SAFM 5 (2) pp.

131–145 Intellect Limited 2013

Studies in South Asian Film & Media

Volume 5 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/safm.5.2.131_1

Suvadip Sinha
University of Toronto

Vernacular masculinity
and politics of space in
contemporary Bollywood
cinema

Abstract Keywords
A series of popular Hindi films, specifically located in north-Indian small towns, not masculinity
just depict a new spatiality through realist overtures; they also stage the appearance small town
of a distinct form of masculinity on-screen. This article specifically looks at the repre- space
sentation and construction of masculine subjectivity in contemporary small-town realism
films such as Dabangg (2010), Ishaqzaade (2012) and Gangs of Wasseypur I and cinematic excess
II (2012) to analyse how this new spatiality is conjured through the re-configuration Bollywood cinema
of non-urban manhood. Visibly distinctive bodily gestures, unique modes of
consumption, often accompanied by localized dispensation, make it possible for these
male characters to represent the in-between-ness of the small town. While the device
of cinematic excess marks the representation of the vernacular space and its mascu-
line inhabitant, such excess, this article further argues, enables the provincial India
to appropriate its own discourses of legality, politics and community.

In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival showcased films from Mumbai
in their City-to-City segment: however, of all the ten Indian movies screened
during the festival, not a single big-budget Bollywood movie was located in

131

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

1. Through this phrase, Mumbai or any other big Indian city. Gangs of Wasseypur I and II, Ishaqzaade
Nandy suggests that
the postcolonial
and Shanghai (Banerjee, 2012), showcased in the category, had one thing in
subject in South Asia common – a small town as their location. While India has managed, in recent
attempted to undergo years, to draw attention as an emerging power in the context of the global
this physical and
symbolic transition in economy and showcased its cities as centres of economic growth, a series of
order to renew itself recent Bollywood films depict a narrative space that is specific to provincial
from a pristine and India. By looking away from the metropolis, overseas locations and sites of
traditional space of
village into a space, the glitzy consumerism, they alert us to a new spatial register that has hitherto
addictive post/colonial remained absent in Hindi popular cinema of the last two decades. Revealing
metropolis, that has to
be built on the ruins
a puzzling discrepancy within the narrative of economic globalization, they
of an earlier self (2001: familiarize us with the acrimonious world of provincial India.
1−15).
2. This phrase is an
appropriation of Where was the Indian small town?
what Madhava
Prasad considers Reflective of the nation’s prolonged and ambiguous arbitration between the
‘identificatory realism’ rural and the urban, Bombay cinema for long has been caught within the
in his reading of city–village spatial binary to represent the dialectic between tradition and
middle-class cinema of
the 1970s (2000: 130). modernity. In the context of the discursive rise of nationalism, as Holston
and Appadurai claim, ‘cities remain the strategic arena for the development
of citizenship’ (1996: 188). Cities have indeed remained a critical space for
the construction of the dual discourses of nationalism and citizenship, not to
mention ethical and moral tribulations, in post-Independence Hindi cinema. If
villages experienced the tangible changes ushered in by the developmentalist
projects of a recently decolonized state, it is the city that provided the repre-
sentational space for enacting the construction of postcolonial subjectivity and
citizenship. While the city has been depicted as the noirish, uncertain antago-
nist to the pristine, ethical village, it is the urban space where the nation and
its inhabitant finally had to come to terms with postcolonial modernity. This
idea of a city as a formative space, a space the displaced rural subject of pre-
modern India had to occupy in order to be transformed into a modern citi-
zen, was depicted in a number of Bombay films in the 1950s. The postcolonial
nation’s transition from a rural, agrarian society into an urban, modern milieu
of fractured inconsistencies has been metaphorically represented through
what Ashis Nandy has termed as ‘an ambiguous journey to the city’.1 Out
of this binary both city and village emerged as discursively condensed spaces
that embodied the two opposing sides of a Manichean nation.
Within this dyadic formulation the small town remained a grossly over-
looked space: only some films from the 1970s and the early 1980s sporadically
show areas that bear resemblance to the small town. However, they are never
developed as lived spaces with their own dynamics and dialectics. Some recent
scholarly works on the small-town films claim that they produce a nostalgic
disidentification among the urban, multiplex audience (Ganti 2012; Kumar
2013). While the urban centres and their satellite extensions have undergone
an elaborate and unilateral process of consumptive gentrification, it is the gritty
and unpredictable small town that has emerged as a mnemonic constellation of
the real India. Such portrayals, as these readings suggest, deploy an aesthetics
of what I would call ‘disidentificatory realism’2: an aesthetic of realism that
generates a sense of alienation and distance among the urban audience, while
consistently hinting at a certitude of plausibility. Some early and successful
examples of this particular trend are E. Nivas’s Shool (1999), Prakash Jha’s
Gangaajal (2003) and Apaharan (2005) and Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil (2003).
This new cinematic spatiality was further galvanized by Vishal Bhardwaj’s

