strategy deployed by Indian multiplexes in a superimposition of the global
‘Hollywood’ model. Restaurant chains, franchises and shops were inextri-
cably conjoined to the cinematic experience through visual, spatial and sen-
sorial cues, rendering obligatory the attainment of ‘wholeness’ through the
‘total malltiplex experience’, where actual film viewing was attenuated to a
part in the whole (ibid.).
The Indian government was an instigator in this process, extrapolating the
global commercial corporatisation of Bollywood as profitable (Rai, 2009:
135). This assertion is directly relevant to the theory of a meta-hegemony
proposed earlier in this book. The state conferred industry status on films
in 1998 and granted tax waivers to multiplex corporations (Mehta, 2005:
135–136). Big budget Bollywood benefited in particular, leading to an increase
in the number of commercial films vying for a multiplex release. Therefore,
the annealing of multiplexes as a commercially viable forum for both cinema
and consumerism entailed their new dominance of public exhibition in the
urban Indian cinemascape.
Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill’s comprehensive investigation of Indian
multiplexes observes ‘a productive tension between the way the multiplex
reinforces and legitimises the overall dominance of the blockbuster film,
whilst at the same time offering … a toehold to filmmakers producing off-
beat films’ (Athique and Hill, 2010: 208). However, in recent years, there
appears to be ambivalence in terms of multiplex space for Indian Indies,
as ‘the logic of the multiplex paradoxically ensures that those films remain
economically and materially marginal’ (Athique and Hill, 2010: 208).
Filmmaker Kiran Rao (personal communication, 2013) observes a paucity
of exhibition spaces in recent times for non-mainstream Indie films, empha-
sising a dialectical disequilibrium between the increasing number of Indie
films and the restricted arenas for exhibition. India’s largest corporate multi-
plex chain, PVR Ltd, has arguably enacted a significant role in the discourse
surrounding dwindling spaces for the distribution and screening of Indian
Indies, particularly through its pricing system (Bashir personal communica-
tion, 2013; Bhaskar, personal communication, 2013; Rao, personal commu-
nication, 2013).
Affordability in relation to cinema access continues to be a vital factor.
Implications of India’s new ‘leisure economy’, demonstrated in a thrust
towards neoliberal urban corporatisation and consumerism, frames the
multiplexes’ ‘push to create a globalised, consuming middle-class and a
new urban environment’ (Athique and Hill, 2010: 213). This has informed
the multiplexes’ deployment of disproportionate pricing systems that often
place access to cinema beyond the economic reach of the less affluent.
Aamir Bashir, director of Harud, identifies the core issue of multiplexes
charging the same ticket price for a low-budget Indie and a Bollywood
blockbuster. PVR’s asymmetrical policies are further manifested in their
designation of non-Bollywood films with an arthouse aesthetic and inde-
pendent antecedents to a cinematic exhibition slot entitled ‘Director’s Rare’
(Bashir, personal communication, 2013). Ostensibly proffering an autono-
mous Indie film space, divorced from the domain of Bollywood, the ticket
price for a Director’s Rare film such as Harud is around 1,000 rupees or £10
(Bhaskar, personal communication, 2013; Bora, 2013). Ira Bhaskar (per-
sonal communication, 2013) recounts her experience of paying this price to
watch an Indie at a PVR Director’s Rare cinema in south Delhi, screened to
an attendant audience of only three people.
In addition to high pricing, Indie Director’s Rare screenings are often
inconveniently slotted at 5.30 p.m. on working weekdays and are subject to
‘arbitrary schedule changes’ (Chatterjee, 2012). Bhaskar (personal commu-
nication, 2013) expresses her doubts about PVR’s erstwhile credentials as a
visionary cinematic space, raising the pertinent question, ‘Who is going to
go for these films?’ She ponders on the teleological consequence of an indis-
criminate and unmediated pricing system that divests some young members
of middle- and low-income groups, particularly students, of the opportunity
to view non-mainstream films. Bhaskar asserts, ‘young people will wait to
download [them] from torrents or get pirated copies, so multiplexes are
killing the [Indies] movement’ (ibid.).
It is fair to argue that limited channels of distribution stymieing acces-
sibility to Indian Indies is a legacy of an enduring metanarrative of sys-
tems and structures, such as the meta-hegemony exercised by Bollywood
on its internal others, particularly the Indies. The PVR multiplex chain as
another hegemonic arbiter, constitutes an important factor, not just in the
peripheralisation of the Indian Indies to the margins of multiplex exhibition
strategies, but also their displacement, in terms of access, into the pirate
sphere of torrent downloads.
Critically acclaimed Indies, such as Harud and I Am, sometimes man-
age to gain screenings in PVR multiplexes, but their presence on multiplex
screens can often be fleeting, making way for the latest Bollywood block-
busters. Therefore, the ephemerality of these films in the public domain has
paved a path towards pirate spheres and peer-to-peer file-sharing ‘BitTorrent’
downloads as tools to gain access to films. Whilst providing an alternative
to high-priced multiplexes in India, BitTorrent downloads have diminished
the viability of a moribund DVD distribution system that often exists in the
form of cheap, low-quality, pirated DVDs.
Aamir Bashir encapsulates the transition from DVDs to downloads in the
context of Harud:
That is the problem even if you release on DVD. DVDs do not make
any money but provide accessibility. We released our film on DVD
and we sold around 3,000–5,000 DVDs till date, but that is not a
money-making venture, because the day a DVD is released it is already
on torrent.
(Bashir, personal communication, 2013)
The digital reproduction of a single, original, high-quality DVD in torrent

form and its dispersal into a labyrinthine, anonymous BitTorrent network is
largely facilitated by an increasing access to the technoscapes of broadband
Internet and digital devices.
Torrent Downloads, Technics and the Hyperreal3

The burgeoning rise of pirate spheres, including P2P (peer-to-peer)
file-sharing through BitTorrent is a phenomenon congruent with growing
broadband access, particularly in urban India. A research study, commis-
sioned by the Motion Picture Distributors Association (MPDA), revealed
that India accounts for the most film piracy in any English-speaking country,
proportional to the number of broadband subscribers (Borpujari, 2009). It
also revealed that from April to September 2009, India figured in the top
ten countries in the world with the largest number of illegal P2P activities.
‘Overall, India is the fourth largest downloader of films after the U.S., Great
Britain and Canada’ (ibid.). India is also the world’s third largest Internet
user. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) listed 164.81 mil-
lion Internet subscribers in March, 2013 (‘India Is Now’, 2013). A major
proportion of users are young males, in a country where more than half
the population is under the age of 25 and 70 percent of Indian Internet
users watch online videos (Vaidyanathan, 2012). Metropolitan cities Delhi,
Mumbai and Bangalore account for the ‘major share of illegal downloads’
(Borpujari, 2009). This young demographic to a large extent embodies the
shifting patterns of access to media and in the context of this study, the new
Indies. Pawan Kumar affirms that ‘in the 1970s and 80s the cinema theatre
was the only way that they could see film, there was no torrent or other
option. Now phones are visual media, you don’t have to go to the theatres
to feel the magic’ (Kumar, 2013).
Kumar’s contention imagines a post-globalisation, postmodern hyperre-
ality, where India’s infrastructural vicissitudes are mirrored in an enmesh-
ing of culture and information and an aspirational clamour for space in an
information and knowledge economy. Lawrence Liang (2009) locates the
role of India’s ‘transcontinental networks through infrastructure consisting
of telecommunications networks, broadband cables that traverse the seas
much as the ships of maritime capitalism did’ (Liang, 2009: 5). This asser-
tion of global networks contributing to cultural and information interflows
resonates with Arjun Appadurai’s (1990, 1996) model of global cultural
economy, characterised by an imbrication of ‘technoscapes’ and ‘medias-
capes’ (Appadurai, 1990: 296; 1996: 33).
Liang perceives an ambivalent ascendency in the increasing commodi-
fication of information and knowledge as cultural capital, particularly
amongst the rising urban Indian middle class. He underscores the reality
of a vast proportion of the Indian demographic elided from access to the
global culture-knowledge economy, particularly through marginalisation
by the state and corporate institutions. It is possible to acknowledge the
above-mentioned disproportional access to technoscapes and mediascapes
across gradations of Indian civil society, particularly the rural demographic.
In this antinomy, wherever accessible, the pluralistic structure of the pirate
sphere imbues it with the propensity to function as an interstitial site, to
subvert the aforementioned elision or alterity engineered by discriminatory
state practices, socio-economic inequities or infrastructural inadequacies.
Liang and Sundaram (2011: 339) maintain that the informal sui juris net-
work of pirate spheres enables a larger number of people into ‘the informa-
tion and knowledge economy’. This is precisely the case in terms of access
to the new Indian Indies as well as to World Cinema.
It could be argued that torrents play a role in contesting dominant or elit-
ist discourses that appropriate cultural capital through uni-dimensional and
privileged access to cinematic culture and the information economy. This
is reflected in the medium’s ability to actualise or sublimate the sublime,
transform the immanent into the imminent, reclaim cultural capital and
effect its libertarian redistribution (Devasundaram, 2014: 113). Kiran Rao
(2013) asserts that access to an array of World Cinema facilitated by torrent
downloads has ‘increased audience awareness and exposure’. She observes
that whilst social media like Facebook and Twitter have assisted in raising
audience awareness of a diverse range of films, particularly Indian Indies,
it is torrents ‘that have done the real job of education’, also unveiling open
‘access to Iranian, Korean and Japanese cinema’ (Rao, 2013). Q, director of
controversial film Gandu (2010), attributes his discovery of esoteric Filipino
director Khavn De La Cruz’s films to BitTorrent, stating ‘pirated software
and films; none of us would have made films without them. Wong Kar Wai
famously said “I would not be Wong Kar Wai without pirated films”’ (Q,
2013).
Other Indie filmmakers, Onir and Pawan Kumar, raise questions about the
implications of BitTorrent on Indie filmmakers and revenue loss. Onir (2013)
asserts ‘film is an expensive medium. I have to earn my own living. Why will
I provide my work of art, my labour, free to anybody?’ Liang and Sundaram
(2011) however, state that the economic impact of BitTorrent remains neb-
ulous in terms of drawing ‘specific conclusions about losses’ (2011: 359). In
addition, theatrical revenues do not appear to exhibit any decreases com-
pared to the increases in Internet connections (Scaria, 2013: 653).
BitTorrent has arguably enacted an antinomy of cohesion and fragmen-
tation, and as mentioned above, contributed to levelling the field in the form
of free, egalitarian access to the culture and knowledge hub. On the other
hand, torrent downloads have the propensity to displace the collective expe-
rience of cinema hall viewing into an individual space, where a commu-
nion between Internet pirate sphere and private sphere of the downloader
coalesce. Therefore, the spatial and temporal variables between the ideation,
production, distribution and exhibition of a film applicable to conventional
cinema spectatorship are subverted and reconfigured by a process of con-
densation (Harvey, 1990: 284–286; Rai, 2009: 140). This involves shrinking
the trajectory of a film, from creation to consumption, into a monadic space
and a temporality of minutes instead of months or days. This constriction
of time and space is facilitated by ‘technics’ (Stiegler, 1998) ) – technological
objects and interfaces, in the form of Internet torrent downloads. In this
context, torrent downloads have assisted in exteriorising into the public
sphere the interiority of indeterminate human BitTorrent downloading indi-
viduations (Stiegler, 1998: 141–142).
Torrents as technics could themselves be perceived as a technological
intermediary, as they are intertwined with the internal drive and elemental
human impulse to communicate or share information (Stiegler, 1998: 49).
Therefore, the interiority of the individual engaging in the autochthonous
process of downloading, viewing and sharing is interlocked in a process of
sustained deliberation with larger outside discourses. One manifestation of
this tumultuous imbrication is when the state apparatus and its ideological
extensions of regulation and censorship try to perform interventions in this
discursive field. The proliferation of Q’s subversive Gandu via torrent and
on YouTube, juxtaposed with the film being debated on national television,
is a key example of the discursive overlaps between the above-mentioned
interiority and exteriority.
Torrents: Agents of Change?

Torrents have polarised opinion in the Indian public sphere. This is illus-
trated by the Madras High Court’s short-lived legal action barring access
to torrent websites across India, and the Court’s subsequent volte-face
on this legislation, owing to resistance by hacker group Anonymous in
the form of cyber-attacks against ‘Internet censorship’ (‘India Unblocks’,
2012). MPDA research implicating the growing rise of illegal P2P activi-
ties underscores state and industry cognisance of issues relating to copy-
right infringement. On the other hand, the BitTorrent network has been
acknowledged by Indie filmmakers as an emissary to democratise access
to cinematic cultural capital, particularly independent Indian cinema and
inaccessible World Cinema.
There appears to be an amplification of the earlier mentioned acknowl-
edgement of torrents ‘educating’ and exposing Indian audiences to trans-
global cultural interflows. Anand Gandhi, director of internationally
acclaimed indie Ship of Theseus, affirms:
The biggest boon my generation had was the Internet. Thanks to this,
we were exposed to global cultures through foreign films. We may
have to give some credit to the foreign film piracy too! Our films are
slowly transcending international borders.
(Dasgupta, 2013)
Arul Scaria problematises the introduction of new Digital Rights Man-

agement (DRM) laws in India, asserting ‘it is high time for the industry
to evolve innovative business practices to reach those potential consum-
ers, rather than solely relying on threats against those consumers through
technological and legal measures’ (Scaria, 2013: 663). Innovative systems
are already being devised by some Indie filmmakers, utilising the common
platform of the Internet. Anand Gandhi and his production team, Recycle-
wala Films, in an ‘open source initiative’ uploaded a high-definition (HD)
version of Ship of Theseus on their website, exhorting people to watch
the film through streaming or free legal download and make voluntary
donations (‘Ship of Theseus’, 2014). Their rationale (as articulated by the
creative team in the download copy’s pre-film exordium) is that free com-
munity sharing could circumvent the monetising of their film by advertisers
or third parties.
Actor and filmmaker, Rahul Bose (personal communication, 2013), pre-
figures further technological introductions, such as ‘4G’ technology, where
‘everybody can watch films’. He also forecasts aggressive self-promotion
by filmmakers through ‘viral marketing’ (ibid.). Pawan Kumar reveals his
motivation in devising independent distribution channels to counter torrent
downloads.
‘Today everybody is watching 90 percent of the films on torrents, so we came

up with an independent system for distribution called “Hometalkies.com”, a
website we started, where you can watch any of our films’. (Kumar, personal
communication, 2013)
Bejoy Nambiar, presaging the further expansion of Indian Indies, states:
It is evolving. We are getting in new filmmakers and trying new things.

What we really need is for audiences to accept any avenue – torrents or
even watching on their phones. If someone gets to watch Miss Lovely
[a 2012 indie film] on their phone and pays one rupee, that would be
a great thing. Only if the money comes in will you find more funders
putting [in] more money into these films.
(Nambiar, personal communication, 2013)
Pawan Kumar cites an increasing number of donors willing to ‘click, pay

and watch’ his films on his website in HD, rather than via torrents. His rea-
soning is that ‘people above 27 or 29 years of age are not the sort who wants
to go and look for a torrent’. Kumar perceives transience in the BitTorrent
phenomenon stating ‘it is a good way to get students addicted to our films
and when they start earning they will come back to HD’ (Kumar, personal
The proliferation and impact of torrent downloads is dyadic. It conjoins
the proponents of Indian Indie cinema – its emerging young filmmakers,
with their young urban audience. The torrent realm has the propensity to
influence and shape the filmmaking contours of the former, with the latter
now increasingly the possessors of wider, relatively unmediated access to
these Indie films. Overall, torrent downloads and P2P file sharing may rep-
resent alternative future formulations for young urban Indian viewers to
access the Indian cinematic sphere, particularly in relation to the multiplex
hegemony and its attendant disproportionate pricing system. This imagines
a discursive intertwining between mainstream and marginal, multiplex and
BitTorrent in India’s larger urban public sphere.
The BitTorrent phenomenon also has direct and tangential implications
on articulation and agency in the public sphere. The most perceptible mani-
festation is in the growing democratisation of discourse relating to film criti-
cism and review. The aforementioned example of public debate surrounding
Q’s Gandu on NDTV invokes discourses of the film’s open access via the
Internet, despite the spectre of censorship and Gandu’s elision from the
mainstream multiplex cinematic space. The ascendency of online blogs such
as F.i.g.h.t C.l.u.b and websites like DearCinema.com, dedicated to film
reviews and discussion forums on new independent Indian cinema, represent
increasing sites for public interaction in relation to the latest Indie releases.
This has arguably destabilised and displaced the dominant discourse of
uni-directional, pedagogical exposition by established television and news-
paper film reviewers and critics from conventional conduits of the public
sphere into more participatory, pluralistic realms of the blogosphere and
social media. Q, noting the decentring of authoritative voices asserts ‘with
the rise of the new Indian Indies, we have seen the new rise of new Indian
journalists and new Indian journalism’ (Q, personal communication, 2013).
Therefore, increased access to films, particularly Indian Indie and esoteric
World cinema via BitTorrent downloads, has set the stage for enhanced cin-
ematic awareness in the urban Indian public sphere. This has largely assisted
in shifting the pendulum of arbitration, articulation and agency towards a
civil society that is more empowered than before in its ability to influence
public opinion on new Indian cinema.
Ultimately, the downloading sector could be perceived as accelerating the
articulation and exteriorising of opinion through the portals of technics and
technoscapes in the Indian public sphere. Whether torrents are a transient
trend or not, it seems conceivable that technics and technoscapes will play a
prominent role in the shifting patterns of future film consumption, particu-
larly in relation to the new Indies in India’s public sphere.
Notes
1. Aamir Khan was instrumental in bridging the Bollywood and alternative
domains through films such as Taare Zameen Par (2007) and 3 Idiots (2009).
2. The Indian government’s A-B-C ranking system has been replaced by an X-Y-Z
system.
3. The section on torrent downloads contains extracts from an earlier journal
article, ‘Cyber Buccaneers, Public and Pirate Spheres: The Phenomenon of
BitTorrent Downloads in the Transforming Terrain of Indian Cinema’ published
in Media in Australia (MIA). Permission for re-use has been granted and the full
reference appears in the reference section at the end of this chapter.
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5 Interstitial Indies Interrogating
India’s Double Narrative
This chapter examines the notion that the Indies emerge from an inter-
stitial space between India’s pedagogical master narrative of purportedly
unifying historical traditions and values (Bhabha, 1994: 37) and the mod-
ern daily performative which ‘ruptures’ the authority of the pedagogical
‘by introducing the ‘“in-between”’ (McLaren, 1995: 245). I will argue that
the Indies, sitting in this middle space, negotiate India’s idiosyncratically
mixed milieu of archaic religiosity and postmodern hyperreality. This lends
to the thesis that the Indies, with their ‘liminal character of performance,
can function as a counter-narrative to rupture the essentialist identity of the
state’ (McLaren, 1995: 245–246), particularly as legitimised by Bollywood.
The new films significantly achieve this by liberating the ‘ghosts’ of forgot-
ten, concealed, erased, untold and disavowed events that haunt the master
narrative’s grand design.
A burgeoning postmodern ‘interconnectedness’ is suggested in C hapter 4’s
mention of the pervasive influence of social media and the I nternet in Indian
urban centres. This network of communication is served by a labyrinthine
transglobal crisscross of knowledge and information flows and an unbridled
growth of consumerism that positions India’s brand of postmodernism as
‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ (Jameson, 1991). This is particularly
visible in metropolises, such as Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, and bears
testimony to India’s ascendant neoliberal market-driven techno-economy.
It is possible to commence by locating the postcolonial and post-modern in
relation to Indian cinema, thereafter dealing with the theme of interstitial
Indies in a split narrative of nation.
Film scholar Nandini Bhattacharya renounces the term ‘postcolonial’
and privileges the expression ‘post-independence’ to describe Indian cinema
after 1947. According to her, a postcolonial approach ‘assumes an inevitable
cathexis of cinema and the nation with a particular relation to temporality
and historical periodization as expressed in the progression of modern and
postmodern, colonial or postcolonial’ (2012: 25). Bhattacharya neverthe-
less affirms that ‘cinema in India has always been postmodern in a singular
non-eurocentric way’ (ibid.).
There seem to be contradictory convolutions and epistemological anoma-
lies in this thesis. The proposition appears to simultaneously disavow India’s
110 Interstitial Indies Interrogating India’s Double Narrative
postcolonial temporality whilst affixing a postmodern paradigm to Indian
cinema, thereby disregarding the interlinking of postcolonial theory with
poststructuralist and postmodern constructs. In this regard, I would argue
that the temporal dimensions of postcolonial studies are indispensable to the
(re)appraisal of contemporary cultural forms such as new Indian cinema.
Merely suggesting the pre-existent ‘postmodernity’ of ‘cinema in India’
does nothing to acknowledge the anteriority in systems of dominance, dif-
ference and exclusion. For example, the morphology of Bollywood’s cur-
rent meta-hegemony is identifiable in the incipient developmental stages of
‘post-independence’ Indian cinema. This period has witnessed the estab-
lishment of mainstream Hindi cinema’s monopolistic and often dynastic
name-based star system. This constellation includes the Kapoors in the
1950s (Chapman, 2003: 348), Deols and Bachchans in subsequent years,
and currently the Kapoor scions (Kareena, Ranbir) and Khans (Shah Rukh
Khan, Salman and Aamir; not related to each other). Therefore, a history
of dominant systems and practices is evident in the chronological timeline
of commercial Hindi cinema’s mutation into post-liberalisation Bollywood.
In addition, Bhattacharya does not specify what ‘cinema in India’ entails –
does it refer to art, commercial Hindi, or regional cinema? Therefore, casting
a blanket of post-modernism across the historical trajectory of Indian cin-
ema is to paradoxically instigate a ‘postmodern’ metanarrative that repeats
the scholarly folly of not sufficiently differentiating ‘Indian cinema’ into its
heterogeneous parts. In the process of inadvertently ratifying a monolithic
‘cinema in India’ (which in its current context is collapsed into the term
Bollywood), Bhattacharya, by default and without differentiation, appears
to ascribe an amaranthine pre-existing ‘post-modernism’ to commercial
Hindi cinema, with the exclusion of India’s cinematic others.
The assertion of Indian cinema’s universal historical post-modernism
notwithstanding, it could be argued that the new ‘interstitial’ Indies with
their emphasis on hybridity, fragmentation and difference rather than cohe-
sion constitute more accurate and apposite descriptors of post-modernism
in current Indian cinema. This is in terms of form, style and content as well
as the Indie films’ multi-perspective representation of India’s contradictory
immersion into religiosity and the postmodern condition.
Fragmenting the Familiar: Postmodern Hyperreality

and Mythologised Religiosity
Delving into the nuances of the postmodern condition in relation to the
hybrid, fragmented narratives, form and style of the Indies recalls David
Harvey’s seminal definition (1990: 44): ‘Postmodernism swims, even wal-
lows, in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change as if that is all
there is’. This splintering effect leads to contemplating what the Indies’ post-
modern narratives augur in relation to the homogenising time of nation
pedagogically propagated by Bollywood. Bollywood has generated its own
Interstitial Indies Interrogating India’s Double Narrative 111
mythological hyperreality (Schaefer and Karan, 2013: 132) in the form of a
monadic space where traditions and a mythical religious national imaginary
are couched in fantastical stories and plots. The Indies fracture this tradi-
tional sense of national ethno-religious (Hindu) unity through their recon-
figuration and contestation of Bollywood’s mythologised conception of the
hyperreal.
Significantly, in their heterogeneous thematic articulations, several Indies’
disaggregated narrative structures stand apart from classical Bollywood’s
didactic delivery and tripartite Aristotelian ‘linear progression’: from ‘patri-
archal status quo’ to ‘rebellion/conflict’ ultimately leading to ‘resolution
where patriarchal authority is restored’ (Mehta, 2011: 8). In stark contrast
to this mainstream model, Gandu [2010], an Indie film that will subse-
quently be analysed at length, manipulates time and space and resists the
authority of normative representation. It fractures conventional linearities
in terms of story logic and meaning formation. The film accomplishes this
by constant defamiliarisation, subverting audience expectations and bypass-
ing narrative conventions through its chaotic bricolage and pastiche of indi-
vidual paradigmatic filmic elements.
The Indies’ postmodern tropes extend to experiments with multiple iden-
tities, narratives, encounters between urban and rural and the omnipresence
of televisual media. In their diegetic frames, these new films often repre-
sent the pervasive presence of virtual interfaces such as social media and
mobile electronic devices. These symbols of technology and hyperreality
often appear as integral mediatory implements used by film characters to
filter and negotiate their daily real world experience. It is important to note
that Indies, including Peepli Live (2010), The Lunchbox (2013) and Ship of
Theseus (2103), consistently demonstrate India’s digital divide through their
representation of digital ‘have-nots’ – individuals and groups denied access
to or alienated from postmodern urban India’s technological transforma-
tions (Kool and Agrawal, 2006: 180). This is in contrast to Bollywood’s
fetishising and commodification of smart phones, tablets and other gadgets
as symbols and instruments of privilege (Basu, 2010: 189). In terms of repre-
sentation, the Indies exhibit the postmodern trait of attenuating or bridging
the ‘high/low’ divide (Hayward, 2013: 292), combining realism with enter-
tainment. Through their representations of micro-narratives and subalterns,
the Indies demonstrate that ‘postmodernism in culture’, one way or another,
is an ‘implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational
capitalism today’ (Jameson, 1991: 3). It could be asserted that the Indies
and Bollywood address this postmodern politico-cultural stance on capital
in distinctly diverging if not antithetical ways.
For instance, Peepli Live depicts a media-saturated urban Indian pub-
lic sphere, mass-producing sensationalist discourse to a demanding demo-
graphic of cosmopolitan consumers, highlighting the fracture between
India’s capital-driven cities and their agrarian other. Ship of Theseus por-
trays the imperative of technological devices, including mobile phones and
laptops, and social media, used by characters to navigate their daily lives.
Ultimately, the film uses its philosophical grammar to convey the dehuman-
ising and alienating effects of these technological implements when wielded
as simulacra of symbolic capital in a milieu where exchange value increas-
ingly precedes use value (Harvey, 2014: 15).
It is also important to understand the undercurrent that stimulates urban
India’s immersion into simulacra and the hyperreal. The nation is undergo-
ing a fractious shift from a mythologised historico-religious past towards
a more contemporaneous homogenising time of consumer capitalism. This
transition gestures towards a growing universal drive, a unidimensional
thrust towards the attainment of middle-class economitas – economic
gravitas as the barometer of social gravitas and acceptance. This phenom-
enon is significantly an artefact of globalisation’s standardisation of soci-
eties through public spaces – malls and multiplexes, or as Amit Rai (2009)
prefers, ‘malltiplexes’, and the anonymity of cyberspace and new media. In
general, the above vicissitudes fit into the frame of urban India’s collaps-
ing of reality ‘exclusively into images, illusions and simulations’ (Slattery,
1995: 286).
Allusions to the hyperreal can be traced to earlier scholarship on
Bollywood. This relates to scholars, such as Vijay Mishra, referring to
the Indian ‘proletariat’s’ en masse spectatorship of Bollywood stars as the
darshan (worship) of simulated on-screen ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ in cinema
halls that are more akin to ‘temples of desire’ (Mishra, 2002: 1). B audrillard
deems hyperreal ‘the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory
models in a hyperspace without atmosphere’ (Baudrillard, 2001: 170). This
vacuum is analogous to Partha Chatterjee’s (2004: 4) elucidation of ‘empty
homogeneous time’ facilitating the illusory unity of the imagined nation
(Anderson, 2006) and the virtual commonality that this engenders.
Chatterjee suggests that this all-encompassing empty time is a temporal-
ity that is susceptible to the indiscriminate or exploitative designs of capi-
tal (Chatterjee, 2004: 4, 6). Therefore, in the context of my argument, the
imaginary dimension of the hyperreal and its simulacra of sensorial spaces
incorporate India’s metropolitan multiplexes (or malltiplexes), which are
postmodern temples where Bollywood’s invocation of the hyperreal is per-
formed. This ‘sanctified’ space provides a forum for Bollywood’s narration
of the national drive towards capital and hyperreal consumer-oriented life-
styles. In essence, Bollywood and the malltiplex are a (hyper)link to India’s
current neoliberal imagination of the nation – its new national homoge-
neous time.
Bollywood integrates enunciations of religious hyperreality into its new
neoliberal narrative, exhibiting a simultaneous and paradoxical concatena-
tion of two dominant forms of homogenising time in India. Carole Cusack
(2012: 282, 294) connects the ‘hyperreal simulacrum’ of Indian televisual
and cinematic practices with Hindu nationalism, or ‘hyperreal religions’,
citing the overarching popularity in the 1980s of the TV series adaptation of
the Hindu mythological text, the Ramayana. Cusack observes the religious
fervour generated by mass consumption of the series, likening its viewership
to the darshanic (worshipping) gaze. Ramayana’s star actors were appro-
priated as talismanic emissaries to propagate the agenda of political parties
in India. The popular engagement with Ramayana by the majority Hindu
populace, particularly in Hindi-speaking northern India, was harnessed by
the nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), who perceived possibilities
of political mileage in Ramayana’s simulacral authenticity (Cusack, 2012:
282). Interestingly, a wide array of sadhus and sadhvis (religious ascetics)
populate the political ranks of the current BJP government and its religious
affiliates, demonstrating the lack of distinction between religion and politics
in India.
Lutgendorf asserts that ‘allusions to the Hindu epics, especially through
dialogues and the names of characters, abound in popular Hindi films’
(Lutgendorf, 2007: 19), such as Bollywood science-fiction film Rudraksh
(2004) that references the Ramayana. In this context, several Bollywood
films, particularly since the 1990s, have served as hyperreal narrative vehi-
cles for normative Hindu nationalism. Mainstream cinema’s almost obliga-
tory religious iconography continues to punctuate contemporary narratives.
For example, the song and dance set-piece from the film Don (2006), Morya
Re, is a devotional paean to Lord Ganesh. Producer Karan Johar’s remake
of an earlier Bollywood film, Agneepath (2012,) prominently depicts its
main star, Hrithik Roshan, propitiating Ganesh in prayer, echoing his pre-
decessor, Amitabh Bachchan, who paid obeisance with a similar incantation
in the original film.
Religious hyperreal simulacra in TV series and Bollywood films of the
late 1980s and 90s continue to be popularised in updated tele-serialisations
of Hindu mythologies, including the Mahabharat, which aired in the early
2010s. In commercial cinema, to some extent, the affirmation of majority
religious ideology has shifted to a supporting role in light of contemporary
Bollywood privileging the pursuit of capitalist plenitude. Arguably, Indian
audiences now vicariously accompany virtual onscreen Bollywood ‘gods’
and ‘goddesses’ on imaginary sojourns to exotic global locations – junkets
of the young upper-class Indian jet set, as seen in the 2011 film Zindagi Na
Milegi Dobara (‘You Don’t Live Twice’).
To a significant degree, the new Indies have destabilised familiar
Bollywood imaginings of neoliberal ostentation and opulence, by con-
spicuously breaking the Bollywood mould of largely north-Indian-centric
representation. This fragmentation of unilinear representation has several
contours and dimensions. The Indies’ narratives traverse the nation, express-
ing local specificities: Lucia (2013), a Kannada film from South India is set
in Bangalore; Papilio Buddha (2013) is situated in Kerala; Parched(2015) is
situated in Gujarat; Masaan (2015) in Varanasi, Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)
is located in the rural hinterland of northeastern Bihar; Liar’s Dice (2013)
traces a journey from snow-clad Himachal Pradesh to Delhi and Fandry
(2013) unfolds in rural Maharashtra. The polyvocality of these Indie films is
a distinctive feature, augmented by their representations of ordinary every-
day life. Unlike B ollywood, Indie narratives often critically evaluate daily
encounters between India’s dyadic construct of postmodern hyperreality
and retrenched religiosity. Ship of Theseus is an apt example, with its narra-
tive revealing a nation reluctant to divest itself of its traditional and religious
past. This turbulent tug of war between national past and future waged in
the present constitutes a recurring theme for the Indies, themselves located
in an ‘in-between’ space. Therefore, the India re-imagined in the Indies, par-
ticularly as presented to a Western audience, offers different, multifaceted
dimensions and challenges the West’s convenient, reductionist and conde-
scending conflation of all Indian cinema with Bollywood.
Overall, the marginalisation of alternative narratives in the unitary mythic
construction of both Indian history and Indian cinema post-independence
are integral points in the Indies imagination and contestation of a homo-
genising national metanarrative. Bhattacharya argues that Indian cinema is
‘a mythology whereby a political history of disjunctures is naturalised into
a unitary ideology of the nation’ (Bhattacharya, 2012: 25). Her assertion
is valid and pertinent to Bollywood’s meta-hegemony and the Indies’ artic-
ulation of divergences and disjunctures that undercut a monodimensional
construction of ‘political history’. This proposition, therefore, largely echoes
a double temporal construction of nation – the homogenising mythic time
and a present time of undecidability (Bhabha, 1994: 37, 70, 77, 208, 220;
Pisters, 2009: 302). The next section focuses on the Indies as interstitial,
mimetic yet polemical interrogators of India’s own current liminal transi-
tion from tradition to modernity; in other words, the nation’s negotiation of
‘double time’ (Bhabha, 1994: 208) and the Indies’ interpretation of it.
The Indies and Double Time

The topical nature of this study on the emergence of new independent Indian
cinema since 2010 renders it important to reappraise the nature of India’s
national homogenising time in line with its present form. Similar to Bhabha,
Partha Chatterjee highlights and commends Benedict Anderson’s (2006)
thesis of the imagined nation that exposes the ideologically constructed idea
of a monolithic nation-state community. However, Chatterjee considers the
construction of nation in ‘homogeneous empty time’ problematic, because
he sees national time as heterogeneous, a place where politics ‘does not
mean the same thing to all people’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 4–7).
As mentioned in the preceding section, the concept of a shared albeit
imagined national consciousness places the national subject in an illusory
time and space – a false and meretricious sense of commonality. Chatterjee
illustrates the tenuousness of ‘large anonymous socialities being formed by
the simultaneous experience of reading the daily newspaper or following
the lives of popular fictional characters’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 5). According
to Anderson, this apparent commonality facilitates discourse in the public
sphere relating to shared social anxieties – ‘prices, wages, markets and so
on’ (ibid.) For Chatterjee, the jeopardy in this paradigm is that the empty
homogeneous time of the nation is also the dominion of capital and, in his
opinion, capital brooks no interference or resistance to its expansion (ibid.).
It could be argued that unregulated neoliberalism and the apparently
inexorable proliferation of capital in India constructs a hermetic cylinder of
empty homogenising time. This is essentially comprised of a new temporal
mono-logic of nation manufactured through an ersatz sense of oneness that
is supposedly based on the common aspirational goal of capital enterprise
and economic gain. In this topography, Bollywood’s capital generation and
global franchising potential facilitates its ideological potential to monopo-
lise national cultural time (and space). Bollywood’s dominance largely fits
Anderson’s aforementioned frame of ‘large anonymous socialities’ engaged
in ‘following the lives of popular fictional characters’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 5).
Pushing its own monetary interests, both at home and abroad, Bollywood’s
meta-hegemonic soft-power narrative has gained paramountcy by being
co-opted as a national cultural signifier. The industry now symbolises an
indispensible cultural bulwark for the new neoliberal empty homogenising
time of the nation. What does this entail for the new Indies who are attempt-
ing to create a space in the dominant Bollywood domain?
It is worth considering scenarios surrounding the Indies’ increasing
‘encroachment’ into the above-described homogenising time and space of
nation, hitherto secured and hegemonised on a cultural level by Bollywood.
This prompts presaging of the possible outcomes of an intensifying imbri-
cation between Bollywood’s homogenising time and the time of undecid-
ability signified by the Indies. This intermeshing of temporalities reaffirms
this book’s conceptualisation of the Indies as ‘hybrid mutants’; interstitial
cinematic forms that are spawned from and represent the prevalent uncer-
tainties and contradictions in the extant socio-politico-cultural system.
In this regard, it could be contemplated whether the Indies are necessitat-
ing an ongoing reorientation in Bollywood itself – a shift in the complacent
linearity of the mainstream industry’s time-space continuum. Unconven-
tional new Bollywood films, such as The Dirty Picture (2011), a biopic
about a female south Indian soft-porn film star, and PK (2014), a satiri-
cal critique of India’s obsessive religiosity, indicate an ‘Indie influence’ in
Bollywood. If this influence becomes more pervasive, it is possible to con-
sider whether a wider disjuncture in Bollywood’s representation of a linear
national narrative could be orchestrated. It may then be useful to ask if the
state’s ‘homogeneous postulate of identity’ could be ‘left behind’’ (Marramao,
2012: 211) – ‘behind’ here alluding to the temporal narrative of the national
past. In this respect, it may be useful to frame the Indies within the notion
of postcolonial cinema as exhorting its viewers to ‘reflect upon the repercus-
sions of policies of the past within the present as well as their implications
for the future’ (Chauduri, 2012: 195).
Academic prognostication aside, if Bollywood’s modern narratives, over-
whelmingly, are reflections of the urban bourgeoisie’s immersion into con-
sumer capitalism, and by that token are a barometer of India’s neoliberal
narrative as the predominant inscription, how do the Indies paint themes
of temporal undecidability on the canvas of a transforming nation? This is
particularly important when both Bollywood and right-wing elements of the
Indian political system seem invested in the ambivalent retention of ‘tradi-
tional’ Hindu ideology and the pursuit of consumer capitalism.
Indian cinema’s historiographical timeline, which experienced a g lobalisation-
induced disjuncture in the 1990s (with Bollywood at the vanguard of trans-
formations in the industry), again appears at a fault line, within the event
horizon of another fissure. This time, a fracture could be precipitated by
the glocal Indies, necessitating reconfigurations in Indian cinema’s current
post-globalisation timeline and paving the way for even greater hybridity.
As has been stressed, the Indies emphasise their point of departure from
normative structures by sometimes functioning as filmic texts of resistance;
Harud (2010), I Am (2010), Papilio Buddha and Gandu being pertinent
examples. It could be argued that the Indies exercise mostly fluid and subtle
but sometimes overt and subversive strategies to interrogate the dominant
national narrative and Bollywood’s linear representation of it. Most prom-
inent among these mechanisms is the Indies’ evocation of the forgotten and
disavowed ‘ghosts’ that dwell in the in-between third space (Bhabha, 1994:
55, 312) of the double national narrative.
Ghosts of Narratives Past and Present

The European Jews massacred are not just of the past, they are the
presence of an absence.
—Emil Fackenheim (quoted in Shoah, 1985)
This section argues that the Indies represent some of the past voices from
India’s historiographical evolutionary timeline. Despite being disavowed,
excluded or erased from collective memory, these voices from the past are
a constant presence in vicissitudes of the nation’s present. In essence, these
elided voices – the ghosts of nation – are present despite their absence. Aes-
thetic and auditory representations of forgotten narratives made visible and
audible in the Indies’ film frame particularly enables subaltern ghosts to
speak and therefore brings them to ‘life’. These audio-visual instantiations
possess the propensity to throw the viewer into an unsettled state of unde-
cidability or ‘crisis’. This abstract evocation of marginalised narratives and
voices by the Indies resonates with the thesis that displaced spectral voices
inhabit an interstitial space, both in Indie film narratives as well as in the
temporal narrative of nation.
Representing the concept of nation as a temporal process necessitates an
examination of the nation’s ‘disjunctive time’, which signifies fractures in the
ostensibly linear timeline of national history (Bhabha, 1994: 142), effected
by minority cultures. Similarly, the modern narrative of nation lies in a
median space, in fault lines and inconsistencies between its ever-changing
(post)modern present and the overarching ‘certainties of a nationalist ped-
agogy’, steeped in a purportedly originary past (ibid.). Akin to ‘colonial
authority’ (Huddart, 2006: 110), this overweening nationalist pedagogy,
as mentioned previously, is susceptible to manipulation by right-wing reli-
gious ideology and, increasingly in the postmodern age, to the dictates of
capital. Where does this leave alternative and minority narratives that are
excluded during the process of constructing the linear nationalist pedagogy
of homogenous time?
It could be asserted that the new Indian Indies, as cultural intermediaries,
to a large extent perform the function of mediating between national past
and future. As more self-reflexive cinematic proponents than Bollywood,
they do so by dint of their themes and narratives, resurrecting spectres of
several specific historical events that have been precluded or effaced from
the nation’s postcolonial metanarrative.
It is possible to summon the analogy of Anish Kapoor’s art installation
Ghost (1997) to gain a better understanding of the spectres of events, individ-
uals and communities forgotten and marginalised in India’s nation-building
process. Kapoor’s sculpture Ghost, a monolith of Kilkenny limestone with a
black reflecting surface, has a cul-de-sac hewn into its centre containing the
installation’s titular uncanny presence, its intangible aura (Bhabha, 2012). It
is from within this ghostly core that the viewer’s ‘reflection gradually gathers
definition, a distorted, mutable uncertain shade, which does not so much
announce your death as offer a shaky, dreamy, partial guarantee of your
continuing presence on earth’ (Warner, 2003: 215).
Homi Bhabha (2012) narrates his unsettling experience: a sense of dis-
placement upon viewing his own inverted transmogrified image in the reflect-
ing centre of the Ghost stone. His apprehension prompts him to realise that
a work of art is not confined to being just an object but rather represents
a rite of passage, a corridor between the past and present, a transitional
moment when our enduring conceptions of identity are transformed into
‘crisis’ (Bolt, 2011: 34). It is possible to analogise this evocation of crisis to
the new Indies that represent alternative narratives from an interstitial space
and unsettle the equilibrium of a linear homogenising Bollywood.
The above crisis of identity originates from the unravelling of certainty
during the temporal encounter. In the case of Ghost, it happens during the
hiatus between Bhabha’s self, which directs its gaze at what he expects will
be his reflected other, and the appearance of the other’s belated, distorted
answering gaze. The linearity of time and space is broken in the process
between Bhabha directing his glance at the Ghost core, the formation of
his grotesque reflection in the core, and its returning ‘stare’ back at Bhabha.
This shattering of Bhabha’s preconceived or expected notion of stable unity
and the artwork postponing revelation of its presence signifies a disruption
of linearity. This dislocation or deferral of cohesive meaning, in turn inau-
gurates a time of undecidability or ‘crisis’ (Bhabha, 2012).
The notion of crisis evokes Derrida’s description of ghosts in Ken
McMullen’s film Ghost Dance (1983). Derrida draws from Freud, describ-
ing two ways of mourning the dead. The first is by ‘internalising the dead’
into ourselves – accepting them as ‘dead’ and hence being able to engender
some form of closure. The other form of mourning involves ‘incorpora-
tion’; where the dead are co-opted into our bodies, but instead of being
absorbed they occupy a certain space in our bodies, leading to a splitting
of the body (Ghost Dance, 1983). This bisection of the body could be
related to the double time of the (body of) nation: the dissonance between
homogenising mythic time and the uncertain, fluctuating present time of
undecidability.
The process of splitting consigns ghosts of excluded minority narratives
to a liminal interstitial space in the nation’s official pedagogical narrative.
The presence of these ghosts, despite denial of their existence and their inter-
mittent interventions in the everyday performative functions of the body of
nation, results in a sense of disequilibrium. This initiates a ‘zone of occult
instability’ (Fanon, 1963: 226; Bhabha, 1994: 218–219), which is a larger,
macro-level, national manifestation of the micro-crisis of identity experi-
enced on a more abstract, individual scale by Bhabha upon perceiving his
grotesquely reflected ghost. This latter concentrated effect may also be expe-
rienced by Indian cinema audiences witnessing unsettling Indie narrations
of nation.
Summing up the transplantation of the above thesis to the corpus of the
nation, marginalised and forgotten narratives foreclosed during the for-
mation of the nation-state are not assimilated into its historical national
narrative. However, they continue to haunt the liminal spaces of national for-
mation in the present. These narratives attempt to articulate and sometimes
contest their alterity and exclusion from the dominant common national
metanarrative which forms the representational core. A good recent Indie
example is the independent film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (2014),
starring Irrfan Khan, which revisits the traumatic dismembering events of
the post-independence Partition, revealing the residual spectres incorpo-
rated into and forever haunting the split body of nation.
Bhabha emphasises that the only way to represent interstitial spaces is by
a process of repeatedly questioning the ‘representational core’, from the out-
side (Bhabha, 2012). In a broader context, this core represents the beating
ideological heart of mythologised national traditions and values that homo-
genise citizens under the banner of imagined nation. Bhabha prescribes a
repetitive disruption of the ‘representational core’, from the margins, by
incorporating the ‘ghosts’ of alternative and minority representations, with
a view to altering and mutating the ossified core.
This approach could contest the core’s credibility as a fixed point of
origin. Therefore, this sustained process of shape-shifting the core from the
periphery, akin to the Ghost, slowly reveals the amorphous, multiplicity of
propositions and perspectives that lie concealed by the towering presence of
the core. Ghosts of the nation problematise easy Manichean dualities: the
simplicity of belonging or not belonging, of either ‘negative or affirmative
space’ (Bhabha, 2012), or the superficial binaries of simply positive or neg-
ative meanings and identities: ‘the framed and the free, what is inside and
outside’ (ibid.). Arguably, the new Indies, with their heterodox narratives
that contain marginal and forgotten narratives, perform this function of
blurring distinctions.
Revenants also continually haunt India’s present time of capital, charac-
terised by widening inequity and signifying a national time of undecidabil-
ity. Arundhati Roy’s 2014 publication Capitalism: A Ghost Story is timely in
this context, and her book’s main themes are pertinent to this section. Roy
enunciates the specific context of India’s ghosts:
In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post–International

Monetary Fund ‘reforms’ middle class – the market – live side by side
with the spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry
wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000
debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 m illion
who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.
(Roy, 2014: 8)
Roy therefore reveals India’s thrust towards the neoliberal free market as
being cheek-by-jowl with the casualties of unmediated consumerism – the
nation’s ghosts. It must be acknowledged that the Indies, distinctive in their
narrative divergence from Bollywood’s dominant representations of the
aspirational middle-class, are nevertheless themselves discursively enmeshed
in what Roy refers to as the ‘middle-class market’. It is mainly in this urban
middle-class arena that the Indies have to manoeuvre for space in a meta-
hegemonic Bollywood-centric film industry. This conundrum exemplifies
not only the singularity of India’s new Indies but cogently demonstrates the
intricate, indiscriminate, often contradictory field of globalisation in which
the Indies vie for space. Peepli Live is probably the most relevant Indie film
interpretation of the suppressed narrative of farmer suicides, as elucidated
by Roy. A more detailed study will be conducted in a later chapter dedicated
to the themes in Peepli Live.
The Indies’ narration of the mundane and the ordinary often percolates
deep into the nether realms of oppressed and marginalised subaltern sub-
jects and communities. It could be argued that the Indies, in their renderings
of alternative stories, deploy overt and covert mechanisms; objects, charac-
ters or allusions that release the apparitions of forgotten events and people.
In this regard, these films often evoke representations of interstitial spaces
from the periphery, by setting up a main narrative theme as their ‘represen-
tational core’; a central plot or storyline. They then proceed to destabilise
this ostensibly straightforward thematic core by introducing from the mar-
gins of the main narrative, ghosts that transgress the core narrative’s logical
or unilinear constructions of identity, time and space. As stated earlier, there
are manifold devices or artifices strategically deployed to bring these ghosts
to life in the Indies. In addition to secondary or tertiary narratives inserted
into the main storyline, several Indies include nondescript objects, props
or media that appear in the mise-en-scène of the film’s diegetic world, such
as a hand pump, video tapes, radio broadcasts or television news reports.
These ostensibly inconsequential insertions contain intertextual references
or extrapolations of past, present or future events.
Derrida sees cinema as ‘the art of ghosts; a battle of phantoms’, asserting
that ‘the future belongs to phantoms’ (Ghost Dance, 1983). Following his
encounter with the art installation Ghost, Bhabha infers that the phantoms
of marginalised narratives are difficult to contain within the frame of the
artwork. Transposing this to the new Indies’ thematic verisimilitude, the
spectres they portray seem to simultaneously inhabit ‘the inside’ of the films’
narrative space and the materiality of the outside world. Ultimately, I would
argue that in their representation, several new Indies, such as Dhobi Ghat
(2010), render marginalised ghosts as both virtual and real presences, in
films and in the national narrative.
Shonali Bose’s independent film Amu (2005) is a potent example of
the assertion that it is difficult to distinguish between the ghosts’ fictional
presence in the Indie cinema frame and their real presence in the everyday
lived experience. The film engages with Kaju, a young American woman of
Bengali origin, who returns to India on holiday and inadvertently stumbles
onto the dark secrets of her past. She eventually discovers that her birth
name was Amu, before she was given up for adoption to new parents and
a life in America. Amu’s biological father and baby brother were murdered
during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Her traumatised mother, unable to
countenance the aftermath, hangs herself. During the events of 1984, thou-
sands of Sikhs were massacred following the assassination of incumbent
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Probably the first
Indian film to critically appraise the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, Amu also con-
fronts the historical dimensions of India’s current internal divisions.
The film illustrates how the shadow lines between self and the other are
indistinguishable; instead of being dichotomised, identities are fluid, indis-
tinct and overlapping – the part exists within the whole and the whole exists
within the part. The gradual uncovering of Amu’s past unleashes the ghosts
of visceral, bloody events suppressed and disavowed in the Indian historical
narrative. The massacre of Sikhs in reprisal for Indira Gandhi’s assassination
is still a taboo topic in the Indian political and public sphere. Self-reflexive
and polemical cinematic investigations of the anti-Sikh riots are still subject
to scrutiny by state authority.
The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), under the custodianship
of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, directed Bose to extirpate
references to the riots and their political motivations (Walsh, 2005). The
complicity of the local police force with the ruling Congress government
in permitting the killings is revealed during crucial plot-points in the film
and particularly at its climax. After learning the truth, Amu and her friend
Kabir are seated near a railway station abutting the slum where Amu was
born. A news bulletin emanating from a television in the railway-side tea
stall announces the death of 58 Hindu activists on the Sabarmati Express at
Godhra railway station in the western state of Gujarat. This incident trig-
gered the 2002 Godhra riots and precipitated the mass killings of Muslims.
Following the news report, passers-by start milling around the teashop’s
television. The camera performs a slow pan, gliding into a bird’s-eye view
crane shot of the railway tracks, capturing the impoverished, precarious
dwellings of the trackside inhabitants, their homes so close to the inter-
secting railway lines, they appear to melt into them. The distant departing
figures of Amu and Kabir can be discerned along the railway tracks amidst
the gathering throng of pedestrians as a train slides into frame across an
adjacent track. Through this sequence of events, the film effectively per-
forms a conjuring of phantoms from the past: victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh
riots. These ghosts are embodied in the film’s present by their ‘descendant’,
Amu. The narrative proceeds to link the spectral detritus of the ghosts of
1984, with a premonition of the future – the 2002 Godhra massacre. In this
sense, a compression of time and space is enacted through Amu’s dénoue-
ment. The past, 1984, folds into Amu’s diegetic present, which in turn pre-
figures future events. Amu’s re-invocation of 1984’s forgotten narratives in
the film’s plot time, set at the cusp of the 2002 Gujarat massacre, also ges-
tures towards the nation’s present, its current situation of religio-communal
precarity. As Amu’s director pointed out in an interview with David Walsh,
‘the seeds of the politics of the last twenty years were sown in 1984’
(Walsh, 2005).
The recrudescence of communal violence in Gujarat in 2002, alluded
to in Amu’s epilogue, signposts the ascendency of Narendra Modi, current
Prime Minister of India and incumbent Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time
of the Godhra incident. Rustom Bharucha cites numerous scholars such as
Asghar Ali Engineer (2003) and Martha Nussbaum (2007) to ascribe the
term ‘genocide’ to the killings in Gujarat, owing to ‘predetermined calcula-
tion and the intention to kill’ (Bharucha, 2014: 95). Bharucha also mentions
several social organisations, including the National Human Rights Com-
mission and Human Rights Watch’s indictment of Narendra Modi’s ‘role
in engineering the genocide’ (ibid.). Nussbaum (2008: 50–51) in particular
perceives the Gujarat violence as a pogrom of ‘ethnic cleansing carried out
with the complicity of the state’. In the context of these observations, the
significance of railway tracks and the passing train in Amu’s climactic scene
evokes three monumental temporal events seared into the timeline of post-
colonial Indian historiography, events that are largely elided or sublated in
the construction of nation.
Amu’s trope of the transient train recalls Train to Pakistan (1998) and
Earth (1998), films that re-enact or re-imagine the carnage precipitated by
the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan, resulting in genocide on both
sides and the loss of up to a million lives. Analogous to the Nazi Holocaust,
trains functioned as mobile theatres or sites for extermination, with many
trains during the Partition arriving at their destinations ridden with corpses.
Amu bases its reconstruction of the 1984 killing of Sikhs beside a railway
station based on actual incidents. The Gujarat anti-Muslim violence of 2002
was precipitated by the immolation of a train carriage in Godhra railway
station that contained 58 occupants, predominantly activists belonging to
far-right Hindu groups, the VHP and Bajrang Dal (We Have No Orders to
Save You, 2002).
Amu’s tripartite invocation of past, present and future events foreshad-
ows several later new Indies performing similar interpretations of the time
of nation, including the banned film Kaum de Heere (‘Diamonds of the
Community’, 2014), which includes a representation of Indira Gandhi’s
assassination. These overlaps in filmic attributes across the alternative cin-
ema timeline validate the perception of the new Indies as historiographical
hybrids from an interstitial space. In addition, the ramifications of Amu’s
final sequence presaging Godhra and the massacres that ensued still rever-
berates and if anything has reached a crescendo in the nation’s present,
visible in rising violent intolerance towards minorities under the veil of
right-wing nationalist Hindutva politics. The film’s clairvoyant coda there-
fore captures and forecasts the nation’s continuing time of undecidability.
In this regard, films such as Amu and Nandita Das’s Firaaq (2008), which
delves into the aftermath of the Gujarat carnage, obscure borders between
film narrative temporality and real time. Representing the interstitial space,
several independent films therefore form a disruptive, repetitious periph-
eral force that interrogates the representational core and destabilises the
national narrative’s time-space horizontality.
Rakesh Sharma’s documentary Final Solution (2003) is a visceral exposé
of the chilling events leading up to the massacre of more than 2,000 M uslims
in Gujarat by VHP and Bajrang Dal extremists. The film also reveals the
complicity of several Hindu fundamentalist leaders and political groups, the
ruling BJP and Narendra Modi in either orchestrating or condoning the kill-
ings. Overall, it could be reaffirmed that the above films and several current
Indies raise questions about the act of forgetting. These films’ re-invocation
of the ghosts of bloody and violent events in national history, including the
Gujarat genocide, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the contravention of civil
liberties in Kashmir, is comparable to Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent award-
winning film, The Act of Killing (2012).
In his documentary, Oppenheimer gets state-sanctioned Indonesian ‘gang-
sters’ to re-enact the brutal acts of mass murder they perpetrated in the past
during a nationwide pogrom against alleged communists, following the fall
of the Sukarno government in the 1960s. During their reconstructions and
oral testimonies, the gangsters are confronted by the ghosts of their victims.
Similarly, the marginal figures and narratives that inhabit the celluloid space
of many Indian Indie films unsettle and expose the duplicity of the official
homogenising national narrative. To some extent, Aamir Bashir’s Harud
and Onir’s I Am perform similar self-reflexive examinations of the national
narrative. These and other manifestations of ‘ghosts’ integrated into Indie
narratives, often at a subtextual level, will be scrutinised at length in case
studies of selected films exhibiting varying modes of conjuring these narra-
tival ghosts.
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6 Running with Scissors
Censorship and Regulation
Censorship is a perennially traversed topic in scholarship on Indian cinema.