132

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

Omkara (2006). An adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello, Omkara, like

its predecessors, represents the heartland of the Hindi belt, without specify-
ing a location, and its politics. These films, as Akshaya Kumar rightly points
out, depict a world that no longer exists among the increasingly homogenous
space of multiplexes and shopping malls, and ‘warn us against the absence
of lawfulness, which orders our urbanity’ (2013: 65). Even an art-house film-
maker such as Shyam Benegal has made small-town films such as Welcome to
Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba! (2009) that are not particularly violent or
gritty; nonetheless, as Meheli Sen (2011) argues, they represent a provincial
India that is captured in a liminal zone between globalized consumption and
unrequited desire, between national narrative of development and its ubiqui-
tous limits. Such readings repeatedly perceive of the cinematic small town as
an anachronistic space, a space caught in a time warp, that is always defined
through its relation with the city.
While understanding Bollywood’s recent obsession with small town in
the context of the radical change taking place in rapidly globalizing Indian
cities is valid, I will argue that these films construct the small town with its
own specifics irrespective of the gaze of the urban spectator. The provincial
India, in these films, is not necessarily determined and defined through its
relationship with urban India. Rather, the cinematic small town is constructed
as a space onto which a unique process of subjectivation takes place: a proc-
ess that leads to a cultural and political milieu rendered realist and excessive
simultaneously. Such cinematic spatiality is realized by establishing an intri-
cate relationship between the image of the men and the space they occupy.
Cinematic and narrative investment in the masculine figures in these films
turns them into a metaphorical embodiment of the spatial discontinuity
between the national and the local. Unlike their counterparts from the 1950s
(Raj Kapoor) and 1970s (Amitabh Bachchan), these men do not undertake an
uneasy journey to the city. If social alienation in conjunction with a precarious
negotiation with the city space characterizes the former two groups of films,
the non-urban men in recent Bollywood cinema do not undergo any physical
dislocation. This legitimacy of belonging, often characterized by a violent and
hyper-masculine overtone, enables them to evince a seeming control over
the space they inhabit. Such authority, although not without a set of predica-
ments in both private and public spheres, projects the masculine figure as a
site on which the provincial India appropriates its own discourses of legality,
politics and community.
The distinct spatial character of the cinematic small town is inscribed
within the corporeal production of the male heroes. In her study of chang-
ing representations of masculinity in Bombay cinema from the 1950s through
the 1980s, Sumita Chakravarty shows how the male star has emerged as a
‘signifier of immanent and transcendent nationhood’ (1993: 233). The corpo-
real figuration of the male star has been, as Chakravarty suggests, consist-
ently reflective − an impersonation − of the morality, ideology and politics of
the nation and the state. ‘The Bombay cinema’, she concludes, ‘presents the
masquerading male body as a site for the elaboration of an Indian identity
that can ever materialize as masquerade, as a mobile field of signifiers open to
conscious rearrangements’ (Chakravarty 1993: 234). Perceived through this
analytical frame, the small-town men of recent Bollywood cinema can be
considered reincarnations of the angry young man − a figure that had more or
less disappeared − probably with the exception of Sunny Deol’s rebellious and
Shahrukh Khan’s psychotic phase − from the post-globalization Bollywood.

133

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

3. Dibakar Banerjee’s In her comparative essay on Bachchan’s angry young man and Khan’s
Shanghai (2012)
too begins with a
psychotic anti-hero, Ranjani Mazumdar positions the male bodies squarely
Google satellite map within the economy of desire that characterized the milieu they belong to and
of a fictitious place address. Mazumdar argues, specifically referring to Deewar, that the angry
called Bharatpur,
which is a small young man’s power is generated through a ‘masculinity that acknowledges
town going through the object of desire yet fails to possess it’ (2000: 250). In the case of Khan’s
massive overhaul psychotic hero − a role he played in films such as Baazigar, Darr, Anjaam and
due to the economic
re-organization Ram Jaane − the overanimated physicality and a schizophrenic excess open
ushered in by a up a radical possibility of disrupting and challenging the formulaic storytell-
proposed SEZ.
Bharatpur, however,
ing of Bombay cinema (Mazumdar 2000: 251−58). The emotional and physical
unlike Wasseypur, excess of both these figures is caused, if not justified, by a disrupted familial
remains a generic structure.
template for any Indian
small town. Like their predecessors, the small-town men too demonstrate a physicality
that mirrors the space they occupy. Instead of embodying a tantalizing experi-
ence caused by a displaced compulsion, they demonstrate a narcissistic iden-
tification with the place they belong to. Rather, the small-town man practices
a unique mastery over the space he occupies, and in the process, becomes
a corporeal signifier of the space and the milieu. A dialogic relationship
is established between the image of the small town and that of the male hero.
Like the new cinematic small town, these men declare their unique presence
by emerging as a site of ambiguous juxtaposition of realism and excess. Here
I look at three recent small-town films from Bollywood, Gangs of Wasseypur
(2012) Dabangg (2010) and Ishaqzaade (2012), to analyse how these narra-
tives establish a visual economy, functioning between the terrains of desire
and reality, that enables and articulates a juxtaposition of spatial identity and
masculinity to invoke a new imaginary. It cannot be denied that they deploy a
number of master tropes of Bollywood crime genre; yet, these tropes are topi-
cally appropriated and re-contextualized in these films.

Gangs of Wasseypur: Dystopian heartland

Divided into two parts, the 320-minute-long Anurag Kashyap magnum opus
is set in the eponymous Wasseypur, a little-known suburb of Dhanbad in the
mining belt of Jharkhand. Gangs of Wasseypur (hereafter GoW), ostensibly a
story of corruption, power, crime and revenge, is also a family saga, spanning
three generations of one family. Although it has become a norm in Indian
cinema to show a statutory declaration that films are based on fictitious char-
acters and resemblance to any living or dead person is coincidental, GoW’s
credit scene audaciously declares that ‘Wasseypur is an actual place’ and the
film ‘is based on real incidents’. If that is not enough, the credit sequence
is accompanied by a detailed historical cartography of this small town.3
Throughout the film, the omniscient narrator provides tidbits, often with
the help of visuals of newspaper clippings, about the history of Wasseypur
and that of the nation, constantly reminding the audience of the film’s close
allegiance with the real. The screenplay writer of the film, Zeishan Quadri, a
native of Wasseypur, however, has claimed that ‘80% of the story is real’. Such
realist overtures also generated a series of journalistic pursuits of the ‘real’
Wasseypur around the release of the film: a number of major national media
outlets, both print and electronic, went looking for the authentic Wasseypur
and its sinister mafia world. Major national and English media outlets such as
NDTV, Times of India, Hindustan Times, India Today and The Hindu published
or aired stories with the purpose of discovering the real Wasseypur. The titles

134

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

of some of these publications were remarkably similar in bearing the qualifier 4. Discussing the
representation of the
‘real’ in them, e.g. ‘The Real Gangs of Wasseypur’, ‘NDTV meets the real cityscape of Bombay
gangs of Wasseypur’. One story, however, points out how the real people in cinema and visual
of Wasseypur found the reel representation problematic, and one respond- arts in the 1970s
and the early 1980s,
ent argues that the film attempts to ‘generalise criminal conflict between two Rajadhyaksha claims
people as the story and history of Wasseypur’. It should be further noted that a particular kind
that protests mainly came from local vernacular press that saw the film as a of realism was at work
to reclaim the city’s
purveyor of the negative stereotypes associated with Muslims and Muslim- territorial legitimacy.
dominated areas. Such localized realism
concentrated on
Carefully detailing the film’s proximity to the real-life events and characters, the local problems,
and its possible digressions, these media reports capture Wasseypur as a tensions and politics
space caught in a perennial state of suspended legality, banal violence and to ‘usurp urban
realism away from
precarious everyday life. At the same time, these commentaries point out how state authentication’
the folkloric, insidious and dystopian world of Wasseypur is wrapped in a (Rajadhyaksha
façade of unremarkable decrepitude. While the film elaborately depicts how 2009: 198).

this town is caught in the ebb and flow of nationalist and capitalist moder-
nity, it also squarely positions the narrative within the local dialectic. In doing
so, the narrator immediately takes it away from the prevalent vocabulary of
either Hindu–Muslim communalism or Shia–Sunni rivalry by proclaiming
that Wasseypur is inhabited by only Sunnis. Ensuring Wasseypur’s political
interiority through the conflict between two Muslim sub-castes – Pathans and
Qureshis – Kashyap’s film forces the audience to receive the space through its
own political and social dialectic and this localization is relayed to the audi-
ence by establishing an intimate relationship between Wasseypur’s men and
its violent diegesis (Figures 1 and 2).
The socio-economic milieu of Wasseypur is predictably influenced by
national politics; yet, does not become a mere allegory of the nation. Rather, it
signifies a sovereign residue − an anomaly that cannot ever be controlled and
structured by the state machinery − of all that has happened in the nation’s
power centres. This narrative outcome is accomplished by conjuring what
Ashish Rajadhyaksha calls, albeit in a different context, ‘territorial realism’.4
Such reliance on realism certainly affects the spatiality and temporality of the
film: the opening scene itself tries to establish Wasseypur’s cultural universe.
The camera retreats as a smiling Tulsi (Smriti Irani) on the television screen
welcomes the audience into the Virani household. The audience soon finds
out that they are watching a group of Wasseypur people watching an episode
of popular Indian TV series, often lampooned for its right-wing cultural poli-
tics, Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. This glimpse of a fantastically opulent
household is soon followed by a long sequence where the household of
Faisal Khan can be seen terrorized and cowered under a barrage of bullets.
By underlining the schism between Wasseypur’s fantasy and its lived reality,

Figure 1. Figure 2.