Several recent studies have delved deep into the intricacies of film censor-
ship, certification and regulation, especially the role of the Central Board of
Film Certification (CBFC) and its operations under the aegis of the Ministry
of Information and Broadcasting. Someswar Bhowmik’s essay ‘Film
Censorship in India: Deconstructing an Incongruity’ (2013) and Monika
Mehta’s Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011) provide par-
ticularly incisive academic analyses in this regard. However, these studies
and others tend to focus on mainstream Indian cinema. When they do refer
to independent films, their evocation is either intermittent or neglects the
credentials of alternative films as offering a bona fide cohesive corpus and
a distinctive discourse in Indian cinema. This could be attributable to the
timelines of such scholarship and their intentional focus on Bollywood or
could be symptomatic of the general lacuna in scholarship relating to the
emergence of a new wave of Indian independent cinema.
In order not to step on the toes of previous scholarship in these broader
areas, this chapter will examine censorship in Indian cinema within the
contours of the new Indies, whilst still invoking existing scholarly liter-
ature as a frame of comparison. It will also attempt, wherever possible,
to address gaps in research, contextualising and therefore contempori
sing the discourse of censorship through the current Indies. In this regard,
it would be impossible to disregard the significance of rapidly transpiring
recent events that directly impact the future of the Indies. These include
politically engineered reorientations in the CBFC, foundational state-
orchestrated overhauls in key funding organisations, such as the National
Film Development Corporation (NFDC), and strategic installations of
religio-politically partisan individuals in positions of cultural power, most
notably at the wellspring of critical art cinema; India’s premier film school,
the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. The overall endea
vour is to co-relate the multifaceted themes and issues arising in this sec-
tion on censorship to the main focus of this book. It must be mentioned
that some of the interviewed former CBFC board members, whose input
informs elements of this chapter, have been anonymised in adherence to
their wishes.
Politics, Polemics and the CBFC
An analysis of fieldwork research interviews alongside an appraisal of the
extant literature on India’s state-controlled censorship suggests a largely
dyadic mode of organisation and function. This is both in terms of hierar-
chical power structures as well as bifurcation in the actual standards and
practices of operation.
Cinema censorship in India is the overarching prerogative of the state’s
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The CBFC is the Ministry’s offi-
cial arm and carries out the process of ‘certification’, which mainly involves
granting films a U (Unrestricted Public Exhibition), U/A (Unrestricted but
with Parental Advisory for children below 12 years), or A (Restricted) cer-
tificate (Cbfcindia.gov.in, 2014; Mehta, 2011: 14). The CBFC also possesses
the power to deny certification to a film, blurring the distinction between
censorship and certification. The trajectory of film censorship in India has
to a large degree been predicated on the process of expurgation rather than
certification (Bose, 2013: 195); a notion exemplified by the organisation’s
significantly superficial nomenclatural change from ‘Board of Film Censors’
to ‘Board of Film Certification’ in 1983 (ibid.). This moniker change not-
withstanding, the persistent use of the term ‘Censor Board’ to refer to the
CBFC, much to the consternation of (now former) members of the CBFC
interviewed during fieldwork, appears unanimous across a spectrum of
demographic agents. This runs the gamut of filmmakers, newspapers, media,
film scholars and denizens of Indian civil society.
Paradoxically, ‘Censor Board’ is consistently used as a self-referential tag
in the official communiqués of Prasar Bharati, India’s national public broad-
casting system, an organisation significantly influenced by the M inistry of
Information and Broadcasting. ‘Censor Board’ also appears in the guidelines
of the official application form for filmmakers hoping to have their films
screened on the state television channel Doordarshan (Prasar Bharati, 2014).
The above scenario suggests a tacit refusal to acknowledge the Board’s
revamped title by the wider Indian public, not to mention the persistent,
if anomalous, use of the erstwhile appellation by its own progenitors. To a
large extent, these factors reflect a general reluctance amongst the public
to affirm the legitimacy of the CBFC’s purportedly benign and euphemistic
eponymous function of certification.
On its website, the CBFC describes itself as being comprised of ‘non-
official’ board members and a chairperson, appointed by the Central
Government (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, n.d.). These board
members are non-official in the sense that they are not directly affiliated to
the government and are usually established and recognised individuals in
various fields across the arts and culture. In this regard, they are invited or
nominated to function as Board members and their appointments ratified by
the central authority.
In addition, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting appoints
an ‘official’ Advisory Panel with nine regional branches. These panels are
Running with Scissors 127
purported to be constitutive and representative of the nation’s broad
demographic (Bose, 2013: 195). In reality, as Bhowmik (2013) asserts, the
nomination of Advisory Panel members is largely governed by political
nepotism, cronyism and opacity in the bureaucratic process, resulting in the
Panel often being populated by ‘people biased towards or against particular
themes or types of cinematic expression’ (ibid.: 303).
The CBFC’s dyadic structure – Board members and Advisory Panel is
further dichotomised into Examining Committee and Reviewing C ommittee
(Bose, 2013: 195). This subdivision appears nebulous and redundant, because
the Advisory Panel effectively constitutes the Examining Committee and
the Reviewing Committee is an amalgamation of selected Board and Panel
members (Bhowmik, 2013). An interviewee mentions that the services of the
CBFC Board members are usually only solicited whenever there is an anom-
aly or dispute in the Examination Committee’s primary certification process.
Such situational exigencies then pass down to the Reviewing C ommittee,
which includes representatives from the Board, nominated according to their
suitability to evaluate the specificities of each censorship dispute.
The Advisory Panel is therefore at the vanguard of the CBFC’s certifica-
tion procedure. Donning the mantle of the Examining Committee, Panel
members are the first point of contact in the process of appraising a film and
certifying it. According to one of the former members interviewed, the Panel
(or Committee) first views the film and then provides its imprimatur, pre-
scribing cuts and deletions or flagging ‘inappropriate’ content. The Board is
generally regarded as a nominal, subordinate appendage to the larger super-
vening regulatory authority of the Advisory Panel and their common custo-
dian, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The general affirmation
of the Board’s restricted role in the censorship process gleaned from inter-
views with members of the CBFC concurs with the idea that the ‘CBFC is
not an autonomous body’ (Bhowmik, 2013: 302). In addition, there appears
to be a randomness informing the appointment of the Advisory Panel. This
irregularity in the selection process accompanies a confounding indistin-
guishability between Examining and Reviewing Committees and their pro-
genitors, the Board and the Advisory Panel. Both of the above propositions
coalesce into consequent questions about the Panel members’ suitability for
their roles. All of these factors signpost an arbitrariness in the process of
certification and censorship in Indian cinema.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting extends this dichotomous
field of operations (its discrepant distribution of power to the Advisory
Panel and nominated Board members) into arguably dual standards of film
classification. This is manifest in inconsistent, often antithetical, parameters
applied to popular Bollywood films on the one hand, and non-commercial
independent films and documentaries on the other. Bhowmik highlights the
CBFC’s expurgation of a scene from Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) that
depicts the decapitated head of a rebel, while Bollywood director Ramesh
Sippy’s film Shakti (1982) and its portrayal of a person’s head being put
through a sugarcane masher was passed without any cuts (Bhowmik,
2013: 303). These early filmic examples could be contemporised through
several instances of current Indie films undergoing gratuitous excision or
being denied certification, which is tantamount to banning a film outright.
Before examining these examples, it may be useful to orient this discussion
around an understanding of some underlying reasons for this ostensibly
inconsistent if not discriminatory system of film certification and censorship.
Scholarship on censorship in Indian cinema largely focuses on the
domains of sex and violence, situating these areas as definitive demarcators.
For example, Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra (1996) was embroiled in court dis-
putes initiated by the CBFC. Monika Mehta (2011: 74) largely attributes
this to Nair’s non-resident Indian status, the film’s sexual content and conse-
quently the CBFC’s apprehensions about the film’s influence on perceptions
of ‘Indian culture’.
Violence plays partner to sex in the CBFC’s discourse of film censorship,
as the above examples of Elizabeth and Shakti aptly demonstrate. Unlike
sex, however, societal and censoring authority attitudes towards violence
are ambiguous and mostly laissez-faire. This is owing to the interchange-
ability of violence and action-based entertainment as a vital ingredient of
the Indian commercial film genre (Hood, 2009: 5), as manifested in sev-
eral Bollywood blockbusters such as Ghajini (2008) and Singham Returns
(2014). ‘Violence’ in the discourse of Indian cinema censorship is largely
not concerned with nor constrained to overt depictions thereof in the films
themselves.
In practice, ‘violence’ relates more to the CBFC auguring a film’s pro-
pensity to trigger communal violence. In this context, Indie films and docu
mentaries fall discrepantly under the censoring blade compared to their
Bollywood counterparts. This is largely because independent films and
documentaries are more likely to be vehicles of political commentary and
critique. It could be argued that the CBFC has cultivated a pre-emptive policy
of excising or withholding release of some films by raising the spectre of
violence possibly spilling over the film frame into real-life sectarian strife.
In this regard, state control is often arbitrarily exercised through the CBFC
to proscribe several independent films and documentaries containing poli
tical content.
It is possible to affix to the dominant parameters of sex and violence a
third dimension on which censorship and regulation has increasingly been
brought to bear in recent times – the realm of the political. In actuality, the
realms of sex, violence and the political often overlap in the discourse of
censorship in Indian cinema. The new Indies constitute a recurring site for
state intervention in the form of censorship measures aimed at regulating
socio-political critique or even political references in some of these films. The
documentary filmmaking domain, regarded as a distinct yet integral part of
independent Indian filmmaking, has especially come under the scrutinising
gaze of the CBFC. Socialist filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s documentaries
about religious violence, marginalised communities and environmental
activism (In the Name of God [1992]; Jai Bhim Comrade [2011]), have
consistently evoked turbulent debates with right-wing religious groups and
state censorship (Maclay, 2004). As mentioned in Chapter 5, self-reflexive
Indie film critiques of political and juridical complicity in the face of calami
tous national events such as the 1984 anti-Sikh reprisal killings and the
2002 massacre of Muslims in Godhra have consistently been the target for
censorship or injunction.
Shonali Bose’s earlier-mentioned independent film Amu (2005), again, is
a suitable paradigm to illustrate the often arbitrary expurgation of Indian
alternative cinema when it broaches politically sensitive issues from the
nation’s past and present. Amu, ‘the first and probably the only film so far’
to engage with the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi (Somaaya, Kothari
and Madangarli, 2012: 204), explores the nexus between ruling Congress
party politicians and local law enforcement that permitted and often insti-
gated the killings. Bose narrates her experience of the CBFC giving her
film an ‘A’ certificate, despite the film not containing any sex or explicit
violence. She reveals the censors’ rationale for their decision: ‘Why should
young people know a history that is better buried and forgotten?’ (Walsh,
2005). The CBFC’s attempt at the eradication of multiple events from the
collective national memory emphasises the state’s encouragement of empty
homogenising time (Chatterjee, 2004: 6) in the form of a mythologised one-
size-fits-all national history. The Board’s actions symbolise how the grand
narrative of the ‘imagined nation’ is forged through the exclusion or sup-
pression of secondary and tertiary narratives, particularly those detrimental
to the cohesion and linearity of the state-sanctioned metanarrative (Bhabha:
1994; Chatterjee, 2004).
Bose also recounts the censorship of several crucial lines of dialogue from
Amu. A pertinent example of such an omission is a scene in the film where a
widow of one of the murdered Sikh men is asked whether it was one or two
high-ranking ministers responsible for mobilising the mass killings (Walsh,
2005). The women replies, ‘No, it was the entire state, the bureaucracy, the
government, the politicians, the police, all’ (ibid.). After being asked by the
censors to delete the widow’s revelation, Bose decided to do so, substituting
symbolic silence in its place. The filmmaker’s rationale was to invoke the
silence of 1984 widows, rendered inarticulate in the aftermath of the state
apparatus colluding in the deaths of their husbands and around 5,000 other
people (ibid.).
This scenario of censorship exacting silence from national subjects blurs
the distinction between representation and reality. The discourse of indis-
criminate state power is evoked in Amu’s filmic representation of the atro
cities of 1984 and mirrored in the reality of the state’s attempts to control
collective memory through censorship. The notion of the subaltern’s silence
and inability to speak comes to the fore here. Bose’s testimony regarding
the 1984 riot victims’ compensation claims and petitions for perpetrators
to stand trial not having been redressed to this day underpins the thesis of
unified national time and memory being formulated alongside the acts of
alterity and forgetting. In effect, Gayatri Spivak’s question, ‘Can the sub-
altern speak?’ and its addendum ‘Can the subaltern (as woman) speak?’
(Spivak, 2006: 33), are invoked, both in the cinematic silencing of the
widow in Amu, as well as in the inarticulacy of the surviving victims of
1984 and the reality of their unresolved trauma. These seminal questions
can be conflated with Spivak’s thesis that ‘the subaltern has no history
and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’
(Spivak, 2006: 32).
Amu’s brush with censorship underscores what appears to be a recur-
sive phenomenon, particularly in relation to the new wave of Indian Indies.
Another analogy is the recent ‘blocked release’ of independent film Kaum
de Heere (‘Diamonds of the Community’, 2014), based on the 1984 assas-
sination of Indira Gandhi – the event that precipitated communal violence
in Delhi (‘Indira Gandhi’, 2014). The CBFC restrained the film’s release on
the grounds that its screening could vitiate law and order, with political
party members threatening to agitate in the event of the film’s release (ibid.).
In this milieu, the film’s director, Ravinder Ravi, poses an interesting rhe-
torical question, asking why a film about Mrs Gandhi’s murder was almost
inconceivable in India, when films portraying political assassinations were
de rigueur around the world (ibid.)? Ravi’s rumination encapsulates the field
of complexity facing Indian cinema, where the censoring authority has a
propensity to form an impregnable barrier to free filmic expression.
State intervention in the situation of Kaum de Heere seems explicit, con-
sidering that the film had originally been cleared by the CBFC and then
immediately rescinded, after the Home Ministry castigated the film as ‘highly
objectionable’ (Najar, 2014). The state justified its fulmination by alleging
that the film portrayed Mrs Gandhi’s killers in a sympathetic light (ibid.).
This scenario illustrates the Indies’ engagement, and often their encounter,
with the dominant national narrative; this is one of the main areas of focus
in this book. The historical backdrop to the impasse between Kaum de Heere
and the ruling state evokes the 1984 ‘Operation Blue Star’. Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi directed the Indian army to storm the sacred Sikh Golden
Temple complex in the Punjab city of Amritsar in a bid to flush out Sikh
separatists who had occupied the shrine, with the army action resulting in
several civilian casualties (Najar, 2014). The Sikh community denounced the
army-led operation as a desecration of their consecrated religious space.
The incident maligned Mrs Gandhi’s reputation and was widely considered
the cause of her assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards (Das,
2001: 45). In this context, the state’s denial of permission to screen Kaum
de Heere represents ‘the choices that are made to include or exclude events,
people and perspectives in the creation of a cohesive national ‘“story”’
(Lee-Loy, 2010: 28). These sidelined narratives and stories are not dissi-
pated by their exclusion but instead persist in ‘haunting’ the present time of
the nation – the ‘ghosts’ that inhabit the nation’s liminal interstitial space
(see Chapter 6) (Bhabha, 1990: 1; Lee-Loy, 2010: 28).
There is an interesting coda to the above scenario of state censorship
and Kaum de Heere. The imbroglio surrounding the film was augmented by
the subsequent arrest of the CBFC’s chief executive, Rakesh Kumar, on the
charge of accepting bribes in exchange for approving films (Sharma, 2014).
On interrogation, Kumar stated he had received Rupees 100,000 (around
£1,000) from Kaum de Heere’s producers to grant the film a release, an alle-
gation denied by the filmmakers (Najar, 2014; Sharma, 2014). The veracity
of Kumar’s claims or the filmmakers’ vehement refutation notwithstanding,
it is possible to infer that state intervention into the realm of cultural pro-
duction in India is a fait accompli. Rakesh Kumar’s actions precipitating
his arrest, as a metonymic manifestation of macro institutional corruption,
exposes the systemic inconsistencies and lack of autonomy and transpar-
ency in the process of regulation. The above-described agonistic overlaps
between state, CBFC and filmmakers reveal complex layers in the constantly
shifting tectonic plates of censorship in modern Indian cinema.
Scholarship consistently mentions the prevalence of institutional corrup-
tion in the machinery of state censorship. Bribery is described as an almost
conventionalised proviso for filmmakers and producers to circumvent being
encumbered with a certification that is detrimental to the commercial inter-
ests of their films (Bhowmik, 2013: 303; Mehta, 2011: 76, 246). Arguably,
Bollywood, with the buying power of superior production budgets, stands
at the forefront of being able to bypass this system, compared to small-scale
Indie films. Bollywood possesses another more intangible advantage that
enables it to flex its meta-hegemonic muscles: its underlying ideological cre-
dentials in the form of soft power.
An example of this is Aamir Bashir’s experience filming Harud (2010),
with its politically sensitive theme portraying life in conflict-ridden Kashmir.
Bashir recounts in an interview how he had to manoeuvre through seve
ral layers of government bureaucracy as well as the caprices of the CBFC
in order to bring the film to fruition. In order to film in volatile, army-
controlled areas of Kashmir, Bashir had to sometimes film covertly by not
divulging Harud’s theme and plot (Bashir, personal communication, 2013).
Bashir mentions that on occasions when authorities discovered Harud was
not a Bollywood film, their levels of co-operation diminished.
He attributes this to the pervasive privileging of Bollywood star power
that in turn affords big-budget films greater filming rights and access. Bashir,
noting Bollywood’s superiority in gaining access to filming locations remarks:
‘they will not be questioned or contested because they are stars’ (ibid.). This
observation of Bollywood’s ‘star power’ effectively demarcates the hege-
monic cultural capital that forms a part of Bollywood’s soft-power narrative
and shows how it can implicitly influence the narrative of censorship in India.
The earlier mentioned arrest of CBFC Chief Executive Officer Rakesh
Kumar on charges of bribery, largely confirms the assertion that graft and
corruption seem endemic in the ambiguous hierarchies of the organisation.
Before he was remanded to judicial custody, Kumar oversaw the censorship
of Vishal Bharadwaj’s film Haider (2014), an adaptation of Hamlet and akin
to Harud set in Kashmir. Kumar, at the helm of the Examining Committee,
prescribed 41 cuts to the film and proceeded to grant it a U/A certificate
(Lalwani, 2014). CBFC protocol deems that once the Examining Committee
has scrutinised a film and ordained cuts, further responsibility for censor-
ship falls exclusively within the domain of the Reviewing Committee. How-
ever, in the case of Haider, this system was subverted. Senior Board member
and Chair of the Reviewing Committee Nandini Sardesai has revealed that
Rakesh Kumar watched the film and passed it with a U/A certificate and
41 cuts without consulting the Reviewing Committee (ibid.).
To a significant extent, as the world’s largest and arguably most diverse
democracy, the heterogeneity of the Indian body politic itself often becomes
a force inimical to the freedom of speech and expression. There are seve
ral circumstances where the CBFC’s ‘non-official’ board members in the
Reviewing Committee are faced with a Hobson’s choice when it comes
to accommodating the sensitivities of India’s myriad religious, communal,
ethnic, linguistic and sectarian differences. One of the former CBFC board
members interviewed in 2013 maintained that the incumbent board at the
time was probably the most progressive committee in recent times, inclu
ding several members with backgrounds in the arts and culture.
Interaction with the board members reveals the quandaries they face
in the Reviewing Committee. In this context, there are scenarios where
even the titles of films could be deemed offensive or inappropriate by sec-
tions of the public. Kannan Iyer’s 2013 supernatural thriller Ek thi Dayan
(‘Once there was a Witch’, 2013) came in for condemnation from the
National Committee for Women. This was because the word dayan (witch)
had been banned by the regional government of the state of Jharkhand,
following incidents of dayan pratha, or witch-hunting – an arcane rural
practice whereby primarily ‘lower-caste’ Dalit and tribal Adivasi women
suspected of witchcraft are subjected to violence and often killed (Murthy
and Dasgupta, 2014, n.p). Ek thi Daayan, a film thematically unrelated to
the practice of dayan pratha, exemplifies how even titles of films can be
taken out of context and denounced by sections of the public. This under-
scores the arena of complexities countenanced by the Reviewing Committee
board members in the process of censorship.
It would be fair to state that the broad spectrum of religious, ethnic,
linguistic and caste divisions in India’s socio-cultural fabric intensifies the
CBFC’s difficulties in navigating issues relating to film censorship. The sce-
narios discussed thus far also foreground the systemic inconsistencies and
disaggregation in the CBFC’s contemporary policy of operations that seem
incommensurable with these multiple obstacles. One of the main contribu
ting factors to the CBFC’s inefficacy is the countermanding impingement of
national ideology at the behest of state control over the CBFC’s censoring
operations. In this configuration, the state either directly or by proxy of the
CBFC, interferes in political censure or commentary through film.
For example, Harud’s encounter with the CBFC’s Examining Committee
resulted in a series of cuts being prescribed. These included references to
Indian security forces being responsible for forcibly ‘disappearing’ Kashmiri
men, as well as references to Kashmir being a historically independent state
before its accession to India in 1947 (Bashir, personal communication,
2013). Another redacted reference was in relation to a scene in which three
young men discussing a hypothetical World Cup football match imagine
Kashmir having its own team, separate from India and Pakistan. Bashir
largely attributes the excision of these instances of dialogue from Harud to
the overriding powers of the government-appointed Advisory Panel drow
ning out the ‘progressive’ voices in the CBFC (ibid.).
There are multiple dimensions informing the CBFC’s apparent antipathy
towards self-critical filmic reconstructions of politically sensitive historical
events or current affairs. Once again, India’s diverse ethno-religio-linguistic
demographic itself plays a role, rendering it necessary to factor in societal
consent and the ‘policing’ of and by the people themselves. A good example
is Madras Café (2013), a mainstream film with a veneer of the independent
aesthetic. Madras Café reconstructs India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan
civil war and consequent events leading to the 1991 assassination of Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi by Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger rebels in the south Indian
state of Tamil Nadu. The film falls within the representative matrix of re-
inscribing Indian nationalism, with the lead character played by Bollywood
actor John Abraham, representing a traumatised, battle-weary, yet unswer
vingly patriotic Indian espionage agent.
Despite its patriotic narrative, the film faced allegations in Tamil Nadu
of negatively representing the Sri Lankan Tamil rebel organisation and its
leader (Chandrababu, 2014). This led to widespread opprobrium of the film
in Tamil Nadu, a region sympathetic to Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil commu-
nity. In effect, what appears to be Madras Café’s patriotic triumphalism on
a national level was deemed offensive at the Tamil Nadu state level, leading
to cinemas in the state refusing to screen the film (Chandrababu, 2014). This
summarises the complex concentric layers of discourse in Indian geopolitics
that question the viability of compartmentalised or homogenised systems of
censorship and regulation.
Another example of arbitrary and asymmetrical censorship practices
is filmmaker Rakesh Kumar’s aforementioned investigative documen-
tary Final Solution (2003) about the 2002 Godhra pogrom that led to
the organised massacre of Muslims in the western state of Gujarat. In
the film, Sharma accuses Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Guja-
rat (and currently Prime Minster of India), along with the state’s ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, of being complicit in the kill-
ings. In 2014, Rakesh Kumar accused Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, who
is a self-avowed BJP nationalist and was CBFC chairperson from 2003
to 2004, of having colluded with the ruling BJP-led National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) in order to ban Sharma’s documentary ‘by not giving it
clearance’ (‘Anupam Kher, Rakesh Sharma’, 2014). Sharma contends that
Final Solution was ‘finally cleared’ in 2004, when the Congress-led United
Party Alliance (UPA) government replaced the BJP’s NDA at the centre
(ibid.). Kher’s rejoinder to the allegation claimed he had actually passed
the film without any cuts and that Sharma was ‘lying … [the] Censor board
has the proof’ (ibid.). This gridlock, reminiscent of the situation involving
Kaum de Heere and CBFC chief Rakesh Kumar, demonstrates an intrinsic
volatility in the Indian system of regulation and censorship that often vac-
illates according to the nation’s changing cycles of political power.
Another recent example of the new Indies’ implication in censorship
and the dominant national narrative is Papilio Buddha (2013), a film by
Jayan Cherian, representing the downtrodden Dalit community in the
southern state of Kerala and their struggle as historical objects of caste
oppression. The film, based on authentic stories of violence on Dalits
and symbolically representing a ‘pan-Dalit movement’ (Anandan, 2012),
received a moratorium on its screening from the CBFC. The organisation
cited the film’s disparagement of iconic leaders and visuals of ‘extreme
violence’ as reasons for proscription, (Express News Service, 2012a). The
CBFC’s allegation that the film contained iconoclastic content was based
on an allusion to Mahatma Gandhi as a homosexual and a sequence
where Gandhi’s effigy is depicted with a garland of slippers around his
neck (ibid.).
Papilio Buddha was excluded from the International Film Festival of
Kerala 2012 and an alternative private screening of the film was disrupted
by the state police (Express News Service, 2012b). These incidents bear the
traits of similar circumstances in Mumbai, where Q’s film Gandu (2010)
had to be cancelled because of police refusal to provide security in the
event of intervention or attack from violent members of religious politi-
cal groups (Q, personal communication, 2013). The ternary conjoining of
state, CBFC and police invokes Althusser’s (1971) notion of the Repressive
State Apparatus (RSA) in the form of police and law enforcement operat-
ing in tandem with institutionalised national ideology in the form of the
Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) (Althusser, 1971: 140–145). In this regard,
Jayan Cherian termed the CBFC’s banning (through denial of a certificate)
of Papilio Buddha as a ‘fascistic’ move by a ‘draconian government body’
(Anandan, 2012). Cherian expresses what he considers the wider context of
indiscriminate censorship in democratic India:
Attempts at strangling creativity and barring arthouse productions

from reaching the masses is condemnable. In the film, we have tried
to re-frame the historical references, and if you are denied the space
for a counter-narrative, what is the point in calling India a democratic
country? (Express News Service, 2012a)
Cherian’s query at the end of the above quote echoes earlier sentiments
expressed by Shonali Bose in relation to Amu’s revisiting of the 1984 inci-
dents. Cherian’s rhetorical question also resonates with Ravinder Ravi’s
befuddlement at not having the freedom to portray Indira Gandhi’s assas-
sination in Kaum de Heere. This bolsters the notion of a common thread
emerging from a pattern of national censorship that quells overt self-
reflexive political critique.
Papilio Buddha’s exclusion by machinations of the state transcends
boundaries of censorship in Indian cinema and questions the nation’s
broader accommodation of the freedom of speech and expression in its
democratic narrative. While this small-budget Indie film about the Dalit
community was denied a release, allegedly for denigrating Gandhi, portray-
ing ‘extreme violence’ and alluding to Gandhi as homosexual, it can be inter-
textually linked to the scenario surrounding Joseph Lelyveld’s 2011 book,
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India. Following the
book’s publication, some news reports including the right-wing British tab-
loid, The Daily Mail claimed Lelyveld’s book portrayed Gandhi as b isexual,
precipitating outrage in India. In her book review Martha Nussbaum men-
tions how, in March 2011, Narendra Modi, then still Chief Minister of
the BJP government in Gujarat, proposed a ban on the book, which was
eventually enforced in the western state (Nussbaum, 2011). This ban was
met with resounding approbation by the rival Congress party, who sought
a similar nationwide ban but eventually performed a volte-face on their
position (ibid.).
A similar predicament was faced by University of Chicago academic
Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), which
was impugned by Hindu groups and subsequently withdrawn by its pub-
lisher Penguin Books India in 2014. Penguin’s decision was in the aftermath
of the particularly persistent demands of an obscure but obdurate Hindu fun-
damentalist group Shiksha Bachao Andolan (‘Save Education Movement’),
whose raison d’être is to advocate the expurgation of ‘deviant’ content
and the sanctification of ‘Hindu’ culture and morals in school curriculum
(Biswas, 2014). The group identified in Doniger’s book, ‘Christian mission-
ary zeal’ and the approach of a ‘woman hungry for sex’ (Gopalakrishnan
and Rituraj, 2014). The above examples underscore a recurring theme of
impetuous, decontextualised reactions to alternative cultural representa-
tions emanating from religious fringe groups, political authority and often
from sections of the public.
In the perspective of this book, the above arguments feed back into the
theme of a hegemonic national metanarrative and its intolerance for diverg-
ing or alternative side notes and footnotes. Jyoti Thottam (2011), writing in
Time magazine, notes India’s ‘limits of free expression’ and summarises the
nature of India’s post-liberalisation democracy: ‘it upholds free expression,
but privileges national harmony over the right of the individual to offend’
(Thottam, 2011). It is possible to read between the lines of ‘harmony’,
in the ‘national harmony’ mentioned above, to perceive the ‘hegemony’ and
‘homogenisation’ that reside therein.
In a dramatic series of events in January 2015, twelve CBFC board mem-
bers, including those interviewed during the fieldwork research phase of this
book, resigned in solidarity with Chairperson Leela Samson’s resignation.
The board members attributed their action to what they termed the repeated
interference and direct encroachment on their functioning by the ruling BJP
government and ‘fundamentalist organisations’ (Maheshwari, 2015). The
members stated:
[The] Advisory Panel continues to be filled up with people of question-

able credentials appointed directly by the Ministry, without taking the
Board’s recommendations into account … It is our firm position that
given the cavalier and dismissive manner in which the CBFC is treated
by government, it is impossible to perform this duty with even a modi
cum of efficacy or autonomy. (‘9 Censor Board’, 2015)
The mass resignation of the board members was triggered by the board’s
apprehensions about the release of the controversial religious film The Mes-
senger of God (2015), which the members perceived as propagating ‘blind
faith’ (Haq, 2015). The members’ appeal to prevent the film’s release was
overruled by the government. This is significant, in light of the Samson-chaired
board’s earlier complaints of state coercion following their refusal to com-
ply with government demands to cut scenes from Aamir Khan’s satirical
2014 film PK, which parodies India’s obsessive religiosity and critiques the
tradition of deifying self-appointed ‘holy’ men (Maheshwari, 2015). The en
masse resignations were immediately accepted and a new board constituted,
formed almost exclusively of BJP affiliates or sympathisers. The installa-
tion of new chairperson, Bollywood director Pahlaj Nihalani, is particularly
notable, in light of his vociferous support for the ruling Modi government
(Haq, 2015). Apprehensions about the impartiality of this appointment are
intensified, considering Nihalani’s role in conceiving Modi’s campaign video
during the 2014 national elections (ibid.). More recently, whilst installed in
his incumbent position of Censor Board chief, Nihalani created and dissem-
inated an obsequious hagiographic music video venerating Narendra Modi
as a new father-figure of the nation (Mehta, 2015). In some measure, this
blatant conflict of interest and political bias further maligns the credentials
of the CBFC. Indeed, it challenges the veracity of the organisation at a foun-
dational level.
It is interesting to note that far from being an isolated event, the recent
reconstitution of the CBFC is only a drop in the ocean of several reappoint-
ments to the helm of influential arts and cultural organisations under the
BJP-led NDA government. The impact on new independent cinema is partic-
ularly profound in light of similar partisan placements at the executive level
of the NFDC, the solitary bastion of state-funding for alternative and Parallel
cinema. In addition, the indefinite student strike at FTII, Pune, in protest
against the appointment of BJP member Gajendra Chauhan as Chairperson
of FTII, highlights the ascendant trend of politico-religious intervention in
the arena of arts and culture in India. Direct suppression of dissenting voices
by the appendages of state power is demonstrated in the police action taken
against two former FTII students who shouted protest slogans and dis-
played placards at the opening ceremony of the 46th International Film Fes-
tival of India (IFFI) at Goa in November 2015 (Gatty, 2015). The presence
at the ceremony of ruling government elites – Union Minister, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Harshvardhan Rathore; Union Minister for
Finance, Arun Jaitley and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar–emphasises
the symbolism of the ex-students’ act of resistance. The former FTII students
were subsequently taken into police custody and interrogated (ibid.). These
developments point towards an emerging statist superstructure, where every
stage of the filmmaking timeline – ideation, funding, production, censorship
and exhibition of an Indie film – is in some way or the other subjected to
interventions and impingements by the ruling state.
Overall, the broad-ranging intertextual film and literary censorship sce-
narios discussed in this section reinforce the notion of the state as sanction-
ing moral authority on affairs of art and culture. The rapidity with which
regimes of political power are being inserted and configured in pivotal cul-
tural positions bears direct ramifications for free artistic expression, parti
cularly for the new Indies, but also for Indian cinema per se. This scenario
aligns with one of the axioms of the meta-hegemony: the state selectively
endorses some ‘benign’ cultural forms, such as Bollywood, under the scheme
of soft power, and arbitrarily censors self-critical cinematic others. These
ambivalences emphasise India’s time of undecidability, its turbulent tussle
between mythologised tradition and modern materiality that are currently
arbitrated by religo-political regimes of the state.
Meta-Hegemony, Patriarchal Narrative and Censorship

The argument that state control of censorship and certification exercises
duplicitous standards is strengthened on the basis of another argument
raised earlier in relation to Bollywood’s meta-hegemony (see Chapter 2).
This relates to the state’s agenda of formalising a patriarchal heteronorma-
tivity in the sustenance of a homogenised nation-state, a strategy absorbed
and reflected by Bollywood’s cinematic affirmation of these norms. In this
regard, Mehta (2011) cites a triad of non-Bollywood films, Bandit Queen
(1994), Fire (1996) and Kama Sutra that precipitated censorship-related
polemic.
The debates surrounding these 1990s films often tipped over into vio-
lence, largely because the films disorientated the discourse of heteronor-
mativity and gender, integral to ‘conventional understandings of the Indian
family and Indian film history’ (Mehta, 2011: 56). The same thesis is viable
and, if anything, magnified in its applicability to the current crop of non-
Bollywood independent films and documentaries. To a large degree, films
such as Papilio Buddha, Harud, Gandu and I Am, either through their cen-
sure of political malaise or deviations from accepted norms of sexuality, disrupt
the state-engineered equilibrium of ‘empty homogenising time’ (Chatterjee,
2004: 14). In this regard, they incur disciplinary or punitive measures in the
form of censorship for their ‘deviancy’.
It would be misleading and myopic to posit censorship in India as the
exclusive top-down prerogative of an ‘authoritarian’ state. The actuality is a
field of inestimable complexities, where governmentality is not restricted to
state operations but permeates across the micro level. In this regard, moral
policing is often seen as a socio-religious duty of the individual. ‘Moral
policing’ is common parlance in India ‘to describe instances of persons –
including but not limited to police officers – intervening in some situation,
often though not necessarily with violence … even if it [the situation] is not
illegal’ (Jauregui, 2013: 149). These ‘moral’ interventions are increasingly
prevalent in an ascendant milieu of right-wing Hindu religiosity in India, as
thematised in The World Before Her (2012). The counterpoint to this rise in
reactionary orthodoxy is India’s inexorable engagement with the neoliberal
free market economy.
It is important to stress these transformations in a timeline that has pre-
viously witnessed the vandalising of cinemas and disrupted screenings of
Deepa Mehta’s film Fire. The film portrays an intergenerational lesbian rela-
tionship between a young woman, Sita (Nandita Das), and her middle-aged
sister-in-law, Radha (Shabana Azmi). Nearly 15 years on, the screening of
Onir’s I Am, featuring India’s first on-screen ‘gay kiss’ (Onir, personal com-
munication, 2013) was not matched with the same crescendo of incendiary
opprobrium faced by Fire. This could ostensibly indicate a détente or declen-
sion in parochial or reactionary public sentiments, particularly amongst the
rising nouveau riche middle-class and their intensified urban drive towards
consumer culture. On the other hand, this apparently less confrontational
attitude (compared to that directed at Fire) towards the homo-eroticism
depicted in I Am (2010) could be symptomatic of the diverging standards of
India’s patriarchal society.
The 1996 film Fire, portraying Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi as women
expressing same-sex love was seen as unacceptably taboo. Their male ‘mirror
images’ in 2010’s I Am – actors Rahul Bose and Arjun Mathur’s enactment
of similar intimate scenes – also evoked conflict between Onir and the cen-
sors. Onir describes the CBFC’s discrepant standards, stating that the organ-
isation prescribed cuts to I Am and only gave it a U/A certificate after eight
months, whilst another film with similar themes backed by influential main-
stream producers was cleared with a U/A certificate ‘right at the beginning’
(Onir, personal communication, 2013). Onir laments the pyrrhic victory of
receiving ‘Best Hindi Film’ for I Am at the 59th National Film Awards at a
time when Section 377, an antiquated British colonial law is still in force
outlawing homosexuality in India (Jha, 2014). A comparison between the
two plot-points in the timeline spanning the two non-Bollywood films, Fire
and I Am, reveals the ossification, disjunctures, contradictions and intrica-
cies that intermingle in Indian society, politics and cinema.
Transitions in the Indian socio-political matrix can be identified in the
granting of legal recognition to India’s transgender community, the hijras,
as an official third gender (Khaleeli, 2014). The regression in such progres-
sive moves could be observed in the Supreme Court’s re-criminalisation of
homosexuality in 2013, reinstating Section 377, in a volte-face on an earlier
decriminalisation ruling in 2009. In the context of censorship, independent
films with gay themes still face the censor’s scissors and occupy a position
of marginality. Sridhar Rangayan, whose film Gulabi Aaina (‘The Pink
Mirror’, 2003), dealing with transsexuality, was twice denied a certificate
(Indo Asian News Service, 2012), is optimistic about growing Indie repre-
sentations of LGBTQ themes in films like I Am. He speculates that Gulabi
Aaina (2003) ‘would’ve been cleared had it been made … today’ (ibid.).
Following on from this assertion, transformations in Indian cinema and
its encompassing milieu are indicated by emerging examples, such as the
independent film Third Man (2015), claiming to be the first movie with
an all transgender cast (‘Hemant Turns Hamangi’, 2015). However, these
reorientations in modern Indian cinema are still subordinated by the domi-
nant socio-political narrative of politically influenced censorship. Indie film
forays into representing the wider reality of LGBTQ communities largely
remain suspended between India’s current rejuvenation of Hindu conserva-
tism and the nation’s broadening trajectory of globalisation.
In this context, serious film treatments of the lesbian lived experience in
India, whilst increasingly visible in the Indie domain, are either limited or
non-existent in the mainstream. Portrayals of same-sex female love in the
2004 Bollywood film Girlfriend are arguably stereotypical and bowdlerised.
The film had the dubious distinction of incurring the wrath of both the
Hindu fundamentalist group Shiv Sena and women’s rights organisations –
for different reasons (Bajoria, 2004). The former denounced the film as
being against Indian culture, the latter criticised its reductionist, ‘regressive’,
male-oriented portrayal of lesbianism (ibid.). Therefore, the contention
that patriarchy and masculinities preside over representation and reception
seems viable, whilst examining the persistence of diverging attitudes and
censorship of film representations of sexual minorities in India. The corol-
lary to this is that whilst representations of alternative sexualities in general
continue to be fraught with obstacles, depictions of female sexuality and
women also face a disproportionate and discriminating field.
In an interview, Arundhati Nag, erstwhile member of the CBFC board
and founder of Bangalore’s Rangashankara theatre, states that one of the
factors influencing the above scenario is systemic and structural dualities
(Nag, personal communication, 2013). This results in discrepant regula-
tory yardsticks for heterocentric Bollywood and alternative independent
articulations. Arguably, this paradigm seems embedded in the dyadic practices
of ideological instruments of the state, such as the CBFC.
A striking recent illustration is Raj Amit Kumar’s Unfreedom (2015),
banned by the CBFC largely due to its portrayal of a lesbian relationship
and religious fundamentalism. In essence, the censorship and moral policing
fiasco surrounding Fire in 1996 is rekindled in the CBFC’s injunction on
Unfreedom. The board justified its punitive action on the basis that the
‘nudity and lovemaking scenes’ between the film’s two female protagonists
would ‘“ignite unnatural passions”’ (Chatterjee, 2015). This spotlights how
the discourse of censorship surrounding new Indian cinema is counterpoised
between regression and progression.
Reconfigurations in contemporary Indian society present opportunities
for contestation and resistance. A snapshot of emerging articulations of
agency can be seen in the first-ever Lesbian Film Festival organised by Delhi
University’s independent Gender Studies Group. The event’s credo according
to one of its organisers was to interrogate the reality in India that ‘Women
who love women are erased. Same-sex culture is dominated by gay men.
Women are not given space to be on their own’ (Kausar, 2014). The festival
programme included current Indies, earlier Parallel films and Deepa Mehta’s
Fire (‘Lesbian Film’, 2014). This event exemplifies the opening up of alterna-
tive spaces through new independent films that interrogate the uniformity of
the national narrative and dualities in its systems of regulation.
There is the contention that directors of films such as Unfreedom and
Gandu turn the ‘banned in India’ tag into a catch-phrase to promote their
films (Chatterjee, 2015). Whilst this may be a valid point, I would argue
that this proposition could be approached from an alternative angle. In sit-
uations where films are banned, filmmakers turn the dominant or authori-
tarian narrative to their advantage, inverting it and re-appropriating it as an
idiosyncratic tool of resistance, not to mention an unexpectedly propitious
tool to propagate their films.
As is evident in the above arguments, restrictions surrounding the portrayal
of sex in modern Indian cinema folds into the politico-religious discourse and
largely enacts the meta-hegemony’s gendering of the nation. Conservative
academic proponents go so far as to invest Bollywood with a moral sanctifier
role akin to ancient Hindu stories and scriptures, as does Madhu Kishwar,
who claims ‘Bollywood cinema has assumed the mantle of upholding a dis-
tinct moral code, just as the pauranic kathas once did’ (Kishwar, 2013: 95).
Bollywood, as overweening common cultural currency and narrator of the
national grand narrative of ‘family values’, appears to garner greater legiti
macy and leniency, particularly whilst facing the frontlines of the Exami
ning Committee’s censoring gaze. As such, Onir (personal communication,
2013) contends that sexualised Bollywood ‘item numbers’ routinely escape
unscathed from the primary censorship process (see Chapter 2).
Onir underscores what he perceives to be the disparate treatment of Indie
films in relation to Bollywood, where the CBFC turns a blind eye to scenes
in Bollywood films, such as Rowdy Rathore (2012), depicting women as
sex objects. To illustrate his point, Onir describes a scene in the film where
the hero’s arm is seen reaching out towards a woman’s stomach. The hero
attempts to arrest his arm’s inexorable progress with the words ‘I cannot
control myself’, but his arm eventually wins. Asked about the ‘regressive’
portrayal of women in his films in an interview with the Hindu, Bollywood
actor and Rowdy Rathore (2012) star Akshay Kumar retorts: ‘It’s okay if
you pinch your wife or girlfriend. It’s never the women who will make the
move … (they are shy). The men have to do it. Some 80–85 percent of the
time, it’s like that’ (Kamath, 2014).
In an article entitled Molesters or Heroes, Anna Vetticad questions whether
2014 Bollywood blockbusters, featuring industry stars Salman Khan in Kick
and Akshay Kumar in Holiday ‘continue the Bollywood tradition of sexually
harassing their heroines under the guise of humour and romance’ (Vetti-
cad, 2014). She implicates Akshay Kumar’s repeated acts of female objec-
tification, including ‘roughing up the heroine in Holiday to joking about
rape in Tees Maar Khan, from calling the girl ‘maal’ (hot stuff) in Rowdy
Rathore to pinching her waist with fingers that act of their own accord’
(ibid.). The author traces Bollywood heroes’ enduring historical ‘harassment’
of women as a means to gain their affections. This is a trope dating back to
seminal 1970s and 80s commercial Hindi films employment of these tactics.
Vetticad’s article argues there is a coalescing between Bollywood misogyny
and India’s political patriarchy. This is reflected in Samajwadi Party leader
Mulayam Singh’s controversial press statement issued in the aftermath of an
incident of rape: ‘boys will be boys. Mistakes happen’ (ibid.).
Arguably, the distillation of Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan’s misogy
nistic proclivities into Bollywood’s serialised ‘item number’ bolsters the
objectifying male gaze in commercial Hindi cinema. Onir attributes the
normalisation of the ‘item number’ in India’s common cultural narrative to
Bollywood’s endorsement by the regulatory establishment – the CBFC and
the Indian media (Onir, personal communication, 2013). This legitimisa-
tion often overlooks or disregards the popularisation of the item n umber’s
overt and subliminal link to the grim reality of rape in India (ibid.). This
discussion of the national patriarchy underwritten by Bollywood highlights
the new Indies’ broader representation of women in prominent roles in sev-
eral films including Dhobi Ghat (2010), Peepli Live (2010), Masaan (2015),
Parched (2015) and Ship of Theseus (2013). The Indie space is also witness-
ing an increasing number of female directors, including Kiran Rao, Anu-
sha Rizvi, Anajali Menon (Bangalore Days, [2014]) and Geetu Mohandas,
the director of independent film Liar’s Dice (2013), India’s entry into the
87th Academy Awards competition in 2015. Indies increasingly representing
LGBTQ issues include Aligarh (Hansal Mehta, 2016), based on the life of
gay Professor Ramchandra Siras. Siras was suspended from Aligarh Muslim
University after being outed by a sting operation, and eventually died in
mysterious circumstances.
In summary, the binarisation of regulation and censorship in the state-
controlled structure is manifested in the CBFC’s dual hierarchies as well as
its often duplicitous policies of operation. The fragmented composition of
the Indian polity also presents a minefield in the terrain of censorship, fur-
ther impeding the efficacy of this monolithic state-controlled system. Even
the division of the Advisory Panel into regional branches and the Film Cer-
tification Appellate Tribunal often proves inadequate to address the multi-
farious discursive permutations and combinations that could be triggered
by filmic content, as demonstrated by the example of Madras Café. Another
indeterminable variable is the arbitrary ‘moral policing’ exercised by vigi
lante political and religious fringe groups – an enduring feature of Indian
‘self-censorship’. Manifestations of this range from attacks on the film Fire
by right-wing Hindu extremists to the more recent Gandu, Papilio Buddha,
Kaum de Heere and even the Aamir Khan blockbuster PK. In this milieu,
filmmaker Ashvin Kumar articulates the need for a reappraisal of censorship
rules, the restriction of the CBFC to certification rather than censorship, and
a distinction between ‘what is regressive and what is throttling of art in the
name of morality’ (Kumar, 2012).
The ambivalence inflecting India’s push-pull between mythic homogenising
time and the current time of undecidability facilitates the emergence of multi-
ple articulations from the interstitial third space. These include t ransgressive,
self-reflexive or iconoclastic political enunciations and imaginings as cited in
this chapter on censorship. These articulations are instantiated in the various
Indie films that interrogate or contest the patriarchal and heteronormative
socio-political status quo and in a largely indiscriminate and disproportion-
ate system will continue to bear the brunt of censorship.
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Part II
Case Studies
7 Rapping in Double Time
Gandu’s Subversive Time of Liberation
This chapter undertakes a close reading of the film Gandu (2010), as an

illustrative example of the new Indian Indies’ mélange and hybridity of
formal and stylistic influences. By framing Gandu as a postmodern film,
particularly in relation to its fragmented construction, the chapter aims
to identify the multiple discourses the film either espouses or signifies.
Addressing the overarching question of the Indies’ emergence from an
interstitial space, an examination of form, style and content in this film
subsequently extends to its overt and latent references to extant discourses
in contemporary Indian society and culture. Gandu presents subversive
characters and portrays transgressive themes, such as social exclusion, drug
abuse, anarchistic hedonism, breakdown of conventional family structures
and the explicit expression of sexual freedom. All these elements have
inflected the film’s turbulent immersion into the wider sphere of debate
surrounding the state’s regulation, censorship and moral policing of cinema
in India. From a theoretical standpoint, this case study argues that Gandu
exemplifies a performative text of resistance signifying a ‘time of liberation’
through contestation of the national pedagogical mythical time. This is in
concordance with Homi Bhabha’s construction of nation in double time as
discussed earlier in Chapter 5.
Synopsis
Gandu (‘Asshole’, 2010) charts the directionless existence of its eponymous
protagonist, ‘Gandu’ (Anubrata Basu), a lower-middle-class teenager in
urban Kolkata, capital city of the Indian state of West Bengal. Gandu lives
with his single mother (Kamalika Banerjee), who sustains the household by
providing sexual favours to Das Babu (Shilajit Majumdar), louche owner of
the local Internet café in exchange for his financial largesse. Caught in the
middle of this arrangement, Gandu compensates for his fractured domestic
situation by paying obeisance at the local shrine to Kali (the goddess of death),
buying lottery tickets at the local shop and seeking solace in drug-addled
fantasies of being a rap star. Gandu’s disillusionment with life stems from his
mother’s affair with Das Babu, his adolescent sexual frustration and impre-
cations suffered at the hands of his peers, who ostracise him as a misfit
and outcast, repeatedly ridiculing his name, Gandu (asshole). Although this
disparaging title has been imposed on Gandu, he has also accepted it as his
identity, resigned to the marginal status connoted by this name. All these
factors precipitate Gandu’s descent into a drug-induced alternative reality,
replete with hallucinogenic delusions and an idée fixe of performing with
the British-Asian band Asian Dub Foundation. Gandu finds it increasingly
difficult to grapple with his growing ennui and sexual frustration.
In the midst of his turmoil, Gandu befriends Ricksha (Joyraj Bhattacha-
rya), a slum-dweller who pulls cycle-rickshaws for a living. The new friends,
joined by the mutuality of their social marginality, embark on a psychotro-
pic road trip that rapidly spirals them into a disorientated labyrinth of time
and space. The obfuscation of distinctions between fantasy and reality leads
to the eventual disintegration of Gandu’s sanity.
Postmodern Freestyle and Freeplay

Gandu diverges from the normative content and conventional storytelling
grammar associated with mainstream Indian cinema. This is largely attrib-
utable to the film’s complex interweaving of cinematic genres. Global influ-
ences, particularly of European and Japanese art cinema, are perceptible
in Gandu, gesturing towards the self-affirmed investment of director Q
(Quausiq Mukherjee) in transglobal cinema. In an interview, Q cites French
New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard as his personal filmmaking bell-
wether, also expressing his appreciation for the work of Japanese experi-
mental director Takashi Miike (Q, personal communication, 2013). In this
sense, Gandu’s amorphous mix of form and style problematises a reduc-
tionist Bollywood/Parallel Indian cinema classification and points towards
a postmodern pastiche of styles.
Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli (2003: 10) mention the character-
istics of postmodern film seen in the work of modernist filmmakers like
Godard – ‘radical self-reflexivity … an unorthodox approach to narration
and its parameters in space and time; and a polemical attitude towards
modern capitalism and its features’. This interrogation of capitalism
includes themes of media domination, political indifference, the loss of
freedom and verisimilitude (ibid.). Gandu exhibits ‘radical self-reflexivity’
juxtaposed with a fragmented, experimental and non-linear narrative
approach amongst the other above-mentioned characteristics of postmod-
ern texts. From the outset, the film sets out to defamiliarise, disorientate
and challenge normative structures and conventions, both socio-political
(through its portrayal of themes and issues) and cinematic (through its
experimentation with non-linear time and space).
The film’s exposition is dedicated to an evaluation of the perceived mean-
ing of the word gandu, which serves as the film’s title. Split-screen images
simultaneously depict responses to a vox populi involving a range of people
expressing their understanding of the term gandu (Fig. 7.1).
Rapping in Double Time 151
Figure 7.1 The vox populi.
The keywords – stupid, fucker, loser, moron – that appear as on-screen sub-
titles, are synchronised with each respondent’s utterance during the vox
populi. They reflect the arbitrariness of the signifier – gandu. The multiple
articulations stemming from the respondents’ subjective denotations of the
word gandu are transposable to the larger fragmentation that undergirds
the film’s form, style and content. This babel of public voices expressing
diverse perceptions instantiates Gandu’s multiplicity, its compositional
multilayering and the film’s destabilisation and fracturing of meaning. The
vox populi sequence foreshadows the subsequent disjunctures that seem
endemic in the film’s narrative, expressed through the constant arbitrary
rupture of linearity and a subversion of the desire for cohesive closure.
The film’s fragmented morphology appears to be in direct resonance with
the postmodern condition, which problematises notions of unity, a stable
centre or logos of meaning, instead highlighting chaos and disaggregation
(Harvey, 1990: 44). Within a poststructural paradigm, the creation of mean-
ing analogous to the construction of identity is multifaceted and subjective.
Therefore, the cacophony of voices at the outset of the film – enunciating
diffuse perceptions in relation to the solitary signifier, gandu – sets the stage
for the film’s dismantling of unity. In essence, the documentary-style vox
populi functions as cinematic shorthand; it is a precursor to the film’s decon-
structive, decentring of meaning, which is never located and fixed, but desta-
bilised and perpetually deferred (Derrida, 1976: xxii, 69).
The absence of unitary meaning or stable identity affixable to the word
gandu is important, because this signifier doubles as the film’s title and main
character’s name. The free play of meaning (Derrida, 2001: 344, 355, 365)
demonstrated in the vox populi also points towards eponymous protago-
nist Gandu’s volatile persona. The narrative subsequently reveals Gandu’s
‘divided self’, his tempestuous splintering between antinomies of recreation
(drugs) and reality (fractured familial situation). Gandu is unveiled not only
as the object of a fractured self, but also of a socio-economic reality that
denies him a locus, a sense of identity, even on the nomenclatural level of a
conventional, socially acceptable name.
The aforementioned subtitles and audio-visual clues in the film’s vox
populi scene elucidates the disparaging connotations of the auditory signi-
fier gandu. In a later scene, Gandu is pilloried by his peers, who in the pro-
cess of their bullying vilification repeatedly re-invoke the multiple pejorative
social connotations of the word gandu that were revealed earlier in the vox
populi. Gandu’s lack of social acceptance and a stable identity, character-
ised by the arbitrary and derogatory connotations of his name, ‘Gandu’ (the
narrative never reveals his actual name), indicate at an elemental level the
displacement of this film’s primary character to a marginalised space.
The film’s opening sequence, which reveals the multiple deprecatory
meanings contained in the term gandu, leads the film’s audience to form
an association between the word (and its implications) and the physical
embodiment of gandu – the young person seen seated at a table in the scene
immediately after the vox populi sequence. Expressing this concept another
way: the word gandu expounded in the vox populi introduces the character
Gandu we see in the next shot. Therefore, Gandu has always-already been
dispatched to the margins right at the start of the film. This is accomplished
through an associative process where the verbal signifier ‘Gandu’ is conju-
gated with the first visible filmic character that becomes the signifier’s logical
‘signified’.
This process is an example of syntagmatic connotation in cinema, where
the significance of a shot and its meaning are contingent on ‘the shot [being]
compared with actual shots that precede or follow it’ (Monaco, 2009: 181).
James Monaco (2009: 182) ascribes a similar connotative ability to individ-
ual words strung together that then find meaning in those that precede or
follow. The above cinematic transition from the vox populi scene to the shot
of Gandu involves a connotative interaction between signifier word and
paradigmatic filmic shot. It is the word or signifier gandu and its relation to
the signified – the corporeal Gandu, who appears in the scene subsequent
to the evocation of the word – that eventually constructs meaning in the
mind of the viewer. The connotative property of the ‘sign’ thus created by
the combination of signifier and signified assists the viewer in imagining the
character Gandu in the film’s narrative as a pariah outsider.
It does this by bridging the gap between interiority and exteriority, link-
ing the young man Gandu in the frame and the signifier gandu in the vox
populi (public sphere) by invoking in the viewer the idea of ‘Gandu-ness’.
The sign is not restricted to cinematic meaning creation in the film’s diegetic
world; Gandu’s world within the confines of the film’s finite frame, but
has broader, discursive symbolic evocations. To a large extent, the sign of
‘Gandu-ness’ created in the film signposts underlying ideological Indian
discourses relating to alterity, subalternity and peripheralisation in the lived
experience of modern Indian society.
In the context of this film, the sign creates the idea of a generic
‘Gandu-ness’ relating to the social exclusion or othering of individuals,
sometimes on the basis of a single word or signifier. A broader exam-
ple is the word ‘Dalit’, which now (catachrestically in the Spivak sense1)
undifferentiatingly subsumes a ‘lower-caste’ minority community pre-
viously referred to as ‘untouchables’. Q mentions his intention to nor-
malise the socially taboo word gandu by using it as the film’s signifier,
ironically stating, ‘we have successfully baptised a Shudra [‘untouchable’;
lowest caste] word and made it if not a Brahmin [highest caste] at least a
Kshatriya [caste directly below Brahmin] word. It is an upper-caste word
now!’ (Q, personal communication, 2013). This harkens back to Q’s tax-
onomy of the Indies (see chapter 4). Q also reveals that his deployment
of the word gandu stems from his perception that ‘a linguistic shift is
critical to social change’ (Q, personal communication, 2013). In the film,
Gandu’s friend Ricksha shares a similar predicament. He is dehumanised
and defined by the tool of his trade; he is equated through his name with
the object that provides his livelihood, the cycle-rickshaw. Therefore, the
two friends share a state of namelessness, although their marginalisation
occurs according to different Indian contexts of socio-economic and class
stratification. In other words, Ricksha is a subaltern slum-dweller at the
bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, whereas Gandu’s alienation
stems more from socio-cultural exclusion.
The marginality of the film’s characters discussed above is to some degree
shared by the film itself, in its self-professed positioning outside mainstream
cinematic modes (ibid.). In this context, Gandu’s subversive discourse from
the margins of Indian cinema could be viewed through the lens of Bhabha’s
mythical pedagogical time of nation and the performative time of liberation.
From the theoretical purview of this book, Gandu could be regarded as
espousing an alternative, transgressive filmic discourse, not solely because of
its graphic depictions of sex and drug abuse, as well as a screenplay punctu-
ated with profanity. Gandu distorts and disrupts the unified, mythical time
of the nation by its subversion of the status quo – the traditional Indian
‘archetype’ often proliferated by Bollywood films. In this regard, the film
has two young, anti-social drug addicts as its central characters, at once
elementally antithetical to Bollywood’s privileging of the muscular, hand-
some hero. Gandu and Ricksha are devoid of any aspirational qualities and
seen as social malcontents. This is diametrically opposite to Bollywood’s
ubiquitous, neoliberal, soft-power narrative of upwardly mobile, nouveau
riche, globe-trotting, young Indian achievers.
Gandu also destabilises the homogenising national narrative of traditional
Indian ‘morals and values’ by introducing a fragmented, hybridised, cultur-
ally ‘alien’ paradigmatic into the linear syntagmatic pedagogy of the nation.
Gandu’s rupturing of conventional Indian cinematic norms and tropes
includes the film’s heterodox strategies of revealing narrative information as
well as its fracturing of time, space and linearity. These devices include often
desultory ‘utterances’ in several subsequent vox populi and most conspicu-
ously through Gandu’s frequent staccato outbursts of rap lyrics.
The film’s director, Q, appropriates rap music, an essentially American
musical genre, and redeploys it in Gandu as a mechanism for the film’s
nihilistic protagonist to express his angst. Rap music is not autochthonous
or typical in an Indian context, as emphasised by Gandu’s isolated and sol-
itary yet passionate pursuit of this music genre. In one sequence, Ricksha,
frustrated with Gandu’s constant obsessive expositions on rap music, turns
to Gandu in consternation, asking him what he means by ‘rap’. Gandu’s
reply is accompanied by subtitles: ‘Rap = Words’. Similar to the use of the
vox populi device throughout the film to demonstrate the multiple mean-
ings and arbitrariness of words such as gandu, rap and pornography, the
film self-referentially deploys rap music to illustrate its own displacement
of unified meaning.
In Gandu, the stylistic codes of the rap music genre are appropriated and
subverted through an infusion of stylised content that addresses the imme-
diacy of Gandu’s local Indian context. The rap-song sequences are therefore
predominantly in the Bengali language and accompanied by English subti-
tles. The genre of rap music itself undergoes hybrid ‘adulteration’ in Gandu
by the inception of Bengali lyrics, Indian beats, rhythms and intertextual
allusions to specifically Bengali themes. This could be perceived as a double
deterritorialisation of geographically or culturally specific art forms through
hybridity.
On the one hand, Gandu’s hybridisation of an endogenously
African-American music form by interspersion of local Bengali contexts
deterritorialises it from its particular American associations. On the obverse
side of this hybridising process, Gandu’s expletive-ridden Bengali-English
rap deracinates notions of ‘pure’ Bengali culture. This is particularly rele-
vant in the context of West Bengal’s enduring tradition of indigenous folk
music and cultural sanctification of ‘Rabindra-sangeeth’ (music composed
by Bengali Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore).
In essence, it is fair to state that Gandu’s subversive rap music emanates
from an in-between third space. In its Indian context, it enacts a deterritori-
alisation of norms of authenticity or notions of pure, inviolate ‘Indianness’.
Gandu’s hybrid rap music reterritorialises this space with a more global
musical mix, simultaneously rooted in its local Bengali context and
coalescing with global influences. In this regard, the interpolation of this
miscegenated form of rap into the film could be viewed as an enactment of
the ‘glocal’- the synthesis of local and global, lending credence to the theme
of hybridity observed not only in Gandu, but also in the larger new wave
of Indian Indies.
An excerpt of lyrics from one of the rap sequences in Gandu illustrates
the specificity of context and the music’s function in character formation
and narrative development. After being harangued and abused by his peers,
Gandu vents his frustration:
You make me feel like a worm