135

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

5. GoW’s opening scene this opening scene makes us confront an India that was once visible in the
reminds one of various
similar sequences from
city-based gangster films of the 1990s.5 In recent Bollywood cinema, however,
Ram Gopal Varma’s the urban landscape has largely been cleansed of these aberrations, while the
gangster thrillers set bestial world of crime and violence has shifted to the small town.
in the city of Mumbai.
Varma started this If GoW captures how the small town was affected by the policies of the
particular trend with nation’s centre,6 it also projects the small town as a space negotiating its
Satya (1998), which own identity and sovereignty out of that strained relationship. The first part
was written by Anurag
Kashyap himself, and of the film charts a parallel trajectory between the life of Faisal’s father,
continued to explore Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpai), and that of post-independence India. Right
the gritty underbelly
of the globalizing India
from the beginning, the narrator, who is also Sardar’s foster father (Piyush
in a number films Mishra), informs us not only about Wasseypur’s intricate relation with
after that. Several national politics but also how the fate of Sardar Khan is intimately linked
scholars (Mazumdar
2007; Vasudevan 2004) to that of Wasseypur. Both, in a way, mark the residue of the aftermath
have written on the of both colonial and Nehruvian modernity. Shahid Khan, Sardar’s father,
representation of gets employed as a muscle-man by the local coal-mine owner, Ramadhir
Bombay as a dystopian
city in gangster films. Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia). Becoming aware of Shahid’s surreptitious ambi-
tion, a threatened Ramadhir gets him killed. Mainly dominated by a locally
6. Especially the
beginning of the first grown feudal lord turned petty industrialist turned political overlord who is
part demonstrates associated with mafia gangsters, this small town emerges as a quintessential
the brutality that the
social milieu of small-
site that undoes the nation-state’s ambition of producing rights-bearing and
town India had to go law-abiding citizens.
through because of the Much like Wasseypur, Sardar’s life too is marked by a temporal schism
post-colonial state’s
developmentalist between the planned narrative and actual reality. Delayed in birth and caus-
policies. For example, ing his mother’s death in the process, Sardar is displaced even before his
Sardar’s father birth. The element of originary debonding becomes further deepened by
gets hired as the
muscleman for the his father’s murder; yet, he escapes the death that Ramadhir had planned
local coal merchant for him. Sardar’s story is singularly motivated by the idea of revenge: deter-
and his job was to
terrorize the miners
mined to avenge his father’s death, he tells his new bride, ‘I have only one
into producing more aim in life: Ramadhir Singh’s death’. Sardar’s masculinity is characterized by a
and more coal so libidinal excess that reveals itself in his overflowing sexuality and his ruthless
that provincial India
could supply the raw demeanours. The film repeatedly refers to his virility, his uncontainable libido
materials needed for and his sexual transgressions. He visits prostitutes, remains unhappy when he
fulfilling the ambitions cannot have sex with his heavily pregnant wife and, finally, gets a second wife.
of the Nehruvian state.
Yet, such masculinist excess in public is often laced with a comical submis-
siveness in the private space. Through such a dichotomous construction of
small-town masculinity, GoW articulates a destabilizing impulse in its repre-
sentation of provincial India.
If, in the first part of GoW, Sardar’s masculinity reflects Wasseypur as
the provincial residue of the nation-state, the second part stages, through
the narrative of Sardar’s son Faisal’s transition into self-assured ‘manhood’,
Indian small town’s coming of age. Wasseypur’s fate in the first part is some-
what determined by the policies of a centralized state-apparatus, but, as we
reach the world of Faisal, this town has increasingly become a self-sustained
territory running its localized, however illicit and murky, economy. Yet this
journey to maturity, like Faisal’s transformation, always remains approximate:
beneath his ruthless demeanour, Faisal remains haunted by his moral turpi-
tude. An element of traumatized childhood remains in his story too: deserted
by his father, he is forced into manual labour to earn a livelihood. However,
it is the sight of his mother about to have sex with another man – something
that is never realized − that leaves an indelible mark on his psyche and trans-
forms him forever. As Faisal withdraws himself completely, he grows up to
become a cannabis addict who has nothing to do with the empire of crime

136

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

his father has built. As GoW moves to its second part, this reclusive oddity,
who has been considered a useless addict by his family, prepares to avenge
the murders of his father and brother. Faisal’s psychic mutation in the second
part of GoW deepens the correlation that Wasseypur has with its men. Faisal
is forced to overcome the memory of his personal trauma in order to acquire
a performative masochism for his family. By marking a departure from the
personal and an arrival to the communal, this moment transforms Faisal into
a metaphor for a space he has loathed so far.
As the lungi-clad serpentine body of Faisal Khan navigates the labyrin-
thine alleys of Wasseypur, we experience the arrival of a new kind of stardom
in Bollywood. While the mainstream industry has long been dominated by
either burly action stars or metro-sexual romantic heroes, Faisal, on-screen,
played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, seems puzzling, odd and sometimes a misfit.
‘Ek paanch foot chhai inch ka aadmi kaise thokta hai logon ko, aap dekhoge
iss film mein’/‘In this film you will get to see how a five-foot-six-inch tall guy
kills people’ says Siddiqui in one of his interviews before the release of GoW.
Because of his looks, Siddiqui complains in several other interviews, he was
always offered roles of impoverished, powerless victims. However, it is this
unglamorous physicality of Siddiqui that renders authenticity to the character
of a small-town man portrayed by him. In a courtship scene, Mohsina (Huma
Qureshi) scolds Faisal, ‘Permissan lena chahiye na aapko’/‘You should take
permission first’, because he holds her hand without asking. Rebuked by the
woman he desires, Faisal withdraws rather sheepishly and starts crying. This
dialogue, arguably the most famous one in recent Bombay cinema, exposes
Faisal’s vulnerability and the limit of his violent manhood. ‘Ek permissan
lena chahta hoon!’/‘I want to take a permission’: The same dialogue returns
when he wants to ‘do’ pre-marital sex with Mohsina. ‘Tumse sex karna chahta
hoon’/‘I want to do sex with you’ requests the man who has by now become
a bloodcurdling gangster, but still remains hesitant to become aggressive.
It is this benign admission of vulnerability that makes journalist and blog-
ger Nikhila Henry observe that Faisal Khan ‘is not the guardian of what
bell hooks calls, “a dick thing masculinity”’. Despite his violent masochistic
gestures, Henry argues, it is an unhesitant acceptance of his doubts, uncer-
tainties and vulnerabilities that makes Faisal even more real. Unlike his father,
Faisal has to govern his libidinal energy in order to contribute towards the
narrative resolution. Violent and ruthless Faisal might be, but his character is
constantly controlled by an internalized self-alienation. This internal conflict
between a desire to return to naive innocence and the duty of performative
ruthlessness works as a death drive. Thus, he has to perish to bring an end to
Wasseypur’s saga of revenge.
Both Sardar and Faisal, along with many other men in the film, are shown
in absolute control of the space they belong to. GoW is replete with scenes
that elaborately depict them navigating the narrow alleys, by-lanes and over-
crowded streets with absolute ease, as if the territoriality of small town is
reproduced through the perambulations of these men. Spatially, GoW ends
with a circular closure: if the beginning shows a fictive domestic world far
away from Wasseypur, the film closes with a scene showing Mohsina with her
child, after Faisal’s death, living in a Muslim ghetto in Mumbai. Bookended by
these two scenes of quiescent order, Sardar’s and Faisal’s Wasseypur, perhaps
undergoing another cycle of violence, remains a perennially indeterminate and
ruptured territory. The camera has moved away from Wasseypur to Mumbai,
but its men would never make that ambiguous journey to the city.