You call me an asshole
Ambition is hopeless my future is dark
You get angry and I go hungry
I am invisible in the dark corner of your room
They tell me YOUR life is worth more than mine
But one day I will haunt you like a ghost
You will be a balloon and I will be a safety pin
Gandu’s spewing forth of these visceral sentiments through the medium of

rap not only provides narrative clues to his condition, but also serves as a
platform to emphasise the dissentious, non-conformist performative ethos
of the film. Gandu’s subversive and profane use of artifice, in this instance
a musical form that is ordinarily ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ to the traditional Indian
national narrative, exemplifies this film text’s disjunctive effect on the endur-
ing grand narrative of nation discussed in earlier sections.
In a broader cinematic context, Bollywood has been epitomised as the
purveyor of traditional, albeit populist, modern Indian film culture, especially
through its signature song and dance sequences. These musical interludes
generally follow a specific format in their narrative function, commonly to
celebrate weddings, courtship rituals, indicate dreams and fantasies (Gopal
and Sen, 2008: 252) or serve as elegies. Gandu disorientates and transgresses
the linear continuity of such normative traditional practices by adopting
a provocative anti-establishment stance. This is characterised by the tren-
chant, obscenity-ridden, vituperative self-reflexivity of Gandu’s lexical arse-
nal expressed during his furious bursts of rap. These vitriolic, explicit and
sometimes nihilistic lyrics subvert the pedagogical national narrative that
Bollywood has conventionally endorsed through its post-globalisation mix
of ‘traditional Indian values’ and sexualised item numbers.
As demonstrated earlier, the explicit and often confrontational lyrics in
Gandu’s rap songs extend a distinctively unrestrained and defiant direct
address. Gandu seems to spew these lyrics as a cathartic release for his ado-
lescent sexual repression in the film. The prominence of the provocative and
the profane in Gandu’s rap songs is exhibited in its overt and Rabelaisian
references to masturbation and sex in songs such as Horihor Nara Nara
(‘Shake it Hard’). Both Gandu and Ricksha perform this song to a raptur-
ously receptive live audience – all part of Gandu’s delusional drug-addled
dream. Explicit expositions of this sort are unprecedented in mainstream
Indian cinema. Gandu’s liberal use of Bengali and English expletives is an
enlarged manifestation of a more general phenomenon. The emergence of
the New Wave of Indie cinema since 2010 has concomitantly accompa-
nied the magnified use of screenplay expletives, particularly ‘home-grown’
vernacular swear words. These are redolent in the dialogues of independent
films such as Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) and Delhi Belly (2011). Echoing
these Indies in this regard, Gandu’s explicit content is another facet that
distinguishes the film from its more circumspect Bollywood counterparts.
Q’s description of Gandu as a ‘rap musical’ revitalises the thesis of the
new Indies as a hybrid resultant of multiple global influences in addition
to their Indian Bollywood and Parallel cinema predecessors. For example,
in interviews with the media, Q positions Gandu as an ‘anti-Bollywood’
film (D’Silva, 2011). He vocally affirmed his counter-mainstream approach
on a live prime-time TV debate show entitled We the People (Dhingra,
2011). Although Q positions his film in opposition to Bollywood, it must be
mentioned that the musical component is common to both Bollywood films
and Gandu, although Gandu uses music as a subversive rather than a cele-
bratory device. In addition, Gandu selectively invokes tropes of Bollywood
musical escapism and lampoons them.
A scene in the film depicting one of Gandu’s drug-induced fantasies paro-
dies a Bollywood-esque song-sequence. It features a seductress, reminiscent
of an ‘item girl’ (see Chapter 2, this volume), draped in a diaphanous sari,
her sensual gyrations archetypal of the mannered theatricality of Bollywood
‘heroines’. This dream sequence appears to be a self-reflexive, postmodern
‘send-up’ of the Bollywood prototype of the sensuous singing and dancing
vamp. The parody also reveals the sustained signification strategies deployed
in Bollywood’s item numbers that have over time become normalised and
reinscribed as identifiable ‘mythic’, culturally specific signifiers in Indian col-
lective viewing practices.
Rap music in Gandu is another divergence from Bollywood song
sequences, such as the ubiquitous item number, which are desultory,
spectacle-based, stand-alone set pieces, unrelated to the main storyline
(see Chapter 2). Gandu’s set-list of rap songs are integral to the film’s plot
and character development, charting a misanthropic youth’s delusions of
rap-music stardom. In this regard, Gandu’s narrative is signposted by a
series of impromptu rap-music videos. These ‘mini music videos’ function as
a portal to Gandu’s psycho-social instabilities and are indexical of his vola-
tile fragmented self. As the rap songs are predominantly vocalised by Gandu
himself, this musical conduit offers him the only agency to express himself
in the otherwise bleak terrain of his marginalised existence.
Gandu’s guttural rap outbursts disclose narrative information accen-
tuated by simultaneous visual renderings of on-screen lyrics. This
resembles the music video format and provides the audience with an
expository insight into the subtextual layers of Gandu’s precarious
drug-fuelled lifestyle and unfulfilled sexual desires. Inclusion of the music
video configuration in the multidimensional morphology (that includes
documentary-style vox populi) of Gandu’s form and style underscores
the film’s postmodern composition. Gandu’s postmodern intertextual-
ity in terms of its experimentation with short-film formats, such as the
music video, attests to director Q’s antecedents as an ad filmmaker and
musician. This in turn underpins the multiple influences and filmmaking
backgrounds informing the constellation of new forms of independent
Indian cinema – itself a polymorphous form.
Gandu’s incorporation of the music video aesthetic permeates into the
film’s title credits that appear recursively and span the spectrum of the film’s
narrative. These recurring ‘title credits’ involve rapid jump cuts; jerky, hand-
held camera work; split screens; the appearance of lurid on-screen lyrics
(including the earlier example) and live ‘performances to camera’ by the
title character, Gandu. These are all ubiquitous devices borrowed from the
modern music video. As mentioned above, the ‘title sequence’ reappears
at several non-linear points in the film, reiterating the film’s postmodern
fragmentation and its dismantling of linearity.
The first appearance of the title credits occurs as unexpectedly as subse-
quent manifestations. Following the film’s vox populi prologue, the estab-
lishment of an ostensibly ‘normal’ narrative commences with Gandu seen
eating at a table in the threadbare environs of his flat as his sullen mother
performs her kitchen duties. A moustached man enters unannounced, his
shifty appearance and demeanour enhanced by the dark glasses concealing
his eyes. He is the aforementioned Das Babu, sleazy owner of the local Inter-
net parlour. The subsequent scene reveals Gandu’s mother and Das Babu
having sex. Gandu proceeds to crawl into their room unnoticed, purloin-
ing money from the man’s wallet, and slithering back out, but not before
craning his head to bed-level and sneaking a curious peek at the copulating
couple. The flow of narrative information up to this point impels the film’s
spectators to anticipate a logical and sequential continuum of this theme. It
sets up audience expectation to extrapolate a continuity editing cutaway to
perhaps a shot of Gandu exiting the flat, spilling out onto the street, maybe
to spend the money he has surreptitiously extricated from Das Babu’s wal-
let. Instead, the filmmaker chooses to interrupt linear progression at this
point by inserting the first instance of rap ‘music video’ title credits.
This abrupt disconnect or disjuncture effected by the intrusion of the
‘music video’ title sequence shatters the brief illusion of linearity that the
narrative has constructed up to this point. The intruding sequence is a
bricolage of multiple split screens containing filmmaking credits, visuals of
Gandu rapping, subtitled lyrics, all simultaneously occupying screen space.
This jarring dissonance of audience expectation is foregrounded by Gandu’s
rapping excoriation at having witnessed his mother and Das Babu in fla-
grante delicto. He vents his expletive-ridden angst in the eponymous title
track, ‘Gandu’, indicting his domestic plight in general and his mother in
particular:
In a dark corner of your room I lurk

You feel love I feel like puking
Your sins burn you, you sit up
Petrified of losing your youth
Some fucker will run away with it
The title song, ‘Gandu’, bears the traits of several musical styles – rap, punk
rock and funk. This unexpected injection of a split-screen, ‘punk-rap’ video
at the film’s outset is symptomatic of postmodern filmic devices and recalls
Quentin Tarantino’s consistent use of pastiche and bricolage.
Gandu’s sudden defamiliarising enforcement of what appears to be an
incongruous stylistic device is ‘out of time’ with anticipated linearity. This
process is repeated throughout the film’s screen duration. Against the back-
drop of Bollywood’s meta-hegemony and the normalisation of its linear,
often formulaic, filmic codes in Indian culture, Gandu’s non-chronological,
transgressive title sequence, with its use of lyrically explicit rap music and its
nihilist protagonist, reiterates the film’s subversive, disjunctive articulation
of cultural difference. Gandu’s decentring of normative mythical time and
the codified conventions perpetuated by Bollywood, locates this film as a
performative text. This in turn invokes Bhabha’s temporal theme relating to
the ‘time of liberation’, or alternative narratives arising from the interstitial
space between the pedagogy and performativity of the nation. The film’s
preliminary statement of its alternative credentials is explicit in the ‘music
video’ title sequence, containing modern urban inflections of contemporary
Indian hybrid youth subculture.
Ghosts of Youth Subculture: Between Postcolonial

and Postmodern
Gandu’s subversion of the pedagogical national narrative could be framed
through the thesis that the film imagines a hitherto unrealised indigenous
national youth subculture or counter-culture. Postcolonial Indian soci-
ety, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, largely adhered to the directives of
state-sanctioned ‘traditions’ and ‘values’ and its preoccupation with the
moulding of a cohesive new nation (Majumdar, 2012: 179). The liberated
nation did not witness the formation of alternative urban youth subcul-
tures along the lines of the ‘mods and rockers’ in the 1950s or the punks
and skinheads in the 1980s in Britain. Such idiosyncratic movements would
have been regarded as a Western ‘incursion’ into Indian culture and largely
viewed with suspicion as alien cultural artefacts up until the onset of India’s
globalisation in the 1990s and the advent of satellite television in the coun-
try (Banaji, 2013: 33, 37).
There were several Indian-global cultural exchanges in the 1960s and
70s, largely through the matrix of the hippie counter-culture movement,
typified by Ravi Shankar’s musical collaborations with the Beatles. How-
ever, the influence of this cultural movement on mass youth culture in India
was either negligible or restricted to denizens of the urban bourgeoisie
dabbling in the fashion, hairstyles and motorcycles of the day. When the
American ‘flower-power’ generation’s Indian manifestations were culturally
represented in commercial Hindi films, such as Hare Rama Hare Krishna
(1971), portrayals were invariably stereotypical or positioned in opposition
to the traditional and religious dictates of Indian culture. Against this
historiographical context, Gandu’s contemporary imagining of a rebellious
youth immersed in non-indigenous rap and punk-rock culture provides a
snapshot of post-liberalisation India. To a significant degree, Gandu is an
adolescent urban by-product of India’s globalisation-induced contradic-
tions, fractures and hybridity. He also characterises urban India’s increased
access to global cultural media in the nation’s post-liberalisation era.
Gandu’s obsession with the radical British-Asian band Asian Dub Foun-
dation is shorthand for contemporary India’s heightened access to global
cultural production. Symptoms of Gandu’s immersion in Western forms of
music (rap, punk, rock and funk), albeit through his hybrid, glocal mode of
expression in Bengali, can be related to the South Indian city Bangalore’s
emergence as India’s ‘pub city’ and ‘rock capital’.
This city’s post-liberalisation engagement with rock and heavy metal
music (Saldhana, 2002: 340) is underpinned by its rising reputation as a
lucrative performance venue for Western artists. Bangalore is now a recur-
ring site on the touring itineraries of global acts such as Metallica, Iron
Maiden, Megadeth and the Rolling Stones. Recent media articles have
charted the growth of the city’s ‘rock music subculture’. The popularity
of Western rock and heavy metal music in Indian urban centres such as
Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi has contributed to a rising number of young
middle-class votaries. However, these are still disaggregated groups that can
be classified less as subcultures and more as hybrid cultural artefacts of
globalisation that are situated within India’s overarching, ongoing process
of neoliberalisation.
This fragmentation in terms of disparate (sub)cultural formations exists
largely because transitional formative hybrid subcultures in India are sus-
pended in a liminal space between the dominant narrative of Indian tradi-
tionalism and the indiscriminate effects of globalisation (Saldhana, 2002:
346). The latter factor operates through the corporatising strategies of
neoliberal frameworks and contributes to India’s already discrepant distri-
bution of economic and cultural capital.
It could be argued that this new version of subculture, exemplified
by Bangalore’s ‘rock culture’, is largely sustained by neoliberal branding
in India’s larger subsuming thrust towards globalisation. This branding
involves a process of monetising and market expansion and – in the specific
context of ‘exported’ subcultures – the commodification of purportedly
alternative or non-conformist Western genres of music. These include rock
and heavy metal (as they existed in the 1980s), themselves largely image-
based franchises that have, since the escalation of globalisation, tapped
into new Asian markets. This renewed, rebranded franchise includes band
merchandise – T-shirts, posters, memorabilia – proliferated through aggres-
sive marketing strategies and corporate-sponsored rock concerts. This
branding of music subcultures is consistent with Slavoj Zizek’s assertion of
‘mass-media symbols’ enticing consumers to identify with the image created
by the franchise (Zizek 1989: 96). This contention could be contextualised
through Gandu in terms of the rock/rap ‘brand’ arousing the ‘idea’ or the
image of a subculture and Gandu’s identification with it.
However, there are no real, tangible means for him to connect with or
feel a deeper and wider sense of belonging, identity or ‘authenticity’. Gandu,
immersed in this imagined ideological connection with rap/punk subcul-
ture (his dreams of fame alongside Asian Dub Foundation), experiences a
disconnection and falls into anomie when he cannot connect or relate in
reality with his domestic and wider social milieu. This line of reasoning
draws on Benedict Anderson’s (2006) concepts of ‘imagined communities’
and ‘imagined nation’ that describe how an intangible sense of kinship
and ‘sameness’ is ideologically normalised without any real tangible com-
monality or face-to-face interaction between individuals. As mentioned in
Chapter 5, Partha Chatterjee refers to this imagined sense of national unity
as the empty homogeneous time of nation. Gandu does not fit into this
unifying frame and hence retreats into a realm of solipsism and escapism.
Gandu’s solitude and social stigmatisation largely arises from his obses-
sion with rap music and his consequent creation of an imaginary realm of
rap culture. This is an individual pursuit confined to the four corners of
his room and the recesses of his imagination. This self-constructed musical
‘barrier’ insulates him from his mother, peers and even his friend Ricksha,
who cannot fathom Gandu’s veneration of this alien form of music.
Gandu’s solipsistic, self-indulgent, imaginary ‘subculture’ could be
related to the current neoliberalism-inflected, music-oriented Indian urban
youth subcultures in metropolises such as Bangalore. It could be argued
that a collective or shared sense of commonality is paradoxically prob-
lematised by image-based signifiers. In other words, the simulacra manu-
factured by modern mass subcultures in the form of merchandising objects
are essentially ‘signifiers that do not refer to a signified’ (Zizek, 1989: 97).
Zizek uses Coca-Cola as an example of such signifiers that point to nothing
in particular. Coke’s slogan, ‘Coca-Cola – it’s the real thing!’, is arbitrary
because, as Zizek asserts, ‘it’ could refer to ‘excrement’ or ‘undrinkable mud’
(Zizek, 1989: 96).
Gandu’s reference to an imagined or virtual ‘Indian’ rap culture is under-
girded by the real example of the earlier-mentioned Bangalore rock sub-
culture. This underlines modern hybrid Indian metropolitan formations’
reliance on arbitrary neoliberal signifiers, similar to Zizek’s Coke analogy.
These signifiers include image-based branding, apparel and the MTV music
video affiliations of modern rap/hip-hop subcultures. The object or cause
of desire, the ‘unattainable something’ that forms Gandu’s unachievable
wish for direct interaction with Asian Dub Foundation is contingent on his
fulfilment of a market economy diktat – the sine qua non of getting signed
to a lucrative record deal. This disjuncture between signifier and signified,
virtuality and reality, causes him to retreat into an imaginary individual
space and resort to drug-induced wish-fulfilment.
Through a cinematic lens, Gandu experiments with the ideological
possibilities of rap/punk rock as a radical medium to articulate both the
film and its protagonist’s anti-system sensibilities. To a large extent, these
musical expositions represent the historically ‘absent’ Indian urban youth
subculture and its current ‘ghostly’ reappearance in the form of Gandu;
floating in a liminal space between tradition and modernity. Gandu’s
ideological entrenchment, reflected in his unquestioning ‘belief’ in rap
music, is conjoined with a material motive. This is indicated in Gandu’s
drug-enforced delusions, where he sees as his apotheosis the act of getting
signed to a record deal with Asian Dub Foundation, a globally recognised
band. The adjunct to this desire for fame and fortune is Gandu’s desire to
win the lottery ‘jackpot’. At the culmination of his hallucination, which
is suffused with wish-fulfilment, Gandu’s tripartite desires are achieved –
sexual appeasement, lottery triumph and a record deal with Asian Dub
Foundation.
The inference from the above proposition is that the teenage Gandu
himself embodies a liminal space, a spatial passageway suspended between
‘religious’ zeal for rap music and a neoliberal reality. He appears to be a
microcosmic manifestation of contemporary India’s negotiation between
the domains of cultural past and modern materiality. However, Gandu
is separated from the majority Indian narrative by dint of his own
‘in-between-ness’ which is transgressive, mutant, hybrid and disjointed.
Therefore, his anarchic rap music is extrinsic, inconsistent or ‘out of time’
with the traditional Indian religio-cultural national metanarrative.
Consolidating the above points, Gandu faces exclusion because of his
musical proclivities, his socio-economic state and his broken home. The
schism between Gandu and society widens due to the lack of recognition
and affirmation of any creative or musical talents he may possess; apart
from the amusement value he holds for the young female cashier at Das
Babu’s Internet café, who begs him to perform his ‘human beatbox’ rou-
tine. Gandu faces an absence of identification or connection with a larger
demographic. He communes with his own constructions of an imaginary
rap subculture in the confines of his mind.
These contentions relating to Gandu’s angst-ridden alienation in con-
temporary India, as mentioned earlier, invokes the absence of endogenous,
urban-youth subcultures in India’s post-independence history. This absence
consequently indicates the paucity of independent conduits or forums for
adolescent Indians to express alternative or dissenting perspectives. A case
in point is the recent banning of a YouTube video of a live comedy ‘roast’
show by young Indian stand-up comedy collective All India Bakchod (‘All
India Bullshit/Bollocks’ [AIB]), followed by the filing of a police complaint
against them (‘AIB Roasted’, 2015). This in turn gestures towards the homo-
genising mythic national narrative scripted by statist interventions after
independence, particularly in the domain of culture. This absence in the
nation’s past also implicates the current meta-hegemonic configuration of
state-endorsed soft power that legitimises Bollywood’s current conjoined
‘traditional’ and neoliberal cultural master narrative. India’s variegated
cultural diversity notwithstanding, ‘the rigid confines of Indian classical
music and escapist Bollywood make no provision for rebellion or any form
of personal expression’ (‘Cheap Alcohol’, 2014).
The film’s imagining of Gandu as a non-conformist youth whose
rebellion is animated by a hybrid non-indigenous musical mix of rap
and punk music with confrontational and explicit lyrics is therefore an
inflection of alternativeness or ‘internal otherness’. Gandu’s subversive
anti-establishment imagery sub-textually evokes both national past and
present. In essence, the film’s discourse encapsulates the absence of alter-
native urban youth subcultures in India’s postcolonial past. The film’s
disaffected protagonist, Gandu, signifies this absence in the nation’s pres-
ent. This representation of absence contests the linearity of traditional
Indian culture and society.
The location of Gandu as a rebellious rapper and a personification of
historically absent urban youth subculture evokes ‘ghosts’ of other elided
or unrealised narratives in the scripting of nation. These disavowed ghosts
haunt the interstitial spaces: liminal conduits in the nation’s purportedly
linear development chronology. These spaces represent the transitory and
suspended in-between states that contain ‘absences’ in the nation’s stages of
‘becoming’ and include the preclusion of indigenous urban youth subcul-
tures from postcolonial past to present. These are the shadowlines bordering
breaks in the linearity of postcolonial Indian historiography. Q describes
this caesura in the flow of nation, rupturing India’s transition from postco-
lonial to postmodern:
We have bypassed the modern era. We have jumped straight from

colonial traditionalism straight into postmodernism … but that makes
it very interesting as an artist to live here and work in this complex
environment.
(Q, personal communication, 2013)
Q’s observation folds into Bhabha’s perspective that the current desultory
and discrepant levels of global development are due to the incomplete
process of decolonisation that was impeded by the Cold War (Bienal de
São Paulo, 2012). This could be one of the factors that caused postcolo-
nial nations like India to leap across the chasm from (post)-colonialism to
post-modernity.
Subversive Spectacle
Ravi Vasudevan (2011) asserts that Bollywood films’ narrative structure
consists of a disorganised version of Classical Hollywood–style continuity
editing, heavily reliant on spectacle and ‘cultural codes of looking of a more
archaic sort’ (Vasudevan, 2011: 100). In Gandu’s postmodern address, the
cultural code of ‘looking’ is transgressive and confrontational, in opposi-
tion to Vasudevan’s aforementioned observation of Bollywood’s antiquated,
conventional codes. This emphasises Gandu’s resonance with the modern
‘time of liberation’ rather than the ‘mythic’ time of tradition that Bollywood
ideologically sustains in its narratives.
Bollywood’s emphasis on grand scale spectacle is often animated
through saturated colour palettes, song and dance interludes that sug-
gest sexuality, desire and libidinal pleasures. However, these films toe the
boundary of Indian ‘morals’ and ‘values’, in relation to overt depictions
of sex. Bollywood’s restraint, which is nevertheless interspersed with
sexually suggestive imagery and lubricious codes, is largely due to its
obligation to the traditional national narrative and commensurate with
its role as purveyor of ‘wholesome family entertainment’. In an anti-
thetical divergence from the Bollywood norm, Gandu provokes the pri-
mordial pleasure of looking by inducing, privileging and celebrating the
voyeuristic gaze.
The pleasure of looking is a recurrent idiom in the film’s narrative, from
Gandu’s ‘sneak-peek’ at his mother and Das Babu having sex at the start
of the film, to Gandu’s scopophilic pursuit of a woman who is an habituée
of the Internet café. This woman is herself implicated in looking at her
boyfriend through the computer screen interface. These representations of
filmic voyeurism are transformed into a mise-en-abyme situation by the
complicity of the cinematic audience enjoying the pleasure of a subversive,
on-screen spectacle. In other words, the audience is watching on-screen indi-
viduals, such as Gandu and the woman in the café, who are themselves
involved in the pleasure of looking. My personal reading of the discomfiture
and premature departure of some viewers at cinema screenings of Gandu, is
that this hasty retreat is symptomatic of the guilty pleasures imagined and
elicited by the film’s explicit visuals.
This reflects filmmaker Q’s strategy to present an unflinching, aesthet-
icised suffusion of sex traversing the length of the film’s narrative. These
overt expositions include scenes showing Gandu creeping in on his mother,
who is locked in noisy shower sex with Das Babu, Gandu masturbating and
the extended full-frontal sequence of Gandu having sex with a p rostitute.
Q’s authorial intent, gleaned from his interviews with the media, suggests
his pre-meditated flinging down of the gauntlet against expurgation by reg-
ulatory powers such as the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) –
commonly regarded as the Indian Censor Board (see Chapter 6, this volume).
His motivation in adopting an explicit, anarchistic, ‘guerrilla’ approach to
Gandu attests to the influences of radical, experimental and underground
filmmakers such as Gaspar Noe, Harmony Korine and Filipino director
Khavn De La Cruz (Q, personal communication, 2013). In effect, Gandu,
performs a subversion of the enduring national notion of spectacle epito-
mised by Bollywood musicals.
It could be stated that Q’s approach to Gandu attempts to combine
elements of the sacred and profane in a unified space, in what he consid-
ers a frontal assault on archaic codes of supposedly inviolate Indian mor-
als and ideals (ibid.). Again, this subversive intent could be viewed as a
double contestation of both the national pedagogical metanarrative and its
dominant cinematic proponent, Bollywood. The co-existence of the sacred
and profane in Gandu invokes one of the sacrosanct totems of the Indian
national narrative, often reinforced by Bollywood’s meta-hegemony – the
Mother figure. Cinema’s system of signs is trichotomised by Peter Wollen
(1972) into three semiotic modes – iconic (signifier represents signified by
similarity), indexical (measures a quality not by likeness but by intrinsic
association) and symbolic (arbitrary sign, signifier has no direct or indexical
relationship to signified) (Wollen, 1972: 142). Bollywood representations
invoke the iconic religious associations of the revered Mother figure, who is
indexical of life-creation and symbolic of the nation – Mother India.
The Mother in Bollywood films is enduringly portrayed as the fountain-
head of wisdom, sanctifier of ideals, and the arbiter of moral rectitude. The
paragon of virtue, she is constructed as a metaphor for ‘Mother Ganga’
or the sacred Indian river Ganges (see Chapters 1 and 2, this volume).
From postcolonial times and in films such as Mother India (1957), India’s
popular cinematic tradition has unswervingly perpetuated the narrative
of the intemerate Mother as symbolic of the nascent nation. This book’s
concept of meta-hegemony demonstrates how the baton of this postcolonial
Indian national narrative was cinematically passed on to postglobalisation
Bollywood.
Gandu contravenes all three codes: iconic, indexical and symbolic in
its portrayal of Gandu’s mother as indexical of failure; she is unable to
embody a stable, inspiring figurehead. In this regard, Gandu’s conception of
a flawed, fallen, morally compromised demi-monde Mother figure appears
to fulminate against an essentialised Indian cinematic fetishisation of the
Mother figure. As a corollary, the representation of Gandu’s mother could be
perceived as an iconoclastic contestation of the postcolonial national mas-
ter narrative of an inviolable Mother India. The film also contains explicit
Freudian sexual tropes involving Gandu’s mother.
Gandu’s adolescent sexual frustration is heightened by his voyeuristic
observation of the young woman in the Internet parlour. The frustration
stemming from Gandu’s repressed sexuality is exacerbated by his domestic
situation – the repeated exposure to his mother’s uninhibited sexual inter-
course with Das Babu. The ‘absent father’ and oedipal feelings towards his
mother propel Gandu’s sacrilegious foray into the ‘sanctum sanctorum’ of
one of popular Indian cinema’s most mythologised symbols. The sacred
space of the Mother is violated in the scene where Gandu indulges his habit
of crawling into his mother’s bedroom and stealing from Das Babu’s wallet
as the couple is engaged in sex. Gandu is suddenly spotted by his mother
and their gazes meet. Mortified, she continues the coital act, drawing
Das Babu closer to her to prevent disclosure of Gandu’s indiscretions, as
well as to shield her own shame and trauma at locking eyes with her son.
Gandu himself retreats to his room and breaks down in tears, devastated by
the guilt-ridden gaze. The reverberations of this incident persist in Gandu’s
subconscious mind. In a later scene, Gandu performs the ‘unthinkable’
and ‘profane’ act of imagining sex with his mother. This is visualised when
the prostitute with whom he is having sex in his hallucinogenic fantasy
suddenly transforms into the superimposed image of his mother. Gandu
instantly recoils and disengages on realising that his mother has encroached
on his sexual fantasies.
This scene extricates deeper psychological ramifications relating to the
sexual repression and unfulfilled internalised libidinal drives that precipitate
Gandu’s actions. The invocation of Gandu’s oedipal desires are reminiscent
of a triune Hamlet configuration – weak and vacillating mother, absent bio-
logical father and incompatible ‘surrogate’ replacement – Das Babu. These
factors contribute to Gandu’s ‘divided self’. This fracture reflects Gandu’s
inner turmoil, his struggle between sacred traditional and postmodern pro-
fane. He is suspended in a limbo between an alienating ‘real’ world and an
alluring chimerical fantasy realm. The binaries that are prominent in sculpt-
ing Gandu’s psychological profile invariably collide, resulting in his mental
fragmentation. The resultant shards embed themselves in the disorientated
imaginings of both the film’s mercurial central character and the defamil-
iarising instability of the film’s narrative itself. The Hamlet trope invoked
here, extends to Gandu’s eventual descent into insanity and self-destruction –
drug-overdose acting as the postmodern substitute for poison as the cause
of death of the ‘hero’.
The collision between dialectics mentioned above is suggestive of the
encounter between Gandu’s self with (M)other. It also highlights larger
post-globalisation Indian socio-cultural ruptures, including inter-generational
differences, the clash between gaps and disjunctures in India’s non-linear
postcolonial jettisoning of modernity and the nation’s indiscriminate leap into
the current consumer driven hyperreality of postmodern society (Q, personal
Q admits that his film intentionally grapples with the notion of fractured
identities, particularly sexual identity, asserting that ‘every human being is
fragmented and is many individuals. It’s again social control that forces a
structured, mono-dimensional personality on an individual’ (Ahmed, 2012).
Q argues that the growing demographic of young people in India and the
pressures of social structures makes this theme especially relevant. These
dilemmas and anxieties are echoed by New York South Asian Film Festival
programme director Galen Rosenthal, commenting in relation to the fes-
tival’s screening of Gandu ‘Half the population of India is under-25. This
is India’s baby-boomer generation. They’re really trying to break free of
the cultural yoke they were living under’ (Dollar, 2010). The Wall Street
Journal, whilst heralding the arrival of a ‘new wave’ of independent Indian
cinema (analogous to Rahul Verma in The Guardian) observes these films’
‘burning need to express themes of immediate social relevance’ (ibid.). This
interpretation is pertinent to Gandu’s filmic representation of sexual repres-
sion and cultural anomie, themes that interrogate the national narrative. On
a broader level, this affirms the perception that the new wave Indies share
a common character by discursively engaging with India’s contemporary
zeitgeist as ‘state of the nation’ films.
Ruptures with the mythical national metanarrative are never comprehen-
sive, as demonstrated by India’s current arbitration between tradition and
materiality (Chatterjee, 1993: 5). The homogenising and monolithic propen-
sity of the national narrative invests it with a resilient resistance to contes-
tation. The character, Gandu, embodies a site of intersection and mediation
between the sacred and profane. Despite his anomie, and disillusionment
with his station and circumstance in life, he is nevertheless interwoven with
the traditional Indian fabric of religiosity. This is evident in his offerings
and obeisance at the local shrine to Kali, the matriarchal Hindu goddess of
death. The film repeatedly invokes Kali as a symbolic leitmotif. She is rep-
resented in the Hindu tradition as having several avatars; not solely as the
goddess of death but also as the custodian of time and change.
Gandu’s nemesis – a simulacrum of the goddess Kali, appears to him
with her blackened countenance and extended tongue, every time he has
a drug-induced hallucination, almost like a malevolent personification of
mythical time. Gandu’s Janus-faced devotions typify his divided self. He
worships Kali; the benevolent dowager during his diurnal moments of sobri-
ety, and experiences the more macabre visitations by Kali; the harbinger of
death, during his dark hallucinations. Sumita Chakravarty (2011: 6) sees
goddess Kali as evoking an ‘in-between stage dividing day from night, the
human from the sub- and superhuman realms, the socially marginal …
from the well-to-do’. Gandu’s own ambivalence (profane rapper and con-
scientious devotee), therefore, reflects the encounter between mythical time
and the ‘time of liberation’, between tradition and modernity. It is worth
considering whether, ‘the masquerade of the goddess Kali as Mother India’
(Chakravarty, 2011: 121) represented in Gandu, functions as a counter-
representation of the socially acceptable mythologised feminine personifi-
cation of the nation, such as Radha in the iconic film, Mother India (1957).
Gandu’s friend Ricksha on the other hand, supplicates to a custom-built
shrine dedicated to a more unconventional icon – martial arts guru Bruce
Lee. The ardent devotee Ricksha genuflects, offers flowers, and burns incense,
all the while chanting ‘Om Lee’ (a parody of the Hindu word Om [‘God’]).
He punctuates his venerations with ritual immersions in the river whilst
chanting the martial artist’s name in the hybrid incantation – ‘Om Lee’.
Ricksha’s stylised idolisation is an ironic, intertextual postmodern device to
evoke wry humour, counterpoising Gandu’s more serious religious devotion.
In this context, it is interesting that the imperative omnipresence of reli-
gion in India inflects the narrative of even this irreverent, carnivalesque
postmodern filmic text. The points discussed so far also stress the process of
negotiation between the binaries embodied by Gandu and Ricksha, raising
the question of whether Ricksha is Gandu’s alter ego – an imagined other
of his split-self.
Film Style, Political Spectres and Self-Reflexive Subversion

The aesthetic choice of filming Gandu predominantly in monochrome with
momentary suffusions of colour to delineate Gandu’s fantasy sex scene, indi-
cates Gandu non-mainstream filmic attributes. Black and white is a depar-
ture from contemporary Bollywood films that usually embrace a variegated
and sometimes garish colour palette. Mixed monochrome and colour is also
used in Kaushik Ganguli’s Apur Panchali (2014), an independent Bengali
film tracing the journey of Subir Banerjee, the little boy who played Apu
in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). Along with Gandu’s use of chiar-
oscuro, it is interesting to consider whether the ‘ghosts’ of Ray and postco-
lonial Bengali art cinema aesthetic techniques can be glimpsed in Gandu’s
minimalist mise-en-scène, framing and composition, particularly its shots of
the iconic Howrah bridge in Kolkata. The bridge has been invoked in earlier
postcolonial art cinema (Hood, 2009: 21–23) including Bimal Roy’s Do
Bigha Zamin (‘Two Acres of Land’, 1953) and Satyajit Ray’s Parash Pathar
(‘The Philosopher’s Stone’, 1958). Interestingly, Q states that he makes a
conscious effort to avoid any influence from Ray, whom he considers to
have exercised an almost obsessive over-indulgence in representations of
poverty (Q, personal communication, 2013).
In general, Q’s approach to Gandu appears to resonate more with the
new Indies’ mitigation of India’s erstwhile ‘high and low’ Bollywood/Ray
cinema schism by hybridising several indigenous and global styles. Any
fleetingly identifiable artefacts of postcolonial Indian art cinema are contem-
porised by Q’s stylised subversive postmodern approach. Gandu therefore
bears inflections of current transglobal influences: alternative and experi-
mental filmmakers such as the aforementioned Gaspar Noe, Takashi Miike
and Khavn de la Cruz (Q, personal communication, 2013).
In terms of modes of production as well as strategies of film form and
style, Gandu shares several common features with the new wave of Indies.
Q highlights the presence of non-professional actors in his film, remarking
that several characters, such as the lottery storeowner, were bona-fide
members of the public (Q, personal communication, 2013). This is akin to
several villagers featuring as actors in Peepli Live in addition to the film’s
lead, Omkar Das Manikpuri, the son of a daily wage labourer. Q asserts
that the inclusion of real world participants or contributors accentuated
the film’s engagement with ‘reality’ (ibid.). The element of spontaneity was
a cornerstone in the construction of the film. Q reveals that the film was
shot without artificial lighting, devoid of a premeditated script, using impro-
visation and a constant dialogic process between filmmaker and actors
(Q, personal communication, 2013). He states ‘we were breaking all the
conventions of shooting patterns. The film was made with a crew of eight
people, a high-definition digital SLR (the Canon EOS 7D) and no script’
(Kamath, 2010). The budgetary sparseness informing the assembling of this
film emphasises its divergence from elaborate, big-budget Bollywood cre-
ations. The freeplay in terms of meaning creation, through a spontaneous
approach to the film’s narrative and its decoupage in the editing room rein-
forces Gandu’s postmodern construction.
Politics and the Subaltern in Gandu

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the self-reflexive postmodern
socio-political strategies of representation in Gandu, it is necessary to pro-
vide a brief overview of the historical, cinematic and political contexts
informing the state of West Bengal, where Gandu is located.
The Indian state of West Bengal has maintained a distinctive socio-political
idiom since colonial times. The election of a Marxist state government after
independence was perceived as a divergence from the norms envisaged by
the seat of power and policy – India’s capital New Delhi. Pranab Chatterjee
(2010: 19) observes the Bengali middle-class ‘pride in being Marxist and
opposing the centre’. However, the state has been beset with political insta-
bility after independence, including the imposition of ‘President’s rule’. The
Marxist Left Front government established in 1977 continued for nearly
35 years. Chatterjee (2010: 20) stresses the popularity and importance of
Bengali art and film in the early 20th century and argues that these art forms
were later marginalised by the growth of Bollywood, which eventually
became the centre of film production in India. He mentions Satyajit Ray’s
influential filmic representations of Bengal’s rural condition as a result of
the above ambivalent modernisation, or the attempt to represent the mar-
ginalised in a transforming cinematic culture. Similarities with Ray’s repre-
sentations could be located in Gandu’s subversive representation of urban
ambivalence in the contemporary transforming terrain of Indian cinema.
Whilst Ray’s films were potent neo-realist statements on the predicament
of the subaltern classes, several other Bengali filmmakers such as Ritwik
Ghatak and Mrinal Sen adapted narratives from Marx, Brecht, Trotsky,
Gogol, and Hegel to the localised Indian context of impoverished farmers,
marginalisation, displacement and migration following the partitioning of
India (Das Gupta, 1991: 48).
These Bengali filmmakers, the pioneers of early Indian ‘Parallel cinema’,
emerged from the Marxist tradition of the Independent People’s Theatre
Association (Hood, 2009: 5, 112) established in 1943 to reinvigorate rural
Indian self-reflexive folk art. They turned to film in order to gain a larger
audience, adapting the techniques of French Nouvelle Vague realist film-
makers such as Godard, and Truffaut and Soviet formalists like Eisenstein
and Pudovkin (Ganguly, 2010: 24).
Themes of poverty, disillusionment and marginalisation starkly represented
in early postcolonial Bengali art filmmakers’ oeuvre are not always visually
overt in Gandu. However, these elements are subtly interspersed into the
film’s visual environment at key plot-points to accentuate the alienation afflict-
ing the film’s peripheralised characters – Gandu and his rickshaw-puller
friend, Ricksha. This is highlighted in the scene where Gandu is invited by
Ricksha to the latter’s squalid surroundings he calls home.
In the rickshaw-puller’s slum habitat, pigs and humans live cheek-by-jowl
and islands of excrement surround Ricksha’s dilapidated dwelling place.
Gandu with his lower middle-class background cannot fathom how Ricksha
lives in such impoverished conditions. This sequence effectively transports
the viewer from Gandu’s rundown but relatively habitable neighbourhood
into Ricksha’s subaltern domain of the urban slum – the fringes of India’s
socio-economic reality. This sequence provides a cross-sectional visual index
of India’s social divide and the marginal existence of subaltern classes in
India.
Gandu’s portrayal of everyday encounters across socio-economic
shadowlines – the spaces in-between India’s multidimensional demographic
is accentuated when Gandu and Ricksha are first introduced to each other
through an accidental collision. As Gandu emerges round a blind corner,
he clatters straight into Ricksha’s onrushing cycle-rickshaw. This collision
between lower middle-class Gandu and the eponymous rickshaw-pulling
subaltern occurs against the canvas of the erstwhile ruling Communist
Party of India (CPI Marxist) hammer and sickle insignia etched on a wall
and clearly visible in the frame’s background. This scene is followed by a
surreal shot of Ricksha and Gandu locked in supine embrace, almost like
Siamese twins. This turns out to be a dream from which Gandu stirs in
an agitated state. The implicit symbolism in Gandu’s disturbing phantasm
revives earlier consideration of whether Ricksha is indeed a figment of
Gandu’s delusions; his alter ego.
Foregrounding the peregrinations of the two teenagers around the
Howrah area of Kolkata, the film simultaneously visualises the backdrop
of complex layers and gradations in modern Indian society. These are
depicted in various spaces and places including aesthetically framed images
of Howrah Bridge, Das Babu’s Internet café, the sinuous lanes of Gandu’s
lower-middle class locality, which is then starkly contrasted with Ricksha’s
slum. The film’s selection of shots therefore provides background context.
It also highlights similarities and differences in Gandu (ostracism) and
Ricksha’s (impoverishment) shared ‘outsider’ status on the fringes of their
common social space.
Gandu is often depicted framed by windows and doors, symbolic of the
restrictive circumstances constraining the fulfilment of his dreams. This
trope of tight framing portrays Gandu as being trapped in an unsympa-
thetic milieu, one that smothers his aspirations of escape from an unre-
mitting socio-economic reality. The alienation and confinement experienced
by Gandu also confront his mother. Although she appears to revel in the
pleasures of sex, cigarettes and alcohol within the frontiers of her home,
she is nevertheless constrained by the reality of her total dependence on Das
Babu for sustenance. In one scene, she lambasts Gandu for being a failure
and not making monetary contributions to the upkeep of the house. In the
process of castigating Gandu, she reminds him that Das Babu, as their bene-
factor, pays for everything, including the roof over their heads. These themes
of social fragmentation and anomie are interpolated with political overtones
that resonate with the filmmaker’s sensibilities. Q reveals that for himself
and the film’s co-writers, ‘this was always a political film’ (Q, personal com-
munication, 2013), in terms of its intention to articulate dissatisfaction and
dissent against socio-political systems and practices that the film’s creators
consider governing factors for social exclusion.
Q’s socio-political interventions in Gandu’s narrative are emphasised
in several scenes through an almost subliminal motif. This is in the form
of a background diegetic voiceover, ostensibly a political speech, appar-
ently emanating from a tannoy and first appearing in a scene when Gandu
proceeds to light a marijuana joint in his darkened room. He proceeds to
have a coughing fit almost as if in reaction to the political diatribe. The
ever-droning speech resurfaces in the background of other scenes, as
Gandu’s mother pops a morning after pill, and as Gandu leans out of a
window whilst smoking only to be caught out by his mother. The ‘voice’
also frames the backdrop of an intense argument between mother and son,
during which Gandu threatens to commit suicide and his anguished mother
threatens to kill him before he can commit the act.
Following these scenes, the sinister, implacable political drone is ren-
dered visible through the conversion of speech to writing in the form of
scrolling subtitles onscreen. This occurs in the scene where Gandu’s mother
serves him food, whilst in the background the sonorous voice keeps up its
incessant rhetoric. On this occasion, rapid scrolling subtitles traverse the
screen accompanying the amplifying voice, simultaneous with Gandu and
his mother’s conversation, entailing a double narrative as well as multiple
points of possible viewer focus (Fig. 7.2). In the babel of voices, the viewer
is able to perform a découpage of the enigmatic political speech via the sub-
titles. It turns out to be a leftist call to fight systems of oppression and bring
revolutionary changes to the political system. In an interview, Q reveals his
deliberate intention to superimpose the political speech ‘on all the window
scenes’ commenting on the speech’s growing intensity as ‘it gets louder and
louder, and at the end it just takes over’ (Q, personal communication, 2013).
It could be argued that there are sub-textual implications in Q’s strat-
egy of repetitively cueing the acousmatic auditory motif of the speech to
coincide with the film’s cloistered characters – mother and son, and their
gravitation towards the liminal space symbolised by windows. Gandu seems
trapped within his environs; literally and figuratively caged behind the win-
dow grilles. There is a separation between the interiority of his existence,
Figure 7.2 Scrolling subtitles.
circumscribed by the restrictive contours of his home, and the exteriority of

an outside world that shuns him. This chasm is emphasised by the ominous,
extraneous political monotone working in consort with the physical divider
of the window. These elements seem to emphasise Gandu’s separation from
the ‘real’ world’. It could be argued that the interjection of political symbol-
ism in the above scenes is connotative of the enduring metanarrative typified
by the state of West Bengal’s communist political legacy, and the ‘ghosts’ of
its failure to materialise or reify the social equity envisioned and prescribed
by its Marxist ideological underpinnings.
The apparently casual almost anodyne inclusion of the ‘political voice’
in Gandu could be indicative of the disjunctures endemic in the lives of the
state’s marginalised objects, Gandu, his mother and Ricksha, at the micro
level. The ‘voice’ illustrates larger fractures in terms of the inefficacy of the
political apparatus whose ideological credo theoretically espouses equitable
distribution of wealth, social welfare and justice for all, and yet fails to crys-
tallise these ideals, thereby contributing to the continued alterity and alien-
ation of some of the state’s marginal citizens. This is rendered all the more
pertinent in light of the growing popular discontent in West Bengal with the
current leader Mamata Banerjee and her ruling Trinamool Congress who
replaced the protracted rule of the Left Front. The recent ruthless suppres-
sion of popular dissent is instantiated in the Trinamool Congress collud-
ing with local police in launching an assault on peacefully demonstrating
students from Kolkata’s Jadavpur University (Basu and Ghosh, 2014). The
turbulent current vicissitudes in West Bengal’s political trajectory frame
Gandu’s enunciation of rebellion and its representation of the fragments of
failed and failing political systems, past and present.
Q attributes Gandu’s nihilistic discourse to the collective rationale of the
film’s creative team. He asserts ‘it was about giving it back. We are just
standing against everything. We don’t know what the answer is – we are
‘Gandus’ we don’t accept this shit’ (Q, personal communication, 2013).
Q also reveals that the film’s political ‘call to arms’ – the speech leitmotif –
was based on the actual rhetoric of a left-radical speaker (ibid.). To some
extent, Q’s above-mentioned authorial expression of epistemological nihil-
ism informs the film’s framing of Gandu and Ricksha as perpetually aleatory
fragments, wandering in an aporetic state of chaotic undecidability.
Importantly, the mostly inconspicuous deployment of the political speech
in Gandu is analogous to similar devices implanted in other Indies to
evoke the marginal micro-narratives of the nation’s past and present (see
Chapter 5). These inflections interspersed in the films’ main narratives serve
to conjure the latent, embedded phantoms of past socio-political narratives
of resistance, grassroots movements, marginalised individuals and social
groups that have been elided, disavowed or effaced, and haunt the present.
Some of the devices in new Indies include the ghostly vision of the ‘disap-
peared’ brother in Harud’s Kashmir, the migrant Muslim girl Yasmin’s video
diaries in Dhobi Ghat, and Fernandes’s dead wife’s recorded VHS tapes of
pre-satellite TV era Doordarshan (India’s state television channel) comedies
in The Lunchbox. Gandu joins these Indies in conjuring some of the absent
narratives in India’s historiographical timeline. In the process, the film also
addresses its specific local Kolkata/West Bengal context.
Falling into Mise-en-Abyme: Postmodern Self-Reflexivity

One of the key self-referential postmodern moments in the film is when
Gandu and Ricksha leave the city behind and embark on a surreal
drug-distorted journey. The camera tracks their road trip along desolate
terrain, as the disorientating psychotropic effects of the low-grade heroin
they have imbibed finally plunges them into a blackout.
They wake beneath the sprawling foliage and gnarled branches of a ban-
yan tree. Appraising their new environs, the two boys spot an elderly man
seated a few feet away from the imposing tree, declaiming verses of Bengali
poetry. The man appears to be clairvoyantly cognisant of the preternatural
circumstances surrounding the boys’ soon to be revealed assignation at the
big banyan tree. Offering them a morning cup of tea, the Oracle-esque man
calmly informs the lads that a well-known filmmaker Q is en-route to see
them in relation to a film he is shooting, called Gandu. This introduction
of the absurd and surreal into the narrative intensifies when Ricksha, also
apparently clued-in to the entire subterfuge informs Gandu he is the epony-
mous subject of Q’s film.
The bewildered Gandu is flummoxed by the revelation that he is a pawn,
an unwitting and malleable patsy in the grand scheme of things. As Gandu
and Ricksha, similar to Samuel Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for
Godot, bicker about the grotesqueness of the situation, a white car appears
in the distance in long shot, slowly moving towards the frame. The car stops
and a figure in sunglasses steps out. The man raises his arm, which is attached
to a camcorder and begins to film the boys from a distance. We, the audience
suddenly become aware through an editing cut, that we can now see Gandu
and Ricksha’s point of view (from behind them) as they bemusedly return the
gaze of the silent figure filming them. So in essence, we are watching Q film-
ing Gandu and Ricksha through his camcorder whilst at the same time being
able to watch the two boys looking back at Q. This contrivance is revealed
when the screen splits to unveil the invisible source providing the ‘Gandu and
Ricksha POV [point of view]’: a cameraman stationed behind them.
Figure 7.3 Gandu and Ricksha’s POV.
Figure 7.4 View of Q filming.

Figure 7.5 Second camera revealed.
Figure 7.6 Mise-en-abyme diptych.
It is now possible to reorientate the earlier constellation of how we viewed

this sequence of events. The first shot (Fig. 7.3) originates from behind the
boys and facilitates spectator perception of Gandu and Ricksha in the fore-
ground and Q in the background of frame. The next frame (Fig. 7.4) dis-
penses with the boys so we see only Q, filming over the distended door of
his car. The overall artifice is revealed in the subsequent reverse shot from
the filmmaker’s camcorder point of view. Q’s reverse POV, which appears
in the left-half ‘letter-box’ panel of a split screen (Fig. 7.5) reveals the source
that enabled us to gaze at Q from the two boys’ perspective – the camera
operator standing directly behind the duo.
As if to dismantle the elaborate conceit or surreal illusion created in this
scene, the left-half ‘letter-box’ panel of the split screen is balanced by the
appearance of a right-half ‘letter-box’ frame, creating a diptych (Fig. 7.6).
This right-hand panel completes the cycle and reverts to the original POV
from the ‘hidden’ camera stationed behind Gandu and Ricksha. There are
several intricate threads to unravel in the deconstruction of this scene,
including the film’s recurrent strategies of defamiliarising viewer expecta-
tion and destabilising meaning. In this regard, it is worth investigating the
technical modalities implemented whilst filming this singular sequence and
examining the multiple layers of meaning it contains.
Firstly, this filmic sequence is another example of cinematic mise-en-
abyme – an infinite loop generated using the notion of a film within a film.
The audience is engaged in watching through the metaphorical ‘lens’ of the
cinema screen, Gandu and Ricksha in the foreground, who are in turn watch-
ing Q in the distance, as he himself is engaged in ‘watching’ the two boys
through the LCD screen of his camcorder. In the first instance, the audience
picks up the POV of the cameraman standing behind Gandu and Ricksha,
whose camera lens in turn captures Q in the background. The focus of Q’s
reverse shot is on Gandu and Ricksha, but in the process also includes the
camera operator positioned behind the boys. Therefore, Q’s gaze is directed
into and received by the cameraman’s lens.
The assistant cameraman filming from behind Gandu and Ricksha and
thereby providing the cinema spectator with Gandu and Ricksha’s POV
appears to complete the loop by looking back through his camera lens at
Q and his camcorder in the distance. However, the loop does not termi-
nate upon returning to Q. Instead, it is infinite because it returns to us, the
audience, as we ultimately look back at Q. This entails an unending cyclical
chain, owing to the proposition that Gandu has been made aware he is
being watched by the world, that he is the object of both the filmmaker and
hence the filmmaker’s audience’s gaze.
This abstract theme could be understood utilising two analogies. The
first is Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, where the painter is por-
trayed on canvas as engaged in the act of painting Spain’s King Philip IV
and Queen Mariana, who we can see vaguely reflected in a distant mirror
(Fig. 7.7). A mise-en-abyme is generated by Velázquez staring out at the
Royals, who return his gaze and whose presence is affirmed by their reflec-
tion in the painting’s background, which is perceptible to us. The monarchs
return Velázquez’s gaze and also figuratively return our gaze through the
interface of the mirror.
In a filmic example, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) depicts a
scene where Jim Carrey’s character Truman Burbank realises he is the object
of a universal gaze and that his life is being perennially broadcast as daily
entertainment across the globe. When enlightened to this deception, Truman
looks directly out at the hidden camera filming his life. By so doing, he also
stares back at his ‘creator’ in the film, TV producer Christof (Ed Harris), and
at us, the audience, complicit in the voyeuristic gaze.
Figure 7.7 Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, Prado Museum. Source: Google Earth.
Gandu’s similar employment of the self-reflexive device of mise-en-

abyme is another postmodern marker alongside earlier mentioned pas-
tiche and bricolage integrated into the formal and stylistic attributes of the
film. Gandu’s use of mise-en-abyme could be related to the poststructural
proposition of aporia. This theme was invoked at the early stages of this
chapter, whilst demonstrating the arbitrariness of the signifier gandu in the
vox populi sequence.
Derrida’s notion of aporia involves the perpetual deferral of meaning
into an endless ‘reflexivity without depth or bottom’ (Royle, 2003: 92),
an ‘unending experience of the undecidable’ (ibid.) where any unitary sta-
ble fixed logos of meaning is rendered impossible. A similar theme could
be identified in the mise-en-abyme of Gandu’s complex defamiliarising
sequence, where the film audience watches film characters being filmed
by the film’s creator. Arguably, this sequence provides an insight into the
wayless pointlessness or sheer randomness of Gandu’s existence. At a deeper
level, this scene demonstrates the arbitrariness of the very act of cinematic
viewing, as a practice that entails an unfathomable, indiscriminate infinitude
of meanings that cannot be fixed into one single unassailable or irrefutable
reading.
In the context of this study’s postcolonial theoretical focus on margin-
alised narratives, the sequence where Gandu confronts his own objectifi-
cation is an important instantiation of Gandu’s articulation of self. The
scene has a pivotal transition point, when Gandu squarely faces the camera,
confronts the controlling and manipulating agent, in this instance Q and
the wider society (the film’s audience) that Q represents. Gandu’s reaction
is an example of Althusser’s concept of interpellation, where the ordinary
individual walking on the street is hailed by an authority figure (in Althusser’s
metaphor this is a policeman) shouting out ‘Hey, you there!’ (Althusser,
1971: 173–74). By turning around to acknowledge the police officer’s hail,
the individual at once becomes both an object as well as a subject. He
becomes the subordinate object, malleable to the directives of the authorita-
tive voice, and at the same instant, becomes a subject of discursive strategies
of the state’s subjectification of society.
In the above sequence, Gandu, who has thus far been the object of vilifi-
cation and derision, both at home and in his immediate social space, appears
to have been pushed to breaking point. He turns his questioning gaze not
only to the abstract ‘source’ of his condition and his general objectification,
but also turns to figuratively face the ‘exploitation’ and ‘subjugation’ by his
invisible ‘creator’, the ‘author’- Q. By raising his camcorder to film Gandu, Q
has initiated the process of interpellating or hailing Gandu – ‘Hey, you there!’
By turning to face the interrogating eye of Q’s camcorder, Gandu affirms his
identity and by that token confirms his objectification. An abstract parallel
could be drawn with playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search
of an Author, where the characters from an author’s drama script, corpo-
really materialise into the world and demand their author’s recognition by
asking him to cast them as actors in the play.
The writing of India’s modern urban narrative of progress and neoliberal
enterprise arguably peripheralises several actors from the master narrative of
its construction. It writes and moves on. Gandu and Ricksha are examples of
societal detritus left in the wake of majority narratives. Ricksha falls into this
category as a subaltern slum-dweller – always-already at the socio-economic
margins. Gandu, an urban outcaste is displaced to the periphery of social
discourse due to his antecedents in the form of his familial circumstances
as well as his failure to deal with his situation and extricate himself from
a state of despair. When Ricksha reveals to Gandu that he is the object of
Q’s filmmaking project, Gandu bursts out with an angry riposte. This follows
his possible realisation that even his unconventional name and hence his
identity – Gandu, is the construction of an external authority and therefore
even this titular source of daily debasement is not his own. This entails his
enslavement at a primordial level. Gandu’s verbal expostulation and visual
confrontation following the realisation of his appropriated identity, constitutes
his most distinctive act of resistance in the film’s narrative. Overall, it is interest-
ing to note that Gandu, the lower-middle class subject, can vocalise his resis-
tance through rap music, whilst Ricksha the bona fide subaltern cannot speak
and remains silent.
Note
1. Gayatri Spivak’s use of the term catachresis is summed up by Tani Barlow:
‘I understand catachresis to be the occulted (i.e., concealed, hidden from view,
condensed, made difficult to read) evidence of normalizing strategies’ (Barlow,
2004: 32).
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8 Dhobi Ghat
The Marginal in the Mumbai Mainstream
The aim of this chapter is to analyse broader themes and issues in this
study of new Indian Indies through a specific close textual analysis of Kiran
Rao’s Dhobi Ghat (2010). Identifying patterns of similarity and disjuncture
between this film, other new Indies and mainstream Bollywood films will
prove useful in gauging the larger epistemological and philosophical propo-
sitions raised in this book. This is particularly in relation to the postmodern
characteristics of fragmentation, multiplicity and the representation of mar-
ginalised characters in several new Indies. These features are exemplified in
Dhobi Ghat’s portrayal of the postmodern condition in contemporaneous
urban Indian society and culture.
In this regard, I will examine Dhobi Ghat as a postmodern ‘city film’ that
expresses the local context of Mumbai whilst presenting a global audio-visual
aesthetic. My investigation involves a close reading of the film’s form, style and
content to identify ‘glocal’ (Marramao, 2012) hybrid influences. This will assist
in further contextualising the permeation of transglobal cinematic influences
into Indian independent cinema (see Chapters 3 and 4, this volume) through
widening spheres of access in the nation’s post-liberalisation public sphere.
The larger interdisciplinary formulation of this book takes into account the
Subaltern Studies context of ‘fragments’ – marginal elements in everyday social
life, such as minority groups and stories, that are often precluded from the nor-
mative national narrative (Chibber, 2013: 19). Dhobi Ghat’s representations
of marginality and alterity could be examined in relation to the thesis of frag-
mentary narratives and cultural difference emerging from an interstitial space.
The case study in this chapter will also incorporate the implications of glo-
balisation on India’s changing cultural, socio-economic and spatio-temporal
constellation. In the process, this close analysis of Dhobi Ghat will evaluate
interrelations between socio-economic transformations, subaltern figures, cul-
tural difference and the urban space as a site for postmodern intersections.
Synopsis
Dhobi Ghat is framed against the backdrop of contemporary Mumbai,
India’s financial centre and multicultural urban centre. The film foregrounds
three primary characters: Arun (Aamir Khan), a famous but introverted
and angst-ridden artist; Shai (Monica Dogra), a young non-resident Indian
Dhobi Ghat 181
investment banker (also an American), indulging her avocation of photog-
raphy in Mumbai; and Munna (Prateik), a subaltern dhobi, or washerman,
who is a migrant to Mumbai from the economically backward state of Bihar,
who harbours aspirations of becoming a Bollywood star.
Shai first meets Arun at a soigné art gallery opening of Arun’s paint-
ings. Arun appears ill at ease and socially awkward in the ostentatious sur-
roundings and is glad to engage in free-flowing conversation with Shai. Shai
accompanies Arun to his flat and they share an enjoyable evening. The next
morning Arun relapses into saturnine silence, apologising for the previous
night’s ‘indiscretions’ and hoping they would not be misconstrued by Shai
as a prelude to a lasting relationship. Shai departs disappointed from Arun’s
flat, assuring him that she enjoyed their time together and harbours no illu-
sions as to the longevity of their interaction.
Shai subsequently meets Munna, the local dhobi, when he comes round
to collect laundry. She attempts to penetrate the socio-economic and class
divide by communicating informally with Munna. In the process, Shai elic-
its information about his origins in the impoverished Darbhanga district
in the northeastern Indian state of Bihar. Munna is fascinated to learn of
Shai’s interest in photography and petitions her to do a photo shoot of him.
Shai agrees to Munna’s request on the reciprocal arrangement that she can
photograph him at his work place – the dhobi ghat. This is an expansive
outdoor laundry complex, where Mumbai’s myriad washermen beat the dirt
out of their customers’ clothes on stone blocks with warm water and soap.
In the meantime, Arun moves into a new flat. During the process of settling
in, he discovers a box secreted away in an old armoire. It contains personal
bric-à-brac belonging to the flat’s previous occupant, along with three mini
DV tapes. Arun views the tapes and discovers they contain the video diaries
of Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), a young migrant Muslim girl from a small-town
in North India. She is revealed as the invisible narrator ‘seen’ filming and
touring Mumbai in a taxi at the start of the film. Addressed to her younger
brother Imran, Yasmin’s epistolary self-narrated Mumbai video diaries reveal
her slow descent into depression. She recounts the alienation she experiences
in Mumbai and her loveless marriage to a philandering husband. Yasmin’s
video diaries culminate in a farewell message in lieu of a suicide note.
Shai, unable to obliterate the image of Arun from her mind, seeks to reiniti-
ate contact with him. Munna’s credentials as Arun’s dhobi render him a possi-
ble intermediary, and he offers to provide Shai with the address of Arun’s new
flat. Shai, undertaking a nightly photo shoot around the vicinity of Munna’s
dilapidated slum, inadvertently interrupts Munna in the act of performing
his clandestine nocturnal occupation – exterminating rats infesting the area.
Humiliated by Shai’s uncovering of his subterfuge, Munna instantly bolts
away into the darkness. Subsequently, the sudden death of Munna’s cousin
Salim at the hands of Mumbai’s local drug mafia exacerbates the financial
instability afflicting Munna’s family. In these circumstances, Munna realises
his love for Shai is unrequited and the insurmountable socio-economic factors
separating them lead to fissures in their friendship.
182 Dhobi Ghat
Form and Style in a Hyperlink Network Narrative
Dissecting Dhobi Ghat’s structural and formal composition invokes com-
parisons with the genres of anthology, portmanteau and mosaic cinema.
These terms, often used interchangeably, refer to multi-story or multi-plot
narratives. It is interesting to posit ‘global network’ films (Traffic, 2000;
Crash, 2004; Syriana, 2005; Babel, 2006, etc.) or hyperlink films (Ebert,
2006: 100) alongside the suffusion of new Indian Indies, such as Ship of
Theseus (2013) and I Am (2010), that espouse the multiple-strand format.
This comparison may assist in identifying links between ‘global network’
films and Dhobi Ghat, which adopts a multiple-narrative strategy.
Neil Narine (2010) asserts that scholarship in the techno-communications
domain has imagined contemporary society as being interlinked through
global networks and hence has perceived this interconnectedness as an
optimistic indicator of augmented libertarian global cooperation. He coun-
tervails this utopian view by describing ‘global network’ film portrayals of
‘network society’ as an uneven terrain of ‘enduring inequality’ (2010: 209).
Narine further argues ‘borrowing from social problem films, economic guilt
films, and city films of the past, these network narratives illustrate how net-
works can link us in unwanted ways’ (ibid.).
Dhobi Ghat is a concatenation of all three above-mentioned film classifi-
cations that constitute network narratives. The first two – ‘social problems’
and ‘economic guilt’ – inform Dhobi Ghat’s depictions of class divisions
and socio-economic disparity between bourgeois Arun and Shai and subal-
tern Munna. The third category is fulfilled by the centrality of Dhobi Ghat’s
location, Mumbai, rendering it a ‘city film’. Also, ‘in the cinematic network
society, empowered agents fail to coordinate or even comprehend the net-
works that surround them’ (Narine, 2010). This is applicable to Dhobi
Ghat’s characters, the investment banker, Shai, and successful artist, Arun.
These two protagonists’ privileged circumstances in large measure contrib-
ute to their naïve or solipsistic modes of negotiating the network in which
they live. Shai’s exteriority as an affluent, Westernised individual restricts
her awareness of the realities of Mumbai’s socio-economic disparities.
Self-absorbed Arun seems locked away in the interiority of his detached
and often withdrawn self.
Meandering through Mumbai: A Postmodern City Film

The city is indispensable to narrative development in Dhobi Ghat. The film
could be situated as a ‘city text’, not just by dint of its full title Dhobi Ghat: The
Mumbai Diaries, but also because it falls within the vision of the postmodern
city (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2003). The cartography of the postmodern
cosmopolis describes the ascendency of industrialisation, the splintering of
society and a burgeoning information superhighway resulting in the growth
of high-tech industries, increase in social polarisation, fragmentation of the
urban habitat and a compression of space and time (ibid.). This is produced
Dhobi Ghat 183
by information sharing, increased cosmopolitanism, multi-ethnicity, globali-
sation of culture and the shedding of barriers (ibid.). These significations of
the postmodern city punctuate Dhobi Ghat’s narrative. Overall, the above
facets align with the concept of globalisation and the new global economy as
a grid of overlaps between ethnicities, media, technology, finance and ideolo-
gies (Appadurai, 1990). This model arguably imagines a postmodern synthe-
sis of ‘information superhighway’ and ‘global village’.
Whilst Mazierska and Rascaroli’s erudite analysis in From Moscow to
Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema (2003) discusses some of
the postmodern nuances of European cities, it could be argued that Dhobi
Ghat as a city text presents an alternative frame. It envisions Mumbai as
a metropolis in perpetual motion on a superhighway to the postmodern
condition.
A vertiginous divide between social classes and an antinomy of eco-
nomic disparity – a broader symptom of Indian civil society – is visible
in Dhobi Ghat’s representation of India’s financial capital. The disparate
backgrounds of the film’s primary characters to some degree reflect Mumbai
as a fragmented cosmopolis, a metonymic prototype of India’s larger het-
erogeneity. The socio-economic divisions between Munna, Shai, Arun and
the other characters in the film appear watertight and insuperable. Despite
these ostensible divisions, the historiography of the city as a caravanserai of
culture lends to Mumbai’s blurring of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, which is a
component of postmodern cities.
As a nucleus of glocal intersections (global with local), Mumbai is repre-
sented as an unfathomable character in Dhobi Ghat, one that presides over
the overlapping narratives of its various inhabitants. Director Kiran Rao
deploys the device of personification in the form of Arun’s next-door neigh-
bour, an inarticulate, elderly woman who silently observes the daily crisscross
of passers-by from her spartan surroundings. This old matriarchal figure is a
metaphor for Mumbai – the only constant in the perennially changing metrop-
olis. In an interview, Kiran Rao states that the old woman, akin to Mumbai,
has weathered the ravages of time and is a silent spectator to the ‘sadness of
modern life’, contained in ‘the sheer weight of all these stories of failure, sad-
ness or deep tragedy that the city always carries with it’ (Rao, 2013).
The city’s grief-bearing stoicism is epitomised in the scene in which a dis-
traught Arun, after learning about Yasmin’s suicide, stumbles out of his flat
and collapses in the corridor overcome with grief. The omniscient old lady
silently surveys Arun’s sad outpourings as ‘yet another person consumed by
this tide of sadness that the city constantly has to wash over people’ (Rao, per-
sonal communication, 2013). Rao’s figurative allusion to the city as an ocean
that incessantly inscribes and effaces human narratives invokes Mumbai’s
historiographical evolution as a palimpsest of myriad human orthographies.
The postmodern city implicated in an inexorable process of inscription
and reinscription is a recurrent theme in Dhobi Ghat. Mumbai is portrayed
as a canvas that across the annals of time has been spattered by a spectrum
of human stories, an intricate interweaving of narratives that imagine the
184 Dhobi Ghat
historical evolution of this metropolis. A potent idiom of this process of
‘scripting the city’ is a scene in which Yasmin, the small-town young woman,
is enraptured by the wonders of the teeming big city. On a visit to Mumbai’s
seafront, she directs her camcorder towards vain attempts to inscribe her
name ‘Yasmin Noor’ in the sand. The relentless machinations of the waves
repeatedly efface her writing and thwart Yasmin’s endeavour to etch her
name indelibly into the city’s memory.
To gain a deeper insight into the city that draws Shai, Munna and
Arun together, it is useful to trace the trajectory of events that has situated
Mumbai as a point of cultural and social convergence. Historically, Bombay
(the city’s original title) was strategically poised as a centre of trade and
commerce, a liminal point of intersection between East and West. Bombay
was a gift from Portugal to Britain’s King Charles II, to commemorate his
wedding to Catherine of Braganza (Monod, 2009: 16). Kiran Rao empha-
sises the city’s antecedents as an arena for social and intercultural interac-
tion, including trade and commerce (Rao, personal communication, 2013).
This is in contrast with the historical associations of India’s capital city,
New Delhi, as a strategic theatre of battle and conflict for invading empires,
marauding opportunists and warring factions (ibid.). Therefore, ‘Bombay’
is a site of ancient and modern overlapping disjunctures and cultural inter-
flows (Appadurai 1990; 1996). Within the city’s historical diachronic evolu-
tionary timeline, postmodern ruptures stemming from India’s globalisation/
post-globalisation national narratives are identifiable in the contemporary
synchronic, longitudinal slice that Dhobi Ghat as a filmic text represents.
Like the city in which it is located, Dhobi Ghat articulates the glocal –
expressing the local with the global (Marramao, 2012: 35). The narratives
of its main characters are firmly rooted in the local Mumbai urbanscape.
The ‘global’ is expressed through the film’s World Cinema aesthetic; a visual
canvas that is infused with a global soundscape in the form of music com-
poser Gustavo Santaolalla’s musical score.
In a departure from Bollywood-style song and dance interludes, Dhobi
Ghat features a non-diegetic guitar-oriented score, composed and performed
by Santaolalla (The Motorcycle Diaries, Brokeback Mountain). The film’s
mélange of aural textures and layers is an index of Dhobi Ghat’s fusion
of audio-visual styles. Santaolalla’s score augments the film’s global hybrid
sensibility; his solo guitar segues into traditional ragas – melodic modes and
phrases used in Indian classical music. One of these ragas is Paani Bharan
Aaye in Raag Khamaj by Hindustani classical singer Siddheshwari Devi.
Another sequence features ghazal singer Begum Akhtar’s rain song Ab ke
Saawan in the raga Tilak Kamod, deployed diegetically in Dhobi Ghat to
symbolically herald the onset of Mumbai’s monsoon. This synthesis of musi-
cal styles typifies the notion of hybrid amalgamation in the new Indies. It
epitomises their integration of diverse sensibilities and influences that depart
from conventional Bollywood modes of visual form, style and narration.
Dhobi Ghat invokes the postmodern trope of urban individuals voyeuris-
tically watching the world through electronic interfaces. In this regard, the
Dhobi Ghat 185
film draws intertextual comparisons with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
(1954). This relates to a scene where Shai, impelled by an irresistible urge to
observe Arun, climbs up to one of the upper storeys of a high-rise building
construction site owned by her father’s corporation, and located opposite
Arun’s flat. Shai’s view from this vantage point captures the tenement build-
ing opposite her, peppered with windows like rectangular gashes in a cinema
screen (Fig. 8.1). This recalls the view of L B (Jeff) Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart)
in Rear Window; the building across the street from his camera’s spying
eye, consists of a similar conurbation of flats dotted with the apertures of
multiple windows (Fig. 8.2).
Figure 8.1 Shai’s wide shot of windows in Dhobi Ghat.
Figure 8.2 View from Jeff’s window in Rear Window.

186 Dhobi Ghat
From her elevated position, Shai directs her gaze at Arun through the
lens of her camera (Fig. 8.3). Oblivious to Shai’s surreptitious surveillance,
Arun at that precise moment is himself implicated in the pleasure of ‘look-
ing’. He is in the process of gazing at Yasmin’s video diary (Fig. 8.4). Arun
draws inspiration from Yasmin’s onscreen presence and simultaneously
attempts to distill the essence of what he sees onto his sketchpad. Framed
by Shai’s roving camera viewfinder, Arun leaves his sketchpad aside and
moves towards the television, ostensibly to rewind a scene playing on the
television screen through the camcorder. As Arun inspects the camcorder
Figure 8.3 Shai’s ‘stakeout’.
Figure 8.4 Her object of scrutiny – Arun.

Dhobi Ghat 187
(Fig. 8.5), Shai is interrupted by a phone call (Fig. 8.6). Looking at her
mobile phone, she realises it is a call from her father, who is checking
whether Shai has managed to gain access to the building. Shai’s subsequent
conversation reveals she has not disclosed to her father the real reason for
her stakeout – her desire to ‘watch’ Arun.
Figure 8.5 Arun looking into the camcorder while playing Yasmin’s video diary.
Figure 8.6 Shai interrupted by a phone call from her father.
Dhobi Ghat applies a postmodern twist to Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

In the above sequence, Rear Window’s portrayal of the pleasure of looking
that privileges Jeff’s male gaze (Fig. 8.8), is reversed by Shai’s in Dhobi Ghat
(Fig. 8.7). In the latter film, Shai is the ‘watcher’ and Arun is the ‘watched’
188 Dhobi Ghat
object of her gaze. Another distinction is Dhobi Ghat’s deployment of sym-
bols of hyperreal postmodern interconnectivity: technological devices that
pervade the concise duration of this scene. These include Shai’s digital cam-
era and mobile phone and Arun’s camcorder and television.
Figure 8.7 Shai spying through her camera.
Figure 8.8 Jeff indulging in the pleasure of looking.
The scene’s imagination of the process of looking is a sinuous chain contin-

gent on these intermediary interfaces. Shai looks through her camera at Arun
whilst he is watching Yasmin on the television, connected to his camcorder con-
taining the mini DV tape of Yasmin’s video diaries. Shai pauses in her exertions
Dhobi Ghat 189
to look at her mobile phone, which connects her to her father. This cyclical
loop of ‘looking’ returns to the audience watching the film and opens up the
discourse of voyeurism. This is a theme perennially debated and dissected in
Film Studies, particularly through the proposition that Jeff’s scopophilia in
Rear Window largely mirrors the pleasurable act of viewing films (Winkler,
2009: 139). Overall, the interconnectedness on display in the above-described
sequence once again is symptomatic of the postmodern condition – a hyperre-
ality of constant communication via a crisscross of networks.
Aside from Dhobi Ghat’s homage to Hitchcock, the film shares intertex-
tual similarities with fellow Indie, Ship of Theseus. Dhobi Ghat invokes a
dialogic connection with Anand Gandhi’s hyperlink film on the level that
both films frame Mumbai as the backdrop for their narrative events. The
two Indies also overlap in their representation of female characters interpret-
ing the world through the lens of photographic devices – blind protagonist
Aliya’s camera in Ship of Theseus, Shai’s camera and Yasmin’s camcorder
in Dhobi Ghat. Both films’ female characters undertake similar journeys.
Yasmin’s visit to the Elephanta caves, an island located on the outskirts of
Mumbai, in 2010’s Dhobi Ghat is reinvoked in Aliya’s similar journey in
2013’s Ship of Theseus.
Another point of convergence between Dhobi Ghat and Ship of Theseus
is the use of photographs to trigger memory and nostalgia as well as to
imagine Mumbai’s multidimensional socio-cultural layers. Capturing the
city’s spaces, places and sites of intersection is a motif in both these ‘city’
films. As a votary of photography, Shai in Dhobi Ghat seeks to extract the
essence of Mumbai’s beating heart, to find the city in its societal gradations.
Blind photographer Aliya in Ship of Theseus attempts to capture elements
of the metaphysical and transcendental in the ethnographical during her
intuitive forays into the city’s febrile landscape. This implicit interweaving
of local context, global film aesthetic and dialogic intertextuality assists in
imagining the personal transitions of the films’ characters and provides a
glimpse into Mumbai’s inexorable post-globalisation journey. In essence,
Mumbai epitomises a liminal state of flux at the micro level. At the macro
level, this continual state of becoming is indicative of India’s metamorpho-
sis; the national journey from traditional to neoliberal.
Another proposition relates to the film’s signification of absence and
presence in the daily repetition of human narratives in the urban space. For
example, Yasmin’s somatic absence in the film’s ‘world of the living’ empha-
sises her displacement to the realm of the virtual – she only exists in her video
diaries. Yasmin ‘speaks’ to Arun from this peripheral position. Her voice
from ‘beyond’ provides a stimulus for Arun to retrace her journey through
Mumbai and therefore to assimilate her lived experience. In one such instance,
Arun reconstructs Yasmin’s visit to the sea. Emulating Yasmin’s actions in her
video diary, he inscribes his name in the sand. Arun also tries to locate the
essence of Yasmin’s Mumbai experience through haptic engagement with the
discarded objects in the box she left behind in his flat. Arun touches each
object – a compact mirror, a fish-shaped bibelot and a silver ring.
190 Dhobi Ghat
The trope of human touch as a portal to memory of a departed person
is consistently invoked in several films. In the climactic scene of Brokeback
Mountain (2005), Ennis (Heath Ledger) holds the shirt of his departed lover
Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) close to him, feeling its texture and inhaling its fabric
in an attempt to conjure Jack’s lost presence. Carolyn Burnham (Annette
Bening) in American Beauty (1999) performs the same act of trying to cor-
porealise her dead husband Lester (Kevin Spacey) by running her hands
across an array of his shirts suspended in a closet. The grieving Chinese
mother Junn (Cheng Pei-Pei) in the British drama Lilting (2014) evokes the
memory of her recently deceased young son by stepping into his room and
trying to find him in the fabric of his bed linen. In other words, she uses
haptic and olfactory senses as human receptors to assimilate the residual
remains of her departed son. In a similar gesture, Arun strings a ring he
discovers in Yasmin’s belongings onto a chain and wears it around his neck.
Standing in front of a mirror, Arun appraises his attempt to find himself in
the ‘mirror image’ of the other (Fig. 8.9).
Figure 8.9 Arun: seeing himself in the other.
In a more tangible use of image, the recurrent theme of photographs as

a portal to nostalgia, memory and identity is reprised when Arun looks at
family photographs in Yasmin’s small box of possessions. One photograph
contains a message scrawled on its reverse by Yasmin’s brother, Imran. This
inscription and the photographs signifying happier times are the ghostly
text and image traces of Yasmin’s interrupted dreams of a life. They serve as
a memento mori (Barthes, 1981) evoking Yasmin’s past before the rupture
and displacement of her migration from periphery to centre.
Arun’s scrutiny of Yasmin’s family photographs impels him to imagine
the ‘inviolate’ other and what appears to be the unsullied innocence and
Dhobi Ghat 191
naïveté of the small town that seems untainted by modern urban decay
and anomie. To some degree this pre-conception represents the ‘ambivalent
nature of the stereotype’ (Villar-Argaiz, 2008: 21), with the native other
seen as ‘both mysterious and known’ (Bhabha, 1995: 79). The photographic
images put into perspective Arun’s own disillusionment with the superfici-
ality of Mumbai life. His growing cynicism with the vacuous upper eche-
lons of the city’s dilettantes and glitterati is in stark contrast with Yasmin’s
short-lived but genuine joie de vivre; her initial ebullience and excitement at
experiencing the big city. In this context, Arun’s preoccupation with vicar-
iously experiencing Yasmin’s story through her video diaries recalls Homi
Bhabha’s assertion that peripheral narratives are indispensable for majority
discourses and dominant groups to define and construct notions of self.
Dhobi Ghat’s representation of Yasmin’s ‘absent’ voice and memories that
haunt the present, signposts the film’s allusion to marginal individuals and
communities integral to Mumbai’s complex network.
Marginalised Other in Dhobi Ghat’s Double Narrative

Arun, in his speech at the art gallery soirée to launch an exhibition of his
paintings under the theme ‘Building’, acknowledges the influence on his artis-
tic work of labourers and migrant construction workers from ‘Rajasthan,
UP (Uttar Pradesh), Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, who built this city
in the hope that someday they will find their rightful place in it’. Arun’s
paean to Mumbai’s syncretism represents the film’s broader affirmation of
heterogeneity in the city’s construction. This testimony is particularly rele-
vant to the miasma of sectarian violence in 2008, spearheaded by a splinter
group of the right-wing fundamentalist Hindu Shiv Sena party with its drive
to ‘purge’ Maharashtra state of migrant workers from other Indian states.
These extremist groups especially targeted their violent attacks at taxi and
auto-rickshaw drivers from economically backward Northern Indian states
such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (Chandran, 2008). This theme receives crit-
ical examination in independent Marathi film Court (2015), which portrays
a scene where a right-wing theatre audience enjoys a vernacular performance
explicitly advocating the ejection of non-Maharashtrian migrant workers
hailing from other Indian states. In this context, Arun’s articulation and
affirmation of the city’s acculturation in his speech at the gallery is Dhobi
Ghat’s self-reflexive interrogation of the incidents of sectarian and xenopho-
bic violence in Mumbai. As an enunciation of resistance, Arun’s declaration
bears fresh relevance to India’s current socio-political milieu of intolerance,
where mythologised notions of religious and ethnic purity continue to be
enforced on a national scale by right-wing Hindu nationalist groups.
Continuing with this theme, two of Dhobi Ghat’s characters, Yasmin
Noor and Munna are minority Muslims and hail from the ostracised north
Indian states. Both characters are from less-privileged socio-economic cir-
cumstances compared to those of Arun and Shai. During the film’s opening
192 Dhobi Ghat
sequence, Yasmin, from Malihabad, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, discovers
that her taxi driver, a fellow-migrant to Mumbai, is originally from Jaunpur,
a neighbouring town in her home state. Similarly, the dhobi Munna reveals
to Shai that he is from an impoverished region in Bihar and that ‘Munna’ is
a diminutive of his real Muslim name, Zohaib.
The assortment of characters in Dhobi Ghat emphasises Mumbai’s own
socio-cultural multiplicity and hybridity. The city’s polymorphous compo-
sition and its attendant socio-economic realities often get subsumed by the
dominant popular mythologisation of Mumbai as a propitious site, where
financial aspirations and upward social mobility automatically come to fru-
ition in the realisation of the ‘Bombay Dream’. Dhobi Ghat exposes some of
the fissures in the unilinear imagining of Mumbai as modern Indian financial
capital: a city associated with dreams of wealth, fame and Bollywood. The
film demonstrates inconsistencies and instabilities in the ‘Bombay Dream’
by splintering this codified, homogenised and mythologised perception of
the city into its multidimensional fragments. In this regard, Kiran Rao states:
The city [Mumbai] is this universe, but each city having small uni-
verses that only the characters experience … your Bombay is quite
different from the next person’s Bombay, and it is possible for us to
live in the same city and have completely different imaginings and
experiences of the same. The city gets its textures and layers because of
all these multiple experiences. All of this creates this multiple-layered
and still homogeneous whole.
(Rao, personal communication, 2013)
Rao’s perception of multiple imaginings and lived experiences within the

contours of a single shared space recalls the two main characters in Gandu.
Although they live within the same Kolkata locality, Gandu and his impov-
erished friend Ricksha have different interpretations and assimilations of
their surroundings. Similarly, Dhobi Ghat’s location of Mumbai as a theatre
of multiple transformative discourses enables the film’s various characters to
performatively express the city’s pedagogical cultural diversity.
Dhobi Ghat represents hybridity, fragmentation and contradiction in
Mumbai’s daily performance of the aforementioned pedagogic cultural
diversity, as highlighted in Munna, Shai and Arun’s overlapping lives. The
film uncovers ‘the spatial fantasy of modern cultural communities’ being
speciously idealised as the ‘People-as-One’, which in reality robs ‘minorities
of those marginal, liminal spaces’ from where they can interrupt and contest
the ‘unifying and totalizing myths of the national culture’ (Bhabha, 1994:
358). By demonstrating gaps and omissions between the imagined rhetorical
discourse of India’s purported cultural unity (in diversity) and incongruence
in its actual everyday practice, Dhobi Ghat opens up an interstitial median
space that facilitates enunciations of the city’s peripheral subjects, Munna
and Yasmin.
Dhobi Ghat 193
In this regard, the film’s opening scene sets the stage for Yasmin’s articula-
tion of her outsider status in the Mumbai mainstream. She remains invisible
to the spectator during this sequence, and is only identifiable by her voice
heard within the hermetic interior of a Mumbai taxi. The taxi driver from
Yasmin’s home state initiates a conversation, evoking her memories of home
by alluding to Malihabad’s quintessential association with mangoes. The
implicit meaning in this prologue scene is manifold. It provides a snapshot
of the broader migrant experience by evoking Yasmin’s journey from the
small town to the big city; from the margins to the mainstream.
From the impressions evinced in the scene, the taxi driver’s own migration
from Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai appears complete. At home in his surround-
ings, he sees Mumbai as the space where his place, identity and occupation
as a taxi driver are inscribed. Yasmin appears to be in the formative stages
of a similar migratory transition. This proposition is validated by piecing
together the fragments of narrative information revealed in the scene. How-
ever, several audio-visual clues also indicate Yasmin’s sense of dislocation
that is underpinned by nostalgia and memory. She reveals to the driver that
she still feels like a stranger after five months in Mumbai. The camera zooms
in to focus on the taxi’s dashboard sticker. It contains the sketch of a woman
sitting by the side of a highway lost in forlorn thought, as a taxi races past
her in the background. The caption at the bottom of the sticker reads ‘When
will you come Home?’ The symbolism of this trope provides an insight into
Yasmin’s ambivalent state of mind.
Essentially, the taxi evokes the associative idea of ‘home’ or ‘belonging’.
Within its enclosed space, Yasmin nostalgically re-imagines ‘home’; through
the driver’s reference to Malihabad mangoes, which are obliquely invoked
by the decorative green grapes dangling prominently from the driver’s back-
seat mirror. Thoughts of her hometown are amplified by the dashboard
sticker’s melancholy appeal to return home. The camera’s tight framing of
shots accentuate Yasmin’s suspension between the interiority of ‘home’ and
the exteriority of unfamiliar Mumbai outside the taxi. Yasmin attempts to
negotiate this overwhelming new ‘exterior’ space by invoking the memory
of ‘home’, using her handicam to film her experiences in Mumbai and gen-
erate video diaries to send back home to her brother, Imran.
Seated in the taxi, Yasmin is an embodiment of the liminal process of
‘becoming’ – from Malihabad migrant to Mumbai resident. In this sense,
Yasmin herself is a bridge between the taxi’s interiority (home) and
Mumbai’s exteriority. The description of performativity as ‘non-essentialized
constructions of marginalised identities’ (Dolan, 1993: 419), raises the
proposition of whether Yasmin’s performative act of re-invoking memory
and remembering home in the taxi and at other subsequent plot-points
in the narrative, constitutes a daily performance of re-inscribing identity.
In other words, through her digital diaries, Yasmin draws from nostalgia
and memory to perform her own (re)interpretation and (re)mediation of
her daily life in Mumbai from her new perspective as a peripheral subject.
194 Dhobi Ghat
Therefore, Yasmin’s performative re-articulations of her past develop new
contexts with everyday iterations in her present life in Mumbai, ultimately
charting the contingent future possibility of her ‘becoming’ or ‘belonging’.
Therefore, the three mini DV tapes containing her video diaries are like a
triple-act drama: beginning, middle and end, or in a temporal metaphor,
past, present and future.
In the process of interpreting her existence in the present by using the
benchmark of the past, Yasmin includes new marginal characters into
her field of experience. For example, in one segment of her video diary,
Yasmin pauses whilst filming for an impromptu interview with Lata bai,
her domestic help. Yasmin’s intention is to introduce Lata bai ‘virtually’
to her brother Imran via her video diaries. Yasmin asks Lata bai’s adoles-
cent daughter, Vanitha to recite a poem to the camera. Proud of studying
in an English-medium school, young Vanitha declaims the first few lines
of Alfred Tennyson’s The Brook. The poem’s refrain: ‘for men may come
and men may go but I go on forever’, contains the possibility of repetitive
‘performativity’ (Chawla, 2011: 92), and encapsulates Dhobi Ghat’s rep-
resentation of Mumbai as a constant site of perpetually changing human
narratives and identities. In effect, Yasmin’s everyday re-inscriptions reflect
the constantly changing palimpsest of myriad individual layers; narratives
sedimented and concealed by the homogenising discourse of pedagogical
cultural diversity.
This proposition prompts comparison with the experience of the co-author
of Liminal Traces (2011), Devika Chawla, as an Indian migrant to America.
Chawla reveals how she negotiated being an outsider in an unfamiliar milieu
by documenting in a diary her experience of ordinary, everyday ‘affects’ –
‘things that happen’ everyday, that transport people to unexpected places
(Chawla, 2011: 90). To this catalysing force of ‘things that happen’ Chawla
adds her experience of nostalgia, of ‘things remembered’ – ‘the triggers’ or
‘the moments’ that caused her to docket other moments in her diary (ibid.).
Yasmin, due to her ‘absence’ in the film’s ‘living’ world inhabited by Shai,
Arun and Munna, is crucial to extricating larger subtextual discourses of
nation in Dhobi Ghat. This is because her ‘ghostly’ confinement to the video
diaries represents the micro narratives and marginal voices that are elided
or effaced in the unrelenting master narrative of nation. Yasmin’s journey
from the Malihabad periphery to the Mumbai mainstream results in her
alienation from both the big city and her loveless marriage. This anomie
displaces her into the imaginary zone of her digital diaries: a liminal vir-
tual space that affords her the agency to articulate, something she is denied
in her real, everyday existence. In this interstitial domain she can conceal
her anxieties and disillusionment in the ‘hidden’ capsule of a video tape.
Here, Yasmin can draw on memory and nostalgia to imagine her emergence
from the narrow, liminal cloister and break free into the autonomous realm
of ‘becoming’ – however unrealistic that may be in her bleak real world
existence.
Dhobi Ghat 195
The fact that Arun ‘hears’ Yasmin’s posthumous self-narration through
his discovery and viewing of her video diaries, also raises the thesis that
Yasmin gains the agency of speech only in death. This proposition opens up
the turbulent undertow of all the aforementioned ‘ordinary affects’, memo-
ries and performative vicissitudes of Yasmin’s daily life that lie beneath her
oral testimony. Yasmin’s ‘ghostly voice’ is an example of a device used in
several Indian Indies to deploy subtle and overt contestations of dominant
or normalised narratives and figuratively represent peripheralised narratives
in Indian society. Examples include Harud’s evocation of both literal and
metaphorical apparitions: the ‘ghosts’ of young Kashmiri men ‘disappeared’
by the Indian state apparatus, Gandu’s ‘imaginary’ friend, the subaltern
rickshaw-puller, and Peepli Live’s talismanic character Hori Mahato, who
symbolises the ‘ghosts’ of farmer suicides in India.
Representation as a Marker of Divergent Narratives

Shai, as the ‘outsider’, non-resident Indian (NRI) from America, is described
as naïve, uninitiated and uninformed about Indian social mores and hence
embodies an ambivalence of ‘authenticity’. This is in terms of her being out-
side the everyday Indian experience, yet privileged by her social class, family
background and economic status, factors that afford her ready admittance
into the upper strata of Mumbai society.
Aside from this portrayal of the NRI outsider, Dhobi Ghat establishes
a love triangle configuration between Shai, Munna and Arun that seems
reminiscent of the commonly used Bollywood idiom. However, the film
departs significantly from this trope’s conventional and ubiquitous use in
commercial films. Most significantly, Shai is invested, even empowered,
with the agency to pursue and woo Arun. She is relentless in her desire for
him, even resorting to setting up subterfuges and stalking him. This is a
departure from the entrenched masculine codes and privileged male gaze in
Bollywood films, where courtship is an almost exclusively male-dominated
prerogative.
Although Shai appears genuinely fond of Munna and treats him with
kindness, she is fascinated by his ‘exotic’ subaltern idiosyncrasies. Shai
to a large degree infantilises the dhobi, never considering him worthy of
more than platonic friendship and to some extent restricts him to being the
object of her photography. Shai, despite her ‘liberal’ Western sensibilities
and seemingly genuine investment in her friendship with Munna, cannot
break from the ideological shackles of socio-economic strictures. Her priv-
ileged background as the daughter of a corporate business tycoon and her
rarefied upbringing contribute to her bewildered enthrallment with ‘exotic’
Indian socio-cultural rituals and practices. In general, her antecedents as an
American investment banker to a large degree insulate her from the reali-
ties of class and caste hierarchies in modern India. She therefore perceives
Munna as a curiosity or a novelty.
196 Dhobi Ghat
It could be stated that despite their benevolence towards the labouring
class, Arun and Shai, in their own ways, are unwittingly complicit in objec-
tifying the film’s peripheral subjects, Munna and Yasmin. In Arun’s case, he
undergoes a cathartic renewal during the process of vicariously experiencing
Yasmin’s life through her trilogy of tapes. Jaded and cynical with the superfi-
ciality and artistic stagnation that intersperse his existence, Arun discovers a
muse in Yasmin. Watching her video diaries reanimates his creative faculties.
Infused with new inspiration, he begins to paint again, with Yasmin as the
central theme of his rekindled creative drive. As a character in the film, Arun
is portrayed as reclusive, introverted and Bohemian. Although he installs
himself in a nondescript part of Mumbai and seeks to distance himself from
the vapid and vacuous high-society he eschews, he also seems to isolate him-
self from the marginalised sections of society that inspire his art.
In essence, Arun exhibits a marked distantiation from the ‘objects’
that form the subjects of his paintings – the labourers he extols in his art
gallery speech. Similarly, Yasmin seems to have become an object of his
art. However, Arun experiences an emotional rupture and is wrenched from
his idyllic imaginary connection with Yasmin upon learning of her suicide.
Shai’s engagement with the film’s other marginal subject, Munna, is both
similar and different from Arun’s ‘interaction’ with Yasmin.
In an interview, film scholar M K Raghavendra observes Munna’s
relegation to the periphery at the outset of his interactions with Shai.
Raghavendra asserts that Shai cannot even consider Munna worthy of a
sustained or genuine love interest (Raghavendra, personal communication,
2013). This view serves to highlight the deeper implications of India’s water-
tight class divisions that are arguably normalised and legitimised by several
historical, religious and socio-cultural factors enmeshed in the nation’s post-
colonial national narrative. Therefore, Shai’s subliminal casting of Munna
to the margins is symptomatic of the reality of difference and exclusion
always-already extant even in burgeoning Indian urban centres such as
Mumbai. Munna’s predicament evokes similarities with Natha, the farmer
in Peepli Live. Both are central characters in their respective films, but
Munna and Natha are essentially pawns, malleable to the vested interests
and whims of privileged individuals and groups and therefore dispatched to
the periphery at the culmination of both films.
Kiran Rao (personal communication, 2013) observes fossilised socie-
tal striations that seem to perpetuate antiquated historico-religious and
socio-economic divisions in Indian culture. She highlights the reality of
enduring boundaries between the bourgeoisie and working or ‘servant’
class in Indian urban centres, which operate through strictly defined as well
as self-enforced occupational roles and subservient duties (Rao, personal
communication, 2013). This standardised and internalised socio-economic
stratification informs Dhobi Ghat’s representation of Munna. The above
assertions can be contextualised by the Subaltern Studies proposition that
the colonial and postcolonial Indian bourgeoisie could not formulate a
Dhobi Ghat 197
universalising system that incorporated the labouring classes into a ‘recog-
nizable modern political order’ (Chibber, 2013: 37), and this instead con-
tributed to an elite/subaltern divide.
The legacy of this colonial/postcolonial narrative of separation and
exclusion reverberates in modern Indian hierarchical structures and social
situations. This schism is evident when Shai and her affluent companions
share a drink in an upmarket bar. Shai’s friends mock her interest in Munna
with disparaging statements belittling his profession as a dhobi. This social
discrimination permeates into other interactions and extends to the working
class. In one scene, Shai’s housemaid Agnes refuses to acknowledge Munna
as an equal. Agnes expresses her disdain when Shai invites Munna to sit
on the sofa like an ‘equal’. When Shai asks Agnes to serve them tea, Agnes
extends an ‘inferior’ glass tumbler to Munna as opposed to the teacup she
offers Shai. These examples reveal the tacit hierarchical social and class
divisions that persist in modern urban India, where disequilibrium between
privileged and peripheral and the multitudinous gradations in-between, are
always-already formalised and normalised as a fait accompli.
Dhobi Ghat portrays intricate overlaps and contradictions interpolated
into the narrative of Mumbai, the modern metropolis, itself a microcosm of
contemporary urban India. In this regard, the film demonstrates instances
in Mumbai’s terrain where deep-rooted inequalities in society and prom-
inently enacted class divisions in personal or private spheres (such as the
above examples involving Shai in the exclusive bar and at home) can often
be blurred through negotiations in more neutral spaces. Some scenes in the
film depict the demotic sharing of public space, where social intersections
are less constrained by tacit precepts of class and caste separations.
In the first such example, Shai and Munna dine together at a table in a
cosy, quaint old café. Kiran Rao (personal communication, 2013) reveals
that this scene was filmed in Kayani, an ‘Irani’ café – a quintessential yet mor-
ibund Mumbai institution that harkens back to the 19th century. Accord-
ing to Rao, Irani cafés are the legacy of an enduring tradition, established
by Mumbai’s dwindling Parsi community (the progeny of ancient Persian
Zoroastrian immigrants). Rao’s intention was to document the imminent
demise of traditional Irani cafés in Mumbai’s rush towards neoliberal cor-
poratisation whilst also foregrounding the Irani café’s spatial inclusivity
as a site for people of diverse backgrounds to congregate and engage in
conversation. The Irani café therefore represents a neutral, pluralistic site
of mediation between societal binaries and intermediaries (Rao, personal
communication, 2013). In general, Mumbai’s Irani cafés exemplify built
environments in cities, places that have embedded in them shards of the
past and implications of the future. They therefore constitute nodal points
of continual arbitration in relation to the city’s collective memories, current
realities and future aspirations (Broudehoux, 2001: 275).
Dhobi Ghat’s representation of the Irani café as a fast-dwindling
demotic space in an ascendant urbanscape of corporate high-rise buildings
198 Dhobi Ghat
is a reflection of larger vicissitudes in neoliberal India. The new neolib-
eral master narrative entails the ‘imposition of single-stranded images on
urban diversity in the process of city marketing’ (Broudehoux, 2001: 275),
allowing a commodification and consumerisation of city space through the
‘exclusionary processes that often privilege the views of one group over
another’ (ibid.).
Dhobi Ghat’s second instance of neutral social space relates to more con-
temporaneous transformations in urban India – the multiplex. As a point of
contrast with the antiquarian associations of the Irani café, the multiplex is
an enduring legacy of India’s early 1990s engagement with neoliberalism.
The introduction of multiplexes after globalisation led to the phasing out
of less commercially viable single-screens (Reddi, 2009: 377). As discussed
in Chapter 4, Adrian Athique (2010) presents an important insight into the
socio-cinematic disjuncture of switching systems from single-screen to mul-
tiplex. The majority of single-screen owners perceived elitism in the multi-
plex ethos of directing their strategies towards the ‘decent crowds’ from the
upper- and middle-classes, contrasting this with their single-screen cinema’s
accessibility to ‘the poor’, ‘villagers’, ‘rickshaw wallahs’ and the ‘little classy
people’ (Athique, 2010: 221).
This could be viewed through the lens of a scene where Munna, his
cousin Salim and two of their friends run into Shai as they are waiting to see
a film in the foyer of a multiplex. The perception of Mumbai as a postmod-
ern Indian city of contradictions and imbrications is affirmed in the casual,
contiguous co-existence between Shai, her affluent friends and subalterns
Munna and Salim within the same spatial dimensions of the multiplex. At
first glance, the earlier contention of multiplexes deploying selective strat-
egies that solicit urbane audiences seems inconsistent with Dhobi Ghat’s
representation in this scene. The sharing of public space represented in
the sequence reflects perceptions of Mumbai as a melting pot of hetero-
dox co-existence. However, it is worth pondering whether the social mixing
shown in the scene is confined to the multiplex foyer, with no guarantee of
egalitarian access to the screening spaces. In the wider context of this study,
this sequence evokes the unstated realities of the disproportionate multi-
plex pricing system that functions as a socio-ideological sifting mechanism
helping sustain the status quo of socio-economic disparity in Indian civil
society. As a footnote, it is possible to ironically point out that urban multi-
plex ticket prices for non-mainstream films, such as Dhobi Ghat, can range
towards 1,000 rupees (see Chapter 4).
Socio-economic polarities informing interactions between Dhobi Ghat’s
characters evokes comparisons with several British social realism films,
such as A Taste of Honey (1961), Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988) and
Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song (1996), where redeeming human sensibilities ulti-
mately emanate from socially peripheral or subaltern characters. In Dhobi
Ghat, Munna, the migrant washerman eventually emerges on the moral
high ground rather than the film’s solipsistic middle-class characters. Munna
Dhobi Ghat 199
enacts the film’s only selfless human gesture by being able to transcend his
unrequited feelings for Shai and privilege her happiness over his own.
This is portrayed in the film’s climactic scene, where he chases after Shai’s
departing taxi, heedless of the milling Mumbai crowds and maelstrom of
traffic, to pass on a scrap of paper containing the phone number of his
competitor for Shai’s affections – Arun. Munna’s largesse is rendered all
the more altruistic in light of his recent bereavement following his cousin
Salim’s murder. The desperate immediacy of the dhobi’s situation is under-
scored by his new responsibility as the sole breadwinner and custodian
of Salim’s old mother and adolescent brother. Under these circumstances,
Munna’s spontaneous performative act emerges from an otherwise mun-
dane role repetition; his daily performance of ‘identity’ as subaltern migrant
dhobi. Ultimately, Munna’s emergence as the film’s ‘bigger person’ (Rao,
personal communication, 2013) raises questions about the modern Indian
urban narrative of privilege, class distinction and socio-economic inequity.
Munna’s gesture of altruism is an expression of agency ‘from below’. His
act demonstrates the ability of the marginal to contest and diverge from
the essentialising and shackling pedagogy of nation. In his gesture, Munna
breaks the repetitious cycle of expected linearity by performatively express-
ing a ‘time of liberation’, albeit symbolic.
Summing up the arguments and propositions in this chapter, Dhobi Ghat
exhibits several characteristics of the new wave of Indies. In its representa-
tion of liminal ghosts and the fragments of nation, the film reveals micro
narratives of marginalised and subaltern characters whilst performing a
ground level mapping of the national narrative’s transition towards the neo-
liberal. Dhobi Ghat exemplifies the notion of hybridity and glocality in the
Indies by drawing from multiple influences in its narration of multifarious
characters and themes. As a postmodern city film that emphasises hetero-
geneity rather than homogeneity, Dhobi Ghat diverges significantly from
Bollywood. Ultimately, through its own performative rewriting of the ped-
agogical national metanarrative and by exposing the marginal in the main-
stream in terms of representation, Dhobi Ghat articulates a distinctively
alternative narration of nation.
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versity Press.
9 Peepli Live
Neoliberal Capital, Media ‘Knowledge’
and Political Power
Earlier chapters and sections have mentioned Peepli Live’s hybridity as a

film funded and marketed by Aamir Khan Productions (AKP), yet espousing
unconventional satirical socio-political themes. Peepli Live’s form, style and
content will be analysed in this chapter to identify the film’s divergence from
Bollywood narratives, its interrogation of the national narrative and, in this
regard, the film’s evocation of the ghosts of subnarratives elided from the
dominant discourse. I will demonstrate how the film represents marginal-
ised, subaltern figures and their collision with the consumer-driven hyper-
reality of postmodern India, examining the representation of ruptures and
fragmentation ensuing from India’s urban-rural encounter.
I will examine the film’s depictions of the Indian news media as an
increasingly dominant arbiter of discourse in an urbanising nation, where
overwhelming consumerism is coterminous with vestiges of the erstwhile
British colonial system. These relics of pre-independence structures rever-
berate in Peepli Live’s thematic evocation of endemic state corruption,
bureaucratic apathy towards marginalised individuals and India’s seemingly
unbridgeable socio-economic disparity. It is also worth considering whether
the film’s themes and issues interpret discourse emerging from socio-political
fractures and contradictions in a rapidly globalising and increasingly neolib-
eral nation. In this regard, I will reveal a nexus between capital, media and
politics as represented in the film.
Synopsis
Peepli Live, directed by Anusha Rizvi, is a satirical narration of events in
the life of its protagonist, Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri), an impover-
ished farmer. Natha lives in the village of Peepli with his extended family:
his brother Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav), wife Dhaniya (Shalini Vatsa), three
children and the brothers’ elderly mother. The film is set against the
backdrop of farmer suicides in India, stemming from their indebtedness
and inability to repay bank loans in the face of drought and crop fail-
ure. Several rural regions in India witnessed farmer suicides, commencing
in the post-globalisation years. P Sainath (2013) observes that ‘at least
270,940 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1995’; and the Indian
government is consistently indicted for its apathy towards the plight of
these farmers.
202 Peepli Live
In Peepli Live, Natha and Budhia are embroiled in a similar predicament;
they are unable to repay a bank loan and are faced with the prospect of the
bank auctioning their land. The imminent appropriation of their land and
the hopelessness of their situation compel the brothers to ingratiate them-
selves to Bhai Thakur, the local moneylender. Bhai Thakur humiliates the
brothers, sarcastically suggesting the two farmers commit suicide because
the government has launched an initiative to grant monetary compensation
to the surviving kin of farmers who kill themselves. This facetious remark
is absorbed at face value by the siblings and adopted as a plan to extricate
themselves from their impending penury. Natha decides to kill himself.
Rakesh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a reporter for the small, local newspaper
Jan Morcha (‘People’s Front’) gets wind of Natha’s plan and promptly pub-
lishes it. News of Natha’s announced suicide travels far and wide, reaching
the New Delhi offices of news channels ITVN and Bharat Live. Ambitious
news anchor Nandita Malik (Malaika Shenoy) is dispatched to the village of
Peepli to investigate Natha’s ultimatum of self-destruction. Upon arriving in
Peepli and establishing contact with Natha, Nandita’s breaking news report
precipitates a media storm leading to a convoy of TV news vans descend-
ing on Peepli. A regiment of TV channel crews set up camp, laying siege
to Natha’s hut and documenting his family’s every move on live national
television.
The media circus has a cascading effect on the political machinery of
Peepli and the village’s encompassing state, Mukhya Pradesh. The interven-
tion of the Mukhya Pradesh chief minister, Ram Yadav, and local Peepli
politicians in Natha’s declaration of suicide eventually opens up a Pandora’s
box for central government politicians in Delhi. Natha becomes a pawn in a
manipulative game between the media, Chief Minister Ram Yadav, Federal
Union Minister for Agriculture Salim Kidwai (Naseeruddin Shah) and local
level bureaucrats. As the situation rapidly deteriorates, Bhai Thakur kidnaps
Natha and holds him captive in a warehouse on the outskirts of Peepli.
A farcical melee ensues between Bhai Thakur, his minions, the media
personnel and government bureaucrats. In the tumult, a petrol lamp is dis-
placed, starting a fire. Pushed to the precipice of his forbearance, Natha
seizes his chance and absconds under cover of darkness as the warehouse
is engulfed in flames. A body charred beyond recognition is extricated from
the decimated warehouse, and the media hordes proclaim news of Natha’s
death. However, a bracelet on the corpse’s arm reveals to the film’s audience
that it is Rakesh, the Jan Morcha reporter, who has actually perished in the
blaze. The media crews fold up their operations in Peepli and depart, leaving
a trail of garbage in their wake.
The film’s final moments depict Natha’s brother, Budhia and Natha’s
‘widow’, Dhaniya, sitting disconsolately in front of the façade of their hut.
Budhia reveals that the government has rejected their appeal for compen-
sation because Natha ‘died’ in an accident rather than by suicide. The last
scene reveals a despondent, dehumanised Natha as an indentured labourer
Peepli Live 203
at a construction site in the city. He is a diminutive, pale shadow of his
earlier self and seems lost amongst a slew of toiling construction workers;
their bodies encircled by the same high-rise buildings their exacting and
exploitative exertions will bring to fruition.
Peepli and the Postcolonial: Moneylenders, Middlemen

and Farmer Suicides
Peepli Live begins with a microcosmic reconstruction of India’s broad diver-
sity and variegated composition. The heterogeneous nation is personified
by a packed tempo minicab (a small, 3-wheeled van) containing a colourful
assortment of people. The film’s main characters, Natha and his brother
Budhia are ensconced in the throng of passengers as the tempo lurches
forward. The film’s title track Des Mera (‘My Country’) is cued at this point,
as the camera tracks the tempo’s transition from urban to rural landscape,
filming the vehicle’s progress through child labourers toiling by the wayside.
The metaphor of the crowded van, with passengers hanging on to its rear
and sides, hopping on and off in conjunction with Des Mera’s lyrics, appears
to gesture towards India as a nation of multitudinous inhabitants, inexora-
bly hurtling towards an indeterminable destiny. The song’s refrain sums up
the tableau:
A river of colours paints this land