137

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

7. Dabangg also Dabangg: Return to provincial justice

resurrected a figure
that had become An unapologetically masala film, Dabangg, directed by Anurag Kashyap’s
extinct in Bombay brother, Abhinav Singh Kashyap, brings back elements that became effaced
cinema since the
1980s: the invincible in post-globalization Bollywood. Apart from the location, the film depicts
policeman who characters, everyday life and social relations that distinctly belong to provin-
always treads the
fine line between
cial India. ‘Dabangg is’, proclaims film critic Avijit Ghosh (2010), ‘mainstream
legality and crime Bollywood’s reclamation of that lost world’. The diegetic arrangement of the
in order to restore a film is kitschy, deploying tropes, as Tejaswini Ganti rightly points out, that
larger sense of justice.
Following the success were popular in 1980s’ Bollywood (2012: 363). It was labelled, in an almost
of Dabangg, there unanimous voice, ‘zany’, ‘kitschy’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘non-sensical’, ‘brazenly
have been a series dated’ and with many more unflattering qualifiers. Yet, Dabangg secured, as
of films − Singham
(2011), Rowdy Rathore several reviewers and trade analysts had predicted, success among both the
(2012), Policegiri multiplex and the single-screen audience.
(2013), to name a few
prominent ones—that
An interrogation into the film’s success across classes and regions reveals
deploy the character that it opens up a representational scope that not only appeals to a nostal-
of hypermasculine gia for a lost world; it also projects the world of mufassil as a possible site
policemen who do not
wait to be legitimized where the state readily transgresses the limits of its own legality in order
by the system they to ensure justice. Dabangg opens with specifying its location – a small town
function in. called Laalgunj in Uttar Pradesh. Unlike GoW, Dabangg, however, does not
try to produce its location in its historiographic specificity. Rather, Laalgunj
is presented as a generic space holding all the stereotypes that are commonly
associated with the Indian small town: a hypermasculine police officer, a
virginal and good-hearted damsel who supports her alcoholic father by selling
clay pots, hooligan politicians, unexpectedly inserted shots of a pristine lake
and garishly colourful spectacles, among others.7 The audience is routinely
presented with a cornucopia of such elements to piece together an image of
filmy Laalgunj that remains imperviously indistinguishable from any other
small town in India. Perhaps that is why Dabangg did not initiate, unlike GoW,
an anthropological scramble to know the real Laalgunj. Yet, Dabangg is not an
uncomplicated retrospective of an anachronistic space; it presents a collage-
like visual of all the changes that have taken place, sometimes surreptitiously,
in Indian small towns: As Ghosh writes,

Dabangg doesn’t exist in a time warp. The movie romances the small
town, but never gets mawkish. Rather, it internalises everything that
has changed in the kasbah. The lascivious zamindar has been replaced
by the upstart bahubali, also a rising youth leader with an eye on the
local MLA seat. Even the baddies in Lalganj have footstomping caller
tunes on their mobiles.
(2010)

In the film we encounter a small town that has learnt to survive even with its
worst constituents. Laalgunj is not presented to us as a gritty, alienating space;
rather, it visually generates a desire for a pristine locale far away from the city.
Laalgunj’s encounter with crime and violence, however odd and unnatural it
might seem, is needed in order to stage a return to a peaceful and permanent
equilibrium.
Unlike the mafia-lords of Wasseypur, Chulbul Pandey (Salman Khan),
aka Robinhood Pandey as he calls himself, works within the structure of the
state. However, his persona as a police officer is a complicated one. The story
revolves around a dutiful police officer with a questionable morality: Chulbul

138

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

unapologetically extracts money from sinister hooligans and protects the 8. Towards the end of
2010, social activist
vulnerable. Ghosh further comments that he ‘doesn’t really have a moral code; Anna Hazare launched
only a survivor’s sharpness’. While it is true that Chulbul treads a dubiously a massive movement
uncertain moral line, his transgressions are constantly informed by his Robin against government
corruption. Primarily
Hood-like philanthropy. The moral code he abides by does not care to remain demanding the passage
within the limits of legality; rather, he inhabits an ethical world that is extra- of the Jan Lokpal Bill,
legal and melodramatic. In a nation on the verge of a massive anti-corruption which would ensure
the investigation of
movement, Chulbul’s popularity brings out a unique predicament.8 His flam- all corruption cases
boyant exhibition of corruption and the audience’s celebratory acceptance of it under the supervision
of an independent
signify the national citizen’s ambiguous desire for a lived site where compul- body constituted of
sions of the legal structure can be and should be manipulated with in order to unbiased citizens,
ensure an ultimate restoration of justice. this movement swept
across major parts
Like Sardar and Faisal, Chulbul too had a troubled childhood and a dysfunc- of the nation. While
tional family. Always unfairly treated by his stepfather, who remains generous spearheaded by Hazare
to his own son, Chulbul harbours a constant sense of hatred towards him. His and other prominent
members of the civil
explicit and implicit grappling with this lack remains a constant undercurrent, society, this movement
despite the performative machismo in his public life. Particularly attached received huge support
from the general
to his mother, Naina Devi (Dimple Kapadia), this braveheart cop moves public.
back and forth between personal and public. Narratives of personal trauma
and social injustice are juxtaposed to ratify Chulbul’s vigilante masculinity,
which becomes underscored especially in the fight sequences. Strewn with
phallic symbolisms, these sequences establish Chulbul as the epical protector
of Laalgunj’s ethical universe (Figure 3). Predictably, the film ends with the
restoration of order in both Laalgunj’s public life and Chulbul’s familial recon-
ciliation. Shot against the backdrop of lush paddy fields and a picturesque
lake, tinted to generate a different visual register (Figure 4), the final action
scene shows two men with bulging muscles engaged in a bare-handed fight.
Chulbul prevails over Chhedi to suggest that this criminal aberration needs to
be vanquished to take Laalgunj back to primordial serenity.
If Sardar and Faisal represent a tentativeness characteristic of the Indian
small town, Chulbul Pandey of Dabangg stages an assertion of certainty.
Marked by certain signature histrionics and stylistics, Chulbul is the quintes-
sential small-town man who remains comfortable not only within his spatial
location but also the socio-cultural milieu. Salman Khan, who is undoubtedly
more glamorous and popular than both Manoj Bajpayee and Nawazuddin
Siddiqui, has created a different kind of niche for himself as a hero. Targeted
for mainly small-town and rural audiences, his blockbusters are formulaic

Figure 3.

139

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

Figure 4.

packages of Bollywood masala. Not necessarily critically acclaimed, films such

as Wanted (2009), Ready (2011), Bodyguard (2011) and Ek Tha Tiger (2012) have
been immensely successful at the box office. While the other two Khans have
made forays into quasi-serious cinema, Salman remains unabashedly and
unpretentiously mainstream. In a rather self-reflexive gesture, Salman plays
a character who might well be a member of the audience among whom his
films are popular. In his personal life too, Salman Khan reflects the character
of Chulbul: known for his humanitarian activities and his generosity, Khan has
also been involved in several legal problems for killing endangered animals,
running over Mumbai’s pavement-dwellers, etc. As I mentioned above, the
scopic arrangement of Dabangg constantly emphasizes the provinciality of its
location. Yet, it is the figure of Chulbul Pandey that becomes the most auda-
cious assertion of Laalgunj’s identity. Marked by a stylistic panache, Chulbul’s
character makes us reach a renewed perception of the Indian small town.
Comical, ruthless, compassionate and uncontrollably emotive, this ambiguous
policeman becomes a film-text himself. Through a gesture of textual colla-
tion, Chulbul Pandey gives Laalgunj the fantastical small town, and perhaps
Salman Khan the actor, a redemptive opportunity to exist publicly with their
private code of justice.

Ishaqzaade: Revisiting the tradition–modernity formula

‘India is constituted of little, little Almores. Almore’s progress is India’s
progress; Almore’s development is India’s development’, says Surya Chauhan,
a local politician who has just won an election in the film Ishaqzaade. Among
the three films discussed here, this is perhaps the most explicit hint at the
small town’s new role in contemporary India. While the political vocabulary
has perennially claimed that India is made of its villages, this assertion, in a
sharp departure, suddenly claims that synecdochic designation for the small
town. Almore of Ishaqzaade is slightly different from either Wasseypur or
Laalgunj: embroiled in the conflict between two political clans, one Muslim
and the other Hindu, this fictitious small town in northern India bears the
most explicit mark of the provincial transformation in post-liberalization
India. Yet, it is also caught in the grips of regressive tradition. Although this
film too depicts a provincial India and the world of its dirty, violent politi-
cal battles, Ishaqzaade, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, is primarily a love
story. There is barely anything new in the main plot, as Shakespeare’s love

140

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

story has been adapted by numerous Bollywood films. Still, the film attempts
to make itself timely and relevant by referring to the recent wave of honour
killings that has received major media coverage. After the film ends with the
deaths of Parma (Arjun Kapoor) and Zoya (Parineeti Chopra), the eponymous
lovers who fail to overcome the communal enmity between their families,
appear these lines: ‘More than a thousand Ishaqzaades like Parma and Zoya
are punished with brutal death in our country every year. Their only sin: fall-
ing in love outside their religion or caste’. This explicit social message remains
an undercurrent throughout the film, as it depicts how the young genera-
tion of Indian small town deals with the ambiguous blend of tradition and
modernity. We come to know from Zoya’s electoral campaign that her father,
the current MLA of Almore, Aftab Qureshi, has put computers in all local
schools and colleges, as there is no progress without computers. There are
several scenes where the landscape of Almore is replete with advertisement
boards of mobile phone services. In further reference to the electronic revo-
lution in the country, the electoral symbols of the two parties are a compu-
ter and a mobile phone. Notwithstanding such changes, the film also makes
constant references to its power shortage, its dilapidated roads, dingy alleys,
boisterous political violence, deep-rooted patriarchy and various other infra-
structural and social malaises.
Parma, in the very beginning of the film, pays a sartorial homage to the
Salman Khan blockbuster: he appears with the word ‘dabangg’ printed on the
back of his pants. Although Parma is, like Chulbul, abrasive, fearless and rogu-
ish on the surface, Habib Faisal’s film unfolds with Parma’s repetitive negotia-
tion with his own masculinity. Belonging to a ‘mardon ki haveli’/‘household
of men’ and conversant in ‘mardon ki zubaan’/‘parlance of men’, Parma
remains stereotypically obedient and submissive in front of his mother. He
too lost his father when he was a child. It is the absence of the father, who
could have legitimized his presence within the familial lineage, that incites
Parma to prove his mardangi in front of the family patriarch. A constant effort
at overcoming this insecurity of belonging makes Parma morally transgressive
and violently masochistic. He burns down a local diesel-seller’s storeroom at
the slightest provocation, abducts a dancing girl while she is performing
at his enemy’s house, opens fire in the air on every possible occasion and
finally, tricks Zoya into a fake marriage and having sex with him. Yet, he goes
through repetitive phases of repentance only to grapple with his own mascu-
linity. In the popular item song of Ishaqzaade, ‘Jhalla Walla’, the local dance
girl Chand Baby (Gauhar Khan) sings, ‘Whom I considered a teacher of love,
that useless man failed in the first lesson of love/He, who acts like a man in
tight jeans, kept struggling with his pajama the whole night’ (Figure 5). These
lines sum up how this film handles the issue of masculinity. Parma not only
falls in love with the woman he once violated, but he ultimately comes to
terms with her superiority. In the final sequence of the film, when the two
lovers are hounded by the members of the feuding clans, they seek refuge in a
college chemistry lab. As Zoya reveals her love for chemistry, a visibly befud-
dled Parma asks her to help him pass his college examination. The small-
town man finally manages to overcome his chauvinistic impulses, perhaps, to
suggest that Almore too needs to rethink its disposition.
What is important in the context of our discussion of the small town in
contemporary Bollywood cinema is that the film does not provide an escape
to the entrapped lovers; although Parma plans to leave Almore for big cities
such as Delhi or Mumbai, it remains an impossible journey. During the tragic