With a trick in the dye at every bend …
India, you see, is a clever mix
Large hearts, tattered pockets …
The tempo’s transition from the city to Natha and Budhia’s village is signif-
icant at the outset because this journey is reversed and its context altered
at the film’s coda. Narrative information released during the title sequence
enables the viewer to identify the brothers’ underprivileged socio-economic
status. This is accomplished through Des Mera, which plays non-diegetically
in the background as the song’s subtitled lyrics appear simultaneously on
screen, juxtaposed with a shot of the brothers who have alighted from the
tempo.
The wheels keep turning, move on

Who knows where we are headed
No food no water
Find an excuse to carry on living
An interplay between lyrics and images assists in signposting Budhia and

Natha’s impoverished condition. The opening sequence gradually filters
down from its general views of the landscape and camera mid shots of
the crowded van, to an image of Natha and Budhia isolated in long shot
204 Peepli Live
(Fig. 9.1). This distillation from generic to particular also applies to the song
lyrics. The first stanza of the lyrics (above) alludes to India and its people.
The second half of the second stanza (No food no water | Find an excuse to
carry on living) draws our attention to the two brothers and their impend-
ing fate, recalling Natha’s earlier musing, ‘what if we lose our land?’ There-
fore, the combination of image, music and text appears to shift narrative
focus from the diachronic generality of India’s uncertain collective national
destiny to the immediate synchronic specific situation of the two individuals
we see before us.
Figure 9.1 Natha and Budhia: Isolated long shot.
Subsequently, the two men pause for a drink at the roadside country
liquor stall before staggering homewards across the village fields. Natha’s
wife, Dhaniya, irate at their inebriation, demands an explanation for their
visit to the bank in the city. Natha reveals that the bank is poised to auction
their farmland, owing to the brothers’ inability to repay a loan.
The brothers’ situation is a throwback to the historical socio-economic
conflict faced by peasant farmers in India’s feudal colonial system of dia-
lectical agrarian operations involving landowners and indentured peasants
(Chatterjee, 2012: 11). In this colonial-era system, farmers had to rely on
loans from wealthy landowners (zamindars) in order to cultivate crops on
their own land. In the event of drought and crop failure, peasants unable
to repay loans often at usurious interest rates had to either forfeit their
land or become bonded labourers to the zamindars. In order to ameliorate
this feudal structure, the Indian government initiated bank loan schemes
directed at farmers in the rural hinterland. The loopholes in this system are
highlighted in Peepli Live’s representation of Natha and Budhia’s predic-
ament. Facing untenable circumstances stemming from their poverty, the
Peepli Live 205
brothers have had no alternative but to mortgage their land to the bank for
a loan. Unable to repay, they fall prey to the commonly enforced penalty of
banks appropriating land in lieu of loan repayment. In effect, Natha and
Budhia’s condition reflects the contemporary inequalities continually faced
by Indian farmers in the nation’s globalising free market economy.
This indiscriminate system, juxtaposed with Natha and Budhia’s disem-
powered socio-economic status, results in their deflection to the margins
of modern existence. They become subaltern fragments: ‘the elements of
social life that cannot easily be assimilated into dominant discourses or
structures’ (Chibber, 2013: 19). Peepli Live’s representation of entrenched
feudal structures in contemporary rural India reveals reconfigured serfdoms
that manifest in forms and figures such as the modern moneylender. The
moneylender has arguably supplanted the erstwhile zamindar as a source of
capital for impoverished farmers. Wary of state schemes in the form of bank
loans, several Indian farmers still seek out moneylending middlemen as a
more familiar way of procuring capital investment. These middlemen often
resort to tactics of coercion and violence to extract farmers’ compliance to
their directives.
When Natha and Budhia learn about the auctioning of their land for
defaulting on their bank loan, their only recourse is to approach Bhai
Thakur, the local moneylending middleman. Bhai Thakur, the modern
substitute for the erstwhile zamindar, in terms of his intermediary role
between peasant and political elite is an opportunistic extortionist and
unscrupulous fixer for the corrupt state chief minister, Ram Yadav. Bhai
Thakur meets the brothers’ petition with callous disregard and a scornful
suggestion to commit suicide as a means to receive compensation from the
government. Thakur’s apathy and his political connections invoke paral-
lels with India’s historical colonial/postcolonial configurations that con-
tributed to the current tacit symbiosis between the socio-political elite and
middlemen such as Thakur.
Subaltern Studies theorist Ranajit Guha contends that in liberated post-
colonial India, the empowered Indian bourgeoisie capitalist class failed to
dissolve the feudal landowners’ dominance over subaltern peasants and
hence could not engender an inclusive egalitarian system (Guha, 2012: 5).
Instead, Guha argues, the capitalists aligned with the feudal class to form
a coalition of ruling elites that obviated participation of the farmers and
labouring classes, pushing them to the periphery of national discourse and
the decision-making process.
In this context, Peepli Live portrays the modern interpenetration of
regional politics, local middlemen and the central government. Importantly,
it introduces another key modern entrant into the dominant discourse in
the form of the media. However, although the colonial complicity between
feudal landlord and capitalist bourgeois policy makers may have been
reconfigured in present-day India to include new participants such as the
media, this pre-independence alliance remains intrinsically intact.
206 Peepli Live
The detritus of colonial systems persisting in postcolonial India is a
recurring motif in Peepli Live. Vivek Chibber uses the term ‘anticolonial
nationalism’ to describe the independent postcolonial state’s desire to shake
off the shackles of ‘colonial ideology’ or the ‘ideology of rule’, which in
reality is contradicted by the state’s own acceptance and perpetuation of
foundational frameworks that sustained colonial rule (Chibber, 2013: 249).
Peepli Live’s narrative communicates this paradox by interweaving its rep-
resentation of colonial-era bureaucracy and political corruption with the
nationalist rhetoric deployed by local and national politicians in archetypi-
cally divisive state politics. This turbulent negotiation between colonial past
and postcolonial present is couched in the postmodern hyperreality of a
media-dominated Indian urbanscape. Arguably, Peepli Live’s constellation
of financial institutions, political power, moneylending middlemen and per-
vasive news media is symptomatic of India’s rapidly globalising neoliberal
economy.
Neoliberalism and Natha

Peepli Live propagates a self-reflexive appraisal of the consequences of
India’s globalisation for farmers, particularly the role of neoliberal mar-
ket deregulation and corporate investment in exacerbating the nation’s
economic disparity. Natha seems dwarfed by a system where power and
capital preside over political policy and media manoeuvring. Essentially,
most actions by individuals in the film appear to be directly or indirectly
governed or motivated by capital.
Nandita Malik, the relentlessly ambitious and sometimes ruthless ITVN
news reporter, interprets people and situations through TRP (Target Rating
Points) viewership ratings. The TRP system is an Indian media rubric used
by television channels to gauge audience numbers and programme impact.
In a highly competitive and male-dominated media milieu, Nandita’s actions
are determined by her unmitigated thrust towards attaining the highest
TRP ratings. This unfettered zeal to attain corporate targets is shared by
Nandita’s rival news correspondent and bête noire, Deepak, as well as the
motley assortment of media teams sequestered in Peepli.
As the narrative unfolds, it becomes evident that political power at both
the state and federal level is complicit with the news media in an inter-
twining of capital, communication and power. With his debilitating debt,
Natha, the subaltern farmer, is at the receiving end of this discourse. He
appears trapped in a liminal space between this insurmountable web of
neoliberal capital and power. In essence, his manipulation by politicians,
media and middlemen is demonstrative of the overarching and seemingly
all-encompassing power of capital.
One manifestation of the capital-power nexus is Union Minister for Agri-
culture Salim Kidwai’s hidden agenda: to invoke his executive powers and
throw open the nation’s economic portals to American corporations. Peepli
Peepli Live 207
Live’s representation of Kidwai’s link with multinational corporations
refers specifically to the American conglomerate Monsanto. Monsanto, a
transglobal American biotechnology and transgenetic plants developer, was
incorporated into India’s inchoate neoliberal policy of courting deregu-
lated foreign capital investment or foreign direct investment (FDI) in the
1990s. During a conversation with the chief minister of the state of Mukhya
Pradesh, Ram Yadav, Kidwai offers to exercise his powers to extricate Yadav
from the ‘Natha suicide crisis’ in return for Yadav diverting all further
Mukhya Pradesh government crop-seed contracts to the American multi-
national company. Yadav unequivocally accedes to Kidwai’s request and by
proxy to ‘Sonmanto’ (Yadav’s malapropistic reference to the corporation).
In 1998, Monsanto acquired a 26 percent share in MAHYCO
(Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company), a company based in the western
Indian state of Maharashtra. Its goal was to encourage the distribution of
genetically modified Bt cotton seeds and herbicides (Dasgupta, 2005: 75).
Several scholars, such as Vandana Shiva, link ‘multinational capital and
globalisation to the “cultural abomination” of suicide seeds’ (Herring,
2007: 131). ‘Suicide seeds’ was a term coined by activist scholars to
describe Bt cotton seeds proliferated by Monsanto, which could not regen-
erate seeds, leading to a ‘biological dependence of farmers on firms’ (ibid.).
This demonstrates how capital can be totalising in its imposition of the
market imperative, with capital’s attendant hegemonic neoliberal system
predicated on introducing market logic into every human interaction
(Harvey, 2005: 3). Crop failures, to a significant degree ensuing from
Monsanto suicide seeds, exacerbated by failed monsoons and farmers
being unable to countenance financial shortfalls, are factors widely identi-
fied as having precipitated the spate of farmer suicides in several regions in
India. The central Vidharba region suicides of 2008, in particular, form the
touchstone for thematisations in Peepli Live. These scenarios implicate the
role of capital and the neoliberal state in pushing farmers such as Natha
to the brink.
David Harvey (2005) asserts that the global spread of neoliberalism into
education, the media, corporate and financial institutions is so pervasive
that it is now integrated into the common worldview – a blueprint to interpret
daily life (Harvey, 2005: 2–3 ). It is fair to contend that the neoliberal agenda
and its after-effects are thematically folded into Peepli Live’s exposition of
the dilemma facing Indian farmers in general and Natha in particular.
After their failed visit to Bhai Thakur, Natha and Budhia are accosted
by a group of farmers who urge the brothers to join them in sharing a
chillum of marijuana. Budhia recounts Bhai Thakur’s callous exhortation
to commit suicide as a means of gaining compensation from the state. One
of the farmers facetiously retorts that ‘the government should take over our
lands and give us farmers a pension to retire’. Another farmer challenges the
viability of farming in their current circumstances, with the state-prescribed
use of expensive American seeds and fertilisers (a reference to Monsanto)
208 Peepli Live
intensifying the vicious cycle of drought, crop failure, indebtedness and
farmer suicides. This conversation between the farmers encapsulates the
zeitgeist surrounding farmer suicides and underpins Peepli Live’s blur-
ring of boundaries between representation and reality. This exchange also
reflects radical changes in India’s agrarian operations following the nation’s
neoliberal turn in the 1990s.
Ania Loomba, invoking the Indian Research Unit for Political Economy
(2003), cites the research group’s findings, describing globalisation as oper-
ating under the cloak of ‘integration and development’ but revealing its true
form as an instrument of ‘imposition, disintegration, underdevelopment
and appropriation’ (Loomba, 2005: 219). Relevant to the theme of farmer
suicides as presented in Peepli Live, the research findings reported contin-
ued debt extraction in developing nations, cancelling of credit subsidies to
underprivileged sectors, open door policies inviting global conglomerates
to assume large market shares, the dismantling of domestic industry and
supplanting of subsistence crops with cash crops (ibid.). These larger macro
issues embedded in the discourse of neoliberalism inform the grassroots-level
plight of Natha, his brother and the farmers of Peepli. A Centre for Develop-
ment and Human Rights article asserts that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
ruling government has appropriated land from farmers, demonstrating the
‘dominant [neoliberal] discourse in the country’ (Rayaprolu, 2015). This
land is a barrier to the ‘Make in India’ campaign, which encourages multina-
tional corporations to invest in production in India (ibid.). The expropriated
land is passed on to the corporations in line with Modi’s invitation to ‘Make
in India’ in exchange for tax exemptions.
Peepli Live’s indictment of state apathy could be related to Ritambhara
Hebbar’s claim that ‘the government, whilst expressing its concern over
farmer suicides, feigned innocence in its role over the processes that have led
to the conditions of despair and apathy in the countryside’ (Hebbar, 2010:
89). She asserts that the farmer has been diminished ‘to an object of study
for his/her pathos and irrationality, and the state has regained its rhetorical
role as the benefactor of the farmer caught in a situation of crisis’ (ibid.).
This is clearly the case in Peepli Live’s depiction of the anthropological
gaze directed at Natha by TV news channels, local politicians and those
from the highest echelons of federal executive government. They all reduce
Natha to an almost infantilised object (reminiscent of Shai’s overtures to
Munna in Dhobi Ghat), with politicians, including the state chief minister
Ram Yadav and his rival, the local ‘backward caste’ leader Pappulal, dis-
playing a Pecksniffian and patriarchal benevolence towards Natha for the
benefit of the rapacious TV crews.
Peepli Live also parodies caste politics at the grassroots level in India,
eviscerating topical and relevant issues in this regard. Striations of caste and
class are strong determinants, particularly at the district level in Indian state
elections. A scene in the film suggests that Ram Yadav, a member of the Yadav
caste, will receive Yadav caste votes by default in the upcoming election.
Peepli Live 209
With the media frenzy descending on Peepli, Ram Yadav’s opponent, the
‘lower caste’ party chief Pappulal, perceives opportunity in chaos. In front
of the perpetually present TV reporters, he exploits Natha’s background to
fabricate a sense of commonality, a false solidarity with Natha on the basis
of their common caste affiliation. Presenting a placatory television set to
Natha, the leader proclaims to the media that Natha will martyr himself
for the emancipation of the ‘backward’ castes. If Natha does not, Pappulal
pompously declares, several of his party acolytes will lay down their lives
for the cause. The stark irony is that the television presented to Natha is
useless, because his hut cannot accommodate and he cannot afford the
electricity. This irony is magnified by the presence of myriad TV vans and
the media crew stationed outside Natha’s dilapidated dwelling, monitoring
his every move for the viewing pleasure of a voracious urban audience. The
object of their curiosity, Natha, however, cannot even plug in his new pos-
session. The scene with Pappulal and his ineffectual gift therefore positions
Natha as an embodied site of intersection for the nation’s discourses on
economic disparity, pervasive media presence and rural caste dynamics.
The intricacies of caste-based politics are an integral and singular dimen-
sion of rural Indian life. This is particularly the case during elections, when
political groups often use the ‘alleviation’ of the suffering of the ‘lower’
castes as a rhetorical device or a promise of appeasement (Bayly, 1999: 303).
The economic imperatives of India’s capital-oriented economy after
globalisation have contributed to a state of flux in rural caste dynam-
ics (Hebbar, 2010: 92). Hebbar notes the movement of traditionally
non-agrarian caste groups, such as the Mahar, Matang, Teli and Banjaras,
into the farming occupation (ibid.). This state of flux in rural caste dynam-
ics has foregrounded the caste and class specificities of the problem by
‘demonstrating how insular intra-caste cooperation has weakened social
ties and contributed to a loss of selfhood’ (ibid.) in rural India.
Social scientists have argued that farmer suicides indicate the disintegra-
tion of community ties and familial bonds in rural areas (ibid., 192). This
is especially evident in the isolation faced by Natha’s family in the wake of
the media invasion of Peepli. Any notion of solidarity amongst the villagers
is superseded by their desire to capitalise on the opportunity to hawk their
wares to the media hordes. Natha himself experiences a growing dissocia-
tion from his family, falling into a state of anomie as the media onslaught
intensifies.
Fissures develop between Natha and Dhaniya, the latter indignant to the
point of hostility at the media because of their besiegement of her home.
Dhaniya is strong-willed and independent, and her pragmatic worldview
causes her to vent her ire at Natha, blaming his ineptitude for all their
travails. Natha and Budhia’s mother, Amma, played by veteran actress
Farrukh Jaffar, retains her cantankerous, intractable demeanour during the
media ordeal, heaping scorn and imprecations on all and sundry. Director
Anusha Rizvi reveals that Amma was inspired by characters in India’s art
210 Peepli Live
and Parallel films, including Ray’s Pather Panchali and Jaffar’s own turn
as a mother in the mainstream Hindi film Umrao Jaan (1981) (Rizvi, per-
sonal communication, 2013). I contend that Amma embodies Peepli Live’s
postmodern parody of Indian cinema’s venerable matriarch archetype,
invariably present in several seminal arthouse and mainstream Indian films,
including M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) and the Odia-language film
Lavanya Preeti (1993).
Confined to her string-cot, Amma appears detached and almost oblivi-
ous to her son’s impending suicide. Similar to almost all the characters sur-
rounding Natha, she is solipsistic in her concerns for her own welfare and
interests. Natha’s brother Budhia, after cannily transferring the responsibil-
ity of suicide to Natha’s shoulders, is himself reduced to the state of mute
observer. He seems overwhelmed and baffled by the media’s intrusion and
the political interest generated by Natha’s announcement of suicide.
Natha’s isolation from the Peepli villagers as well as his own family is
illustrated in a scene where he is woken from sleep and repeatedly asked
when he will die by his young son. The son’s anxious desire to be aware of
Natha’s time of departure stems from the boy’s uncle assuring the lad that he
will become a government contractor after his father’s demise. Natha, infu-
riated by his son’s apparently callous lack of filial devotion, casts the boy
out of the room after administering a volley of verbal and corporal abuse.
Following this incident, Natha unburdens himself of his weltschmerz, seek-
ing solace in cuddling his goat thereby preferring the company of domestic
livestock to his own flesh and blood. This sequence and preceding events
described earlier indicate the slow breakdown of family ties and under-
score Natha’s alienation. Peepli Live’s representation of Natha’s isolation
also alludes to the larger individualisation and fragmentation of rural com-
munities and the declension of community in the new national narrative of
neoliberalism.
Indie Attributes
Peepli Live departs from Bollywood in its use of several non-professional
actors indigenous to its rural location. Director Anusha Rizvi specifically
cast Omkar Das Manikpuri to play the film’s main character, Natha.
Manikpuri has a background in local village folk theatre and is the son
of a daily-wage labourer from the central Indian region of Chhattisgarh –
the location for Peepli Live (Aikara, 2010). In this regard, Rizvi (personal
communication, 2013) defends the film’s strong Indie ethos, despite its
affiliation with big production companies AKP and UTV. She insisted on
casting Omkar Das Manikpuri, despite the corporate echelons’ apprehen-
sions about the ramifications of this choice on the marketability of the film
(ibid.). Prior to Peepli Live, Manikpuri was a largely unknown actor whose
physical appearance fell outside the stipulations of Bollywood’s male arche-
type, largely required to be tall, fair-complexioned and North Indian, with
Peepli Live 211
a chiselled physique (ibid.). Rizvi managed to convince AKP of Natha’s
suitability for the role. Aamir Khan himself had previously expressed his
desire to play the role of Natha (ibid.). Rizvi’s ability to maintain her artistic
vision and independent ethos demarcates her Indie credentials within the
film’s otherwise hybrid production.
Peepli Live features several veteran actors with theatre, television and
radio backgrounds, including Raghuvir Yadav as Natha’s brother, Budhia,
Farrukh Jaffar as Amma and Naseeruddin Shah as Salim Kidwai. Peepli Live’s
music is another facet that is distinctive from commercial Hindi cinema.
The folk songs interwoven into the narrative are intrinsic to the thematic
context, continuing the precedent of Des Mera at the start of the film,
with satirical self-reflexive social critiques. The amalgamation of diverging
musical styles, the interspersing of music by the Hindi rock band Indian
Ocean with indigenous rural folk tunes, is a marker of Peepli Live’s hetero-
geneous composition.
In addition to involving the participation of several villagers in the
film as supporting cast members, Bhadwai village (where Peepli Live was
filmed), is credited with the composition and performance of one of the
tracks, Mehngai Dayain (‘The Demon Inflation’). Anusha Rizvi reveals the
spontaneous filming of this song during a village geet mandali (commu-
nity music session) (Rizvi, personal communication, 2013). The film’s coda
unfolds to a regional tribal tune Chola Maati Ke, emphasising the integra-
tion of the local rural context into Peepli Live’s larger narrative themes. This
use of indigenous folk music (particularly its lyrics) alongside pop/rock to
develop narrative context in the film demonstrates a strong deviation from
Bollywood strategies of song and dance.
In some measure, Peepli Live’s incorporation of music and lyrics as a
narrative device to raise critical questions about dominant socio-political
systems is analogous to Gandu’s deployment of subtitled rap lyrics. Apart
from its heterodox application of music to bolster its thematisation, Peepli
Live also exhibits form and style that is more protean than Bollywood in
terms of cinematography and editing. Wide-angle and establishing shots
accompany handheld camera and close-up shots. For example, when
Nandita’s ITVN crew first enter Natha’s hut and find him recumbent on
the floor, the camera operator probes Natha’s sleeping face in an attempt to
capture a documentary-style extreme close-up, with comical consequences.
In addition to multifaceted cinematography, editing cuts function in the
film to break linear continuity, enhance satire and, most importantly, to illus-
trate the urban-rural divide. A good example is the strategic contrast-cut
deployed after the scene where Chief Minister Yadav is interviewed by TV
news channel Bharat Live. He waxes lyrical about farmers in India, disin-
genuously declaring that the ‘prosperity of farmers means prosperity of the
nation’. This scene immediately cuts to Natha’s wife, Dhaniya, snapping
‘What rubbish! Have you gone mad?’ In reality, Dhaniya is expressing her
anger at Budhia’s revelation to her that Natha is going to commit suicide.
212 Peepli Live
In conjunction with cinematography and editing, the film’s mise-en-scène
also serves to communicate subtextual layers of meaning.
The Delhi media offices of TV news channels ITVN and Bharat Live
are portrayed as enclosed spaces; beehives of activity with a suffusion of
television screens and technological devices. They represent modern India’s
commodification of news and current affairs commensurate with the
nation’s rapidly multiplying television news channels. The Delhi TV stu-
dios in Peepli Live, to some extent, are metonymic spaces that emphasise
larger contemporary Indian civil society’s immersion into the postmodern
practice of watching (Baudrillard, 1994: 76): mediating, negotiating and
‘consuming’ the world through televisual screen interfaces and the discourse
generated by TV news.
The Ominpresence of Media

The centrality of the media in contemporary India is constantly evoked as a
leitmotif in Peepli Live. The incongruous presence of corporate media crews
in Peepli’s rustic settings draws attention to the distinction between New
Delhi and backward Peepli. Dalmia and Sadana cite the fracture between
urban and rural as the most pertinent issue faced by modern India and
regard this divide as a site of colliding urban and rural perspectives, as rep-
resented in films such as Peepli Live (2012: 5).
However, this ostensible dichotomisation of urban and rural also con-
tains diverse contexts impacted by India’s neoliberal transformation into
a market-driven economy, of which the media is one of the most promi-
nent manifestations. In this regard, corporate television channels ITVN and
Bharat Live are overwhelmingly motivated by India’s aforementioned TRP
system and an obligation to fulfil market demands.
Representation of the two news channels in Peepli Live is an indict-
ment of the burgeoning popularity of a sensationalist, alarmist and tabloid
style of reporting adopted by contemporary news media in India (Athique,
2012: 67). Several of these channels operate within the common parameter
of TRP-oriented news programming, with lurid broadcasting screens
often overpopulated by two and often three simultaneously scrolling news
tickers presenting a virtual bombardment of live news.
In Peepli Live, the capital interests of these corporate TV news chan-
nels encourage their skewed representations that appease the political and
elite class. This is demonstrated by Nandita and her rival reporter Deepak’s
unctuous sycophancy towards Union Minister Salim Kidwai and Chief
Minister Ram Yadav. These above factors – strategic corporate capital and
its alliance with political elites – largely account for the cutthroat competi-
tion between Nandita and Deepak.
Interestingly, Peepli Live’s representation of the local rural newspaper Jan
Morcha contains clues to intermediary agents and actors at the socio-political
interstices that are influenced by the larger shifting matrices of capital markets
Peepli Live 213
and political power. Jan Morcha, a struggling, sole-proprietor-owned village
newspaper, operates at the bare minimum, with a dilapidated printing press
in a decrepit room that is subject to the vagaries of frequent rural power out-
ages. This provincial news daily, operating under the grandiosely-titled sole-
proprietorship, Navkranthi Prakashan Private Limited (‘New Revolution
Publishers Limited’), is portrayed as independent and socialist in its outlook,
covering human-interest stories in the area encompassing Peepli. Rakesh, the
Jan Morcha reporter, breaks the Natha suicide story when he overhears Natha
and Budhia disclosing details of Natha’s suicide pact to a village tea-stall
owner. Jan Morcha, already teetering on the brink of failure, has its licence
arbitrarily revoked by the District Collector in reprisal for its ‘untimely’ publi-
cation of a potentially damaging story on the eve of state elections.
This punitive action by agents of state power is an allusion to the pre-
carity of indigenous local forms of print news media. Jan Morcha’s lack of
autonomy and the newspaper’s arbitrary termination at the hands of the
state political machinery emphasises the relatively unfettered operations of
the TV news teams in Peepli, gesturing towards the intensifying influence of
corporate media in India.
After becoming redundant, Rakesh is optimistic about new job prospects
when Nandita Malik contacts him. Contrary to his naïve expectations,
Nandita takes control of the Natha story and uses Rakesh as a gofer during
the ITVN crew’s stint in Peepli. In one scene, Rakesh presents Nandita with
his job CV, mentioning his prior work experience of covering various village
events for Jan Morcha. Nandita condescendingly dismisses Rakesh’s sugges-
tions that she study his CV, tersely suggesting he should restrict his attention
to the Natha story.
In another sequence, Nandita berates Rakesh for his idealistic, sentimental
view of the farmer suicides. This occurs when Rakesh raises the self-critical
question of why media attention is tendentiously focused on Natha, when
the entire village has witnessed a suffusion of farmer suicides. Nandita
remonstrates with Rakesh for what she considers his maudlin view, declar-
ing that the undeviating objective of journalism must be to acquire a story
and maximise its appeal.
Differing dimensions of discourse emerge from Nandita and Rakesh’s
perspectives, where encounters between dualities of realist and sensational-
ist, urban and rural, print and television, corporate and local, occur against
the backdrop of India’s transforming structures. These representations of
Rakesh and Nandita, Jan Morcha and ITVN, signpost the changing dimen-
sions of the Indian media. These overlapping dialectics invoked through
antinomies of the nation’s media forms directly address the contention that
the Indies evoke discourses of the national narrative from their median posi-
tion in an interstitial space.
In this context, Rakesh personifies the theme of diminishing integrity,
ethics and honest reporting in modern Indian journalism. His death in
the warehouse blaze at the end of the film is eclipsed by a cacophony of
214 Peepli Live
live TV reports proclaiming Natha’s death in a fire. Rakesh’s inadvertent
‘martyrdom’ in an inferno – a death destined for Natha – functions as a
symbolic elegy for moribund forms of grassroots print media, owing to the
inexorable rise and insuperable influence of corporate news media. Peepli
Live, in underscoring the primacy of media in modern urban India, concom-
itantly reveals the decline of agriculture and labour issues in mainstream
urban media journalism.
Former rural affairs editor P Sainath notes the growing absence of grass-
roots themes and issues in mainstream news reporting and the substitu-
tion of ‘beat’ reporters with business correspondents in the modern Indian
media (Karnad, 2007). Sainath claims that these correspondents ‘walk in the
tracks of corporate leaders’, and when they do report issues pertaining to
labour, they do so ‘through the eyes of corporate leaders’ (ibid.). This asser-
tion informs Peepli Live, which to a significant degree mirrors the symbi-
osis between corporate-owned media companies and political power, often
resulting in tendentious news coverage.
Deepak, the Bharat Live reporter, sets up an interview with Samman state
chief minister, Ram Yadav. He displays his overt familiarity with Yadav,
ingratiatingly asking him to provide a few ‘soundbytes’ to camera on the
farmer suicide issue. Ram Yadav indulges Deepak’s blandishments, offer-
ing superficial platitudes about the value of farmers to the nation. Nandita
Malik displays a similar lack of impartiality in the form of her obvious
familiarity with Salim Kidwai, Union Minister for Agriculture. Kidwai and
Nandita engage in playful repartee during the commercial break of a live
news bulletin, with Nandita indulging Kidwai’s oblique and inconsequential
remarks on the forthcoming Peepli by-elections, and in a later interview, the
farmer suicide crisis. Peepli Live’s satirical take on the bonhomie between
media and political power arguably bears a large degree of verisimilitude, in
terms of a general ‘disconnect between the mass media and the mass reality’
(Karnad, 2007) in post-liberalisation India. This, in turn, questions impar-
tiality and objectivity in factual coverage of news and current affairs in a
neoliberal milieu where, as Peepli Live suggests, the media colludes with the
state apparatus.
In his interview with Karnad, Sainath mentions the departure of the ‘agri-
culture columnist’ in most newspapers, asserting ‘if you lack correspondents
on those two beats [agriculture and labour], you’re saying 70 per cent of the
people in this country don’t matter’ (Karnad, 2007). This could be trans-
posed to Peepli Live’s representation of the laissez-faire reluctance by both
Nandita and Deepak to cover Natha’s quintessentially rural problem. When
Nandita is first assigned to the Natha story in Peepli, she initially demurs
stating; ‘farmer kind of stories are not exactly my forte’. Nandita’s detached
view is shared by the multitude of TV channels that descend on Peepli for
the sole purpose of getting an exclusive and sensational ‘scoop’ on Natha’s
suicide. This mirrors the agonistic and dialectical arbitration between the
urban and rural space in the Indian national narrative.
Peepli Live 215
Concomitant with its appraisal of news media practices, Peepli Live also
uncovers systemic political malaises and malpractices perpetuated by state
representatives at the regional and national level. These bureaucratic mis-
demeanours occur in collusion with the sensationalist media. The dyadic
forces of media and state eventually atomise Natha’s abject situation to the
level of spectacle (Dalmia and Sadana, 2012: 5). There is a recurring theme
in the film; Natha is treated as an anthropologised object, manipulated by
the system and constantly oscillated between centre and periphery.
Natha is dehumanised by the media, in the sense that his home becomes
a human zoo and he is transmuted into a human exhibit to be broadcast
for the spectatorial pleasure of a primarily urban viewership. Even Natha’s
unpredictable bowel movements become a source of obsession for the
stationed camera crews. In effect, as a pawn of the self-serving and oppor-
tunistic media, Natha is compelled to ‘perform’ before the camera, to enact
his ‘exotic’ rural identity for a national TV audience, thereby appeasing the
mythologised urban imagining of the ‘backward villager’.
In this regard, Natha could be compared to Truman Burbank in The
Truman Show (1998, director Peter Weir), where Truman’s daily life is on
display, televised as fly-on the-wall corporate-sponsored entertainment for a
worldwide audience. The distinction between the two film characters is that
Natha is moderately aware he is being filmed (see Gandu’s similar predica-
ment in Chapter 7), while Truman only realises this artifice halfway through
the film. The common thematic strand that intertwines these two characters
is their exploitation by the media to provide entertainment to a demanding
viewership.
Complicit in this manipulation, politicians fuelled by their own ulte-
rior motives pose and posture in Peepli with the beleaguered Natha. After
playing to the myriad camera crews, the politicians promptly depart, as
soon as the cameras are set aside, and the discarded Natha is once again
relegated to the periphery. P Sainath’s statement, describing his view of
India’s liberalisation is also relevant to Peepli Live’s depiction, not only of
Natha’s manipulation, but also of Peepli village’s contradictory stagnation
in India’s neoliberal age. In other words, ‘political opportunism and media
management have provided the appearance of different choices and systems,
without any meaningful changes in outcomes’ (Sainath, 2001).
In this context, entrenched corruption, bureaucracy and apathy are dis-
played at the highest levels of power in the central government’s ministry of
agriculture. P Sengupta, the Agricultural Secretary to Agriculture Minister
Salim Kidwai, exhibits a sense of detachment, reminiscent of the colonial era,
preferring to indulge in tea tasting rather than paying heed when Sengupta’s
secretary conveys the news of Natha’s impending suicide. Disregarding the
announcement, Sengupta bids his secretary to sit down and sample the
‘second flush’ of his new exclusive Darjeeling tea. He advises his secre-
tary not to concern himself with the situation, as they could easily transfer
responsibility for the Natha crisis to the High Court, whilst their boss, Salim
216 Peepli Live
Kidwai, would ‘manage the media’. Sengupta’s ‘let them eat cake’ attitude
to some degree parodies the historical British colonial affinity for tea as well
as the colonial authority’s apathy towards Indian peasant welfare. Natha’s
story eventually makes the cover of Time magazine, exemplifying the inter-
twining of local, national and global levels through the hyperconnectivity of
the media. This does nothing, however, to ameliorate Natha’s condition, and
he remains an exploitable marginalised object.
Ghosts of Other Stories, Intertextuality and Double Time

Peepli Live, similar to several of its new Indie counterparts, intersperses
the ‘ghosts’ of other narratives in its primary storyline. As mentioned pre-
viously, these phantoms of ‘other’ stories often relate to issues and themes
of alterity, marginality and exclusion in the historiographical inscription of
India’s grand narrative. Peepli Live uses postmodern meta-reference as a
recurrent strategy, conjuring these ghosts through the medium of intertextu-
ality that is codified into the film’s narrative.
Peepli Live specifically invokes the past narrative of colonial subaltern
peasants operating under the yoke of feudal practices. The film demon-
strates how these ‘ghosts’ still haunt the present in the unchanged situation
of farmer suicides and rural stasis. The visitation of such subaltern narra-
tives and historiographies from below (Chaturvedi, 2012: ix) in the form of
farmers forgotten in the postcolonial mapping of a new nation is conjured
through the talismanic leitmotif of Peepli Live’s lone farmer. He appears as
a malnourished solitary figure, incessantly toiling and digging in unyielding
barren soil in the intense Peepli heat.
When the media cavalcade descends on Peepli, Rakesh the local reporter,
astride his motorcycle, chances upon the solitary digger and asks him for
directions to Peepli. Rakesh’s query falls on deaf ears and the farmer con-
tinues his relentless and seemingly hopeless pursuit of digging into the
non-arable land. The silence of the emaciated figure appears to signify his
inarticulate lack of agency; the inability of the subaltern to speak. This
silence seems emblematic of the film’s larger theme of dispossession and
desuetude afflicting farmers. Later in the film, Rakesh attempts to re-engage
with the farmer, this time dismounting from his motorcycle, approaching
the labourer and asking for his name. The man pauses only for an instant to
proffer his reply – ‘Hori Mahato’ – before returning to his apparently futile
labours (Fig. 9.2).
The figure of Hori Mahato, the lone tiller – a ‘son of the soil’ trope,
recalls Bimal Roy’s canonical postcolonial arthouse film Do Bigha Zamin
(‘Two Acres of Land’, 1953) and its farmer protagonist Shambu Mahato.
Shambu suffers a similar predicament to Natha. Following a famine in his
village, he is unable to repay his debt to a feudal landlord and faces the
auctioning of his two acres of land. The significance of the surname shared
by Peepli Live farmer Hori Mahato and Do Bigha Zamin protagonist
Peepli Live 217
Figure 9.2 Rakesh’s encounter.
Figure 9.3 The vacant pit symbolising Mahato’s absence.
Shambu Mahato, could be posited as Peepli Live’s modern intertextual

invocation of the ‘ghost of Mahato’, and the discourse of oppression and
exclusion signified by this name.
In addition to this filmic homage to Do Bigha Zamin, Peepli Live
contains identifiable references to characters and themes from works of
Hindi literature. Hori Mahato is also a central character in the seminal
pre-independence Hindi novel ‘Godaan’ by literary luminary Munshi
Premchand, which was published in 1936, translated into English by
Gordon C Roadarmel in 1957 and adapted into a homonymous Hindi
218 Peepli Live
film in 1963. Godaan’s Hori Mahato, like his skeletal namesake in Peepli
Live, is a penurious peasant. Similarly, Natha’s spouse in Peepli Live
shares the same name as Hori’s wife in Premchand’s book, Dhania [sic].
Like Peepli Live, Godaan’s themes interweave class and caste distinctions
in rural Indian society and the enduring problem of farmer debt often
engendered by feudal systems. Peepli Live’s inclusion and portrayal of
the Hori Mahato character is not restricted to functioning as a stylistic
intertextual cinematic narrative device.
As a signifier, Hori Mahato enables Peepli Live to establish a dialogic,
subtextual connection with Godaan, the colonial era Indian literary master-
piece; it therefore creates a link to the nation’s past. Mahato’s gaunt corpo-
real form is an almost spectral presence in the village of Peepli. He appears,
drifting across the background of village events, including the evening musi-
cal gathering, the geet mandali. In another scene, Mahato silently glides past
the raucous carnival put on by the villagers in front of Natha’s hut, a mute
observer to the spectacle (Fig. 9.4). The simultaneous presence and absence
of Hori Mahato rekindles latent narratives of marginalisation. These in turn
summon the revenants of an effaced and disavowed subaltern past in India’s
developmental historiography.
Figure 9.4 Mahato in the midst of the media circus.
The ‘then’ (Godaan’s Shambu Mahato) and ‘now’ (Peepli Live’s Hori
Mahato) emphasise both the ruptures as well as the stasis in the nation’s
timeline, gesturing towards India’s current time of undecidability. In the
2010 film, Hori Mahato remains fixed as the hopelessly oppressed, perpet-
ually labouring farmer, while the world around him modernises and moves
on. His appearance in Peepli Live symbolises the unchanged plight of the
rural subaltern in India’s modern metamorphosis. This recalls historical
Peepli Live 219
episodes such as the Bengal famine of 1943 that resulted in the deaths of
close to four million people (Fraser, 2006: 201).
Crop failures in the wake of 1942’s devastating cyclones were com-
pounded by the British administration’s diversion of food supplies intended
for a starving rural Bengal population to an already well-stocked Allied war
effort (Gupta, 2008: 253). Gupta mentions how the colonial administration’s
vacillating ‘trial and error’ policies, including ‘free trade’ of essential food
grains during a time of crisis, ‘sacrificed the civilian population, particularly
of the rural areas’ (ibid.). This pre-independence scenario is re-enacted
in Peepli Live’s depiction of Natha and of Hori Mahato’s contemporary
postcolonial predicament in a neoliberal free market system where starva-
tion, suicides and government indifference underscore the peasants’ largely
unaltered state. Arundhati Roy draws attention to India’s current post-
globalisation market-oriented middle-class existing alongside the ghosts of
‘250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves’ (Roy, 2014: 8)
(see Chapter 5). This revelation reaffirms Peepli Live’s evocation of the
ghosts of subaltern peasants that re-emerge in a recontextualised present as
recrudescent evocations of the past.
Hori Mahato’s silent passing goes unnoticed by the media crews, unde-
viating in their obsession with Natha. Mahato dies in the very pit he was
digging, literally and metaphorically having dug his own grave. His absence
is denoted by an image of the vacant pit, the site of his fruitless exertions
during his impoverished life (Fig. 9.3). This poignant and symbolic trope
demonstrates the contiguous cohabitation of the modern market-driven
middle class and the static rural subaltern – the encounter between
majority and minority narratives in modern India. Hori Mahato’s largely
unacknowledged death in Peepli Live signifies his passing into the s pectral
realm of innumerable farmer deaths and suicides in post-globalisation
India. It gestures back to Roy’s assertion (also see Chapter 5) that the
‘300 million’ members of India’s post-International Monetary Fund mar-
ket ‘“reforms”’ middle class, exist alongside the ‘800 million who have
been impoverished and dispossessed’ in order to make way for the middle
class (Roy, 2014: 8).
Peepli Live’s subtle interpolations of metaphorical devices such as the
subaltern Hori Mahato extends to the film’s incorporation of intangible and
nondescript objects. In a knee-jerk reaction to Jan Morcha’s article reporting
Natha’s impending suicide, the state’s political machinery under the aegis
of Peepli’s district magistrate (DM) allocates Natha a conciliatory gift: a
hand pump, whose model name is Lal Bahadur Shastri. This turns out to
be a small hand pump. The significance of this diminutive and nondescript
pump’s grandiloquent title is considerable, as it is shared eponymously with
one of India’s prime ministers, himself physically short of build but regarded
as a strong leader and an outspoken crusader for farmer welfare. The latter
Lal Bahadur Shastri belonged to the Indian National Congress and was a
votary of Nehruvian socialism, rendering the satirical potency of the above
sequence all the more relevant.
220 Peepli Live
However, the ‘Lal Bahadur Shastri’ given to Natha under the state’s Lal
Bahadur Shastri resettlement scheme, has no appurtenance or mechanism to
support its primary purpose: pumping water in a drought-ridden region. The
hand pump impotently occupies space at the centre of Natha’s hut along-
side the unopened box containing politician Pappulal’s placatory television;
both objects are united in their total lack of practical function (Fig. 9.5).
The DM’s emissary, Peepli’s block development officer, after leaving Natha
with the unviable device, reminds him that he now cannot consider suicide,
declaring ‘Lal Bahadur Shastri has just saved you’. This parody of the real
Lal Bahadur Shastri’s grand design for rural India denotes how ‘out of time’
Shastri’s vision is with chief minister Yadav’s disingenuous piece-to-camera
‘soundbyte’: ‘prosperity of farmers means prosperity of the nation’.
With the failure of the Lal Bahadur Shastri hand pump to forestall a
media invasion, the chief minister compels the DM to consult a compendium
of bureaucratic government schemes and programmes designed in the past
to compensate or placate peripheralised sections of society. A Kafka-esque
web of ritualised colonial red tape is re-imagined when the chief minister’s
apparatchik DM recites an interminable list of such programmes. The DM’s
incantation of schemes and initiatives is based on actual post-independence
programmes aimed at alleviating the poverty of the rural poor, but largely
ineffectual in reality, owing to the vitiation of these programmes by corrupt
and bureaucratic government systems.
These past programmes are parodied in Peepli Live in such a way that
their archaic and vacuous titles appear to summon the ghosts of India’s
bureaucratic past. They include Indira Housing for the Homeless (named
after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi), the Jawahar Employment
Figure 9.5 Ineffectual offerings: The Lal Bahadur Shastri hand pump and
untouched television.
Peepli Live 221
Programme (after her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first Prime
Minister), Annapurna (Sanskrit for ‘full of food’) for starvation and Gramin
Vikas (rural development) for villagers. Minister Yadav displays his exasper-
ation at the unsuitability of all these hoary and grandiose schemes that seem
incommensurable with the contemporary singularity of Natha’s predica-
ment. He asks the befuddled district magistrate to concoct a new scheme
more apposite to the modern idiosyncrasies of the ‘Natha problem’.
Two disparate timescales emerge from the above discussion of the
ghosts invoked in Peepli Live and point towards the double time of nation.
The village Peepli and its inhabitants seem to be suspended in limbo; a
state-sanctioned stasis, where anachronistic colonial systems of feudal
exploitation, bureaucracy, socio-economic and caste hierarchies are reinvig-
orated and sustained. This situation is encapsulated in reporter Rakesh’s
remark, ‘Nothing has changed in Peepli for 60 years, so what will the elec-
tion change?’ Peepli Live’s suspended state is to some extent comparable to
the representation in Indie film Harud (2010) of the cloying environment in
which ordinary civilians in the turbulent northern territory of Kashmir live
in isolation, surrounded by Indian security forces and detached from the rest
of India (See chapter 11).
Rural Peepli, suspended between an ossified past and a hyperreal,
media-dominated urban consumerist India, largely represents the nation’s
present time of undecidability. The imbrications between these temporal
dimensions imagined in Peepli Live epitomise turbulent, agonistic negotia-
tions, multiple overlapping layers between ostensible dualities – development
and stasis, urban and rural, peasant and politician, colonial and postcolo-
nial. Through its ghosts that emphasise the splitting of the nation into dou-
ble time, Peepli Live addresses several shades of globalisation’s asymmetries
and ambiguities, particularly the widening gulf between marginal and main-
stream in a rapidly neoliberalising nation.
Natha’s Transition from Rural to Neoliberal Space

Peepli Live represents a nation gradually subsumed by the ‘totalising’
narrative of globalisation and neoliberalism. The ground-level reality of this
subsumption is the elision of subaltern fragments. Modern embodiments
of marginality, such as Natha, are arguably ‘living ghosts’ of the national
narrative. Their peripheral existence in India’s present bears transdiscur-
sive testimony to the nation’s historical colonial/postcolonial exclusion of
subalterns from the process of scripting a national narrative. Instead, the
traditional Indian pedagogical ‘mythology of nation’ is transmuting into a
current dominant urban imagining of a neoliberal nation.
David Harvey asserts that neoliberal capital aims to implant a univer-
sal economic impulse or market logic in every human interaction (Harvey,
2005: 3). Similarly, Sainath (2001) observes the universality of market
fundamentalism from ‘Mumbai to Minnesota’ (cited in Loomba, 2005: 218),
222 Peepli Live
with the neoliberal system ostensibly cutting across ethno-religious and
geopolitical distinctions in order to present the market as a nostrum for all
global malaises.
On the one hand, globalisation has aided the compression of time and
space through technological advances (Appadurai, 1990: 296; 1996: 33).
On the other hand, despite the shrinking of spatial and temporal geopoliti-
cal dimensions, imaginings of the ‘global village’ have excluded and denied
‘citizenship’ to peripheral actors like Natha in the interstices of its discourse.
Therefore, a politics and economics of exclusion inform interstitial sites
such as Peepli and non-actors such as Natha, who become the marginalia of
complex discourses of neoliberal capital, media-generated knowledge and
political power.
The above argument presenting the universalising and supervening face
of capital is to an extent represented by the reaction of the Peepli villag-
ers towards the impingement on their habitat by the urban media. The
incursion of the media is not viewed as an encroachment on their space
but as a stimulus for the economically desperate villagers to set up their
own microcosmic open-market system and utilise the ad hoc opportunity
to generate some income. Stalls selling bottled water and burgers spring up
side by side with folk arts, puppetry and tightrope walking – archetypes of
the traditional Indian village fair, underpinning the contradictions of glo-
balisation. Enduring, mythologised notions of the rural sense of community
and solidarity inscribed in films such as Mother India (1957) are superseded
by the Peepli citizens’ individualistic pursuit of capital goals. They perceive
the media circus as a serendipitous opportunity to alleviate their economic
impoverishment rather than as a situation that demands their collective
intervention in their compatriot Natha’s deteriorating state of affairs. This
opportunism arising from impecuniousness resembles Hyenas (1992), a film
by postcolonial cinema auteur Djibril Diop Mambéty, where denizens of
the dilapidated Senegalese village of Colobane ingratiate themselves to a
wealthy home-returning expatriate in the hope of receiving her financial
favours.
The standardisation of capital logic and the incorporation of the global
neoliberal enterprise into the narratives of postcolonial nations (themat-
ically invoked in Hyenas), arguably occurs through diffuse networks of
power and a governmentality of the human body. Ultimately, in Peepli
Live, Natha’s body itself becomes a site of contestation, a bio-political
battleground in the complex network of state, media and capital. Natha’s
ultimatum of suicide – the destruction of his own body, the source of
‘anatomo-politics’ and biopower (Foucault, 1978: 139–40) – despite orig-
inating from a sense of abject helplessness, nevertheless connotes an act
of resistance.
Interventions by agents of power in the form of the state and media,
trying to either encourage or prevent Natha’s suicide, indicate coercive
attempts to discipline, dominate and thwart Natha’s resistance through
Peepli Live 223
objectification and appropriation of his body. This objectification occurs
on several different levels. For Nandita the reporter, the objectification of
Natha is a means to an end. She is aware that the ultimate goal of the media
corporation she represents is the achievement of top TRP ratings. The TRP
barometer of corporate success therefore becomes Nandita’s own compass
to navigate an unrelentingly competitive media milieu. This fuels her drive
to flesh out a sensational story in Peepli, irrespective of its moral implica-
tions. This rationale also informs the modus operandi of Nandita’s nemesis,
Deepak, and the media contingent in Peepli. However, the sinuous chain
does not end here.
The media maelstrom that descends on Peepli, patronising and anthro-
pologising its inhabitants and Natha, is inextricably linked to the demand
for sensational stories by an urban Indian viewership. This is symptomatic
of the postmodern condition of consumer capitalism that extends from com-
modity fetishism to a rapacious desire for audio-visual images, news stories
that entertain or titillate. The dominant discourse of urban consumerism
also implicates the Peepli villagers, whose own compliance with objectifica-
tion by the urban media and the state indicates a collective ‘lack of activism
and political mobilisation’ (Hebbar, 2010: 103). This enables the hegemonic
state and media to reinforce their intended status quo of top-down govern-
mentality. In so doing, Peepli’s citizens become inadvertent instruments and
unwitting accomplices in the repressive and ideological state apparatuses’
appropriation of Natha’s body.
Eventually, at the film’s dénouement, Natha’s corporeal body is subsumed
and subjugated by capital. His escape from Peepli marks his transition from
the rural margins to the urban metropolis; a coda that reverses the film’s
opening sequence. During the film’s final moments, the camera frames the
city’s images of progress in the form of large billboards promising palatial
dream houses in sprawling urban spaces – the modern Indian neoliberal
dream. Natha is subsequently revealed as one amongst the multitude of the
city’s indigent subalterns existing at the bottom of the urban food chain – he
is an indentured migrant labourer in a building construction site.
The montage at the end of the film depicts Natha and his fellow migrant
labourers as spectres, their physiognomies shrouded in the white cement
mortar and dust of their labours. The dispatching of Natha from the centre
of the narrative to its periphery at the end of the film seems total and irre-
versible. This displacement symbolises the final appropriation of Natha’s
body by the hegemonic neoliberal discourse marking his relegation to the
realm of spectrality.
Back in the village, Natha’s brother Budhia reveals to Dhaniya that their
claim for compensation has been denied on the grounds that Natha ‘died’
in an accident and did not commit suicide, as per government stipulations.
Natha’s transformation into a ‘living ghost’ and his surviving kin’s denial
at the hands of the state is analogous to Bholaram’s soul in the satirical
Hindi short story, Bholaram ka Jeev (‘Bholaram’s Soul’), by Harishankar
224 Peepli Live
Parsai. This is a trenchant black comedy about the continuance of colonial
corruption and hypocrisy in bureaucratic Indian government offices. The
title character Bholaram, an ex–civil servant spends the entirety of his
retired life propitiating and pleading with government clerks and officers for
his pension. Bholaram’s dead soul even shuns paradise and returns from the
afterlife to continue his crusade on earth. However, even his soul is unsuc-
cessful in receiving reparation from the state. In a similar vein, Peepli Live’s
epilogue establishes that Natha and his ‘surviving’ family seem condemned
to occupy the same liminal purgatory as Bholaram, suspended in a hege-
monic national narrative.
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10 All the World’s a Ship
Broken Binaries and Hyperlinked
Heterotopias in Ship of Theseus
Each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death.

—Roland Barthes (1981: 97)
For nothing is so productive of elevation of mind as to be able to e xamine

methodically and truly every object that is presented to you in life, and
always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of uni-
verse this is and what kind of use everything performs in it and what value
everything has with reference to the whole.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. (167 bce)
Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus (2013) is based on historian Plutarch’s

conundrum about mythical Greek hero Theseus’s ship. Plutarch ponders
whether the ship retains its authenticity if its old, worn-out, constituent
parts are removed incrementally and replaced by new ones. This intriguing
motif is intricately interwoven into the film’s three ostensibly self-contained
stories that are ultimately interlinked. Ship of Theseus (SOT) embarks with
the story of a blind girl, Aliya (Aida El-Kashef), whose passion for pho-
tography is guided by an intuitive and sensorial approach, enabling her to
navigate the febrile Mumbai cityscape in her quest for aesthetic images.
The film’s second strand, and perhaps its philosophical pièce de résistance,
delves into the eschewal by Jain monk Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi) of all medi-
cation, despite being diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. Maitreya’s refusal
of medical treatment is in accordance with his beliefs and his legal campaign
against laboratory testing on animals by pharmaceutical companies. The
film’s third tributary traces the intercontinental journey of a human kidney.
It was stolen from an impoverished Indian bricklayer, Shankar, and tracked
by an improbable Good Samaritan, Navin (Sohum Shah), an opportunistic
stockbroker, himself the recent beneficiary of a donated kidney.
At the outset, SOT could be considered a watershed film, a distinctive
yardstick in the changing trajectory of Indian cinema, setting a precedent
not only for the new Indies but also for the entirety of modern Indian
cinema. This interpretation is not based solely on the film’s aforementioned
non-linear multi-narrative approach – the anthology, portmanteau or hyper-
link format it shares with several new Indian Indies and Indie/commercial
All the World’s a Ship 227
hybrids such as David, I Am and Bombay Talkies. The feature that sets
SOT apart, particularly from mainstream Bollywood, is the intensity of its
intellectual arguments that are crystallised by the introspection, depth and
profundity of its philosophical point/counterpoint and intricate overlapping
patterns. This close reading of the film reveals the palimpsest of philosophical
and epistemological expositions that qualify it as a bellwether in modern
Indian cinema. This in-depth analysis calls for the application of an appro-
priate philosophical palette. I will therefore draw not only from Derrida and
Barthes but also from under-studied and excluded Indian epistemological
canons that precede privileged European philosophical paradigms in terms
of provenance, but often languish in their shadow.
I contend that director/screenwriter Anand Gandhi deploys binary oppo-
sitions in the film, animating agonistic negotiations between these appa
rent dialectics. He then proceeds to fracture these dyadic modes of thinking
to reveal gradations, multidimensionality and disaggregation that sit in the
interstices of ostensibly simple dichotomies. In this postmodern aspect of
affirming fragmentation, difference and overlapping heterogeneity, SOT
shares consanguinity with the other Indies.
Also akin to the other new Indies mentioned in this book, SOT speci
fically addresses India’s protracted push-pull between the spiritual and the
material. In this chapter, I propose that SOT undertakes to undermine this
bipolarity by revealing the nation’s fragile bipartisan compromise between
these two realms. The film shows how this tenuous truce plays out on a daily
basis in everyday interactions across the socio-economic divide in India,
often splintering into multiple shards that mirror the makeup of this diverse
nation. In this context, I will demonstrate how SOT disrupts a dualistic
model of life that informs modern India’s preoccupation with the spiritual/
material binary. The film accomplishes this by often drawing from a school
of Indian nihilism that predates Nietzsche, an indigenous form of anar-
chistic thought, conceived and prescribed between the eighth and twelth
centuries ce by an ancient sect of Indian iconoclasts, the C arvakas. This is
another conspicuous facet of SOT. The film harkens back to and rejuve-
nates the underexplored, arcane yet influential Carvaka school of thought,
which includes avant-garde proponents of atheism, rationalism, hedonism
and materialism. Overall, it would be fair to propose that SOT sets its
filmmaking machinery in motion to dismantle dominant, unitarian, socio-
religio-economic perspectives that uphold the whole as superior to its parts.
SOT’s credo, therefore, stands in opposition to a Gestalt Frankfurt School
Weltanschauung, or worldview that privileges the total over the fragments
that fuse together to create the bigger picture.
In this respect, I liken SOT’s three hyperlinked stories to permeable mem
branes that haemorrhage into each other. Despite this inter-story interflow
and the stories’ ultimate interlinking, it would be shortsighted to regard the
film as merely a sum total of three subnarrative compartments that subservi-
ently surrender or conveniently collapse into an overweening main narrative.
Indeed, as will be explicated, the diegesis of each individual story entangles
a motley array of individuals, objects, ideas and concepts that constantly
co-mingle, covertly coalesce and randomly collide with one another. In other
words, these filmic elements and agents burst the banks of their cinematic
story borders. They communicate feverishly across micro, meso and macro
levels and across spatio-temporal, tangible-intangible, socio-economic and
ethno-cultural borders, at local, national and transglobal levels of discourse.
In this sense, I propose that the film uses Mumbai as a microcosmic analogy
of the larger heterogeneous Indian terrain, which in turn, is hyperlinked to
the world at large, via the cursor click of globalisation.
It is possible to draw a connection between the film’s themes and my dia-
grammatic conception of a Ship of Indian Cinemas (see Chapter 3). The notion
of a ship as a heterotopic space that I ascribed to the ship of Indian cinema,
where majority Bollywood is coterminous with the new Indies, also informs
the film’s convergence of mainstream, marginal and intermedial. Heterotopias
are manifested in several social spaces, where majority and minority dis-
courses, social agents and stakeholders are side-by-side, enmeshed in various
sites of arbitration including museums, galleries and prisons. The cinema also
constitutes a heterotopia where socio-economic, ethno-religious and linguistic
asymmetries coexist in a common space for the screen duration of a film.
SOT’s strategy of breaking binary oppositions and its portrayal of Mumbai
as a postmodern, hyperlinked glocal city assists the conception that the film
itself, with its interpenetrating layers, represents a fluid heterotopic film space.
I will scrutinise each of the three instalments in the film in order to iden-
tify and gauge philosophical and epistemological undercurrents in each
synchronic slice that forms the larger Ship of Theseus. I will then stand
back and assess the whole within the context of the fragments, spotting
how the ship sails purely by dint of the incessant interaction of its parts.
Some perspectives suggest that Anand Gandhi apportions the film’s three
subnarratives according to the Hindu philosophical triumvirate of ideals:
Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram – truth, ethics, aesthetics. Although these themes
are identifiable in the three strands, hermetically sealing each story with
the totalising stamp of mono-dimensional meaning would be restrictive and
counter-intuitive to the film’s emphasis on impermanence. In keeping with
my aforementioned thesis that the film’s semantic and hermeneutic borders
are porous and hence invite multi-perspective interpretations, I will now
examine the interplay of meaning in the film’s intertwining threads.
Blindness, Beauty and Multimedia in a Perception-Dominated

Hyperreal World
The first story charts blind photographer Aliya’s transition into the world
of sight following a cornea transplant. Despite her blindness, she possesses
an intuitive ability to frame and compose her human subjects, propriocep-
tively wielding her camera as if it were an extension of her body. With Aliya
as its focal point, the film’s first instalment problematises the privileging
of perception as the pre-eminent tool to experience the world. Instead, the
narrative destabilises the link between creativity and the ability to see. This
is epitomised when Aliya faces her own paradox. She gains her eyesight but
loses the innate creative compass that has enabled her to transcend the dual-
ism of seeing and not-seeing and reproduce the beauty of the world through
photographs. Aliya’s paradoxical predicament echoes the film’s motif of
blurring barriers and dissolving demarcating lines that are often drawn arbi-
trarily and spuriously to separate elements that are actually conjoined.
Themes in Aliya’s story are symbolised by objects placed in the film frame.
Visual interfaces – mirrors, desktop and laptop screens and camera lenses
screens and camera lenses – pervade the mise-en-scène, performing the dual
function of simulating the human eye, as well as signposting the postmod-
ern condition: fragmentation, heterogeneity and the pervasive presence of
techno-visual devices. Transglobal cultural communications across techno-
scapes (Appadurai, 1996) are underscored when Aliya, who is of Egyptian
extraction but resides in M umbai, interacts with her mother via Skype. The
film’s emphasis on postmodern heterogeneity includes intercultural misce-
genation, represented by Aliya’s relationship with her Indian partner Vinay.
The shrinking of time and space through virtual interfaces is invoked
when Aliya regains her eyesight in a hospital room in the presence of her
father and Vinay, the latter filming the event with a digital camera. In a
microcosmic re-imagining of the global village, Aliya’s mother and sister
join in as virtual participants, witnessing Aliya’s transformation via a
computer logged in to Skype. Therefore, Gandhi concatenates the global
and local, collapsing the macro into the micro by aggregating geographi-
cally and ethnically disparate agents through the virtuality of technics and
technoscapes, bringing them into a shared liminal space where they collec-
tively experience Aliya’s life-changing transformation.
In addition to SOT’s representation of technological interconnectivity,
the film’s polyglot palette of English, Hindi, Arabic, Marathi, Kannada and
Swedish paints the picture of a glocal network with nodal points that inter-
sect in an aleatory, stochastic manner. Aliya, like most of the film’s char-
acters, appears acclimatised to the multicultural and multilingual Mumbai
milieu. For example, Aliya’s Arabic Skype conversation with her mother
switches to English when Vinay enters the scene. Aliya’s eye surgeon simul-
taneously code switches and code mixes from Hindi, to the lingua franca,
English, both official Indian languages. This versatility of lingual acrobatics
is passed on to the other story strands. Maitreya, the monk, performs incan-
tations in the ancient sacred languages, Sanskrit and Prakrit, segueing into
English and Hindi as the situation requires. In the film’s third instalment
Navin, the stockbroker, chats to his doctor about Kannada, a regional lan-
guage spoken in the southern state of Karnataka. On his kidney-seeking
mission to Stockholm, Navin uses a Swedish-speaking Indian intermediary,
Ajay, to communicate with the locals. This lattice of language use bolsters
the notion of SOT as a glocal film, forging connections between the local,
national and global. The above aspects of SOT could therefore be located
as a cinematic evocation of a post-global ‘network society … a culture of
virtuality in the global flows that transcend time and space’ (Castells, 2010:
386–387). In essence, SOT represents a hyperlinked world communicating
in a crisscross of levels, languages and media.
As a noteworthy addendum to the above discussion, in SOT living
languages co-exist with dead ones. English, Hindi, Swedish inter alia are
coterminous with so-called extinct Sanskrit and Prakrit. This shared lives
of languages – present and absent, living and extinct – emphasises SOT’s
recurrent motif of syncretism and synthesis that supersedes oppositions and
antinomies. The first narrative is inflected with several binary oppositions,
largely undergirded by the ostensibly foundational dichotomy between
vision and blindness. For example, at an exhibition of her photographs,
Aliya is queried by a reporter about her reason for choosing black and white
as a medium. Aliya replies that chiaroscuro gives her greater control. It is
this notion of control that is destabilised after she gains her eyesight and is
no longer able to experience the intuitive inspiration she possessed whilst
sightless. In other words, Aliya’s erstwhile sensorial proclivity towards
black and white is denuded when she perceives the world through new eyes,
assailed by its disorienting suffusion of colour. In short, her black/white
binary is broken.
The trope of antinomies also punctuates the first film’s mise-en-scène.
SOT’s recurring theme of duality appears in different modes, formulating
a subconscious backdrop to the film’s narrative progression. In one scene,
Aliya stands poised to photograph an elderly man and his young grandson
as they engage in a game of chess. The counterpoise of intergenerational dis-
tinction and the diametric opposition of black and white chess pawns subtly
invoke a universal normalised system of binaries.
As mentioned earlier, this depiction of conventionalised dichotomies is
offset by the film’s subtle interspersion of shots that continually affirm
multiple parts that make up a whole and reflect the Ship of Theseus
paradox. For example, Aliya whilst ascending the stairs of a building is
intrigued by the presence of bamboo poles flanking the stairs. She ques-
tions a man walking ahead of her about the purpose of these pillars. The
man explains that the poles serve to prop up the building. This scene’s
allusion to individual components indispensible to the existence of the
larger superstructure is one of the film’s many allegorical reinventions of
Plutarch’s conundrum.
The motif of monadic components collectively constituting their over-
arching monolith is transposed to Gandhi’s formal assemblage of paradig-
matic film shots. Each shot depicts a fragment of a larger object – a hand, a
contact lens reunited with its other half, a piece of cloth on a washing line,
the segments and pips of an orange – all accentuating and reinforcing the
notion of the part within the whole.
It is possible to draw on a comparative filmic frame to delve deeper
into the theme of binaries blurred by multiplicities and the perception of
beauty, as portrayed in Aliya’s story. In this regard, Dhobi Ghat (2010) and
SOT share a kinship based on both films’ deployment of photography as
a medium to advance plotline and character development. The two films’
prominent female characters, Aliya in SOT and Shai in Dhobi Ghat, are
united across the film divide by their passion for photography. There also
exist obvious distinctions between the two women. Shai is a diasporic Indian
from America, whose eagerness to ‘return to her roots’ and capture ‘authen-
tic’ culture often borders on an exoticising anthropocentrism. This is parti
cularly visible in her desire to photoshoot Munna, the dhobi (washerman),
in his ‘natural habitat’, the dhobi ghat. (outdoor laundry). Aliya, on the
other hand, is an Egyptian expatriate living in Mumbai, and unlike Shai, her
commitment to photography seems more psychologically intense and artis-
tically driven, although at first glance Aliya appears to match Shai’s desire
to capture an ethno-cultural slice of Mumbai and its citizens. Both clamour
for an authentic image, in some way reflective of the photographer’s own
detached wish fulfilment that seeks ‘essence’ before affirming existence.
Departing for a moment from the two individuals’ personal causal moti-
vations for freezing life in still frames, it is possible to read reasons for the
strategic deployment of photographs per se as a narrative tool in the two
Indie films. In both films ‘the testimony of the photograph bears not on
what is represented, but on Time’ (Ribière, 2008: 65). Photographs in Dhobi
Ghat are used as visual documents of the city and as tombstones to the fleet-
ingness of time. They reflect the ephemerality of Mumbai’s diverse cast of
characters: its multitude of inhabitants, as they play their daily role on the
city stage and then are heard and seen no more, their narratives overwritten
by the arrival of new dramatis personae, in the constantly changing theatre
of life. Photos in SOT are markers of time too. They trace Alia’s liminal jour-
ney into seeing. Apart from standing as sentinels of time, photos in Dhobi
Ghat and SOT are also symbols of death.
The presence of artistic objects focused on in the images created by Shai
and Aliya reflects the two women’s desire to appropriate and keep alive
that which has already passed away in the outer world. Barthes asserts that
‘photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figu-
ration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.’
(Barthes, 1981: 32). Raising the thesis of SOT’s deployment of photographs
as demarcators of human mortality, it is possible to frame photographic
images as memento mori. The immobilised subject’s stasis in a photo is an
immortality of sorts, free from the ravages of time. However, the apparent
constancy of a figure in a photo is neutralised by the death of the person in
real life – their passage into posterity. Even if the person has not yet died,
the moment in which they were captured has elapsed, leading to an illusory
hyperlink – a dead link, where the image as reference has no corresponding
tangible referent in the real world.
The severance of the unique bond between Aliya’s blind intuition and her
prodigious ability to artistically render the world outside shines a light on
how arbitrary the relationship is between her photos and the world she is
able to perceive after gaining eyesight. In her case, newly acquired eyesight
suffocates her innate and instinctual artistic ability. Alia’s own personal
paradox subsequently leads her to an aporia – a sense of pathless disil-
lusionment. The above dead hyperlink between photos and their referents
gives rise to the question, Is visual perception in the process of art creation
as imperative as meets the eye? Not mentioned till this point, the most visi-
ble distinction between the Dhobi Ghat and SOT characters is Shai’s sight-
edness and Aliya’s blindness. Deeper scrutiny of the apparently axiomatic
binary of blindness/sight draws into focus Aliya’s aforementioned ability to
perceive beauty even in blindness, through her tactile, auditory and vocal
senses. It is possible to consider whether ‘ultimately—or at the limit—in
order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes’
(Barthes, 1981: 53). At this point, it could be argued that Shai and Aliya’s
photographic attempts at the preservation of beauty for posterity is created
by a double blindness: by looking away (Derrida, 1993) or in Aliya’s case,
looking through closed eyes.
To illustrate this assertion, attention could be drawn to Derrida’s
curation of an art exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, Mémoires d’aveugle
(‘Memoirs of the Blind’), based on his hypothesis that the process of
painting or drawing is one of double blindness. In particular, Derrida
focuses on Joseph-Benoît Suvée’s Invention of the Art of Drawing (1791),
depicting the Corinthian woman Butades, who, torn by her lover’s immi-
nent departure, traces his profile on the wall using his shadow as a guide
(Fig. 10.1). In Butades’s tracing of her lover, she must look at him first
and then lose visibility for an instant, as she leans over him to outline his
shadow on the wall behind them. She is therefore tracing from her mem-
ory of the object, leading to a time delay between perceiving her lover,
turning a blind eye to him, whilst retrieving from memory the impres-
sion of him and reproducing it on the wall. In other words, the artist
Butades is blind whilst creating beauty. Also, what she is ‘capturing is
not his presence, but the presence of his absence1 – his shadow’ (Kenaan,
2006: 24).
How does this relate to the technological apparatus of modern photo
graphy and filmmaking and in particular Aliya and Shai? When photo
graphers frame their objects through the inanimate medium of the camera,
be it through the lens or viewfinder, they are oblivious to the actual object
they have assessed and framed with their own optic lens – the eye. So in this
regard, by using the camera as an intermediary device to perceive the figure
they are representing, the artist is blind to the object and also experiences the
same time-lag or belatedness as Butades between appraisal and reproduc-
tion of the model. So, ‘without this miniscule hiatus, one would either have
the vision of the model or the vision of the paper, but not drawing on the
paper’ (Lawlor, 2006: 32). Is it possible then to tell the difference between
Figure 10.1 Butades’s ‘blind tracing’ of her lover. Source: Joseph-Benoît Suvée,
Invention of the Art of Drawing (1791) © Groeningemuseum,
Bruges. Image appears in Blocker, J 2007. Reprinted by permission
of Taylor & Francis.
Aliya, who can look away or directly face the object of her photography but
cannot see it, and Shai, who momentarily loses sight of her model as she
peers through the virtual lens of the camera? This leads to the inference that
‘drawing is blind, if not the draftsman or draftswoman’ (Derrida, 1993: 2),
and the ability to apprehend and capture beauty is informed by blindness.
This conjoins Aliya and Shai rather than dividing them, dissolving the super-
ficiality of the seeing and non-seeing delineation.
In addition, the trace of the represented figure, ‘an emanation … from
a real body, which was there’ (Barthes, 1981: 80) inhabits both the mere-
tricious copy temporarily housed in the camera lens and the final captured
photographic image or film frame. The art object’s physical and temporal
absence lingers in its photographic presence, enlivened by the eyes of the
beholder. In other words, ‘the heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible
can haunt the visible as its very possibility’ (Derrida, 1993: 45). The flip side
is ‘that it is visibility itself that involves a non-visbibility’ (ibid., 52). The
adjunct to this simultaneous presence/absence is that death resides in life
and vice versa, creating a liminal in-between state.
Aliya’s blind ability to create visually stimulating images evokes blind
Homer, who in Nietzsche’s (1967 [1872]: 64) opinion, writes more vividly
than others because he can ‘visualize so much more vividly’ than those with
sight. Perhaps this is why when Aliya awakens to the ‘light’ of perception,
after her cornea transplant, she is disillusioned and disoriented, because
for her, seeing entails blindness. The unsettling residues of her ‘un-sight’
haunt her newly gained sight. Her previous ability to establish rapport with
her photo subjects through a synergy of other senses – speech, sound and
touch – seem to have deserted her, dissipated by her inauguration into the
normative seeing world, where tangibility is privileged over the ineffable.
Without the harmonious collaboration of the senses, experience via percep-
tion alone appears an implausible proposition. Eventually, this interruption
in Aliya’s ability to produce beauty through art causes her to travel to the
ethereal beauty of the snow-capped Himalayas in a quest for inspiration.
Patricia Pisters (2014) reads SOT and in particular Aliya’s story through
the lens of post-human feminism, espoused by philosopher Rosi Braidotti.
Invoking Laura Marks’ (2000) notion of ‘haptic visuality’, Pisters prescribes
a decentring of aesthetics and perception that has thus far been implicated
in reducing women to cinematic objects of male desire. This position is par-
ticularly pertinent to this book’s indictment of the Bollywood ‘item number’
(a provocative dance sequence) as cinematic conventionalising of women as
objects of male spectacle. Through its strong female protagonist, SOT raises
alternative discourses of experiencing beauty through more subconscious
synergies, intuitive modes and sensorial tools. It seems ironic therefore, that
Aliya’s departure to the pristine landscape of the Himalayas in order to
rediscover and rejuvenate her artistic adroitness is presented to us, the view-
ers, as grand spectacle – a stunning wide-angle canvas of snow-clad peaks
encompassing the foaming white waters of a river cutting through a valley.
It is food for thought: the film’s philosophical caveat against privileging
the visual as the only means of experiencing and reproducing beauty is itself
reliant on aestheticised iconography to communicate the full impact of its
message. Could this be considered a paradox within SOT’s rendering of
Plutarch’s paradox?
Locating a Confluence Between Nihilism and Metaphysical

Dualism: Materialist Charvaka and Monk Maitreya
In the film’s second segment, Maitreya, a Jain monk, is vehemently opposed
to laboratory animal testing by pharmaceutical corporations. His cru-
sade leads him to a legal battle during which he meets a young law intern,
Charvaka, at a court hearing. Although united by their public interest
litigation, Maitreya and Charvaka espouse antithetical worldviews. This
disjuncture between the older monk and the younger man, who is a radical
nihilist, precipitates an impassioned philosophical debate. Charvaka reveals
to Maitreya that he has rejected his birth name, Madhavacharya (an ancient
Hindu theologian), and adopted, at the age of 14, the name Charvaka [sic],
inspired by the ancient heterodox Carvaka school of thought. The Carvaka,
or Lokayata, system advocated materialism and atheism, exhorting hedo-
nistic enjoyment of worldly pleasures and a nihilistic disassociation from
metaphysical concepts such as the soul. During their conversation, Maitreya
asserts his perception of human beings as dualists, echoing Madhavacharya’s
metaphysical tenets from the Dvaita Vedanta, or dualistic school (Myers,
2001: 125), propagating a God/soul binary that is contingent on interpreta-
tion through the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas (Iammarino, 2013: 188). This
is anathema to Charvaka, who in rejecting his given name, Madhavacharya,
has symbolically abjured the dyadic metaphysical subscription to God and
the existence of the soul.
A strong component of SOT’s philosophical framework is its resurrection
of iconoclastic Carvaka thought in the film’s postmodern narrative time-
line. The second story’s incorporation of this autochthonous Indian phi-
losophy is all the more striking in that Carvaka was revolutionary at its
time. The Carvakas displayed a radically dissenting non-conformity to both
the elite echelons of mainstream Hindu ‘high caste’ Brahmins as well as to
the a lternative but pedagogical religious paths of Buddhism and Jainism.
Somewhat akin to the new Indian Indies, the Carvaka collective occupied a
tertiary, in-between space. As Ramkrishna Bhattacharya argues, the Carvaka
credo was the ‘lone contender standing against the perceived binary of pro-
Vedic Brahminical schools on the one hand, and the non-Vedic Buddhist and
Jain schools on the other’ (Bhattacharya, 2011). In a modern Indian milieu,
with the ascendency of Hindu nationalism under the government of the BJP
(Bharatiya Janata Party) and their far-right affiliates, it would be worth-
while to hypothesise how the apostate and often libertine Carvakas would
be apprehended if they were to be corporealised amongst the current cre-
scendo of calls for the homogenisation of India as a Hindu nation. In large
measure, the film’s second strand performatively exhumes the past, bringing
the anarchical Carvaka philosophy back to the present, embodying it in
the young law intern Charvaka and pitting him in an itinerant intergenera-
tional Socratic duel with Jain monk Maitreya, who although metaphysical
in his spiritualistic affiliations, simultaneously claims adherence to atheism,
thereby revealing the instability of logocentric belief.
One of the cornerstones of Carvaka philosophy states, ‘Only the perceived
exists; the imperceivable does not exist, by reason of its never having been
perceived; even the believers in the invisible never say that the invisible has
been perceived’ (Myers, 2001: 26). This puts into perspective the first story’s
focus on Aliya’s problem and the ‘blindness’ involved in replicating beauty
through art. However, Bhattacharya refutes the conception of Charvakas
being perception-centric as a common misinterpretation. He argues that
‘inference preceded by perception’ (Bhattacharya, 2011: 63) is integral to
the Carvakas Weltanschauung, although the Carvakas interpretation of
‘inference’ was the antithesis of Brahmin, Buddhist and Jain teachings. Infer-
ence in the Carvaka interpretation took a transgressive stand. Rather than
toeing the line of scriptures, rituals and mediating priests, Carvaka inference
opposed the belief in self, immortal soul, the existence of God, heaven, hell
or the afterlife (ibid.). This bipolarity sets the stage for the ideological bat-
tleground between Maitreya and young Charvaka.
The Carvakas’ refutation of the existence of anything that cannot first be
seen recalls the dictum espoused by Gorgias, the nihilist pre-Socratic sophist.
Gorgias argued that nothing exists; if it exists, it cannot be known, and if
it is known it cannot be communicated (McComiskey, 2002: 35–36). The
similarities between Gorgias and Carvaka epistemology are distilled into
the views of Charvaka in SOT, who debates the existence of the soul with
Maitreya. According to Michael Myers (2001), ancient Carvaka philosophy
rejects ‘arguments across the philosophical spectrum – for dualism of body
and mind, or for idealism … as part of a general dismissal of metaphysics’
(Myers, 2001: 29). In large part, Charvaka’s debate with Maitreya mirrors
both the philosophical fracas between Gorgias and Socrates and the Carvaka
disbelief in logocentric transcendentalism.
Myers subscribes to what he claims is the Carvakas’ tendentious focus on
‘seeing is knowing’ (Myers, 2001: 31), which seems restrictive and myopic
when analysed alongside the broader Indian philosophical thesis that the five
senses operate in unison to facilitate ‘experience’ (ibid.). This cooperation
between the senses to some extent explains Aliya’s innate ability to repro-
duce beauty through photography. Bhattacharya undertakes to dispel the
conventional conception of the Carvakas’ allegedly unremitting emphasis
on perception as the sole means of knowledge. Contrary to popular concep-
tion, although the Carvakas did position perception at the pinnacle of expe-
rience, they did not disavow other modes of knowledge. They considered
all other forms subordinate to seeing in the chain of learning and knowing.
‘They denied the validity of any kind of inference whatsoever unless and
until it was preceded first by perception’ (Bhattacharya, 2011: 62).
The philosophical duel between Maitreya and Charvaka, often perpetu-
ated through the walking-talking Socratic method of doubt, question and
counter-question, provides a conduit to further explore the film’s binaries:
tradition and modernity, intergenerational differences, metaphysical trans
cendence and nihilism inter alia. In one scene Maitreya chants a prayer con-
taining his core beliefs that at once appear nihilistic and metaphysical:
There is no celestial beings I know of

There is no God
Neither heaven, nor hell
Neither a preserver not an owner of this universe
Neither a creator not a destroyer
No eternal judge
There is only the law of causality
I take responsibility for my actions and their consequences
The truth is multifaceted and there are many ways to reach it
May I find balance in this duality
I pray, may my true self be liberated of the cycle of life and death
… and attain Moksha.
Maitreya’s prayer is punctuated with philosophical contradictions. Although

he appears to espouse the multifariousness of truth, he still subscribes to the
metaphysical notion of truth qua truth. His exhortation to seek balance in
‘duality’ affirms a dialectical imagining of the world. Maitreya is further
implicated in metaphysical conditioning, indicated by the desire for his ‘true
self’ to be liberated from the karmic cycle of life and death. The allusion to
a ‘true self’ seems inimical to the aforementioned notion of multiplicity and
entails the monk’s desire for and attestation to a stable unitary logos – a ‘true
self’ towards which an individual must aspire in order to attain Moksha,
or salvation. Therefore, Maitreya perception of the soul as transcendent,
infinite and amaranthine is divergent from Socrates’ perception of the soul
as contingent on a being’s life or death – the soul exists whilst life exists and
dies with the death of its bearer.
The ambivalences in Maitreya’s incantation provide an insight into his
philosophical perspective, redolent with dualities, denying the existence of
a creator or destroyer, yet deterministically extolling the primacy of the ‘law
of causality’. Maitreya appears to articulate a Sartrean existentialism, where
actions and their consequences are the sole determinants of human existence.
However, this thesis is subsequently disavowed by the monk’s affiliation to
metaphysical causality. In contrast, Sartre advocates non-deterministic auton-
omy. Maitreya’s adherence to the law of causality more closely resembles
Schopenhauer’s dualistic metaphysical interpretation of Brahman (universal
reality) and atman (individual embodied soul), (Cooper, 2012: 273), stemming
from the German thinker’s study of ancient Hindu philosophical scriptures,
the Upanishads. Maitreya tells Charvaka, ‘Every molecule in the universe is
affected by our actions. That is the truth or else everything is meaningless … the
soul is formless, shapeless, it’s non-matter and it connects to the world through
the body’. For the metaphysical M aitreya, the body is but a mortal coil, a car-
rier for the immortal soul, serving no other purpose that to signpost the soul.
Earlier comparison of Maitreya and Charvaka’s intellectual sparring ses-
sions to Gorgias/Socrates evokes Indian equivalents. Exchanges between
Maitreya and Charvaka can be posited as the film’s modern re-enactments
of a similar verbal duel between Pingakesa, a Carvaka adherent of dehat-
mavada (non-belief in the existence of soul outside the body) and Vijaya-
simha, a Jain monk (Bollée, 2002), 2002: 357). The prolonged debate over
the existence of the human soul and, according to Pingakesa, the futility of
monastically renouncing the world, is invariably and unsurprisingly won
by the monk. This is attributable in no small measure to the urtext for this
story stemming from a Jain source, Samaraditya Katha, by Haribhadra
(Bhattacharya, 2011: 22). Indeed, as Bhattacharya observes, ‘in all versions
of the story, the denier of soul is defeated by some Jain or Buddhist monk …
and is reduced to submission’ (Bhattacharya, 2011: 23).
SOT turns the tables on this ancient religious grand narrative, with
Charvaka the atheist eventually prevailing over Maitreya in the philosophical
battle of wills. At the end-stage of cirrhosis of the liver, Maitreya lies prostrate
and dying, refusing both medication and food, in a ritual fast unto death. The
visiting Charvaka sits by his side and, similar to Pingakesa of old, endeavours
to make Maitreya acknowledge the futility of his self-destructive fast unto
death. The young man draws on rationalism to try to make the monk realise
the irrationality of his decision to renounce life by refusing medication for
his liver, as well as refusing food. He challenges the fast-fading Maitreya with
the argument that, with millions of bacteria inhabiting the human body, who
knows whether brain cells or bacteria are really in charge? Ergo, he confronts
Maitreya with a coup de grâce question to clinch the philosophical duel:
How do you know where you end and where your environment begins?
Faced with the excruciating pain of his liver cirrhosis and confronted by
Charvaka’s unrelenting deconstruction of metaphysical binary conceptions,
the monk eventually chooses to sever ties with monastic life and enters the
mainstream of secular society. Religious Maitreya’s capitulation to rationality,
through his renunciation of asceticism and his integration into society, indi-
cates his acknowledgement of the inadequacies of dualistic, transcendental and
metaphysical modes to explain or provide answers to modern life’s everyday
quandaries. Unable to further countenance his corporeal suffering, M aitreya
repudiates his previous Cartesian dualistic separation of body and soul, mind
and matter, self and world, and throws himself headlong into the Dasein of
being in the world (Heidegger, 1962). This also spells the annihilation of his
adherence to the notion of one true self. Therefore, the structural binary of
his earlier privileging of soul over body has effectively been dismantled.
It is interesting to note, as the narrative reveals at a later stage, that M
aitreya
divests himself of the monastic cloak, the sartorial symbol of s pirituality that
largely cuts him off from the very society he seeks to engage with, and to
which he is so morally and idealistically committed. In particular, the monk’s
ultimate renunciation of the spiritual can be interpreted as an impetus to dis-
entangle several apparently binary questions that directly confront a modern
Indian context. Charvaka and Maitreya’s vocal tug-of-war and the latter’s
realisation of the shortcomings of religious belief animate the larger binary
of India’s tussle between spiritual and material (see Figs. 10.2 and 10.3). This
is aesthetically articulated in several camera shots.
The subtext in the second story gestures towards imminent decisions facing
the nation in light of the upsurge in invidious religious politics. It is possible to
contemplate whether this entails a choice between whether the nation in the
future sails towards a free-thinking, free-expressing autonomy or dogmatically
Figure 10.2 Spiritual and material in Mumbai.
Figure 10.3 Karma and commerce in contemporary India.
religious heteronomy. This is particularly relevant at a time when the biparti-

san compromise that has characterised the historically pluralistic and secular
Indian social fabric is now under threat from politico-religious factionalism.
Journeying through Time: Hyperlinked Humans,

Postcolonial Traces, Transglobal Kidneys
The trope of a human kidney’s transcontinental journey is transposed to the
time and space boundaries thematically traversed in SOT’s third film seg-
ment. Navin, a capitalistic stockbroker turns unlikely crusader, setting off
on a cross-continental mission to track down a stolen kidney belonging to
Shankar, a daily-wage construction labourer. Navin’s empathy for Shankar’s
predicament stems from the stockbroker’s own recent kidney transplant and
his social activist grandmother’s exhortations to eschew materialism and
embrace altruism.
Chasing a clue to Shankar’s whereabouts, Navin and his friend Mannu,
reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, set off on an animated quest.
They arrive at one of Mumbai’s meandering slums, resembling the B razilian
favelas in City of God (2002) and Trash (2014) and the Argentinian Buenos
Aires equivalent, the Ciudad Oculta, portrayed in the film Elefante Blanco
(‘White Elephant’, 2012). The camera tracks the duo’s progress down the
labyrinthine layout of the slum’s gullies, nooks and crannies leading to
Shankar’s dilapidated dwelling. This lattice of lanes calls to mind the inner
space of the human circulatory system. The city space has long been con-
ceived of as a complex maze of arteries, veins and blood vessels (Fraser,
2011: 89–90; Sennett, 2008: 204). Navin and Mannu’s winding quest for
Shankar through the maze of Mumbai’s slums (Fig. 10.4) simulates the film’s
anatomical theme of a constellation of body parts composing the inner and
outer whole. The duo’s encounter with Mumbai’s ‘other’ side also exposes
‘officially discarded “‘obsolete’” citizens who form the underground of a
modern city’ and whose exploitable labour fuels the ‘ambitions of its mod-
ernising elite’ (Nandy, 2008: 74). This in turn invokes the interrelation of
micro- and macro-levels of socio-economic discourse.
Figure 10.4 Through winding alleys.
The film zooms out from Navin and Mannu’s expedition to the beating
heart of where Mumbai’s downtrodden denizens live to reveal transglobal
European links. We learn that the trail of Shankar’s stolen kidney leads to
Sweden, where a Swedish man, Aron Jacobsen, has undergone a transplant,
becoming the kidney’s new owner through a purchase brokered by an Indian
doctor acting as middleman. This theme of a ‘middleman’ acting as inter-
nuncial ‘connecting tissue’, or the meso layer between the macro and micro,
again comes to the fore. In Peepli Live, the penurious farmers, Natha and
Budhia, had no recourse but to supplicate the unscrupulous money-lending
middleman Bhai Thakur, himself a venal agent, serving the macro politics of
apathy and corruption at the local and national government levels.
Navin and his interpreter friend, Ajay, eventual track down the Swedish
recipient to his home and confront him with the real provenance of what
the man had hitherto considered a legitimately obtained kidney. Navin
narrates how his overseas investigation is spurred by the uncovering of a
global organ-trafficking network masterminded by the Indian doctor, who
has since been arrested in Mumbai. Jacobsen tries to exculpate his action,
stating ‘a man in need of money sold his kidney. I am told it happens all the
time in India’. He also asserts that he paid a lot of money to obtain the kid-
ney. Navin confronts Jacobsen, asking him whether he considers it morally
viable to buy a kidney and capitalise on someone’s poverty. Navin’s riposte
is an important inversion of the ethico-moral high ground often portrayed
in mainstream western films to be the preserve of white western charac-
ters. Navin’s indictment of Jacobsen’s action reflects the larger discourse of
indifference and feigned ignorance that typifies the Eurocentric disavowal
of historic economic exploitation and inflicted human bondage on which
the colonial edifice of Europe was founded and on which its postcolonial
structure still stands.
Navin’s sojourn to Sweden and his ethically incendiary exchange with the
Swedish kidney recipient represents the European man as personifying a dis-
course that is ‘no longer viable as the deep-frozen Cartesian modern Man of
disconnected, distanced and disinterested ways of seeing the world’ (Asberg,
2014: 60). Although the recipient breaks down in tears at the revelation that
his body’s gain comes at the cost of another person’s loss, he opts to shut
Navin and Ajay out, urging them to leave and never return, on the condition
that he will richly recompense Shankar. Jacobsen’s refusal to delve deeper
into the humanitarian ramifications of his own solipsistic requirements is
symptomatic of wider contemporary discourses, such as the refugee crisis
and pandemic of deaths in the Mediterranean, beginning in 2015. In this
regard, the third story in SOT exposes the residues of orientalist systems and
practices that continue to pervade in the disinclination of richer nations to
face up to the realities of socio-economic degradation and dehumanisation
that in large measure are vestiges of past colonial oppression, revivified in
the global postcolonial present.
Navin could be posited as a postcolonial embodiment carrying the
trace of the subaltern Shankar across time (of historical colonial oppres-
sion) and space (of geopolitical separation). Navin’s act of reversing the
moral compass results in a posthuman, boundary-breaking, postcolonial
encounter. Nonetheless, I argue that this scene in SOT does not seek to
overturn a simplistic east/west binary merely to privilege its altruistic Indian
protagonist. It is revealed that Jacobsen acquired Shankar’s kidney through
the same doctor who was implicated in the Mumbai kidney racket. The
murky dimensions of the mercenary middleman in India resurfaces in this
regard, escalated to a global level, in comparison with the local operations
of Peepli Live’s Bhai Thakur.
The interpreter and intercultural go-between, Ajay, represents the hybrid
in-betweenness that informs the postcolonial encounter and perturbs binary
separation. An Indian expatriate, Ajay speaks Swedish, and mediates the
interaction between Navin and the kidney recipient. Ajay therefore exem-
plifies the permeability and interconnectivity of globalised socio-cultural
inter-flows. He functions as a device in the film to obviate a bipolar ‘moral
versus amoral’ representation of the stockbroker and the Swede, instead
underscoring a third space fluidity between ostensible opposites. In effect,
the notion that ‘relations precede identities’ (ibid.) is very much at the heart
of this three-person set-piece in Ship of Theseus. This sequence resonates
conceptually with the posthuman mode of superseding boundaries between
the ethical and political, ‘agency and subjectivation, autonomy and depen-
dence’ (ibid.).
Another scene depicts Ajay perfectly integrated into the cultural milieu
of his adopted Swedish environs as he engages in a Swedish folk music sing-
along with two local girls. In an earlier scene, we see Ajay’s naturalisation
within his home space, where his flat becomes a site of interaction between
his Swedish and Asian friends and the Indian sojourner, Navin. The film’s
socio-linguistic acculturation and syncretism translates into its multilayered
music and soundscapes.
Akin to the villagers’ songs in Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat’s use of
Ghazal and Hindustani classical ragas, SOT incorporates indigenous
Indian folk music, interweaving it with global soundscapes. In an ear-
lier scene, Navin’s grandmother, hospitalised with a broken leg, invites
renowned, real-life folk music singer, Mukhtiyar Ali, from the western
state of Rajasthan, to her hospital ward. Ali, who hails from the ‘semi-
nomadic community of Mirasis’ (‘Mukhtiyar Ali’, 2015) performs a song
in the Muslim Sufi music tradition. These ethnic tonalities are textured
with a more unclassifiable, hybrid sound design, juxtaposing music by
Indo-British composer duo Chandavarkar and Taylor, with an aural pal-
ette designed by Hungarian sound designer Gabor Erdelyi. The film’s var-
iegated sonic template, alongside the above-described diegetic audio-visual
representations of a multilingual and multi-ethnic world, further demon-
strates that the players in SOT are enmeshed in a postmodern grid society,
one that seems irreducible to simple dialectics. The points raised so far
affirm the thesis that SOT imagines local and global heterotopias; spaces
of interpermeation, throughout the course of its narrative, ranging from
the inner contours of private spaces to larger fields of intercultural and
ethno-linguistic communication.
SOT throws a twist into the previously mentioned postcolonial segment
of its tale, queering the pitch for any humanist resolution of the kidney-
related impasse. Navin telephones Shankar from Stockholm to triumphantly
reveal the success of his kidney-finding mission. He apprises Shankar about
the possibility of restoring the latter’s kidney through the legal channel of
filing a judicial challenge. Expressing his distrust and disdain for judicial
processes and the law, Shankar spurns Navin’s overture to bring the Swedish
recipient to justice, stating he has no more use for the kidney because he has
already accepted an out-of-court monetary settlement from his kidney’s new
owner.
In effect, Shankar’s impoverishment compels him to privilege commerce
over kidney. He therefore prefers being bought out of his legal rights to the
less lucrative restoration of his kidney. Shankar’s choice, whilst serving as an
ironic plot twist, reflects the complexities of entanglements that transcend
any predictable pattern of human behaviour, particularly given the fluctu-
ations of a market-driven globalising world. Shankar’s rejection of Navin’s
bourgeois altruism also reflects the stark reality of subaltern need at the
grassroots level. In addition it dismantles any deterministic cause-and-effect,
top-down conception of Navin’s middle-class beneficence and Shankar’s
automatic subaltern gratitude. Indeed, Shankar subverts this scheme by
displaying agency, taking matters into his own hands and not letting the
Bourgeois speak for the subaltern. Essentially, Shankar sidesteps the meso
level, in this instance represented by Navin, to directly deal with the macro
agent; the foreign usurper of his own body part. Shankar’s volte-face also
functions to subvert audience’s expectation of redemptive narrative closure.
In addition, it breaks the dualism of materialism, personified by the entre-
preneur Navin, and altruism, represented by his idealistic grandmother; a
fractious binary that impelled Navin’s philanthropic quest in the first place.
Ultimately, through the plot surprise sprung by Shankar, SOT once again
accomplishes its agenda of setting up a binary and then breaking it.
Coda: Connecting the Parts

The film’s dénouement connects its three main characters, Aliya, Maitreya
and Navin, along with several other individuals, when it is revealed that
they are all recipients of donated body parts from a single donor. This dis-
tribution of human organs from a single source to multiple recipients recalls
a similar theme in the Canadian film Jesus of Montreal (1989). SOT’s final
sequence depicts a congregation of all the organ recipients (Fig. 10.6), who
have separately received invitations from a humanitarian organisation to
watch a video created by their donor, whose hobby in life was to explore
caves. Gathered in a Mumbai museum hall turned into an ad hoc ‘cinema’,
with screen and projector (Fig. 10.5), the recipients follow their donor’s POV
camera perspective as he tracks through the interiors of a cave. The only
indication of his presence is a shadow cast on the cave walls. This scenario
is comparable to Plato’s ancient allegory of the cave, where an assembled
‘audience’ of captured prisoners is bewildered by shadowy images projected
onto a cave wall by their captors standing in front of a fire, with the captive
audience unable to fathom the genesis or meaning of the images.
Figure 10.5 The museum-cinema heterotopia.
Figure 10.6 Heterogeneous assemblage: The organ recipients.
The jagged excrescences of the cave walls in the donor’s film appear to
resemble the inner contours of the human body and its vital organs, echoing
the earlier slum alley simulacrum of human arterial by-lanes negotiated by
Navin and Mannu. To some degree the three recipients, Aliya, Maitreya and
Navin, have all experienced meandering, introspective journeys. The metaphor
of the cave suggests that the transformative process of their journeys and the
accretion of multisensorial experiences provide a more holistic insight into
reality than only perception can afford. In other words, the replacement of
the original configuration of their corporeal frames with a foreign body part
has precipitated alterations and realignments in their perspectives.
The evocation of intersections between the living and the dead and the
breaching of bodily and conceptual boundaries is underpinned in this cli-
mactic scene. Patricia Pisters argues (2014: 70) that the organ recipients are
the seemingly seamless continuations of the dead donor, because his organs
live in them. I would like to take this a step further and implicate the film’s
audience as collaborators in the film’s cinematic and philosophical construc-
tion of dissolving borders.
To justify this contention, I will revert to the aforementioned argument
that the art object being captured during the process of drawing, painting or
photography is always-already departing or fading into the past. The image of
the object being recorded or reproduced by the artist is produced organically
in ‘real time’ in the present. The completed picture, film or photograph will
stand as future testament, not only as a representation of the object that has
lapsed into history but also of the absent or departed artist. This co-weaving
of past, present and future is reborn in SOT’s culminating sequence. The
seamless flow of time’s triune dimensions is in confluence with the film’s
overarching dissolution of dichotomies. Convergence of time and the breach-
ing of discursive borders in SOT occur philosophically (through the film’s
themes) and physically (in the cinema hall), in both abstract and real hetero-
topic spaces, thereby validating one of this chapter’s core themes. In the lat-
ter case, the modern multiplex cinema hall constitutes a heterotopia, where
marginal and mainstream, both in terms of cinema genres as well as socio-
economically diverse social individuals and groups, congregate in a cotermi-
nous space, with the common objective of viewing a film.
As sharers of body parts, the omnium gatherum of organ recipients,
including main protagonists Aliya, Maitreya and Navin, are all biologically
interlinked. They are hyperlinked humans. This recalls Plato’s analogy in
The Republic and The Laws, where ‘citizens are compared with the parts of
the human body’ (Rutherford, 1995: 220) that unite to build a sharing-based
community – a cohesive city-state. In SOT’s climactic set-piece, off-screen
spectators in the cinema hall watch the onscreen organ recipients assembled
in another heterotopic space; a museum, where they watch images of their
donor on a screen. This looping audio-visual interplay between tangible and
intangible, real and virtual, cinema hall and fictional cinema, occurs under
the auspices of the film projector, similar to the fire in Plato’s cave – both
light sources are indispensible to image generation.
Playing with time, let us transfer the earlier analogy of the art object past,
the artist creating or capturing it in the present, and the artwork as future
signifier of the object and artist’s anteriority. The previously discussed simulta-
neous absence and presence that problematises notions of where the aesthetic
interior of a picture or photographic image ends and its outer frame begins
is extendable to the film’s final sequence, where the boundaries between life
and death are again not just obscured but actively thematically transgressed.
Firstly, as ticket-paying spectators, the audience views SOT on the screen
in real time, in the present, as the narrative unfolds. However, what the view-
ers are watching has always-already elapsed, slipped into the past, because
this is only a mechanical replication of a series of previous screenings.
In other words, thanks to the largesse of the projector, SOT (the art object
being viewed) has already been screened in the past in a plethora of cinema
halls and multiplexes. So, what we are seeing is a facsimilie of a facsimilie.
The assortment of onscreen film characters in the last sequence are them-
selves implicated in the act of looking (Fig. 10.7) at something that has gone
before – the ghostly foray of the cave explorer, his captured video images
speaking from beyond the grave. However, Aliya, Maitreya, Navin and their
organ-recipient compatriots are in unison with us, the audience, in the pres-
ent, because we are all staring at a symbol of our inevitable future – death.
The cave explorer’s shadow on the cave walls; the only trace of his presence,
also signifies his absence from this (and the film’s) world (Fig. 10.8). His
absence, akin to Butades’s shadow-tracing of her lover, also adumbrates the
recipients’ presence; the donor’s shadow signifies absence on philosophical,
figurative and literal levels. His shadow thereby becomes a symbolic prolep-
sis, a flash-forward for the onlooking fictional film characters, whose cine-
matic ‘life cycle’ has already revolved into the past. The spelunker’s shadow
signifying an absent presence also functions as a prefiguring look to the
future for the cinema hall audience in the present. Therefore, in a meld-
ing together of time, spectators in the cinema gain a glimpse of onscreen
character’s ‘passing’ into the past, and through the donor’s posthumous
video footage, an anticipation of their own impending future.
Figure 10.7 Looking into time.

Figure 10.8 Presence and absence coterminous in the cave.
The discontinuities between photo/film image, its represented individu-

als, and the absence of corporeal referents gesture towards undecidability,
the zone of ‘occult instability’ (Fanon, 1967: 182–183) between borders of
life and death, not to mention the borderlines between other bipolarities
explored in SOT’s narrative bulwark. Barthes states:
For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less

intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which
produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the
withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in
our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside
of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.
(Barthes, 1981)
The above-described marbled mosaic of mortality, time, space, conceptions

of humanness and hyperlinked heterotopias plays out in the cinema hall,
itself a heterotopic arena. This intricate tapestry renders indistinct the duali
ties of us/them, viewer/viewed, representation/reality, human/posthuman.
It is difficult to delineate in the instant of the film’s final revelation where the
film frame (for both the live and virtual viewers) ceases and the outer world
commences. It is hard to tell where cinema hall and screen space end and
the outside ‘real’ world begins, or where the gazing ticket-paying audience’s
real human finitude terminates and the ‘immortality’ of the technologically
generated screen characters begins.
The interplay between real and virtual audiences, screens, time and
space in SOT’s filmic finale is a microcosmic mirroring of the larger world,
where entropy and randomness pervade rather than simplistic binaries.
SOT ultimately upholds a non-deterministic, fragmented ambiguity, where
metaphysical logocentric notions are problematised. The film’s circumvention
of overt resolution or restoration of equilibrium is arguably indicative of
the irresolvable and indecipherable aporetic arbitrariness in the matrix of
the human condition. Therefore, the film’s deployment of Manichean modes
and binary encounters that are framed by stochastic, metaphysical, eschato-
logical, rational and nihilistic arguments in all three story instalments lead
to inconclusive alleyways and an infinite sinuosity of propositions.
Ultimately, in its philosophical significance, SOT becomes a powerful
idiom, not just for new, independent Indian cinema, but also for India’s cur-
rent ambivalence; the nation’s own binary forces of spiritualism and materi-
alism that often subordinate the multiple and marginal voices on the fringes
and in the spatial corridors of becoming.
Note
1. This is similar to Aamir Bashir’s statement that he was representing Hindu
Kashmiri Pandits’ presence by their absence in Harud. See the analysis of Harud
in Chapter 11.
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11 A Cinematic Quartet Conjuring
Ghosts of Nation
Harud, Haider, The Lunchbox and I Am
Within this study’s broad focus on new independent Indian films evok-
ing alternative narratives of nation, this chapter reconjures the strategies
deployed by several Indies of embedding ghosts of other stories in their
main narratives and plotlines. It is important to assert that ‘the ghost is
not simply a dead or a missing person but a social figure, and investigating
it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social
life’ (Gordon, 1997: 8). This chapter expands on the silencing of traumatic
episodes in India’s historical timeline, and the new Indies’ reinvigoration
and vocalisation of suppressed stories in the present. I turn this theme
squarely towards a specific canon of Indie films; a cinema quartet that is
simultaneously conjoined and detached by dint of each film’s approach to
common topics.
I will examine Harud and Haider, both largely invested in revealing dis-
concerting realities that menace the lived experience of repressed civilians in
the trouble-torn northern Indian state of Kashmir. One of the storylines in
I Am, last in this chapter’s film quartet, connects with the Kashmir premise
of the two above films. I Am’s general thematic tenor covers a range of
human rights, identity and social justice issues in modern India. I will also
evaluate what is ostensibly an incongruous inclusion to the three above films –
Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox. My intention is decidedly not to forge a facile
or forced interlinking between the latter and former films. That would seem
baseless, considering The Lunchbox, an unconventional epistolary romance
set in Mumbai, seems a world away from the conflict-laden clouds covering
Kashmir, as portrayed in Harud and Haider, or the socio-political malaises
that thematically inform I Am. I will instead gesture towards the converging
and diverging avenues through which all four films beckon to subalterns,
minority spaces and stories of the departed that co-habit with the living in
the nation’s present.
So, whilst Kashmir is mired in the stasis of political and existential grid-
lock, and Mumbai hurtles down the highway to hypercapitalism, the quartet
of films scrutinised in this chapter seem harmonious in their interpolation of
yesterday’s spectres into today’s stories. These ostensibly obsolete, inconse-
quential secondary and tertiary narratives from the past are nevertheless fed
by, meander from and debouch into, the mainstream.
A Cinematic Quartet Conjuring Ghosts of Nation 251
Ghosts of Kashmir’s Disappeared in Harud
Aamir Bashir’s Harud (‘Autumn’, 2010), through its measured narrative
pacing and cinematographic long takes, appears to elongate time itself, mir-
roring the stultified lived experience of ordinary Kashmiri civilians, caught
in the crossfire between separatist militants and the Indian Army. The film
delves into the struggle of Muslim Kashmiris to retrieve their own identity in
this disputed northern Himalayan region, suspended between larger dialec-
tical forces – India and Pakistan, both operating to fulfil their own ulterior
agendas (Devasundaram, 2013: 182).
Harud is a film that validates Derrida’s perception of cinema as ‘the art
of ghosts, a battle of phantoms’ (Ghost Dance, 1983). Derrida’s thesis of
a ghost being something from the past that has never found realisation in
the present (ibid.) is transposable to Harud’s exposition of the ghosts of
Kashmir – its human casualties of conflict. In particular, the film evokes the
phantasms of Kashmir’s ‘disappeared’; thousands of young men whisked
away from their homes by Indian security forces, in plain sight of their fam-
ilies, and never seen again.
The ghosts of traumatic events are abstract apparitions, manifesting in
the hidden stories of marginalised common people, forgotten in the face of
ineluctable conflict. They resemble the spectres of war invoked in The Road
to Guantanamo (2006), through Michael Winterbottom’s ‘double perspec-
tive’, where ‘a different angle of vision’ reveals ‘marginal or excluded figures’
that would ordinarily ‘have remained hidden from sight’ (Bennett, 2014:
188). Similarly, Harud conjures Kashmir’s peripheralised phantoms through
the film’s diegetic elements. These include photographs of disappeared indi-
viduals, real life film clips, radio broadcasts and news footage depicting the
conflict, all self-referentially inserted into Harud’s diegetic mise-en-scène.
The film’s primary character, a teenager named Rafiq (Shahnawaz Bhat),
is continually haunted by the ghost of his brother, Tauqir, who was a tourist
photographer before being ‘disappeared’ by Indian security forces. Tauqir
appears to Rafiq throughout the film as a silent revenant staring mutely back
at Rafiq. These disconcerting visitations exacerbate the bleakness of Rafiq’s
aimless existence as he struggles to cope with the stultifying omnipresence
of armed soldiers and the city’s volatile and uncertain environment. Shubh
Mathur (2012: 218) notes ‘Indian-administered Kashmir is one of the most
highly militarized regions of the world, with over 70,000 troops (military
and paramilitary)’ stationed to counter the insurrection that commenced in
1989 against Indian rule in Kashmir.
The regime of military power at the behest of the Indian Border Security
Force (BSF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is so encompassing
that it interrupts common social interactions and impedes mobility. In one
striking scene, shot in real time, Rafiq and his traffic policeman father, Yusuf
(Reza Naji), are seated in a bus filled with Kashmiri commuters returning
home after a day’s work. The bus is halted at an army checkpoint. The
252 A Cinematic Quartet Conjuring Ghosts of Nation
vehicle’s occupants are ordered to alight and stand in a single-file line as they
are methodically frisked by soldiers, who don’t exclude a small child from
the body search (see Fig. 11.1)
Figure 11.1 Boy frisked during stop-and-search.
In documentary film fashion, the camera locks in on the protracted pro-