141

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

Figure 5.

ending of the film, the lovers, after a prolonged gun battle with their own
family members, decide to kill each other. Suggesting that the lovers, who
have made the mistake of disobeying the dictates of tradition, are destined
to meet their end in the small town itself, Ishaqzaade implies that the classic
tradition–modernity dialectic needs to be resolved, if at all, from within. Not
a mere anachronistic space, Almore remains a realist-sociological site that the
pathological subjects of provincial India occupy.

Negotiation between realism and excess

During a question and answer session following the screening of GoW 2 at the
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2012, a number of people from
the audience asked Kashyap about the necessity of the long, gory scene where
Faisal finally kills his arch enemy Ramadhir Singh. This query reveals that this
particularly ‘unreal’ and grotesque sequence, almost an aberration within the
meticulously constructed realist arrangement of the film, surely puzzled the
audience. Is the purpose of this scene just to represent the intensity of anger
and hatred Faisal has been harbouring for Ramadhir? Such excess of violence
is not a one-time phenomenon in GoW. Both parts repeatedly indulge in
the aesthetic of excess: the audience is repeatedly taken through slaughter-
houses filled with carcasses, bleeding men during the mourning procession of
Muharram and gut-wrenching scenes of human bodies being literally cut into
pieces (Figure 6). The use of cinematic excess is not limited to visuality: GoW
relies heavily on rhetorical excess too. Words, phrases and colloquialisms
that are generally missing from the urban films make a regular appearance
in GoW.
It is not only GoW, but films such as Dabangg and Ishaqzaade also rely
heavily on the device of diegetic and extra-diegetic excess. A cinematic nego-
tiation between excess and realism provides legitimacy to the small town as
a legible space. Moreover, the body of the small-town man in these films
becomes a site of this unique negotiation and contestation between realism
and excess – perhaps an attempt at reconciliation between the two. ‘Yet it is
the excess’, writes reviewer Raja Sen, ‘that suffocates all the magic, originality
dying out for lack of room to breathe. Kashyap gets flavour, setting and char-
acter right, but the lack of economy cripples the film’. Cinematic excess, as

142

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

Figure 6.

Kristin Thompson argues, invites ‘the spectator to linger over devices longer
than their structured function would seem to warrant’ (1996: 133). The use of
excess as a cinematic device underscores certain elements within the narra-
tive beyond their functional aspects. While excess, in its visceral bodily form,
can operate within the voyeuristic fantasy world of cinema (Williams 1999:
702−06), it can also fundamentally challenge elitist ways of seeing cinema by
catering to a ‘paracinematic taste’ (Sconce 1996: 373). Excess has been a rather
overused device in Bollywood cinema. The small-town films, however, use the
device of cinematic excess in a different way: they do not use excess, unlike
their mainstream predecessors, as a means for escape. Rather, it is deployed
to underscore the element of ‘territorial realism’.
In the case of GoW, however, excess works in a particularly interesting
way: instead of generating a paracinematic experience, Anurag Kashyap’s
use of excess becomes subsumed by the realist impulse of the narrative.
Constantly informed by an underlying implication that this is how things are
in the provincial heartland, a concoction of libidinal excess demarcates the
male protagonists in GoW from their urban counterparts. After he comes to
know that his friend Fazlu was behind the killing of his father and brother,
Faisal executes him in one of the most violent scenes of mainstream Bollywood
cinema. The uncensored version shows the ominous silhouette of Faisal, about
to go down an endless path of gruesome violence, slicing Fazlu’s throat with
blood sprouting out (Figure 6). In the first part, we hear his father command-
ing his aide, ‘Kat, kat uska auzaar kat!’/‘Cut off his weapon’: ‘weapon’ being a
colloquial euphemism for male genitalia). In another sequence Sardar chases
down an enemy through the streets of Dhanbad, before he literally stabs him
to death in the open. These are just a few samples from a vast corpus of bodily
excess, both visual and rhetorical, that appear in GoW.
Excess is also used in Dabangg and Ishaqzaade, although on a very differ-
ent register. In the case of the former, excess lends itself to the film’s self-
reflexive kitschy character. Dabangg stages an implicit comixing of genres:
the hyperbolic action sequences, regularly punctuated by freeze-frame shots,
remind one of superhero comic strips. During the last fight sequence, when
he comes to know that Chhedi Singh had killed his mother, an incensed
Chulbul bursts out of his shirt in an intertextual reference to the Hulk. The
element of excess prevents both Laalgunj and Chulbul from being stable
signifiers. The role of realism-excess dialectic in the case of Almore and
Parma resides somewhere between that of GoW and Dabangg. Because of