cess, providing a real-time glimpse into Kashmiri citizens’ resigned accep-
tance of an intrusive security measure that has become a routinised part of
their daily rituals. This scene is evocative of how ‘Palestinian films take place
at borders and checkpoints and have therefore been termed ‘roadblock
movies’ (Gertz and Khleifi, 2007: 124). In an interview, director Aamir Bashir
(personal communication, 2013) reveals the context behind the filming of
this sequence in Harud. He notes that he requested permission to film the
bona fide army stop-and-search but had no control over its actual enact-
ment. Bashir asserts that the frisking of the little boy came as a surprise to
him and presented a deeper perspective on enforced interruptions in every-
day Kashmiri civilian life. He notes:
So when I went to the soldiers to say this is what I want, they said, ‘we
will do what we do’ … but I did not tell them to frisk the boy, who
was 3 or 4 years old, and the soldiers did. So for me, that scene became
about the stoppage of time. If you are going from point A to B, how
an external force comes and stops you from getting there … and the
fact that he actually frisked the boy as well … a 3-year-old kid. (ibid.)
The provision of a free hand to the Indian security forces in Kashmir was for-
malised by state and judicial imprimatur of the 1990 Armed Forces (Jammu
and Kashmir) Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which was passed by parliament.
The Act empowers army personnel to ‘enter and search without warrant any
premises’ (Goldston and Gossman, 1991: 29). It affords armed forces the
authority to make an arrest if ‘“reasonable suspicion” exists that [a person]
has committed or is about to commit a cognizable offence.’ (ibid.). This is
precisely the discourse that informs the disappearance of Rafiq’s brother
and a multitude of others in the film.
Harud highlights several instances of Kashmir’s suspension in limbo, not
only in terms of security, but also the region’s socio-economic detachment
from the rest of India and the latter’s thrust towards consumer capitalism.
An interesting example is when Rafiq and his friends Ishaq (Mudessir Khan)
and Aslam (Rayes Mohiuddin) are lounging on the grass, engaging in idle
banter. Ishaq strikes up a melancholy ditty ‘O, world of regret. How can
one ever find happiness here? Look at all those who have ended up in their
graves’. Commending his vocal abilities, Aslam suggests Ishaq try his luck on
the (fictional) TV Show, ‘Who Wants to Be a Superstar?’, assuring him that
the whole of Kashmir would send SMS votes in support of their local lad – as
and when Kashmir receives a mobile-phone service (the film is set in 2003,
when Kashmir was on the cusp of becoming connected via mobile phones).
Singer Ishaq retorts, ‘Kashmiris have never voted in an election, so why
would they vote for me?’. This is a reference to the promise of a plebiscite
for Kashmiris on the question of autonomy and self-determination, which
has not been fulfilled. There is a double narrative running through this scene.
On the surface, we are clued in to the fact that Kashmir has thus far been
disconnected from the rest of India by its lack of a mobile phone service. The
narrative subsequently reveals that the Indian government is due to intro-
duce SIM cards in Kashmir as a symbolic ‘gift’ to the people on the Muslim
festival day of Eid. However, the perceptibly commonplace conversation
about a TV talent show and mobile phones contains deeper connotations.
Ishaq’s observation that Kashmiris were not able to vote, together with the
fact that mobile phones came to Kashmir several years after they were intro-
duced in the rest of India, underscore the historical disenfranchisement and
disjuncture from normative modes experienced by modern Kashmiri civil
society. This disconnection has contributed to the community’s continued
suspension in a regressive state. Therefore, the film’s ironical interplay of
meaning portrays pre-mobile-phone Kashmir’s disenchanted and estranged
position in the world’s largest democracy. Arguably, this remains a relatively
unaltered state of uncertainty in contemporary times.
Harud’s recurring employment of embedded and semi-restricted narrative
information provides further insight into Kashmir’s state of arrested devel-
opment. This is exemplified in a scene where young Kashmiri men stand
in a serpentine queue, waiting to receive their mobile phone SIM cards.
A TV news reporter from Delhi directs her microphone towards the men and
asks them how it feels to be ‘connected with the rest of India’. Segueing into
a piece-to-camera, she proceeds to laud the state’s benevolent gesture; the
‘bold step’ of bringing connectivity to Kashmir. The reporter’s superficial and
specious ‘coverage’ is typical of endemic media misrepresentation in India
and mirrors similar scenarios portrayed in Peepli Live. It also demonstrates
the nexus between the news media and government that largely legitimises
hegemonic structures. This sequence also throws light on the endeavour to
present Kashmir as ‘normal’, integrated and inscribed within a homoge-
neous national metanarrative. Overall, the reporter’s duplicitous coverage
unveils the stark reality of alterity in Kashmir, a region which plays catch-up
with the rest of India and therefore is a ghostly shadow of the nation.
The device of liberating disconcerting pieces of information from osten-
sibly mundane interactions is re-invoked in a set-piece involving a football
match. Rafiq gets into a fracas with a member of the opposing team. He
is dragged away from the melee by his friends, who admonish him for his
belligerence, revealing that his opponent is the local militant commander’s
cousin. This scene illustrates how, at every turn in Kashmiri life, there seems
to be a subversion of ‘normality’, with common citizens constantly sand-
wiched between military and militants, and where a daily existence bereft of
complex underpinnings seems a distant utopian dream.
Expositions of socio-political fractures in Kashmir also emerge in moments
of levity, as when, for example, the three friends indulge in ‘armchair’ poli-
tics, adopting the World Cup football qualifiers as a metaphor to delineate
global configurations of power. Conflating football and world dominance,
Ishaq, the budding singer, mulls over his hypothesis that if Kashmir were to
play the World Cup qualifiers, they would have to play against Pakistan –
but he reckons Pakistan is too busy with cricket, so Kashmir might have
to play Afghanistan – but he thinks that country cannot even put together
a team. Ishaq ultimately declares that China would be Kashmir’s biggest
challenger. Aslam reminds Ishaq that ‘China could kick us (Kashmir) like a
football’. Ishaq expresses his confidence that America would not permit any
Chinese dominance over Kashmir, inviting Aslam’s riposte, ‘Why would the
Americans be interested; we have no oil!’
From the points raised so far, a conception emerges of Kashmir as a post-
colonial third space, a no-man’s-land populated by living spectres branded
by the painful scars of a traumatic past. The title of Pierre Bourdieu’s essay,
The Disenchantment of the World, ironically and inadvertently is an almost
direct translation of the mournful song Afsoos Duniya, or O World, Full
of Regret, sung by aspiring singer Ishaq. The similarity does not end here.
Bourdieu’s study of space in relation to the French military presence and
their regime of surveillance during the Algerian War of Liberation resonates
thematically with Harud.
Physical space was forcibly reshaped to be one in which Algerian

peasants and nomads would become good subjects under the bar-
rel of the gun. The violence of occupation attacks personhood; but
also, in ways inaccessible to western liberal discourses centred on the
autonomous individual, attacks, tortures and destroys beloved others,
things and ideals.
(Mathur, 2012: 217)
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to see shades of Gillo Pontecorvo’s
The Battle of Algiers in sections of Harud (and as will be seen, in Haider).
This is particularly the case in Harud’s depictions of military occupation
that not only deterritorialises geopolitical space but also etiolates the local
populace, rendering its members pale shadows of their own existence.
During the course of Harud’s narrative, the apparition of Rafiq’s brother
is transformed into a metonym for the thousands of young Kashmiri men
‘disappeared’ by instruments of the Indian state apparatus (the police and
army). Blurring distinctions between reality and fiction, the film captures an
actual mass rally by the APDP (Association of Parents of Disappeared Per-
sons), an organisation demanding government accountability for the abduc-
tion of their sons. A scene in Harud depicts the gathering, comprised mainly
of Kashmiri mothers, including Rafiq’s, holding placards with photographs
of their missing sons.
This cinematic revelation of a macabre Indian reality is a definitive com-
ponent of Harud. It exposes the human rights abuses (Kabir, 2009) and
repression inflicted on members of Kashmiri civil society in a democratic
nation, thereby uncovering the disturbing skeleton of disappeared Kashmiris
in secular India’s closet. Harud’s portrayal includes the Indian state amongst
the ranks of nations such as Chile, Argentina and Spain, who have the dubi-
ous distinction of having the largest recorded numbers of ‘disappeared’
citizens. In this context, the events in Harud and the ghosts of forgotten
narratives evokes India’s time of undecidability.
During my conversation with Harud’s director Aamir Bashir (personal
communication, 2013), he remarked that his film came under fire from
mixed sections of Indian society. This was either for not presenting a more
radical representation of atrocities inflicted by security forces on innocent
civilians, or for not adequately addressing the plight of the exiled minority
Hindu Kashmiri Pandit community. Following violent attacks on their com-
munity, Kashmiri Pandits fled the valley in the 1990s. Their flight received
mention in Onir’s film I Am as the largest mass exodus in Indian history,
after the monumental 1947 Partition. When queried about addressing the
displacement of the Pandits from their homes in Kashmir, Bashir replied,
‘I have represented them by their absence’ ( personal communication, 2013).
One of the lines spoken in the film echoes Bashir’s statement: ‘a whole gen-
eration of (Kashmiris) have [sic] grown up for whom the only reference to
Kashmiri Pandits is abandoned houses’ (ibid.). In other words, the absent
always inflects the present.
The points discussed underscore how Kashmir is asynchronous, out of
time with the rest of the nation’s march towards neoliberalism. Kashmir,
as a perpetually deferred signifier, is a symbol of national difference,
always-already in a state of anteriority and latency. Ananya Kabir (2009:
108) observes ‘the nationalist discourse around Kashmir that promoted its
purity and antiquity to supplement the modern Indian nation’. Kabir seeks
‘an alternative Kashmiri history … the signposts of which are the wounded
Kashmiri body’ (2009: 108). What Harud provides is a sliver of alternative
contemporaneity that we get to see through Rafiq’s eyes, which in turn sign-
posts not only Kashmir’s wounded, but its dead, departed and disavowed.
Young Rafiq is himself consumed by the ghosts of Kashmir at the film’s
climax. This is metaphorically evoked in the film through Rafiq’s sacrificial
killing of a sheep, customary during Eid celebrations. As the festive day
dawns and Kashmir receives its Eid gift of mobile phone connectivity from
the Indian government, it is revealed that Rafiq has been gunned down in an
alley by security forces.
The film’s climax is portentous, mirroring actual events that transpired in
September 2010 during the Eid festival, when four Kashmiri teenagers were
killed by Indian security forces (Mathur, 2012: 235). This has led Parveena,
the woman who founded the APDP, to sum up the situation in Kashmir:
‘Here is only matam (mourning); there is no Eid [celebration] here’ (ibid.).
This perpetual deferral of celebration and interminable mourning for the
departed largely captures the communion between the living and dead
ghosts of Kashmir.
Digging Up the Departed: Haider, an Indian Rendition

Haider’s (2014) cinematic treatment of the Kashmir quandary epitomises
the new Indies’ multifaceted and parallax approach to topical discourse.
Haider shares Harud’s anxieties and apprehensions of the political and reli-
gious dimensions of the Kashmir conflict, but is distinct from Harud in its
interpretation, form and style. The film is directed by Vishal Bharadwaj,
synonymous with Indianised adaptations of Shakespearean plays, including
Maqbool (‘Macbeth’, 2003) and Omkara (‘Othello’, 2006). As such, Haider
takes its narrative cues from the theatrical template of Hamlet, and in its
film frame, the ghosts of the departed perturb the living present. Through
a hybridised lens the film transposes the ‘something is rotten in the state
of Denmark’ premise to turbulent Kashmir, a terrain itself torn asunder
by political and religio-sectarian ambivalence. In addition, the intertextual
dialogic between Haider and Harud is unmistakeably significant in both
films’ unequivocal interrogation of the Indian state’s human rights record
in Kashmir.
Like Harud (and Hamlet), Haider spotlights a solitary young man’s psy-
chological problems and internecine instabilities against the backdrop of
sectarian strife and political injustice. Haider’s eponymous central character
is played by Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor, exemplifying the diverse and
fissiparous field that typifies the new Indian Indies. Haider seeks to avenge
the disappearance of his father, which has been arranged by the conniv-
ance of Haider’s uncle, Khurram/Claudius (Kay Kay Menon) and mother,
Ghazala/Gertrude (Tabu). The seeds of this plot were sown whilst Haider
was away at university, and his father, Hilal/King Hamlet (Narendra Jha),
an altruistic doctor, agrees to provide medical treatment to a wounded
Kashmiri militant. Unbeknownst to the doctor, his brother, Khurram is an
informant, and has tipped off the Indian military about the presence of the
injured militant and his comrades in the doctor’s house.
In a pitched gun battle, the security forces blow up Haider’s house. His
father is denounced to the police and is subsequently disappeared. Akin to
Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet, Khurram courts Ghazala and they even-
tually wed. Haider embarks on a quest to trace his vanished father, joining
political demonstrations with the APDP. Uncovering a tangled web of deceit
and duplicity, Haider encounters the repressive apparatus of the police,
embodied by Superintendent Pervez Lone/Polonius (Lalit Parimoo) in collu-
sion with Khurram, who becomes a state politician. Haider’s love for Lone’s
daughter Arshia/Ophelia (Shraddha Kapoor) is impeded by the intense hatred
harboured by her brother Liyaqat/Laertes (Aamir Bashir) against him. Ulti-
mately, Haider’s discovery that his father has been tortured and murdered
sends him down a violent spiral of mental illness and bloody retribution.
It could be noted that whilst Harud adopts an introspective, meditative and
understated arthouse cinema approach, Haider’s rendition of Hamlet contains
the dynamic address of drama. Whilst divergent in form and style, the two films
are united in foregrounding the contentious theme of Kashmir’s ‘disappeared’.
Moreover, Haider’s indigenisation and contemporising of Shakespeare’s sem-
inal work underscores the Indies’ adoption of hybrid modes to exhume the
‘corpses’ of forgotten narratives, marginalised individuals and groups.
As mentioned earlier, Haider shares a ‘fraternal’ connection with Rafiq in
Harud, in that they are both isolated figures battling with their own inner
demons and the injustice they experience in the outer world. A striking sim-
ilarity is the two young men’s subjection to the imperious directives of the
Indian military as they are stopped and searched at checkposts that pose
obstacles to the free mobility of Kashmiris in general. In Harud, it is the
earlier-described scene where Rafiq, his father, fellow commuters and a little
boy are frisked. Haider’s encounter is more rigorous. After being frisked
(Fig. 11.2), he is taken into an army tent, his diary confiscated and its con-
tents scanned as a means of ascertaining his Indian affiliations.
Figure 11.2 Haider frisked by security forces.

The army’s ritualised invasion of body space is re-invoked in another
scene. A Kashmiri man, who appears to be in a catatonic state, refuses
to step across the threshold of his own home, despite his wife’s entreat-
ies. Eventually, an artifice is employed by a helpful passer-by, whereby the
mentally-disturbed man is frisked and asked to display his identity card.
When this mock exercise is completed and the card ‘validated’, the man
subserviently walks into his home. The passer-by, Roohdaar (Irrfan Khan),
who is later revealed as a personification of Kashmir’s disappeared ‘ghosts’,
subsequently declares ‘people have become so used to body searches that
unless they are frisked they fear entering their own homes’. Haider and
Harud also portray how, on a mass scale, Kashmiri men are ordered out
of their homes herded into open fields, their identity cards checked one
by one, as a police informant picks out suspected ‘militants’ who are then
‘disappeared’. This en-masse round-up is reminiscent of the mass arrest
and detainment of Jews by French police in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1942
during the Nazi occupation of France. As depicted in the film Sarah’s Key
(2010), most of these victims reached their journey’s end at the Auschwitz
extermination camps.
Haider reveals that the territorialisation of space and forced rendition of
humans into spectral shadows of themselves relies on systematised zones
of dehumanisation and ideological indoctrination. This is represented
through clandestine army torture centres. In one scene, we see disappeared
prisoners including Roohdaar and Haider’s father in one such army prison
called MAMA 2. Incarcerated along with Roohdaar, the imprisoned doctor
laments ‘the prison is a sullen ghost. Ask the breeze for a whiff of hope’.
After his escape from this ‘fortress’, Roohdaar recounts to Haider how ‘men
returned from MAMA 2 as mere shadows of themselves’. In this cavern
of torture, the film reveals a prisoner being emasculated through electric
shocks administered to his testicles. His agonising screams that he is a stu-
dent not a militant are disregarded by his torturers. In the prison precincts,
ideology is implanted in the minds of the prisoners, who are ordered to
chant ‘Long Live India’.
More macabre dimensions come to light when a derelict cinema hall is
revealed as another carceral space. Here, dominant cultural and state narra-
tives collude in the degradation of the disappeared men. Roohdaar further
reveals to Haider how Faraz Cinema has been reterritorialised by the Indian
army (Fig. 11.3). The edifice now doubles as an arena of pleasure and a site
for torture. Bollywood films are screened to army personnel coterminous
with Kashmiri prisoners being lined up for surveillance.
Akin to the Plato’s cave analogy as applied to Ship of Theseus, Faraz
Cinema operates on a system of projector light, shadows, captors and pris-
oners. Haider’s father, Hilal, and several disappeared prisoners are marched
into the cinema hall and lined up in front of the screen. Their shadows
are incongruously cast on the canvas containing the cavorting gyrations of
Bollywood star Salman Khan as he relentlessly pursues a girl in a song and
Figure 11.3 Army audience reterritorialises Faraz cinema.
Figure 11.4 Bollywood ‘applauds’ hegemonic power.
dance sequence. Indeed, the film characters flashing jubilant ‘thumbs-up’

signs to Salman Khan, also seem to be applauding their armed forces audi-
ence for the parade of prisoners (Fig. 11.4). The oppressors positioned
behind the film projector are subsequently revealed as Khurram and police
superintendent Parvez Lone; who have masterminded the disappearance of
Haider’s father. The self-referential transmutation of the cinema hall from
a space of entertainment to a zone of state terror bears testimony to the
meta-hegemonic construction where Bollywood as banalised cultural enter-
tainment can turn a blind eye to acts of social injustice and state oppression.
Haider, however, takes a political stand. His earlier zeal to investigate his
disappeared father’s fate saw him join APDP rallies, holding up placards and
demanding restitution. After learning of his father’s murder, Haider adopts
confrontational and violent methods. Addressing a huge crowd in the town
square he muses, ‘Do we exist or do we not?’ Haider asks the crowd about
azadi (freedom), a taboo word that invokes state and cinema censorship.
If Harud implicitly portrays the AFSPA, Haider openly heaps vitriol on
the legislation, sarcastically declaiming its most contentious sections to the
gathered throng. Drawing attention to the Armed Forces’ authority to use
deadly force Haider quotes Article 4(a) of the Act:
After giving such due warning as he may consider necessary, fire upon
or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person
who is acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being
in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more
persons or the carrying of weapons or of things capable of being used
as weapons or of firearms, ammunition or explosive substances.
Overall, the Act’s nebulous and partisan phraseology grants the army and
police absolute power to act with impunity in Kashmir. Security and para-
military forces often interpret this law as carte blanche to carry out acts
of rape, torture and extra-judicial killings (Mathur, 2012). Morton (2013:
194) argues that by repeatedly ‘framing Kashmiri civilians as Pakistani
infiltrators’ the Indian military legitimises repressive violence as a lawful
‘struggle to protect the security of the Indian nation state’ (ibid.). It is ironic
that the Special Powers Act of 1990 has its antecedents in the British colo-
nial regime’s Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance of 1942, which
granted the British army the licence to ‘kill civilians to suppress the Quit
India movement’ (ibid.). This shakes the foundations of the notion that
India, ‘because of its iconic history of colonization and anti-colonial strug-
gle, is not to be held accountable for the abuses the post-independence state
has wrought in its turn’ (Mathur, 2015: 220). Importantly, Haider’s direct
confrontation of controversial and taboo themes such as AFSPA and azadi
demonstrates the delineation of the Indies from apolitical Bollywood, in
terms of content.
Indeed, Bollywood codes are recast in Haider, during the latter’s equiv-
alent of the tragedians’ performance in Hamlet. Adopting the Bollywood
song and dance format, Haider exposes the perfidious role of his mother
and uncle in the disappearance and death of his father. Appropriating the
trope of Bollywood spectacle, incorporating costumes and giant puppets
to convey a counter-narrative underlines Haider’s heterodox approach.
It also exemplifies how the conventional musical interlude when used
in Indies is often integrated into narrative context. Incensed by Haider’s
song and dance subversion, Parvez Lone and his police officers set off in
hot pursuit as Haider flees the scene. This aptly captures how flouting the
norms of state censorship through counter-narratives often invokes the
wrath of ruling power structures.
Haider’s turbulent encounter with the law is abstractly evoked in another
sequence in which he returns to his former home, which has largely been
incinerated by the security forces’ siege and assault. As Haider, accompa-
nied by Arshia, steps into the remains of what used to be the living room,
his discovery of a family photograph lying amidst the wreckage triggers an
analepsis to happier times when he bantered with his father in that very
room. This propensity of decrepit buildings to act as crucibles of memory
and containers of traumatic events is also shared in the film I Am, where
Megha, a Hindu Kashmiri Pandit, revisits her uncle’s abandoned house. She
walks through its bullet-scarred hallways reliving the moments preceding
her father’s murder at the hands of Kashmiri militants.
Ultimately the spectres of conflict consume Haider’s main players in an
apocalyptic shoot-out sequence. Haider and three elderly gravediggers (who
are insurgents) engage in a bloody and explosive battle with the paramili-
tary forces led by Khurram. Holed up in a log cabin in the centre of the cem-
etery, death is the inevitable consequence of the conflict. During the carnage,
Ghazala, unable to countenance Haider’s imminent destruction and her own
guilt, detonates a garland of grenades she has strapped to her body. The final
image of the graveyard scattered with fresh bodies and dismembered human
body parts is emblematic of the cheek-by-jowl existence of life and death in
a region trapped in undecidability.
I Am: Interrogating the National Narrative

Like Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus, Onir’s I Am adopts the hyperlink for-
mat, interweaving four apparently disparate narratives into a filmic mosaic
based on four characters. Each story segment is named after its protagonists;
Afia, Megha, Abhimanyu and Omar. I Am’s portmanteau of stories exhibits
an explicit representation of past narratives and themes that confront the
film’s characters in the present. I Am also strives for a more representative
rendition of nation, with its plotlines spread across the four corners of the
nation: Kolkata, Kashmir’s Srinagar, Bangalore and Mumbai.
In I Am, director Onir challenges several institutions and appendages of
the state apparatus that dichotomise into distinct but overlapping domains –
the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) and the Ideological State Apparatuses
(ISAs) (Althusser, 1971: 140–145). RSAs are state institutions such as the police
and army that can use violence or repressive methods to elicit compliance from
civil society, whilst ISAs, such as the media, education, family and religious
systems are secondary arms of the state, incorporating ideological forms of
societal control (ibid.).
Onir challenges both the RSAs and ISAs in I Am. The film questions
Indian society’s normalised, often mandatory, institution of marriage and
entrenched patriarchal attitudes in ‘Afia’, the film’s first story. ‘Afia’ broaches
the theme of its titular character, a recently divorced single woman, who is
stigmatised in her struggle to have a child through IVF (In vitro fertilisation)
treatment. The narrative also examines the role of the medical clinic that
Afia approaches for help in receiving IVF treatment. Continuing themati-
cally with the traditional construction of family, the third segment traces
Bangalore-based Abhimanyu’s struggle with his sexuality, haunted by trau-
matising spectres of childhood sexual abuse suffered at the hands of his
stepfather. The third segment reappraises the institution of the family in
India, unpacking the latent, disavowed macro-level discourses of suppressed
sexuality and child abuse. In the interest of brevity and focus, I shall shine
a light on I Am’s second and fourth segments. This is also because they
strongly illustrate this chapter’s primary premise.
The second segment, Megha, conducts a bifurcated examination of the
Kashmir question. The narrative places in parallel the plight of displaced
Hindu Kashmiri Pandits, represented by the film’s eponymous central char-
acter, Megha (Juhi Chawla). She returns to Kashmir after several years and
encounters her childhood Muslim friend Rubina (Manisha Koirala), who
has remained in the strife-torn region.
The film addresses the RSA of the Indian Army in Kashmir, simultane-
ously evoking the exiled minority Hindu Pandits and the army’s harassment
of local Muslims, thereby engaging with complex narratives of conflict and
violence. In this respect, I Am could be presented as a companion piece to
Harud and Haider in the context of these films’ intersecting yet diverging
perspectives on Kashmir.
Megha, who has discovered a new life in Delhi, carries the baggage of
trauma and excommunication from the time when her Pandit family had
to flee the valley in the early 1990s due to violent insurrections, which were
often abetted by an opportunistic Pakistan (Snedden, 2012). In one scene,
Megha, accompanied by Rubina, revisits her uncle’s old abandoned house.
The dilapidated interiors of the building animate the ghosts of conflict in
Megha’s mind. She is transported back in time as she walks through the
ruined house’s spatial passageways and hears the cacophonous clamour of
menacing voices and crescendo of gunfire that culminated in the murder of
her uncle. Faced with the wall that served as the backdrop for her uncle’s
execution, the distraught Megha reaches out to touch the crater eviscerated
by the exiting bullet as Rubina stands silently in the background (Fig. 11.5).
Megha’s experience exemplifies how built environments are often recepta-
cles that bear residues of traumatic and violent events.
This disconcerting visitation by ghostly voices from a traumatic past
unleashes the repressed antagonism in Megha, and she confronts her friend
Rubina with the accusation that her uncle’s murder at the hands of Muslim
militants was part of a larger master plan to expel the Hindu Pandit com-
munity from Kashmir. Rubina’s gentle response is that whilst Megha was
privileged to leave Kashmir, it was her punishment to remain and endure
her futureless existence in the region’s suffocating stasis. As with all four
Figure 11.5 Confronting the wall of the past.
narratives in I Am, the Megha story strand terminates in departure; a part-

ing of ways and severance of relationships, in this case Rubina leaves Megha
and boards a boat that drifts silently away on Srinagar’s Dal Lake.
I Am’s fourth instalment, Omar, indicts the Indian police, an RSA consis-
tently implicated in the brutalisation of India’s LGBTQ community (Onir,
personal communication, 2013), against the backdrop of India’s judicial
system upholding British colonial-era anti-gay legislation. Section 377 of
the Indian penal code was instituted in India by the British. This law was
overturned in 2009, decriminalising homosexuality in India. However, in
a volte-face in 2013, on the eve of national elections in which the right-
wing BJP were strong contenders, the Indian Supreme Court overturned this
ruling, returning India to a colonial-era legal system that enjoins consensual
sexual relations outside the restrictive confines of ‘Victorian’ heteronor-
mativity. Kama Maureemootoo (2014: 122) notes a ‘nationalist attempt
to reclaim Victorian masculinity as Indian’ through a ‘dissemination of
homophobic discourses’ in complete denial and erasure of a pre-colonial
Indian past that embraced polysexuality. In this regard, Onir’s I Am could
be framed against an Indian cinematic firmament where Bollywood, with
its meta-hegemony, actively promotes the Hindu nationalist version of nor-
malised heterosexuality.
Omar, the final instalment in I Am’s quartet of stories, narrates inci-
dents that bring together two men from geographically antipodal Indian
locations. Jai (Rahul Bose), from the southern city of Bangalore, is a man-
aging director of a multinational corporation, and Omar (Arjun Mathur),
a Mumbai-based male sex worker, hails from Delhi. Jai is on a business
trip to Mumbai when he meets Omar at a cafe. The pair dine together,
and prompted by their mutual attraction, go on a nocturnal drive through
Mumbai. Halting in an isolated spot, the couple begin to become intimate
in the car when they are jolted by the loud rapping of a truncheon on the
car’s window pane. A police officer orders them out and proceeds to assault
Jai, accusing the duo of unnatural acts and of ‘sullying the culture of the
nation’. Meting out sustained physical and verbal abuse to Jai, the police
officer extorts a bribe, also relieving Jai of his mobile phone.
The Omar strand of the storyline is based on research drawn from real-
life incidents recounted by members of India’s LGBTQ community who
have suffered victimisation and violence at the hands of the police. In this
regard, Omar could be regarded as a performative enactment of a minority
identity that is consistently disavowed or repressed in the reality of the daily
lived experience. The film therefore becomes a device to reverse-interrogate
repressive and ideological regimes of the state apparatus that deploy physi-
cal violence and legislation to suffocate the free expression of sexual identity.
In the sequence where Jai is repeatedly and mercilessly beaten by the
policeman, the film frame is politicised by positioning a distant fluttering
Indian flag as the backdrop to Jai’s brutalisation (Fig. 11.6) This encoded
aesthetic device prompts conceptions of ideological complicity in the police-
man’s repressive enforcement of regressive statutes that have been upheld
by a juridical system claiming to act in the national interests of maintaining
mythologised moral and cultural imaginaries.
Figure 11.6 Police officer’s assault on Jai, with Indian flag in the background.
It is possible to state that this imagined rectitude and purported purity,

often violently enforced by India’s rising Hindu political right wing, is foun-
dationally out of time and inconsistent with ancient Hindu culture. Hindu
tenets of tolerance and sexual pluralism are etched into the temples of
Khajuraho and inscribed in the Kama Sutra. It is this ancient tradition of
sexual liberation that causes Adela Quested, the repressed British woman in
A Passage to India (1984), to be split between self and other. This division of
Adela’s sense of self is a precursor to her fateful visit to the Marabar caves
(an iconic scene in the film), and occurs when she stumbles into a thicket
containing ancient Indian statues frozen in inventive positions of copula-
tion. The evocation of Adela’s repressed sexuality mirrors the ambivalence
facing modern India. Progressive young middle-class attitudes towards sex
face the opposing pull of the Hindu fundamentalist religious right who, akin
to the police officer in Omar, are often self-appointed sanctifiers of national
morality.
Other discourses of intolerance and division arise from Jai’s punishment
at the hands of the law. When Jai, as a South Indian, whose first language
is not Hindi, addresses the policeman in English, the latter is incensed both
by Jai’s adoption of a ‘foreign’ tongue and by his middle-class affluence.
He rains blows and vituperation on the hapless Jai, using the pejorative
Madrasi; a colloquial corruption of the southern city of ‘Madras’, now called
Chennai. This homogenising slur is often used disparagingly by some North
Indians to refer to the ‘lumpen mass’ of South Indians. The policeman also
threatens to out Jai to his parents, a prospect that terrifies Jai into absolute
submission. These layers of ideological and socio-cultural discourse reveal
the antinomies and fractures that traverse the Indian topography with its
multitudinous mix of religions, ethnicities and cultures.
The police officer’s avarice exhibited in his extraction of a hefty bribe
from Jai also exposes the endemic corruption that runs through the bureau-
cratic structures of power, from local-level middlemen, such as Bhai Thakur
in Peepli Live, to the instruments of regional, state and national law and
governance. Events take a sinister turn when Jai finds himself alone with the
police officer, who has dispatched Omar to the ATM with Jai’s credit card
to withdraw the bribe money.
The police officer forces Jai to perform a sexual act on him, threatening
him with the prospect of being hauled to the local police station where he
would be coerced to comply. Faced with no alternative, the already trauma-
tised Jai obeys authority’s directive. On Omar’s return with the money, the
police officer dismisses Jai, but despite Jai’s protestations drags Omar along
with him to the police station. At the film’s dénouement, it is revealed that
Omar has played a duplicitous game and in reality is an agent provocateur
in league with the police. His modus operandi is to lure unsuspecting gay
men like Jai into the dragnet of an extortion racket helmed by the police.
Omar’s role as a mercenary middleman echoes this trope cited in several
films analysed in this book, from Peepli Live to Ship of Thesesus.
The state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, is an enduring
bastion of Hindu right-wing politics and represents a microcosm of a larger
confluence on a national scale of muscular religious ideology and repressive
juridical power embodied by the ruthless police officer in I Am. A pogrom
to purge Mumbai of ‘outsiders’ from other Indian states is thematically
represented in Dhobi Ghat and in the Marathi Indie film Court (2015),
mirroring real events at the behest of ultra-right Hindu political organisa-
tions such as VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad ), RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh) and Shiv Sena, the state’s xenophobic religious political group, cur-
rently in a co-ruling alliance with the BJP. Recently, examples include deadly
violence over a call for a nationwide ban on beef, as well as the Hindu fun-
damentalist brigade accusing India’s Muslim men of mounting an organised
‘Love Jihad’ – the alleged conversion of Hindu women to Islam by wooing,
courting or seducing them (Sethi, 2015). In essence, such measures could
be regarded as Hindutva power groups’ thinly veiled ploy to proscribe any
interreligious relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women.
During an interview, Onir (personal communication, 2013) reveals that
‘there is so much unspoken censorship that is happening that stops you
from doing things’. With respect to I Am’s Indian release and apprehensions
about the Omar story depicting a socially taboo sexuality, Onir argues, ‘it
is not a film about sexuality; it is a film about human rights, about identity’
(ibid.). He goes on to state that he considers it a duplicitous configuration
when the artistic merits of Hollywood films with gay themes, such as Broke-
back Mountain and Milk may be appreciated in India, but self-reflexive
Indian films grappling with alternative sexualities are castigated (ibid.).
Onir therefore uses I Am as a trigger to invoke topical discourses that
traverse the nation’s temporal timeline – past, present and future. This in
turn invokes ‘postcolonial residues that haunt India’s contemporary cultural
and political scapes’; pivoting India’s cultural identity on the clash between
tradition and modernity, Indianness and Westernization, and the religious
and secular’ (Maureemootoo, 2014: 108, 115).
Ghosts in The Lunchbox

I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.
—Fernandes (Irrfan Khan in The Lunchbox)
As mentioned earlier, The Lunchbox undertakes a more implicit evocation

of the past. In keeping with its ethos of understatement, the ghosts con-
jured in this film’s narrative relate to the temporality of the nation itself – a
duration in India’s collective memory that precedes the disjuncture of liber-
alisation in 1991. The Lunchbox’s evocation of the past signifies a crucial
transition in the time of nation, from an earlier, diluted version of state
socialism to the current state-sanctioned neoliberalism. The film follows the
unexpected interaction between Fernandes, (Irrfan Khan), a middle-aged
office clerk on the cusp of retirement, and Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a depressed
young housewife coping with a failing marriage. The serendipitous wrong
delivery of a lunchbox meant for Ila’s husband initiates daily correspon-
dence between Fernandes and Ila via letters strategically placed in the
lunchbox.
Set against the unrelenting febrile modern Mumbai cityscape, Fernandes’s
Kafkaesque role as a clerk in a bureaucratic government office exemplifies
both him and his office milieu as being temporally unsynchronised with
Mumbai’s rampant movement towards modernity. Fernandes, seated at his
desk, is like a drop in the ocean of his fellow government apparatchiks. He
seems lost amongst the multitude of employees arranged into a regimented
assembly line of rows and columns, bureaucratic functionaries mired in
stasis and embodiments of institutional systems that are to a large degree an
anachronistic continuum of India’s colonial past.
In the midst of their epistolary interactions, Fernandes reveals to Ila his
mechanism to summon the memory of his beloved departed wife. He watches
recorded VHS tapes of old comedy serials broadcast on Doordarshan,
India’s solitary national TV channel, at the time the nation’s only portal
to news and entertainment before the advent of satellite television in the
1990s. Fernandes describes to Ila how his wife during her living years
enjoyed repeated viewings of these old ‘DD’ (Doordarshan) series and how
his own emulation of her actions keeps his memory of her alive.
Fernandes’s ostensibly en passant anecdote actually contains a link to
another time. His motivation in watching pre-recorded 1980s Doordarshan
comedy shows such as Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi (‘The Life That We Have’) is to
resuscitate the memory of his wife, but it also indicates his nostalgia and
longing for a ‘better’ time. Before the entry of Rupert Murdoch’s STAR TV
satellite network in 1991, Doordarshan, as a transregional custodian of cul-
tural memory, ‘played a critical role in the recasting and redeployment of the
very notion of culture’ (Mankekar, 1999: 11).
Countenancing the daily prospect of a rapidly changing Mumbai, caught
in the mainstream of modernity and development, Fernandes seeks the
solace of what he considers a less complicated, navigable time. This sim-
plicity is reflected in the archaic aesthetic and opening titles of Yeh Jo Hai
Zindagi, as it blares out from Fernandes’s video cassette player, itself a mor-
ibund device. Essentially, the integration of this nuanced reference to the
‘good old DD days’ in the film’s main narrative performs the function of
signposting anteriority. Writing to Ila about Mumbai’s frenetic, dehumanis-
ing dash into capitalism, Fernandes laments ‘life is very busy these days, too
busy, there are too many people and everyone wants what the other has’. So,
the content of the VHS tapes invokes a past that has gone by but neverthe-
less revisits Fernandes in the present and evokes in him feelings of longing,
nostalgia and desire.
In effect, the video cassette and its contents serve as a hyperlink to an
earlier era in India’s timeline – a period that has since been palimpsestically
overwritten by the discourses of globalisation. These indelible re-inscriptions
occlude any reversion to an earlier originary temporal state – the past, which
is only accessible through the invocation of its ghosts. The trope of video
tapes used in The Lunchbox is also deployed in Dhobi Ghat as examined in
detail in Chapter 8.
In The Lunchbox, the female character, Ila, has her own encounter with
nostalgic narratives. This memory of the past is reified as the unseen ‘Aunty’,
an older lady who lives with her paralysed husband in the flat above Ila’s.
Aunty is perpetually invisible in the narrative. Her presence is only indicated
by two elements. First, her raucous voice, dishing out culinary instructions
and maternal advice, as Ila prepares her daily lunchbox, and second, the
pulley-operated hanging basket; the ‘dumb-waiter’ through which Ila and
Aunty exchange condiments and sundry items.
In one scene, Ila requests Aunty to play the title love song from popular
Hindi blockbuster Saajan (1991) on her audio cassette player. Unbeknownst
to Aunty, Ila’s sudden urge to hear this particular ballad is because ‘Saajan’ is
also Fernandes’s first name. Ila’s intergenerational petition to Aunty nostal-
gically summons the era of cassette tapes and commercial Hindi cinema; the
latter of which, in the watershed year of liberalisation (1991), stepped into
the more glamorous, globally rebranded avatar of Bollywood. Fernandes’s
fetishism of old 1980s DD TV series via a VHS player and old Aunty’s audio
cassette player recalling 1991 symbolically alert the viewer to a national
rite of passage into a new order of neoliberalism and meta-hegemonic
Bollywood. Echoing the property of media to double as instruments of
entertainment and chroniclers of time, onscreen Ila and Fernandes them-
selves embody corporeal and conceptual links to two chronologically con-
tiguous decades in a departed national past.
It is almost as if the chimera of the national past hangs in the film’s
ether, and in the two above scenes, is channelled into the material media of
audio and video players. In other words, these inanimate (and moribund)
technological devices kindle audio and visual signals that are infused
with the ideological implications of carrying the grand narratives of
Doordarshan, neoliberalism and Bollywood over the airwaves. There is
a striking similarity between the predicaments faced by Yasmin in Dhobi
Ghat and Ila in The Lunchbox. Both live repressed, domesticated lives in
Mumbai, trapped in loveless marriages with misogynistic and philandering
husbands. In what seems to be an intertextual conversation between the
two Indies, The Lunchbox depicts a scene where Ila writes to Fernandes
about her empathy with a woman who commits suicide by leaping from a
Mumbai skyscraper. It appears as if Ila is obliquely communicating with
the ghost of Yasmin. However, whilst the medium of music summoned
through Aunty’s tape player functions as an escape passage into realms
of imagined romantic fantasy for Ila, Yasmin’s VHS video diaries are a
marker of her death.
In this vein, Fernandes’s fleeting visits to the cemetery containing his wife’s
grave is indexical of the impermanence that characterises the Indian cos-
mopolis, which is a theatre of consumer-driven change. This theme evokes
comparisons with Japanese film Okurbito (‘Departures’, 2008), where the
death of loved ones is portrayed as shorthand for larger transitions in tradi-
tional society and culture.
Arjun Appadurai frames Mumbai as a modern contradiction; a metro-
politan urban space aspiring to be ‘ethnically pure but globally competitive’
and a ‘point of translation and mediation between a renascent Maharashtra
and a re-Hinduized India’ (Appadurai, 2000: 644). Through its diverse,
multi-religious collage of characters – Fernandes the Goan Catholic, Shaikh his
Muslim work colleague and Hindu Ila – The Lunchbox reiterates Mumbai’s,
and, by proxy, India’s secular, pluralistic constitution. In this regard, The Lunch-
box implicitly reprises the strident secular affirmations of the multi-ethnic and
multicultural composition of Mumbai, articulated in Dhobi Ghat and Ship of
Theseus. The backdrop to these statements of secularism in the above Indie
films is the amplified calls for a majority ethnic-Maharashtrian Hindu ‘purity’,
at the behest of the Shiv Sena. By offsetting the aforementioned Mumbai
binary of desired ethno-religious homogeneity and aspired global consumerist
hubris, The Lunchbox, like Anish Kapoor’s art installation Ghost, reveals a
slow-forming, distorted reflection of its beholder, a parallax view of a city and
its containing nation, both levels pulling in two differing directions, splitting
the ego of identity formation into an ambivalent state; Frantz Fanon’s (1963:
226) ‘zone of occult instability’. But it is worth questioning: Is this construc-
tion of modern India as bipolar as meets the eye? This is particularly relevant
when bipartisan coexistence in a multicultural lived experience on the ground
is performed as praxis on a daily basis in India, whilst multiculturalism largely
remains a utopian theoretical ideal to be achieved (but constantly deferred) in
western nations.
Capitalism in its universalising, all-encompassing, leviathan form is argu-
ably so structurally isomorphic to right-wing religious politics that the latter
conveniently collapses into the more cavernous contours of the former. This is
a throwback to the book’s earlier assertion of the BJP’s opportunistic courting
of diasporic non-resident Indian capital investment in the late 1990s, allying
with Bollywood in the alloying of a Hindu nationalist narrative contingent on
a relentless pursuit of capital. Indeed, the incumbent leader Narendra Modi’s
current thrust towards a neoliberal nation and the religious right’s call for
Hindu rashtra (nation), both being pursued with indefatigable urgency, bear
witness to the strange amalgam that Appadurai considers apropos to Mumbai.
Fernandes and Ila are united in their desire to leave Mumbai and seek
new lives in other imagined ‘territories of desire’. Fernandes looks forward
to retirement in Nasik, a city in northwest Maharashtra. For Ila, her dream
destination is Bhutan, a land where, according to her; wealth is measured by
a happiness quotient – Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). In essence, the alienating effect generated by hypercapital-
ism leads to a sense of ennui and estrangement from the master narrative of
progress. In this regard, The Lunchbox functions as a narrative elegy to the
bygone straightforward ‘simplicity’ of pre-liberalisation India. Fernandes,
who earlier expresses his regret at not treasuring moments in the past:
‘I wish I had kept on looking back then’, reverses his journey to Nasik and
decides to join Ila in an attempt to look to the future.
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Conclusion
Charting the Ship’s Course
One of the inferences of this book is that the unisonant appellation of a

‘new wave of Indian Indies’ actually conceals a polymorphous set of prop-
ositions. Initial stages of research involving the examination of news arti-
cles and media relating to the new Indies seemed to substantiate the thesis
of a consolidated new wave of Indian Indies. However, my interviews in
India revealed the multiple subjective and contingent perspectives relating
to the description and classification of current independent Indian cinema.
A posteriori knowledge gained from in-depth interviews highlights the dif-
ferent subcategories and cultural specificities collapsed into the umbrella
term ‘Indie’. It must be acknowledged that the heterogeneity of content and
composition characterising the new Indies juxtaposed with their prolific
output since 2010, validates the contention of a New Wave. In addition,
Indie feature and documentary filmmakers and actors have been galvanised
into collective action, manifested in the Save the Indies Campaign. Indepen-
dent filmmakers have also come together in innovative and experimental
creative projects, demonstrated in the 2015 ‘team effort’ film, X: Past is
Present, featuring a synthesis of eleven non-mainstream directors. This exhi-
bition of collective creation and counter-action lends further credence to the
contention of a New Wave.
The term Indie came under scrutiny in this book, owing to the univer-
salising and often essentialist connotations of the term. Albeit an arbitrary
signifier, the moniker ‘Indie’ is ubiquitous to American independent cinema,
rendering it imperative to ascertain the Indian contexts of the term’s use.
Deeper investigation reveals the often precarious and contingent vectors that
govern the Indian context and applicability of ‘Indie’. Some of the determin-
ing factors influencing the taxonomy of Indian ‘Indies’ include mechanisms
of funding, distribution and exhibition.
This study finds that the Indian Indies are a stratified field containing gra-
dations of scale that problematise simple binaries, such as true/blockbuster
Indie or realist/experimental Indie. The traditional Western conception of
Indie cinema as films created outside the studio system is not necessarily
applicable to Indian Indies, which often solicit the financial and infrastruc-
tural support of big corporate studios and Bollywood in order to survive.
Funding and distribution strategies vary between local contexts of Indian
272 Conclusion
filmmaking and span the spectrum of self-funding, crowdsourcing, corporate
production houses, National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) assis-
tance and transglobal co-productions. The common cohesive force that
binds the Indian Indies together and demarcates them as independent is
divergent content – alternative storylines that deviate from mainstream Bol-
lywood. In this regard, several films use heterodox strategies to represent
marginalised and subaltern characters and storylines that interrogate the
national metanarrative.
In terms of classification, the most objective and utilitarian morphology
of the Indian Indies emerged unexpectedly from a ‘freeplay’ of meaning,
during an interview with filmmaker Q (Qaushiq Mukherjee). He revealed
his stylised categorisation of the Indies as Blessed, Unblessed, Rickshaw
and Drain. This subversive reconfiguration of the four watertight compart-
ments in the Hindu caste system makes up with utility for what it lacks
in epistemological conventionality or academic refinement. ‘Blessed’ Indies
have received funding from either an established Bollywood producer or
mainstream corporate production house. ‘Unblessed’ Indies have experi-
enced a latency period during which the filmmaker has solicited financial
capital from mainstream sources and is awaiting the result. The ‘Rickshaw’
category, according to Q, includes filmmakers who are akin to ‘daily wage
labourers’, due to their relentless hard work. This category alludes to the
assiduous labours of independent, largely self-funded filmmakers, partic-
ularly India’s documentary filmmaking community, who regardless of the
vagaries of finance, marshal available resources and continue to make
polemical films. Lowest in this hierarchy is the ‘Drain’ Indie category, which
contains filmmakers bereft of financial resources, access to equipment or
technical knowledge, but who regardless, make a foray into filmmaking.
This idiosyncratic disambiguation of ‘Indies’ in an Indian context per-
formatively reveals not only each subcategory’s enactment of its specific
role but also exposes the inner workings of the Bollywood meta-hegemony.
Q’s classification, in large measure, reflects the Indian Indie’s subordinate
status in relation to Bollywood, and the Indie’s current dependence on the
mainstream Bollywood industry for finance, visibility and distribution. This
resonates with the meta-hegemony thesis that reveals Bollywood’s monop-
oly of capital as well as its normalisation as the state-sanctioned instru-
ment of Indian soft power. This hegemonic configuration often standardises
Bollywood’s presence as a seemingly indispensable intermediary for Indies
to gain funding or a wider audience. Therefore, the meta-hegemony’s inter-
nal Indian operations often necessitate Indie filmmakers to enlist Bollywood
actors to enhance their films’ saleability. The meta-hegemony often deems it
necessary for independent film directors to solicit the influence and patron-
age of Bollywood personalities or producers. The aim is to augment their
films’ visibility amongst civil society by attaching the associative commercial
gravitas of Bollywood to an Indie project. This is part of an idiosyncratic
‘godfather’ syndrome in the Indian filmmaking firmament.
Conclusion 273
The Indies typify the glocal, expressing their local contexts through a
global aesthetic. In this regard, the Indies narrate state of the nation stories
about ordinary, often peripheral, subaltern figures – landless farmers, rick-
shaw pullers, disenfranchised urban youth, Dalit activists, monks turned
anti-corporation animal rights agitators and migrant workers in Indian
towns, villages and metropolises. The Indies espouse these local themes
through a universal cinematic lens, often experimenting with World Cinema
strategies and practices of framing and composition, mise-en-scène and
music. Several Indies also demonstrate postmodern non-linearity, multi-
strand narratives, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, pastiche, bricolage and the
portrayal of simulacra and consumer-driven hyperreality. These attributes
and the new Indies’ interpermeations with the Bollywood superstructure
validate this book’s framing of the Indie New Wave films as glocal hybrids
that are emerging from the interstices of India’s transition into a neoliberal
economy.
Despite their representation of marginal and subaltern individuals and
communities, the young emerging Indie filmmakers are themselves impelled
by a post-liberalisation sensibility. In this regard, they seek a wider audience
and are not averse to assiduous commercial marketing strategies and promo-
tion on social media, as demonstrated by films such as Gangs of Wasseypur
(2012) and Lucia (2013). One hypothesis during the incipient stages of
research for this book perceived the Indies’ representation of peripheralised
subalterns as a common strategy of the New Wave as a collective whole.
Subsequent stages of research revealed that it was the Indies’ commitment to
espousing alternative content and micro-narratives that deviate from major-
ity Bollywood that led to their representations of subaltern characters and
excluded fragments of society. This is congruent with a poststructuralist per-
spective where external socio-political discourse shapes and influences the
individual’s creative conceptions and constructions rather than vice versa.
Distribution and exhibition is a core issue for the Indies. They are often
reliant on Bollywood actors and producers or on big production houses for
financial support or to raise a film’s profile in the public domain. In order for
the Indies to develop into a cohesive self-sustaining industry, there needs to
be parallel construction and development of an infrastructural framework
to encourage young emerging Indie filmmakers. This support structure also
needs to provide more local and global platforms to exhibit Indian Indie
films unimpeded by meta-hegemonic considerations. The section below pro-
poses a few suggestions relating to the future imagination and implementa-
tion of an Indie infrastructure.
The logistics of this prospective infrastructure includes envisioning a more
streamlined finance system that ensures studios or financiers adopt more
acephalous and pluralistic attitudes towards Indies. This could be through
a dedicated quota or percentage of investment in Indies. If this seems unre-
alistic in terms of the profit-oriented corporate agenda, a viable alterna-
tive may be the establishment of more bespoke dedicated Indie production
274 Conclusion
houses across the country, perhaps by Indie filmmakers themselves. This
could assist in circumventing the current institutional Bollywood bias in the
machinations of corporate film finance.
The role and involvement of the NFDC needs to be magnified and diver-
sified to take cognisance of the multiplicity of emerging young filmmakers
from diverse regions. In this regard, the NFDC as a state-run organisa-
tion would need to exceed the levels of its financial and logistical support
for earlier Parallel cinema, to keep abreast of the current upsurge in Indie
films. Criticism of the NFDC’s limited role in assisting Indie filmmakers
with releasing and distributing films indicates an area that seeks immediate
attention in relation to the future role of the organisation in encouraging
new non-mainstream Indian cinema.
The film festival space has constituted a lifeline in terms of exhibition
and distribution for several Indian Indies. The burgeoning of film festivals
dedicated to independent cinema across small towns and remote areas in
India, such as the Himalayan regions of Ladakh and Dharamshala, demon-
strates the growing proliferation of the new Indies. In a broader context,
an infrastructural lacuna necessitates the imagining of a platform that
melds the domains of indigenous Indian Indie filmmaking and Indian local
and regional audiences, whilst at the same time providing global visibility;
something along the lines of the Tribeca or Sundance festivals. However,
it is fair to state that the current germination of independent film festivals
across the diverse Indian terrain and demographic mirrors the disaggre-
gated yet concomitant and prolific emergence of the Indie films themselves.
The increasing Indie presence at international film festivals underscores the
requirement for a dialogic ‘bridge’ between national and global exhibition
of Indian Indies, emphasising the need for wider distribution and increased
access in western cinemas. It is possible to extrapolate a more structured or
centralised, purpose-built, bona fide independent Indian film festival system
in the future, possibly one that does not privilege only the elite top layer
of bigger-budget corporate-sponsored or high-profile Indies. These consid-
erations are contingent on the hypothetical possibility that Indie films will
concretise their hybridisation with Bollywood or alternatively, will establish
not only an autonomous Indie film space in Indian cinema but also an inde-
pendent infrastructure that is decoupled from Bollywood’s dominance of
funding, exhibition and distribution.
A foreseeable Indie infrastructure needs to address the contentions of
the Save the Indies Campaign, stressing the need for more venues and exhi-
bition spaces, especially in Tier-II and Tier-III Indian cities and towns. The
rising popularity of the Indies among urban audiences has precipitated pre-
viously reluctant, intransigent or Bollywood-oriented multiplexes, such as
PVR, to screen esoteric, small-budget films from far-flung regions such as
Local Kung Fu from Assam. This apparent paradigm shift in PVR’s earlier
system of operations augurs a widening of the multiplex space in the future
of Indie cinema. The proliferation of BitTorrent downloads in India presents
Conclusion 275
the pirate sphere as a demotic site for free and open access to new Indie
cinema, bringing with it the question of lost revenue. Whilst the popularity of
peer-to-peer BitTorrent file-sharing emphasises the moribund state of DVD
sales in India, unfettered access to Indie films such as Gandu on YouTube
contextualises the efficacy of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
and the CBFC’s systems of regulation and film censorship in India.
The antiquated system of operations often enforced by these regulatory
institutions is largely culpable for stymieing the free expression of several
independent Indian filmmakers. However, these reactionary structures have
indirectly galvanised new and innovative alternative interfaces for distribu-
tion and delivery of Indie films. Crowdfunding is currently one of the prom-
inent alternative conduits to film funding. Pawan Kumar’s indigenously
created pay-per-view on-demand streaming portal Home Talkies, which he
uses to promote his films and obviate piracy, could be the precursor of more
broad-based national-level streaming video on demand enterprises in India,
along the lines of Netflix (which has now been introduced in India) and
Amazon Instant Video.
Patriarchal and heteronormative socio-religio-ideological structures
remain potent factors surrounding and often impeding the growth and pro-
liferation of Indian Indies. The larger ambivalence in India’s negotiation of
tradition and modernity permeates down to social mores and cultural atti-
tudes to representations of sex, religion and politics. Although there has
been an alteration in social attitudes towards unconventional film content,
this is largely an urban middle-class phenomenon. The vast majority of
the Indian polity remain susceptible to moral policing and vigilantism by
religio-political fringe elements and fundamentalist political groups such as
the Shiv Sena, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), Bajrang Dal and VHP
(Vishva Hindu Parishad) amongst several others. The unpredictability of
the heterogeneous composition of India’s demographic constitutes a difficult
terrain for the Indies’ negotiation of film censorship.
The intervention of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in
the affairs of censorship and regulation entails a continuum of the afore-
mentioned archaic, bureaucratic practices. Indiscriminate state injunctions,
as exemplified by scenarios surrounding Unfreedom, Papilio Buddha and
Kaum de Heere, seem disproportionally directed at self-funded independent
filmmakers. The continuance of arbitrary practices of censorship calls into
question the lack of implementation of India’s constitutional democratic
principles of free speech and expression. In this impinging milieu, the Indies
deviate significantly from Bollywood’s gendered and heteronormative ren-
dering of a patriarchal national master narrative. This is exemplified in the
growing number of female directors and Indie films featuring women in lead
roles as well as Indie representations of alternative sexualities.
As mentioned through the diagrammatic Ship of Cinemas analogy, two
possibilities can be prognosticated for the future of the new Indian Indies
and Indian cinema in general. The first is a Bollywood/Indie hybrid that is
276 Conclusion
more concretised in the foreseeable future owing to Bollywood’s growing
capital investments in the Indie sector. This is commensurate with an ongo-
ing hybridisation process by which Bollywood and Indie are already inter-
twined in collaborations and co-productions. The Indies’ general thrust
towards wider visibility could entail their gravitation in greater numbers
towards Bollywood as a beacon of funding or as a survival strategy. There is
a strong likelihood of this case scenario occurring if there is a failure in the
future to develop the above-mentioned infrastructure to support indepen-
dent filmmaking in India.
The second extrapolation is of an autonomous Indian Indie space. This
forecast is based on the Indies sustaining or magnifying their current pro-
digious production output. If this surge in film production is matched by
proportional audience reception and consumption, it is likely that the exist-
ing infrastructure for exhibition and distribution, such as the multiplex, will
revise and re-orientate strategies to accommodate the new market oppor-
tunities created by a rising demand for alternative cinema. This could initi-
ate a chain reaction in terms of infrastructural adjustments including wider
avenues for the Indies in relation to film festivals, exhibition spaces, private
and state funding and initiatives to encourage young filmmakers. This could
imply a further decentring and destabilising of Bollywood’s undisputed
position at the centre of the Indian cinematic meta-hegemony.
The paradox of this scenario is that it requires the Indies to devolve from
their marginal position of alterity and in effect join Bollywood as an equal
in the mainstream. This raises interesting questions about the continuance
of Indies espousing polemical or subversive content. It also poses the ques-
tion of what would replace the Indie vacuum in the event of their migration
from the margins to the mainstream. In this regard, it is possible to ponder
whether the speculative transition of the Indies to an autonomous or hybrid
mainstream space could transform cinematic expositions of socio-political
narratives of resistance and the articulation of the ghosts of nation into
the sole prerogative of India’s often overlooked documentary filmmaking
domain and the understudied regional vernacular art cinemas, particularly
the Marathi and Tamil sector.
On a broader level, the new Indies reflect the transformations in the Indian
socio-political sphere coeval with the nation’s journey into the neoliberal
domain. The broadening interest in the Indies’ alternative non-mainstream
content, particularly in urban areas, largely reflects shifting social attitudes
amongst the young urban middle class. On the other hand, the unanimous
public mandate in the 2014 national election, handing a landslide victory to
the right-wing BJP-led government is symptomatic of a current wave of con-
servative nationalistic religiosity amongst some sections of Indian civil soci-
ety. This emphasises India’s sustained ambivalence in negotiating a mythical
pedagogical past and a current time of undecidability, whilst charting the
future.
Conclusion 277
In this regard, it is fair to infer that the new Indies are more representative
of this time of undecidability than mainstream cinema because the Indies
critically draw on extant socio-political discourse in their narration of alter-
native content. They are also less impeded by ideological religio-political
and meta-hegemonic constraints than status quo-serving Bollywood,
which affords the Indies wider leeway to articulate minority discourses.
The new Indies therefore, to a significant degree, play an intermediary role
as the interpretive cinematic interface to daily transformations in India’s
socio-politico-cultural matrix.
Positioned outside the mainstream, the Indies possess the ability to trans-
gress, subvert or fracture the dominant national narrative through hetero-
dox representations. The increasingly fractious nature of socio-religious
relations catalysed by a current thrust towards Hindu nationalist theoc-
racy poses crucial questions for alternative cultural articulations in India.
Repressive and divisive designs that appear determined to quell rationalism
and suppress any dissent towards religious patriarchy bears direct relevance
to the future of the new Indian Indies.
With the Indies’ often bold indictments of prevailing political and reli-
gious structures, it is not only the discursive and direct regimes of censor-
ship that could be brought to bear on the Indies and their proponents. The
rise of muscular right-wing Hindutva politics can be indiscriminating in its
deployment of violent methods to cause the capitulation of any dissenting
cultural forms. In this increasingly fraught internal milieu in India, it will
be interesting to observe to what extent the Indies, as a counter-narrative
are permitted space to articulate alternative views. The corollary is to con-
template to what extent the Indies will continue to demand space if space is
not afforded them. All things being equal, it is possible to conclude that the
Indies in their current interstitial position, in-between the nation’s pedagog-
ical past and performative present, could be cinematic signifiers of a future
time of liberation.
Index
A Passage to India 265 anthology films 10, 70, 74, 182, 226
Aamir Khan Productions (AKP) 64, 74, anthropocentrism 231; anthropological
80, 201, 210–211 gaze 208
absence and presence 189, 245 anti-Sikh killings in 1984 9, 120–122,
acousmatic 170 129
Adivasis 37, 132 APDP 255–257, 260
Afghanistan 254 aporia 176, 232; aporetic 172, 248
AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Appadurai, Arjun 54, 102, 269
Act), 252, 260 Apur Panchali 167
Ahluwalia, Ashim 22, 73 Arabic dialogue 83, 229 see Ship of
Algerian War of Liberation 254 Theseus
Aligarh 141 art cinema 18–20, 62, 66, 91, 97,
Ali, Mukhtiyar 242 125, 276; arthouse cinema 6, 25,
All India Bakchod (AIB) 161 69, 257, see also regional and
alterity 9, 36, 102, 118, 130, 153, 171, vernacular films
180, 216, 254, 276 Arun, Avinash 76
alternative: Indie content and storylines Asian Dub Foundation 150, 159–161
2–5, 7, 19, 26, 51, 68–69, 72, 77, Atman 237
83, 86, 92, 114, 117–119, 135, 153, Auschwitz 258
158, 199, 234, 250, 255, 272–273, authenticity 20, 36, 40, 61, 113, 154,
276–277; forms of Indian cinema 160, 195, 226
16, 18–20, 33, 53–54, 72, 89, azadi 260
96–97, 106, 122, 125, 129, 136,
167; avenues of funding, distribution Bachchan, Amitabh 37, 81, 110, 113,
and exhibition 6, 8, 10, 21, 64, 67, see also dynastic Bollywood star
80–81, 88–90, 92, 94–95, 97, 101, system
105, 134, 140, 273, 275 backward caste 208–209
alternative sexualities 139, 266, 275 BAFTA 68
Althusser, Louis 134, 177 Bandit Queen 137
ambivalence 4, 39–40, 99, 102, 116, Banerjee, Mamata 171; see also
137, 142, 166, 168, 178, 191, 193, Jadavpur university; Trinamool
195, 237, 248, 256, 265, 269, Congress
275–276 Bangalore 1–2, 65, 67, 71, 89, 101,
American Beauty 190 109, 139; representation of 77, 113,
American Indie cinema 73–74, 91, 271 261–263; urban rock subculture
Amu 53, 72, 120–122, 129, 130, 135 159–160
Anderson, Benedict 114–115, 160 Bangalore Days 70, 141
Anglo-Indian 43 banning of Indie films 9, 40, 93, 122,
Angry Indian Goddesses 41 128, 134
angry young man films 37 BA Pass 66, 67, 77
Antarnaad 94 Barthes, Roland 226–227, 231, 247
280 Index
Bashir, Aamir 1, 66, 69, 84, 86–87, Bourdieu, Pierre 254
100–101, 131, 133, 252, 255 bourgeoisie 39, 94, 116, 158, 196, 205;
Basumatary, Kenny 71 bourgeois 37, 182, 205, 243
Batra, Ritesh 10, 73–74, 81, 96, 250 Brahman 237
Baudrillard, Jean 112 Braidotti, Rosi 234
Beatles 158 Brand-building 3; branding 7, 32–35,
Beckett, Samuel 172 49, 52, 91, 159–160
Begum Akhtar 184 Brazilian favelas 240; City of God 240;
Belawadi, Prakash 1, 67 Ciudad Oculta 240; Elefante Blanco
belonging 119, 122, 160, 181, 193–194 240; Trash 240
Benegal, Dev 20 Brecht, Bertolt 168
Benegal, Shyam 2, 19, 25, 62, 70, 85, British 46, 76, 150, 159, 190, 216,
93–95 242, 265; Armed Forces (Special
Bengal famine of 1943 219 Powers) Ordinance of 1942 260;
Bengali 120, 154–155, 159, 168–169, Bengal famine of 1943 219; British
172; art cinema 167; films 9, 17, 65, Film Institute (BFI) 23; British social
91, 167–168 realism films 198; colonial system
Berlinale 76, 91 201; mods and rockers 158; Section
Bhaag Milkha Bhaag 42 377 anti-gay legislation 138, 263;
Bhabha, Homi 4, 37, 49, 94, 117–120, The Daily Mail 135
149, 153, 158, 162, 191 Brokeback Mountain 76, 184, 190, 266
Bhadwai village songs in Peepli Live 211 Bt cotton seeds 207
Bharadwaj, Vishal 132, 256 Buddhism 235
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 27–28, built environment 197, 262
39–40, 48, 84, 113, 122, 133–137, bureaucracy 8, 129, 131, 206, 215, 221
235, 263, 266, 269, 276 BYOFF (Bring Your Own Film Festival)
Bhaskar, Ira 2, 64–67, 71–72, 82, 89–90
97–98, 100
Bihar 113, 181, 191–192 ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ 130
binary oppositions in SOT 227–228, 230 Cannes Film Festival 24, 91
biopower 222 capitalism 39, 40, 102, 109, 111, 150,
BitTorrent film downloads 27, 89, 267, 269; Capitalism: A Ghost Story
101–105, 274–275 119; consumer capitalism 2, 33,
Blessed Indies 84–85, 272 36, 40, 42, 82, 112, 116, 223, 253;
blindness in SOT 228, 230, 232–235 hypercapitalism 250, 269
blogs on Indian Indie cinema 75, 92, 105 carceral space 258
Bollywood: Bollywood and Satyajit Carpenter, Russell 77
Ray 60; Bollywood behemoth 62–63, Cartesian 238, 241
73; branding 7, 32–35, 49, 52, 91; Carvaka 227, 235–237; Lokayata 235
family melodramas 81; product caste divide 26, 65; caste and class
placement in films 35, 52; Genesis divisions 85, 182, 195, 196–197;
of the term ‘Bollywood’ 34; meta- caste politics 208; untouchables 153
hegemony 6, 32–33, 37, 40, 42, caste system 37, 85, 272; Brahmin 85,
51–52; Bollywoodization 35, 58; 153, 235–236; Kshatriya 85, 153;
monopoly 6, 33, 54, 272; Bollywood/ Shudra 85, 153; Vaishya 85
Parallel binary 3, 150; star power 87, CBFC 1, 27, 125–134, 138–142;
131; superstructure 5, 38, 48, 62–63, Advisory Panel 126–127, 133, 136,
83, 87, 273; Bollywood/Ray 67, 167 142; Board Members 125–127, 132,
Bombay 85, 184; Hindi cinema 19, 49 136, 145; Censor Board unofficial
Bombay Dream 192 title 8, 126, 134, 136, 163; censorship
Bombay Talkies 74, 77, 81, 98, 227 of political Indies 22, 25–27, 84, 91,
Bombay Velvet 81 120, 128–134, 138, 140; Examining
Bose, Rahul 1, 21, 69–70, 91, 104, 138 Committee 127, 132–133, 140; film
Bose, Shonali 120, 129, 135 certification process 126; Ministry
Index 281
of Information and Broadcasting consumer capitalism 2, 33, 36, 40, 42,
120, 125–126, 275; replacement 82, 112, 116, 223, 253; corporate
of Board members 125, 136, see branding 32; corporate branding
Pahlaj Nihalani; resignation of Leela strategies 32
Samson and Board members in 2015 corporate production companies 66, 81,
136; Reviewing Committee 127, 132 83; corporate production houses 7,
Censorship and regulation 28, 91–92, 21, 25, 73–74, 86–87, 97–98, 272
125–132, 137, 266, 277; corruption corporate TV news channels 38, 212
and bribery 131–132; debate on corruption 16, 25, 77, 131–132, 201,
NDTV 27, 105; efficacy in the face 206, 215, 224, 241, 265
of YouTube 27, 275; Indies face counter-culture 9, 158
greater 5, 8–9, 25–27, 40, 91, 129, counter-narrative 3–4, 109, 134,
133–135, 260–261, 277; Internet 260–261, 277
censorship 104; Madras High Court Court 65, 71, 88, 96, 191, 266
action and Anonymous counter- Critics Circle UK 10, 83
action 103–104; LGBTQ themes in crowdfunding/crowdsourcing 8, 64, 75,
Indies 138–140; books by Joseph 89, 92–95, 275
Lelyveld and Wendy Doniger banned cultural difference 9, 11, 56, 158, 180,
135; restricted to sex and violence 8; 199; cultural diversity 11, 56, 162,
Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra 128; self- 192, 194, 199
censorship and moral policing 9, cultural soft power 34, 48
138, 140, 142, 149, 275 cyberspace 8, 95, 112
Chandavarkar and Taylor 76
Chatterjee, Partha 53, 112, 114, Dabangg 81
Chauhan, Gajendra 137 Dadasaheb Phalke 76
Chawla, Juhi 81, 87 Dalit 2, 26, 37, 40, 91, 132, 134–135,
Cherian, Jayan 26, 134–135 153, 273
Chibber, Vivek 206 darshan 112; darshanic gaze 113
child abuse 10, 77, 262 Dasein 238
Chinese cinema 50 David 77
Cinema’s triple system of signs 164 dayan pratha 132
Cinemas of India 15–16, 61–62, 96–97 DDLJ 35, 37
cinematography 77, 211–212 DearCinema.com 105
Cineworld 60 Dehatmavada 237
city films 9, 77, 180, 182–183, 199 De La Cruz, Khavn 102, 163, 167
city space: consumerisation of 198; Delhi Belly 156
comparison to human circulatory Derrida, Jacques 118, 120, 151, 176,
system 240 179, 227, 232–234, 248, 251
transnational film co-operation and deterritorialisation 154, 255
co-productions 8, 10, 74, 95–96; dhobi 181, 195, 197, 199, 231
Hollywood and Bollywood 32, 55; Dhobi Ghat 5, 9, 16–17, 21, 25, 41,
Bollywood and Indie 276; between 45, 64, 68, 74–77, 80–81, 120, 141,
Indie filmmakers 70; Hubert Bals 172, 180–185, 187–189, 191–192,
Fund 96; across Indian cinema 194–199, 208, 231–232, 242,
history 76; NFDC 96, 272 266–269
colonial/postcolonial 197, 205, 221 Dhoom 3 46
commercial Hindi cinema 15, 18–19, diachronic 62, 184, 204
21, 36–38, 43, 47, 62, 65, 110, dialectic 4, 21, 53, 100, 165, 204,
141, 211, 268; film studios in the 213–214, 227, 237, 242, 251
1950s 36; in the 1970s and 80s 37; diaspora 34, 48; diasporic Indians 15,
transformation in 1991 to Bollywood 38–40, 45, 48–49, 61, 77, 231, 269,
38; cabaret song and dance 43 see also Non-resident Indians (NRI)
Communist Party of India (CPI) 169 diegetic 38, 111, 120–121, 152, 170,
Congress party 48, 121, 129, 134–135 184, 242, 251; diegetic voiceover 170
282 Index
DIFF (Dharamshala International Film Everybody says I’m Fine 20–21
Festival) 89 existentialism 237
digital divide 111; digital citizens 17; exotic 113, 195, 215; exoticised
digital ‘have-nots’ 111 female figures in Bollywood 43,
Director’s Rare 71, 100 46; exoticism 47; exoticising
disappeared Kashmiris 172, 195, 251, anthropocentrism 231
255, 257–258, 260 exteriority 103, 152, 171, 182, 193
divergent content 22, 68, 272; divergent
narratives 195 F.i.g.h.t C.l.u.b Indie film blog 105
diversity: ethnolinguistic 73; of Indian Fandry 65, 113
cinema 15; of the Cinemas of India Fanon, Frantz 269
16; Indies 61, 69; India’s cultural farmer suicides10, 26, 65, 77, 119, 195,
162, 194, 203; Mumbai’s 192; 201, 203, 207–209, 213, 216, 224
Parallel cinema depicts 19 FDI (foreign direct investment) 207
divided self 152, 165–166 female filmmakers in Indie cinema 141;
Do Bigha Zamin 18, 167, 216–217 prominent female roles in Indies 45
dominant discourse 105, 201, 205, 208, female Bollywood actors paid less than
223; dominant groups 191 male stars 42
domination 39, 50–51, 150 feudal systems 216, 201, 205, 221, 218
Doniger, Wendy 135, 143 Film Bazaar 96
Doordarshan 38, 70, 126, 172, Film Certification Appellate Tribunal 142
267–268 film festivals 8, 65, 84, 89–92, 96, 274,
double blindness in drawing 232 276
double narrative 8, 109–124, 170, 191, Film Studies 2, 5, 7, 64, 107, 189
253; double national narrative 116; film style 167
double time 53, 114, 118, 149–179, Final Solution 9, 26, 122, 133–134
216, 221; double time of nation Firaaq 72, 122
53, 221 Fire: attacks by right-wing Hindu
downloading films in India 101, 103, 106 extremists 26, 40, 137–140, 142,
DRM (Digital Rights Management) 104 see moral policing
dualism 60, 229, 234, 236, 243 first instance of crowdsourcing in India
Durga 84 93–94
Durga Vahini 84 foreign direct investment (FDI) 207;
Dvaita Vedanta 235 foreign multinational investment
dynastic Bollywood star system 110 2, 36
form, style and content 4, 21, 62, 110,
EAFF 2016 (Edinburgh Asian Film 149, 151, 180, 201
Festival) 90 Foucault, Michel 61, 222, 224
east/west 73, 242 Fox Searchlight 52
economitas 112 Fox Star Studio 33, 71, 81–82
editing 67, 70, 77, 157, 162, 168, 173, Fox TV 38
211–212 framing 9, 77, 149, 167, 169, 172, 193,
Eid 253, 256; Eid Kashmir killings in 224, 260, 273
2010 256 Frankfurt School 227
Ek Thi Dayan 132 Free speech and expression 2, 135,
elite/subaltern 197 264, 275
Elizabeth 127–128 free market 2, 10, 34, 36, 48–50, 119,
English August 20, 65 138, 205, 219
Erdelyi, Gabor 76, 242 free play of meaning 150, 151, 168, 272
Eurocentric disavowal 241 French New Wave 18, 150; Nouvelle
Europe 241 Vague 69, 71, 168
European: directors 18; Cinema 71; Freud, Sigmund 118
philosophical paradigms and links frisking by police in Kashmir 252,
227, 240–241 257–258
Index 283
FTII 125, 137, 143 Gujarat 9, 26, 93, 113, 121–123,
FTII student protests and arrest 137 133, 135
Gulabi Aaina 139, 143
Gandhi, Anand 1, 10, 61, 73, 76, 104,
189, 226–228, 261 HAHK 37
Gandhi, Indira 36, 120, 122, 130, 135, Haider 10, 132, 250, 255–262
220, see also Operation Blue Star Hamlet 132, 165, 256–257, 260
Gandhi, Rajiv 133 haptic 189–190, 234; human
Gandu 5, 9, 17, 26–27, 29–30, 40, 51, touch 190
65, 67, 70, 89–91, 96, 102–103, Hare Rama Hare Krishna 158
105, 111, 116, 134, 138, 140, 142, Harud 5, 10, 51, 66, 76–78, 79, 86–87,
149–178, 192, 195, 211, 215, 275 90, 96, 100–101, 116, 123, 131–133,
Gandu-ness 152–153 138, 172, 195, 221, 248, 250–258,
Ganga 164; Ganges 27, 164 260, 262
Gangs of Wasseypur 23, 74, 113, Harvey, David 110, 207, 221
156, 273 hat-ke 61
Garam Hawa 19, 210 heavy metal 159, see urban rock
geet mandali 211, 218 subculture
gender 7, 34, 41, 47, 137, 139–140, hegemony 4–8, 10, 15, 18, 32–59, 73,
144, 200, 270; gendered 7, 33, 37, 80, 82, 88, 90–92, 99–100, 105, 110,
41–42, 275; gendered roles 33; 114, 136–137, 140, 158, 164, 263,
gendering the nation 41 272, 276
Gestalt 227 Heimat films 96
Ghajini 81, 128 Helen 43–44
Ghatak, Ritwik 18, 62, 168 heteronormativity 137, 263
ghazal 184, 242 heterotopia 10, 61, 63, 226, 228, 242,
Ghosh, Suman 1, 17, 25 244–245, 247
Ghost art installation 117, 119–120, high-priced tickets 98
269 Hindu Kashmiri Pandits 248, 262
Ghost Dance 118, 120, 251, 270 Hindu nation 235; nationalism 39, 41,
ghost of Mahato 217 56, 112–113, 235; nationalist 27, 39,
ghosts of Kashmir 251, 256; ghosts of 84, 191, 263, 269, 277
nation 116, 250–270, 276; ghosts of Hindu rashtra 39, 269
other stories 216, 250 Hindu right-wing politics 265
Girlfriend 139 Hindutva 39–40, 42, 122, 266, 277
global film festival space 91 Hinglish films 6, 20–21, 30, 65, 69
global village 183, 222, 229 Hippie counter-culture 158
glocal 5, 7, 10, 54, 62, 68, 75–78, 116, historiographical 5, 26, 39, 51, 116,
154, 159, 180, 183–184, 228–230, 122, 159, 172, 183, 216
273; Indies 75, 116; network 229 Hitchcock, Alfred 185, 187, 189
Godaan 217–218 Holiday 141, see Molesters or Heroes
Godard, Jean-Luc 76, 150, 168 Hollywood 6, 15, 26, 32–33, 39, 47–50,
godfather syndrome in Indian cinema 55, 57–58, 73–74, 91, 99, 106, 108,
81, 84, 272 162, 266; Hollywood films 266;
Godhra massacre in 2002 121–122, Hollywood hegemony 6, 32
129, 133 Hollywood/Bollywood 32, 73
Gogol, Nikolai 168 Home Talkies 76, 275
Gorgias 236–237; Gorgias/Socrates 237 Home Video 96
governmentality 138, 222–223 Homer 234
Gramsci, Antonio 50 homosexuality 28, 87, 139, 263; gay
grand narrative 4, 35, 49–51, 129, 140, community and Indie representation
155, 216, 238, 268 77, 87, 138–139, 265–266
grassroots 172, 208, 214, 243 Hori Mahato 195, 216–219
Guha, Ranajit 205, 224 Howrah bridge 167, 169
284 Index
human rights 121, 124, 208, 225, 250, releases 71; Indie content 87, 90;
255–256, 266, 270 Indie infrastructure 21, 273–274;
hybridity 4, 8, 17, 20, 22, 24, 54–55, Indie New Wave 6, 8–9, 54, 70,
64, 68, 70, 73, 81, 95, 110, 116, 149, 72, 78, 273; Indie space 5, 74, 89,
154, 159, 192, 199, 201 141, 276
Hyenas 222 Indie subcategories: true/blockbuster
hypercapitalism 250, 269 73, 75, 271; traditional/experimental
hyperlink films 77, 182, 189, 231–232, 67, 73; Q’s classification of Indies
261, 267; hyperlink format 226, 261; 85, 272
hyperlink network narrative 182 indispensability of Bollywood 80, 83
hyperlinked: heterotopias 226, 247; information superhighway 182–183
humans 239, 245 infrastructure 4, 8, 10, 21, 25, 38, 50,
hyperreal 101, 111–113, 188, 221, 228; 88, 95, 102, 108, 273–274, 276
hyperreality 8, 10, 17, 102, 109–112, intercultural 1, 6, 10, 184, 229, 242
114, 165, 189, 201, 206, 273; intergenerational 138, 230,
hyperreal religions 112; hyperreal 235–236, 268
world 228 interiority 103, 152, 171, 182, 193
hypersexualised 43–44 Interiority and exteriority 103, 152
internal others 100, 162
I Am 5, 9–10, 16, 28, 45, 78, 81, 87–88, International Indian Film Academy 91
93–94, 101, 116, 123, 138–139, interpellation 177
144, 155, 182, 227, 241, 250, 255, interstitial space 4, 9, 51, 75, 109,
261–263, 265–266 116–119, 122, 131, 149, 158, 162,
ideology 2, 6, 33, 36–37, 39, 42, 180, 213
113–114, 116–117, 132, 134, 142, intertextuality 10, 120, 137, 154,
178–179, 183, 206, 258, 265, 270 156, 166, 185, 189, 216–218, 256,
IIFA 91 268, 273
Ilai 60–61 intolerance in India 2–3, 40–41, 122,
imagined communities 123, 160, 178 135, 191, 265
imagined nation 112, 114, 118, 129, 160 Invention of the Art of Drawing
immigrants 197 232–233
In the Name of God 129 Irani cafes in Mumbai 197–198
in-between 5, 8, 22, 109, 114, 116, 154, Iranian Cinema 77, 102
161–162, 166, 169, 197, 234–235, 277 ISAs 134, 261
Independent People’s Theatre Island City 77
Association 168 Italian Neorealism 18, 69
India’s neoliberal turn 33, 36, 43, 49 Item girl 43, 156
Indian army 130, 251, 258, 262 item number 7, 43–47, 140–141,
Indian bourgeoisie 196, 205 155–156, 234; featuring Samantha
Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles 90 Fox, Denise Richards, Kylie
Indian folk music 242 Minogue 47
Indian nation-state 2, 4, 35, 42, 137
Indian National Congress 219 Jadavpur University 171, 178
Indian news media 201 Jaffar, Farrukh 209–211
Indian nihilist philosophy 227 Jai Bhim Comrade 129
Indian Ocean 211 Jainism 235
Indian security forces 133, 221, Jan Morcha 202, 212–213, 219
251–252, 256 Jesus of Montreal 243
Indian state apparatus 195, 255 Jews 116, 258
Indianness 38, 43, 45, 266 Johar, Karan 21, 38, 61, 74, 81–82,
Indies: as alternative films 1, 66, 98, 113
72, 88, 139, 153, 158, 276; box-
office success 16, 23, 66, 71; Indie Kaafiron ki Namaz 90
attributes 67, 210; increase in Indie Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham 61
Index 285
Kaif, Katrina 44, 46 liberalisation 2, 6, 9–10, 28, 34–35, 37,
Kali 149, 166 40, 43, 60–61, 66, 70–71, 75, 96–98,
Kama Sutra 128, 137, 264 110, 135, 159, 180, 214–215, 266,
Kannada 62, 65, 71, 77, 86, 92, 94, 268–269, 273
113, 229 LIFF (London Indian Film Festival) 17,
Kapoor, Anish 117, 269 60, 71, 89–90
Kapoor, Raj 62 Lilting 190
Kapoor, Shahid 256 liminal 90, 109, 114, 118, 131, 159,
Kapoors 110 161–162, 170, 184, 189, 192–194,
Kapur, Shekhar 127 199–200, 206, 224, 229, 231, 234;
Karnataka 33, 62, 65, 77, 229 liminal space 90, 118, 159, 161,
Kashmir 10, 79, 86–87, 89, 122, 170, 192, 206, 229; liminal virtual
131–133, 172, 221, 250–258, space 194
260–262, 270 Loach, Ken 198
Kashmiri militants 261 Local Kung Fu 71, 274
Kashmiri Pandits 248, 255, 261–262 logocentric belief 235
Kashyap, Anurag 23–24, 26, 67, 81–82, logos 41, 151, 176, 237
84, 90, 96, 98 longing 267
Kaul, Mani 19, 62, 70, 85, 97 Love Jihad 266, 270
Kaum de Heere 9, 26, 122, 130–131, love triangle 195
134–135, 142, 275 Lower-caste 132, 153
Kerala 33, 62, 70, 113, 134 LSD 23, 27
Khajuraho temples 264 Lucia 65–67, 70–71, 77, 79, 86, 88,
Khan, Aamir 3, 21, 23, 25, 40–41, 46, 92–94, 113, 273
74, 80–83, 106, 136, 142, 180 lumpenproletariat 37
Kher, Anupam 40, 133–134
Kick 141 see Molesters or Heroes Madhavacharya 235
Killa 76 Madholal Keep Walking 88
Kiran Rao 1, 3, 9, 16, 40, 68–69, 73, Madras Cafe 143
75, 80, 83–84, 92, 100, 102, 141, Madrasi 265
180, 183–184, 192, 196–197 Mahabharat 113
KJo (Karan Johar) films 61 Maharashtra 114, 191, 207, 265, 269
Koi Mil Gaya 39 Maharashtra attacks on migrants 191,
Kolkata 1, 9, 149, 167, 169, 171–172, 265–266
178, 192, 261 Mahatma Gandhi 134–135
Korine, Harmony 163 majoritarian 1, 4, 6, 39
Kumar, Ashvin 142 majority discourses 191
Kumar, Pawan 1, 16, 19, 30, 62, 66, 71, Make in India 208
75–77, 86, 88, 92–95, 97, 102–105, Malayalam 62, 70
131, 140–142, 144–145, 275 male gaze 46, 141, 187, 195
Kumar, Raj Amit 140 Manikpuri, Omkar Das 167, 201, 210
Manthan 19, 93
LAFF (London Asian Film Festival) 90 Maqbool 256
Las Meninas 175–176 Marathi 61, 65, 71, 76, 191, 229,
Lavanya Preeti 210 266, 276
Lee, Bruce 166 Marcus Aurelius 226
Leigh, Mike 198 marginalisation 20–21, 33, 36, 52,
Leone, Sunny 46 102, 114, 153, 168–169, 218;
Left Front 168, 171 marginalised narratives 5, 116,
Lelyveld, Joseph 135, 145 120, 177; marginalised other 191;
lesbian 26, 40–41, 91, 138–140, 144 marginality 9, 139, 150, 153, 180,
Lesbian Film Festival 140 216, 221
LGBTQ 139, 263–264 Marks, Laura 234
Liar’s Dice 113, 141 Martha Marcy May Marlene 73
286 Index
Marx, Karl 168, 179; Marxist 168–169, Mohandas, Geetu 141
171; Marxist Left Front 168 Moksha 237
Masaan 113, 141 Molesters or Heroes 141
masculine codes 195 moneylenders 202–203, 205
master narrative 6, 8–9, 33, 47, 109, Monsanto 207
162, 164, 177, 194, 198, 269, 275 moral policing 9, 138, 140, 142, 149, 275
Mathur, Arjun 138 morals and values 38, 153
McMullen, Ken 118 Mother figure 41, 164
media misrepresentation 10, 253 Mother India 36, 41–42, 164, 166, 222,
mediascapes 73, 102 see also Kali
Mehta, Deepa 76, 138 MPDA 101, 104
memento mori 190, 231 Mr and Mrs Iyer 20, 65
Memoirs of the Blind 232, 248 multiculturalism 180, 229, 269
memory 10, 35, 116, 129–130, 184, multimedia 228
189–191, 193–195, 197, 232, 261, multinational corporations 52, 207–208
266–268 multiplex 2, 6, 11, 28, 33, 56, 60,
Menon, Anjali 70 65, 71–72, 76, 78, 83–84, 86, 89,
meta-hegemony 4–8, 10, 32–59, 73, 98–101, 105–106, 198–199, 245,
80, 82, 88, 90–92, 95, 99–100, 110, 274, 276
114–115, 119, 131, 137, 140, 158, multiplex monopoly 98
161, 164, 259, 263, 268, 272–273, Mumbai 1, 9, commercial Hindi
276–277 cinema’s birthplace 15; represented
metanarrative 4–5, 33, 46, 48, 50–51, in Hinglish films 20; representation
54–55, 100, 110, 114, 117–118, of 1993 bomb blasts 26; Bollywood
129, 135, 161, 164, 166, 171, 199, located in 33–34; Bombay film
254, 272 studio productions in 1950s 36;
metaphysical 189, 234–238, 248; dabbawallahs 68, postmodern
metaphysical dualism 234 Indie film representations 77;
micro-narratives 2, 4, 111, 172, 273 illegal internet downloads 101;
middle cinema 19–20, 34 representations of marginal
middle-class 19–20, 23, 28, 39, 102, narratives180–189; Mumbai
119, 169, 178, 219, 276 mainstream 180, 193–194
middleman 203, 205–206, 241–242, Murdoch, Rupert 38, 52, 82, 267
265 museum space 176, 228, 243–245
Miike, Takashi 150, 167 music video 136, 156–158, 160
militants in Kashmir 251, 254, 258, Muslim 2–3, 9–10, 26, 41, 121–122,
261–262 129, 133, 172, 181, 191–192, 242,
Milk 93, 266 251, 253, 262, 266, 269
Ministry of Information and Muslim Sufi music 242
Broadcasting 97, 106, 120, 125–127, My Brother Nikhil 87
137, 144, 275 mythic time 37, 51, 114, 118, 149, 153,
minorities 2–3, 9, 122, 139, 192; 158, 166
Christians and Anglo-Indians 43, mythology 113–114, 221
minority Muslims 191
minority spaces 250 Nag, Arundhati 2, 139
mirror image 138, 190 Nair, Mira 52, 76, 128
mise-en-abyme 163, 172, 174–177 Naji, Reza 77, 251
mise-en-scène 9, 120, 167, 212, Nambiar, Bejoy 1, 66, 76, 82–84, 98, 105
229–230, 251, 273 nation-state 2, 4, 35, 42, 49, 55, 75,
Miss Lovely 105 114, 118, 137
Mission Kashmir 87 NDA government 134
mobile phones 111, 253 NDTV 27, 40, 105
Modi, Narendra 36, 40, 121–122, 133, Nehru, Jawaharlal 221
135–136, 144, 208, 269 Nehruvian socialism 36, 219
Index 287
neoliberalism 6, 8, 34, 36, 39, 50, 63, Paan Singh Tomar 23
115, 160, 198, 206–208, 210, 221, Papilio Buddha 9, 26, 40, 51, 91, 113,
255, 266, 268; neoliberalisation 116; excluded from the International
159; neoliberal capital 55, 201, 206, Film Festival of Kerala 2012
221–222; neoliberal turn 33, 36, 43, 134–135
49, 208 paradigmatic 111, 152–153, 230
Netflix 76, 275 Parallel cinema 2–3, 5, 18–22, 24–26,
network society 6, 182, 230 37, 62, 67, 69, 72, 156, 168, 210,
new cohort of Indie filmmakers 73 274; Bollywood and Parallel 3, 5, 6,
New Delhi 49, 168, 184, 202, 212 17, 22, 25, 60, 156
new media 27, 68, 73, 112, 123 Parash Pathar 167
New Wave: earlier Parallel cinema Parched 41, 45, 113, 141
as ‘Indian New Wave’ 18–19, 70; Parsi community in Mumbai 197
French New Wave 18, 150; of Indian Partition 118, 122, 168, 255
Indies 1, 5–9, 16–22, 24–25, 53–54, Pasolini, Pier Paolo 76
63–65, 68–72, 74, 78, 85, 90, 125, Pather Panchali 18, 167, 210
130, 154–155, 165, 271, 273 patriarchal 4, 7, 37, 41–42, 47,
New York South Asian Film Festival 165 111, 137–138, 142, 208, 261,
News Corporation 52 275; patriarchal status quo 111;
NFDC 19, 66, 72, 89, 96–98, 106, 125, patriarchy 6, 42, 139, 141, 277
136, 272, 274 patriotism 87
Nietzsche, Friedrich 227, 234 Patwardhan, Anand 26, 128
Night Moves 73 pay-per-view 76, 275
Nihalani, Pahalaj 136, 144 pedagogical 105, 109, 153, 276;
nihilism 172, 227, 234, 236; nihilist cultural diversity 192, 194; master
158, 235–236 narrative 109; metanarrative 164,
Noe, Gaspar 163, 167 199; mythical time of nation 149,
non-linear 8, 150, 157, 165, 226; 153, 276; mythology of nation
non-linearity 273 221; nationalist ideology 37;
non-professional actors 71, 167, 210 national narrative 35, 42, 47, 118,
Non-resident Indians (NRI) 38–40, 76, 155, 158, 199; pedagogical past
128, 180, 195, 269 and performative present 277;
nostalgia 10, 35, 189–190, 193–194, 267 religion 235
Nouvelle Vague 69, 71, 168 Peepli Live 5, 10, 16–17, 23, 38, 64–65,
Nussbaum, Martha 121, 135 80, 82, 85, 111, 119, 201, 207
Nye, Joseph 7, 48–50 peer-to-peer file-sharing 8, 27, 101, 275;
P2P 101, 104–105
oedipal desire in Gandu 164–165 performative 109, 118, 149, 153,
Okurbito 268 155, 158, 192–195, 199, 235,
Om-Dar-B-Dar 65 264, 272, 277; performativity
Omkara 256 158, 193–194
Onir 1, 10, 45, 68–71, 81, 87–88, peripheralised 169, 195, 220, 251, 273
93–95, 103, 138, 140–141, 261, 266 Persian Zoroastrian 197
Operation Blue Star 130 photographs used as a device in Indies
Oppenheimer, Joshua 122 189–190, 229–231, 251, 255
Orientalism 52; orientalist 38, 43, 52, photography 181, 189, 195, 226,
241; self-orientalising 38 231–232, 236, 245, 247
Oscar Awards 32, 75–76, 88, 96, 141 Pingakesa 237–238
other 117, 120, 190–191 piracy 101, 104, 107–108, 275; pirate
outsiders 43, 265 sphere 8, 89, 101–103, 275
Pirandello, Luigi 177
Pahuja, Nisha 46, 84 PK 115, 136, 142
Pakistan 3, 86, 122, 133, 251, 254, Plato 244–245; Plato’s Cave 244–245,
260, 262 258
288 Index
pleasure of looking 163, 187–188; 109; pastiche 9, 150; postmodern
voyeurism 163, 189; voyeuristic gaze theoretical and philosophical
43, 163, 175; watching 173, 184, approach 4, 51, 60, postmodern
188–189, 196, 212, 246, 267 city film 9, 77, 180, 182–184, 199,
Plutarch 61, 226, 230 postmodern condition 110, 151, 180,
pogrom: Godhra killings in 2002 121, 183, 189, 223, 229; freestyle and
133; murder of communists in 1960s freeplay in Gandu 150; intertextuality
Indonesia 122; to purge Mumbai of 166, 216; mise-en-abyme 176;
‘outsiders’ 265 Mumbai as postmodern city 198,
political speech in Gandu 170–172 228; self-reflexivity 168, 172, 216;
polysexual 28, 30, 263 postmodern meta-reference 216;
Pontecorvo, Gillo 255 postmodernism 56, 109–111, 123,
portmanteau films 10, 77, 182, 226, 261 162; Tarantino comparison 158;
postcolonial: Bengali art cinema youth subculture in India 158
167, 169; colonial/postcolonial poststructural 4, 53, 110, 151, 176, 273
197, 205, 221; comparison with POV [point of view] 173–175, 243
Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas power 10, 25, 92, 201, 213–215, 222,
(1992) 222; decolonisation of 254; biopower 222; Bollywood star
India incomplete 162, 165; Indian power 87, 131; CBFC and Ministry
bourgeoisie 196, 205; Indian cinema of Information and Broadcasting
17–18, 33, 70, 109, 115, 164, 216; 126–127, 129, 133, 163, 261;
Indian national narrative 35–36, Hindutva groups’ ‘Love Jihad’ 266;
53, 164, 196, 216; Indian society Hollywood’s power 32; Indian
158, 165; postcolonial encounter military and police in Kashmir
241–243, postcolonial Europe 241; 251–252, 259–260; mainstream
Postcolonial Metanarrative 117; corporate production companies 24,
Postcolonial Studies and theory 4, 85; neoliberal enterprise and power
110, 177; Postcolonial traces 239, 222, see Hyenas; police brutality 137,
241; residues 266; Ship of Indian 265; religious national and political
Cinemas explanation of diagram 62; 2, 27–28, 39, 84, 134, 137, 201, 206,
temporality 36, 110, 121, 162, 206, 213–214, 265; soft power wielded by
241; third space 254 Bollywood and its meta-hegemony
post-globalisation 34, 52, 81, 102, 189; 7, 33–34, 42, 48–52, 115, 131, 137,
Bollywood films 20, 35, 38, 42–43, 153, 162, 272
52, 61, 81, 155, see also Karan Prakrit 229–230
Johar; farmer suicides 201, 219; Prasar Bharati 126, 145
hybridity and western influence 70, pre-Socratic sophist 236
116; hyperreality 102, 165; ‘item girl’ Premchand 217–218
43; national master-narrative 6, 33, presence/absence 234
39, 42, 184 product placement in Bollywood films
post-human 234 35, 49, 52
postmodern: characteristics public spaces 112
of postmodern films 150; public sphere 5, 111, 115, 120, 152;
connectedness, simulacra and Indies being categorised in the public
hyperreality 8, 10, 17, 102, 109, sphere 67; Indies raising awareness
110, 112, 114, 165, 188, 201, 206, and participation in India 1, 16–17,
212; grand narratives 49; new Indies 28, 105, 180; promotion of Indies
as postmodern hybrids 7, 8, 67, 70, 80, 83, 92; reaction to Aamir Khan’s
75–76, 94; Indie films’ postmodern statement 3; torrent downloads 103,
tropes and traits 111, 149, 156, 105–106
157–158, 167–168, 180, 184, 187, Pune 71, 125, 137 see also FTII
210, 227; in Indian cinema 109–110; punk music 158–162
logic of late capitalism in India PVR multiplex 71, 86, 100–101, 274
Index 289
Q 70, 73, 96, 134, 156, 170, 272; 189; heterodox, divergent and
anarchistic ‘guerrilla’ approach heterogeneous Indies 111, 113–114,
163, 172; classification of the Indies 162, 166, 195, 229, 242, 277; India’s
84–85, 272; India’s transition from news media 210, 212–214; minority,
postcolonial to postmodern 162; marginal and subaltern in Indies 2,
influence of Jean-Luc Godard and 9, 116, 118, 120, 180, 183, 191,
Takashi Miike 150; making gandu 196, 273; national issues and topical
socially acceptable 153; mise-en- themes in Indies 8, 10, 110, 122, 129,
abyme and postmodern self-reflexive 168, 171, 190, 194, 197–198, 205,
scene in Gandu 172–177; on his film 255, 261; Parallel films ‘progressive
being leaked online 27; on screening leftist’ realist 19, 20; representation
of Gandu at BYOFF 89–90; on the of digital ‘have-nots’ in Indies 111;
rise of new Indies and new Indian sex, religion, censorship and politics
journalism 105; sexuality in Indian 8, 25, 26, 28, 139, 166, 206, 275;
cinema 28, 165; spontaneous Slumdog Millionaire 52
approach to filming Gandu167; residues 234, 241, 262, 266
torrent downloads in India 102–103 resistance: Arun’s enunciation in Dhobi
Qissa 96, 118 Ghat 191; ‘banned in India’ tag as
Quit India Movement 260 a tool 140; contemporary Indian
society 140; film festivals as spaces
Rabindra-sangeeth 154 of 92; FTII students act of 137;
ragas 184, 242 Gandu as performative 149, 172,
Raghavendra, M. K 2, 196 178; hacker group Anonymous
Ramayana TV series 113 104; Natha’s ultimatum in Peepli
Rangayan Sridhar 139 Live 222; new Indies espousing
Rao, Kiran 1, 3, 9, 16, 40, 68–70, 73, cinematic resistance 4, 54, 116, 276;
75, 80, 83–84, 92, 100, 102, 141, to interventions in the Indie creative
180, 183–184, 192, 196–197, 199 process 75
rap music in Gandu 149, 154, 156, right-wing Hindu nationalist 191;
158, 160–161, 178 BJP27, 39, 84; Bajrang Dal 122,
rape cases in India 45, 141, 260 275; RSS 266, 275; Shiksha
rationalism 2–3, 227, 238, 277 Bachao Andolan (‘Save Education
Ravi, Ravinder 130, 135 Movement’) 135; Shiv Sena 39–40,
Ravindran, Nirmala 2, 65 139, 191, 266, 269, 275; VHP 84,
Ray, Satyajit 6–7, 18, 21, 60, 62, 122, 266, 275
167–168 Rizvi, Anusha 1, 9, 23, 68, 73–75, 80,
Rear Window 185, 187, 189 83, 85, 141, 201, 209–211
refugee crisis in 2015 241 Robinson, Marc 46–47
regional and vernacular films 15, 18, rock subculture in India 158–161, 211
33–34, 60–62, 65, 94, 110, 276 Rowdy Rathore 141, see Molesters or
Reliance Entertainment 32, 82; Reliance Heroes
Big Pictures 86 Roy, Arundhati 119, 219
religiosity 8, 109–110, 114–115, 136, Roy, Bimal 167, 216
138, 166, 276; religious and ethnic RSA/RSAs 134, 261–263
purity 191 Rudraksh 113
Renoir, Jean 76
representation: alternative sexualities Saajan 268
139, 275; Bollywood’s patriarchal sacred and profane 164, 166; profane
normative 4, 7, 41–42, 46, 47, 116, 155, 164–166; profanity 9, 153
139; Bollywood’s representation Sahara 25
of Hindu ideology and capitalism Sainath, P 201, 214–215, 221
36, 38, 41, 115, 119, 164; female Salt of the Earth 93–95
roles magnified in Indies 45, 141, Samaraditya Katha 238
290 Index
same-sex: culture 140; portrayal in Singham Returns 128
Bollywood 139; portrayal in Fire single-screen cinemas 98–99, 198
138; relationships in India 9–10 Siras, Ramchandra 141, see Aligarh
Samson, Leela 136, 145 Six Characters in Search of an Author
Sanskrit 221, 229–230 177
Santaolalla, Gustavo 184 Slumdog Millionaire 52
Sarah’s Key 258 social media: crowdfunding through 94;
Sartre, Jean-Paul 237 Facebook and Twitter 92–93, 102;
Sathyu, M. S 19 representation in Indies 111–112;
Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram 228 social media-savvy young Indians 23;
Save the Indies Campaign 69, 271, 274 to promote Indies 8, 23, 24, 75, 92,
Schopenhauer, Arthur 237 273; wider access in India 17, 105, 109
scopophilia 189; scopophilic 43, 163 social realism 18–19, 25, 198, see also
Section 377, 138–139, 263 British social realism films
secular India 2, 238–239, 255, 266, 269 Socrates 235–237
self and other 265 soft power 7, 11, 33–34, 42, 48–52,
self-reflexive: Anti-Sikh riots 57–59, 131, 137, 162, 272
and Godhra massacre Indie song and dance: Bollywood 7, 22,
representations 120, 129; censorship 113, 155, 163, 211, 260; escapes
suppresses political critique 135, censorship 26; Indies deviation from
142; American Indie cinema 73; Bollywood 5, 184, 211; Parallel
Indie narratives 4, 6, 25, 117; Dhobi cinema dispensed with 19; sexualised
Ghat 191; Harud and I Am 123; 7, 43; subversion of the format in
Peepli Live 206, 211; postmodern Haider 260
subversion in Gandu 156, 167–168, sophist 236 see Gorgias
176; representation of alternative South Indian 60, 115, 133, 159, 265
sexualities in India 266 Soviet formalists 168
semiotic modes in cinema 164 spaces and places 169
Sen, Mrinal 18–19, 62 spiritual and material binary in India 8,
shadowlines 162, 169 36, 53, 227, 238–239, 248
Shah, Naseeruddin 211 Spivak, Gayatri 130, 153
Shahani, Kumar 19, 62, 97 Split Wide Open 20, 65
Shah Rukh Khan 3, 41, 55, 91 splitting the ego 269
Shah, Sohum 83, 87, 226 Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger rebels 133
Shaitan 82 STAR TV Network 38, 267
Shakespeare 257 state censorship 9, 129, 131, 261
Shakti 127–128 state of the nation 5, 25, 166, 273
Shambu Mahato 216–218, status quo 4, 8, 37, 87, 111, 142, 153,
Shankar, Ravi 158 198, 223, 277
Sharma, Rakesh 26, 133–134 stereotype 16, 52, 69, 191
Shastri, Lal Bahadur 219–220 Stewart, Jimmy 185
Ship of Indian Cinemas model 7, 228; subaltern: dhobi 181–182, 199; elite/
diagram and explanation 62–63 subaltern divide 197; farmer 206;
Ship of Theseus 5, 7, 61–63, 66–67, 71, fragments 205, 221, 273; in Dhobi
76–77, 83–84, 87, 90–91, 104, 108, Ghat and British social realism films
111, 114, 141, 182, 189, 226, 228, 198; narratives and historiographies
230, 242, 258, 261, 269 from below 130, 216, 218; peasants
Ship of Theseus paradox 62, 230 and rural subaltern 37, 205, 216,
Shiva, Vandana 207 218–219; representation in new
Shoah 116 Indies 25, 68, 111, 119, 250,
simulacra 17, 160, 273; ‘hyperreal 272–273; representation in Parallel
simulacrum’ in Ramayana TV series cinema 19; rickshaw-puller 19;
112–113; simulacrum 166, 244 silence of the subaltern 129, 130,
Singh, Mulayam 141 178, 216; slum-dweller 153, 169,
Index 291
177; subaltern (as woman) 130; The Good Road 96
subaltern figures 9, 54, 180, 201, The Hindus: An Alternative History
241, 243, 273; subaltern in Gandu 135, see books by Joseph Lelyveld
168; subaltern ghosts in Indies 116; and Wendy Doniger banned
urban migrant 60, 223 The Lunchbox 5, 10, 21, 54, 96, 111,
Subaltern Studies 180, 196, 205 250; BAFTA-nominated 68; box-
subtitles in Gandu 65, 151–152, 154, office success 22; dabbawallahs 68;
170–171 ghosts in 266; Irrfan Khan in 81;
subversive spectacle 162 Karan Johar’s decision to promote
Sundance 23, 90 74; multi-religious characters 269;
Supreme Court 139, 263 nostalgic narratives 266–269;
surveillance 186, 254, 258 similarities to Dhobi Ghat 268; VHS
Susman 94 tapes trope 172, 267
Suvée, Joseph-Benoît 232–233 The Messenger of God 136, see
Swaroop, Kamal 1, 65 resignation of Leela Samson and
swear words 156 Board members in 2015
Swedish: dialogue in SOT 83, 229–230, The Motorcycle Diaries 184
242; folk music 242; character in The Road to Guantanamo 251, see
SOT 240–241, 243 Winterbottom
synchronic 184, 204, 228 The Rolling Stones 159, see Bangalore:
syntagmatic: connotation in cinema urban rock subculture
152; pedagogy of the nation 153 The Sacrament 73, see American Indie
cinema
Tagore, Rabindranath 154, see The Truman Show 175, 215
‘Rabindra-sangeeth’ The World Before Her 9, 46, 84, 138
Tamhane, Chaitanya 73, 96 Third Cinema 19
Tamil: Indie Ilai screened at London Third Man: first film with all
Cineworld 60; Parallel Tamil art transgender cast 139, see LGBTQ
cinema in 1970s 62; director Nalan third space 7, 54, 116, 142, 154, 242, 254
Kumarasamy 70; Sri Lanka’s ticket prices: same for Indie and
minority community 133; vernacular Bollywood films 100; expensive
art cinema 61, 276 multiplex tickets for Indies 100, 198
Tamil Nadu 33, 60, 62; refusal to time of liberation 4, 149, 153, 158, 163,
screen Madras Café 133; migrant 166, 199, 277
workers in Dhobi Ghat 191 time of nation 53, 115, 110, 153, 160,
Tarantino, Quentin 158 221, 266
Tarr, Bela 76 Toronto Film Festival 91
technics 75, 101, 103, 106, 229 torrent downloads 8, 100–106
technoscapes 73, 75, 101–102, 106, 229 traditional Indian values 33, 38, 153,
Teenkahon 77 155
Tees Maar Khan 141, see Molesters or Train to Pakistan 122
Heroes transgender community: hijras 139,
temples of desire 112 see Third Man
Tennyson, Alfred 194 Tribeca and Sundance festivals 23, 274
Tharoor, Shashi 48 Trinamool Congress 171
The Act of Killing 122 Trotsky, Leon 168
The Battle of Algiers 255 TRP television rating system 206, 212,
The Brook poem in Dhobi Ghat 194, 223
see Tennyson TV News channel sensationalism 38,
The Daily Mail 135 208, 212
The Dirty Picture 115
The Disenchantment of the World 254, Umrao Jaan 210
see Bourdieu UN study on women in popular
The East 73, see American Indie cinema cinema 45
292 Index
unblessed Indies 85, 272 Vidharba region farmer suicides 207
undecidability 2, 247; absence of Vijayasimha 237
physical referents in photo/film virtual 112, 160, 189, 194, 245, 247;
images 247; aporetic state of chaotic ghosts as virtual and real presence
undecidability 172; ‘crisis’ 116, 120; interfaces and technological
118; ghosts of forgotten narratives devices 111, 229, 233; onscreen
evoking undecidability 255; Indies Bollywood ‘gods’ and goddesses 113;
represent India’s current time of virtuality in technics, technoscapes
undecidability 276–277; Kashmir and global flows 229–230; virtuality
trapped in of cyberspace 95
undecidability 261; nation’s present
time of undecidability 221; time of Waiting for Godot 172
undecidability 114–116, 118–119, We the People NDTV debate show 27,
122, 137, 142, 218, 276–277 156
Unfreedom 9, 40, 91, 140, 275, Weir, Peter 175, 215
see CBFC Welcome to Sajjanpur 86
untouchables 153; lower-caste 132, 153 Well Done Abba 86
Upanishads 28, 237 Weltanschauung 227, 236
urban slum representations in Indies West Bengal 36, 70, 149, 154, 168,
121, 150, 169, 181, 240, 244; 171–172
slum-dweller 153, 177 Western audience 114
urban space 4, 9, 180, 189, 223, 269 Western conception of Indie cinema 72
urban youth subculture in India 158, wide-angle 77, 211, 234
160–162 Winterbottom, Michael 251
urban-rural divide 18, 201, 211 Wong Kar Wai 103
Uttar Pradesh 191–193 working class 37, 197
UTV 21, 23, 25, 64, 71, 74, 82, 85–86, World Cinema 5; aesthetic influence
98, 210 in Indian Indies 68, 75, 77, 184,
273; broadband Internet and
vamp figure in commercial Hindi downloads in India providing access
cinema 43–44, 156; vamp/heroine 43 75, 102, 104, 106; World Cinema
Venice Film Festival 91 Film Festival 2011 ‘Soul of India’
vernacular 15, 60, 156, 191, 276; films theme 17
from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu,
Karnataka and Kerala 33; art cinema X: Past is Present 70, 271
in the 1970s in Malayalam, Tamil xenophobic 191, 266
and Kannada 62; current Marathi
and Tamil films 61, 276; difference Yadav, Leena 41, 77
between vernacular/regional and new Yadav, Raghuvir 201, 211
Indie cinema 65; vernacular swear YouTube 27, 103, 161, 275
words in Indies 156
VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) 84, 122, zamindars 204–205
266, 275 Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara 113
Viacom 18, 24, 33, 74, 82, 84 Zizek, Slavoj 159–160
Vicky Donor 81 zone of occult instability 118, 269,
Video on demand 8, 76, 96 see Frantz Fanon

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India’s New Independent Cinema

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram has a PhD from Heriot-Watt University,

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

18 European Civil War Films 25 Crossover Cinema

23 Landscape and Memory in 30 Postcolonial Film: History,

24 Masculinity in the 31 The Woman’s Film of

33 Eco-Trauma Cinema 42 Spaces of the Cinematic Home

Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

The right of Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram to be identified as author of

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel.

ISBN: 978-1-138-18462-6 (hbk)

Introduction: Setting the Stage 1

1 Bollywood and the Cinemas of India: The Story so Far 15

2 The Meta-Hegemony: Leviathan Bollywood and

3 The Anatomy of the Indies 60

4 Avenues of Indie Funding, Distribution and Exhibition 80

5 Interstitial Indies Interrogating India’s Double Narrative 109

6 Running with Scissors: Censorship and Regulation 125

7 Rapping in Double Time: Gandu’s Subversive Time

8 Dhobi Ghat: The Marginal in the Mumbai Mainstream 180

9 Peepli Live: Neoliberal Capital, Media ‘Knowledge’

11 A Cinematic Quartet Conjuring Ghosts of Nation:

Conclusion: Charting the Ship’s Course 271

2.1 ‘Vamp’ Helen in the 1970 film, The Train. 44

Bashir, A. 2013. Interviewed by Ashvin Devasundaram [in person], Mumbai, 18 July

I want this to be mainstream. I want the frivolity, the silliness, the

Indian cinema is undergoing a foundational transformation through the

Enter India’s New Indies

Indian Cinema is a growing global phenomenon, particularly as a resilient

The New Urban Independent Films since 2010

Rather than the standard Bollywood audiences across four genera-

Postcolonial Social Realism 1947–1960: India’s

Parallel Cinema: 1970s and 80s

Hinglish Films: The 1990s and Early 2000s

Rise of the Hybrid Mutant

The above summation of Bollywood marketing strategies again magnifies

Unconventional marketing ploys included a team of dancers in ethnic garb

These alignments with the corporate mainstream appear obligatory in the

The New Political and Sexual Liberation

Wider issues of censorship stemming from Gandu were debated on a prime-

Cinema is seen as a commodity. I am seriously scared of the kind of

Contrary to the conservative views expressed by the BJP politician men-

This chapter introduces an original system that will be referred to as a

Melding Neoliberalism and Religion in the National Narrative

the range of consumables increasingly visible on film screens – Stroh’s

Gendering the Nation

Figure 2.1 ‘Vamp’ Helen in the 1970 film, The Train.

In essence, the transition from risquée vamp to hypersexualised item

In India there are societies where a woman’s only job is to dance at

Onir’s assertion carries the undercurrents of a national discourse surround-

Figure 2.3 Miss India training session.

Figure 2.4 Marc Robinson examines ‘hot legs’.

Robinson’s misogynistic objectification of the female participants reflects

Bollywood’s presence in settings such as the World Economic Forum

In essence, Bollywood’s narration of new neoliberal discourse gains legiti-

Metamorphosis in the Meta-Hegemony

This section presents a general appraisal of the new Indies, touching on

Parts within the

1 Post 1947 Art Films-

In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post–International