143

Delivered by Intellect to:

Suvadip Sinha

the realist social message the film-maker attempts to convey, excess here is
used to evoke a truly disidentificatory realism. Parma’s masculinist audacity,
the rampant politics of violence and ruthless obstinacy of tradition almost
reach an unbelievable level; yet, they are necessary to convince the audience
that such a world does exist somewhere out there and to elicit a sympathetic
concern from them.

Girls liked Rajesh Khanna; and, boys liked Bachchan … Amitabh. These
days there is Salman, Salman Khan. … Every idiot is trying to become
the hero of his own imaginary film. I swear as long as there are stupid
movies in this country, people will continue to be fooled.

says Ramadhir Singh in GoW, to suggest that mainstream Bollywood has

turned a blind eye to the reality of India. The genre of small-town cinema
renews that quest for authenticity. I have tried to suggest that this provincial
aesthetic should not be understood as the urban India’s nostalgic desire for
its other. The Indian mufassil, with its own irregularities, inadequacies and
inconsistencies, has audaciously become a space unto itself.

References
Chakravarty, Sumita S. (1993), National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema
1947−1987, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ganti, Tejaswini (2012), Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi
Film Industry, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ghosh, Avijit (2010), ‘Decoding Dabangg’, http://www.timescrest.com/
culture/decoding dabangg-3536. 14 Aug. 2013.
Henry, Nikhila (2012), ‘Kali desires − Love and the Hunter’, http://storiesbe-
hindstories.wordpress.com/. 12 Aug. 2013.
Holston, James and Appadurai, Arjun (1996), ‘Cities and citizenship’, Public
Culture, 8: 2, pp. 187−204.
Kumar, Akshaya (2013), ‘Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of
North-Indian small-town nostalgia in the Indian multiplex’, Journal of
South Asian Popular Culture, 11: 1, pp. 61−74.
Mazumdar, Ranjani (2000), ‘From subjectification to Schizophrenia: The
“Angry Man” and the “Psychotic” hero of Bombay cinema’, in Ravi
Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, pp. 238−66.
—— (2007), Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Nandy, Ashis (2001), An Ambiguous Journey to the City, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Prasad, M. Madhava (2000), Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2009), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sconce, Jeffrey (1995), ‘“Trashing” the academy: Taste, excess, and an emer-
ging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36: 4, Winter, pp. 371−93.
Sen, Meheli (2011), ‘Vernacular modernities and fitful globalities in Shyam
Benegal’s cinematic provinces’, no. 1, http://www.manycinemas.org/
mc01sen.html. 14 Aug. 2013.
Sen, Raja (2012), ‘Review: Gangs of Aise-Waisepur’, Rediff.com. 12 Aug. 2013.

144

Delivered by Intellect to:

 Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary …

Thompson, Kristin (1986), ‘The concept of cinematic excess’, in Philip Rosen

(ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, New York:
Columbia University Press, pp. 130−42.
Vasudevan, Ravi (2004), ‘The exhilaration of dread: Genre, narrative form
and film style in contemporary urban action films’, in Preben Kaarsholm
(ed.), City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, Calcutta: Seagull,
pp. 223−36.
Williams, Linda (1999), ‘Film bodies: Gender, genre, and excess’, in Leo Braudy
and Michael Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings,
5th ed., New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 701−15.

Suggested citation
Sinha, S. (2013), ‘Vernacular masculinity and politics of space in contemporary
Bollywood cinema’, Studies in South Asian Film & Media 5: 2, pp. 131–145,
doi: 10.1386/safm.5.2.131_1

Contributor details
Suvadip Sinha teaches at the Center for South Asian Studies, University of
Toronto. The primary area of his research is Indian cinema and literature. He
has published in journals such as Topia, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture
and Interventions.
E-mail: suvadip.sinha@utoronto.ca

Suvadip Sinha has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

145

Delivered by Intellect to:

 intellect
www.intellectbooks.com

publishers
of original
thinking

Journal of African Cinema

ISSN 1754-9221 | Online ISSN 1754-923X
2 issues per year | Volume 5, 2013

Aims and Scope

What defines African cinema? Is there an African identity, and if so, how is Editors
it represented in film? JAC explores these questions while examining the Keyan G. Tomaselli
interactions of visual and verbal narratives in African film. It explores how University of KwaZulu-Natal
identity and perception are positioned within diverse African film languages, tomasell@ukzn.ac.za
and how Africa and its peoples are represented on screen.
Martin Mhando,
Call for Papers Murdoch University
m.mhando@murdoch.edu.au
The editors are seeking articles, reviews and comparative analyses on African
cinema throughout its historical and contemporary legacies. The journal
wishes to concentrate on:
• The film of the everyday and the ‘every-African’:
populist films and their language
• Shifting sites of authoritative discourses from
knowledge to meaning
• The propagation of the verbal culture-based film

Intellect is an independent academic publisher of books and journals, to view our catalogue or order our titles visit
www.intellectbooks.com or E-mail: journals@intellectbooks.com. Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, UK, BS16 3JG.

Delivered by Intellect to: