When we are asked to look at the time we are living through, current images and their narrative organization keep pulling us back into other times. The contemporary is like an image-track that is layered on to other image-tracks, just as music loops back into earlier melodies and voices. At one level, this has to do with the constitution of selves: inevitably, different generations will regard the contemporary with different time-scales. But, stepping outside these subjective ties, there is the historical institution of the cinema. Composed of the layered experience of its practitioners, its codes of representation and performance, its narrative tropes, the cinema opens up such temporal loops even as claims are made for the contemporary moment as distinctive and unique to itself.
The built environments of cities in the cinema of today conjure up earlier moments in a history of cinematic representation. Public spaces such as Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, high-rises, the interior dimensions of middle- class households and lower-income tenements, factories, warehouses, docks, the raw terrain of construction sites, shopping malls and “bazaars” resonate across time. And screen personas, their social typage, generic placement and performative repertoire set up dialogues with earlier formations of personality. In this essay, I will look at these parameters, the city and the body, as they are woven into the narrative space of the cinema. My exploration of these ways of looking will primarily focus on the experience associated with Bombay (now Mumbai) in the cinema. But the exploration will periodically flow beyond, to see how other spaces, including those of rural life and of global forms, are configured through such body-space articulations. Central to my narrative is a focus on the body as an object and vehicle of violence, but also as a vehicle of performance. By this I mean a form that renders the body as artifice, as subject to play and transmutation. Rather than a self locked into a body, there is a disjunction, affording us the possibility of seeing the body as interpretative vehicle.
The contemporary situation has witnessed substantial changes in state and civil society discourses about the cinema. A key term here is ‘Bollywood’: a term widely used to describe the institution of contemporary Bombay cinema. By and large, it seems to have emerged with the development of a substantial external market for the Bombay cinema, one that exports the elaborate staging of Indianness through the rituals of the so-called traditional family. Such a cultural form, it has been argued, panders to the needs of cultural affiliation and cultural reproduction for Indians who have settled beyond the ‘motherland’. Arguably, such a narrative is as important inside as it is outside, for Indian society has opened up so substantially in the last ten odd years that the dangers to ‘traditional’ culture are felt at home as well. The question of Bollywood is a complex one, addressing issues of globalization, the state’s cultural policies, new linkages between cinema, fashion, advertising and music, and a new constellation of commodity culture (1). For this essay, I want to set this important phenomenon aside, in order to provide another sense of the contemporary and a route for a different engagement with ‘our time’.
I will turn to the 1970s as my point of origin, developing a narrative that moves between the cinema and social and political transformations. That was when the state, social and civil institutions, organizational frameworks and cultural forms in India underwent a crisis whose ramifications were not immediately clear. A huge railway strike paralysed the country in 1974. The government’s breaking of this strike, along with the later failure of strikes in the textile industry in the early 1980s, perhaps signalled a long-term decline of trade unions. The early 1970s also witnessed movements against the corruption of local governments that swept across the federal states of Bihar and Gujarat, indicating a groundswell against the ruling Congress Party, and also against the forms of social alliance and consensus that party had represented since the time of independence. In the face of escalating opposition, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency, arrested opposition leaders, suspended civil liberties and instituted extensive censorship and an executive authority unchecked by the rule of law. This dictatorship prefigured, in its policies, some of the imperatives that have emerged over the last ten years or so: for instance, governmental address of the increasing complexity of Indian cities which had, in these years, witnessed a large influx of population (2). The Emergency deployed a rhetoric about efficiency of government and an agenda to discipline society, which included the notorious government-led drives for sterilization and clearance and relocation of slums (3). Reaction to the Emergency saw the turning back of some of these drives. In the last ten years, much of that earlier agenda has re-emerged. Urban spaces and the disorderly and polluting public of the city have once again become the main targets for cleansing and reform by governments. Of course, where the regimes of the 1970s operated within the parameters of protectionist policies, current regimes have opened up the economy, so that many of the state interventions for reorganization of cities relate to the cultivation of foreign investment (4).
This historical background suggests a complicated field against which to situate the domain of culture. One of the agendas that the independent Indian state set for itself was of modernizing cultural protocols; of supporting a ‘good’ cinema that could vary in form from the experimentalist to the social realist. Madhava Prasad has analysed how this developed in the differentiated cinematic field of the 1970s. He identifies a state-supported cinema that espoused developmental realism, a middle-class cinema devoted to the ordinary and the everyday, and what he calls an aesthetics of mobilization launched by the industry (5). The latter refers both to the narrative content and to the imperative of mobilizing a mass audience into cinema halls against the perceived threat to the industry posed by state intervention and support.
In retrospect: the breaching of vistas
I want to keep aside, in this essay, the more ideologically normative role outlined in Prasad’s description of cinematic differentiation. Instead, I will look at a range of cinematic practices that constitute what I call the breaching of vistas. These are forms of inquiry into received paradigms for social transformation, which include texts of social realism and popular forms of deconstruction, and the orchestration of the cinema as a type of energy-field. These practices undertake the task of unsettling a horizon of desire for national reconstruction by targeting the iconographies through which this imagination has been instituted. They range in generic form from the author cinema through to popular action, domestic melodrama and slapstick comedy. This outlines, then, a set of perspectives that cast a critical eye on the history I have charted.
At the outset, let me gesture to a body of work which, in a sense, never settled into an iconography or established a horizon for national reconstruction: the work of the left-wing Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, which emerged from the historical catastrophe of India’s Partition, involving large-scale bloodshed and displacement. The event marked his work deeply, generating a highly innovative inquiry into the ramifications of this violent rupture. Using mythic and epic resonances in his delineation of characters and settings, he documented how displacement had blighted the attempts to put together a world again, whether on the basis of the household, the radical collective, or the ground of a realist and rationalist ontology. In 1974, Ghatak made something like a last will and testament, “Jukti Takko aar Gappo” (Reason, Debate and a Story), which in many ways carries on earlier forms, composing materials as varied as the traditions of folk dance (“chhau”), the symbolic itinerary of a Bangladeshi woman displaced after the war, meditations on the failed extreme-left Naxalite movement, along with kitsch iconography and autobiographical narrative (6).
In a sense, this work suggests a disaggregation, a breaking-up of forms, in order to interrogate the relationship between constituent elements. This, I would argue, has great resonance, if in very different ways, across the cinematic institution of the time. Let me take certain instances from the mainstream cinema to suggest the outlines of this paradigm shift. The 1957 popular classic “Mother India” (Mehboob Khan) tells the story of the struggles of a peasant woman, Radha, to see her family through starvation and indignity. Its narrative is framed by Radha, now a respected village matriarch, overseeing the construction of a dam. Mother and earth mingle as nature is converted through a nationalist dream of technologically driven plenitude. Jawaharlal Nehru’s by now well-worn statement had claimed that dams would be the temples of modern India; the narrative of the popular film suggests that the image of the suffering, sacrificial mother is the ultimate source of meaning and value. A quarter of a century later, in “Coolie” (Manmohan Desai, 1983), a villainous entity, motivated by sheer lust and the drive to dominate, opens the dam walls to inundate a village. An image of technology not as a benign vehicle of plenitude but as an instrument of destruction and mayhem, surfaces into view.
This is testimony, perhaps, to the epochal rending of Nehru’s developmentalist dream. Images such as these accumulate from this period. A number of icons of modernization, of Nehru’s new faith, are rendered with a dark, even popular, modernist sensibility. The railway, seen as a magical vehicle to carry one into an extending universe of new experience, most famously perhaps in “Pather Panchali” (Satyajit Ray, 1955), is composed within a rather different “mise-en-scène” of the city in films such as “Zanjeer” (Prakash Mehra, 1973). Here, the narrative’s existential sense of the contingency of life, ruled over by the imminent possibilities of accident, sends a man tumbling to his death from a mass commuter train. Elsewhere in the film, a rail bridge and rail tracks are presented as symbolic backdrops for the hero’s merciless beating (7).
While the 1950s rarely displayed an engagement with the representation of work, whether in the popular cinema or art cinema, in the 1970s work is evoked through a realist description of the spaces of dockyards, warehouses, railway platforms, mines, construction sites. But the evocation is not noble; the personality is bound up in involuntary, industrialized rhythms. In “Deewar” (Yash Chopra, 1974), the anger of the migrant child- worker Vijay at the insult to his mother is displaced on to the reverberations of an earth-breaking drill. Elsewhere, the city provides the setting for violent, traumatic outcomes, as when, in “Muqaddar ka Sikandar” (Prakash Mehra, 1978), Amitabh Bachchan and another subaltern figure mistakenly attack each other due to the cunning manipulation of forces behind the scene. Locked in battle at a construction site, they use weapons picked from the debris of the site, the deadly armature of the city-in-the-making claiming its sacrificial victims.
Realist typage and melodramatic fantasy cohabit in the formal structures of this cinematic universe. The city often becomes a crucial space for staging the particular relay between the evocation of the real and its fantastical mutation. Bachchan’s body appears almost architecturally of a piece with the vertical lines of the Bombay cityscape. In Yash Chopra’s “Trishul” (1978), set in Delhi, the ravaging of selves is engineered by a narrative of relentless business logic. A promising young executive forsakes his beloved to pursue a career that will make him the first name in Delhi’s burgeoning construction business. Unknown to him, he has a son by this earlier liaison, and the illegitimate scion grows up with the ambition of upstaging and overturning his father’s business. All of this is motivated by the desire to emblazon the city with the banner of Shanti Constructions, named after his mother. Here and elsewhere, Bachchan in his screen persona recurrently gestures to the built environment of cities as alienated forms. These must be repossessed in the name of the alienated labourer, the mother, who is also the producer of conditions of life and of labour.
The city as a narrative space for the undermining of ethical certitudes is observable across the board. Satyajit Ray’s last film in his city series, “Jana Aranya” (1975), indicates the emergence of a cynical imagination within a humanist œuvre. His protagonist, normally defined in clear moral terms, is here rendered as a shadowy entity. A diligent student who falls foul of the vagaries of the examination system, he gets caught up, with a sense of fascination, in a world of middlemen who get contracts on the basis of bribes and pimping. There is a clear delight in etching a gallery of inventively corrupt characters, glitteringly performed by major character actors such as Robi Ghosh. The city is a space of sharp practices worked out in the offices of political parties, government offices, classy brothels and respectable restaurants. Perhaps a sign of the times, Ray, the Indian master of classical film form and narrative integration, provides a default narrative setting that allows for the play of intermittent attraction rather than causal and moral coherence (8). A delightful version of this new form of engagement comes from a film made by the Film Institute graduate Kundan Shan, part of the elite New Indian Cinema movement supported by state finance. In his “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron” (1983), urban energies are channelled not through melodrama and action but through slapstick and cynical black humour. The post-Emergency scenario had generated a new journalistic form, that of the investigative journalist who would expose governmental and corporate collusion in the distribution of licences and contracts at the cost of public interest. Shah’s film takes this on board and renders it as a cynical whirligig, building his narrative world through references to a topical slew of contemporary scandals, but also fashioning a world shot through with allusions to cinema history. An amiable self-reflexivity leavens the film’s cynical outlook on the hoopla of investigation so lauded in those years. The city as a comic, absurdist frame displaces nationalist narratives of truth and justice, engaging the spectator instead in a rather different form of visceral engagement.
Let me return, however, to the issue of melodrama. The nested spaces of the household within the city afford a powerful location from where to launch an inquiry into received terms of value and meaning. The popular domestic melodrama of these years offers a significant lexicon. A database of images and narrative syntagma brings Bachchan into view again, this time as a force straddling the revenge scenario and domestic melodrama. Both “Trishul” and the domestic melodrama “Kabhi Kabhie” (Yash Chopra, 1976) frame him against a backdrop of explosions. Destruction and construction, destruction for construction, these are well-established motifs in a modernist reinscription of the world (9). But here the modernist motif is interrupted; destruction is torn from the chain of signification, its constructivist object drained of value.
In “Kabhi Kabhie”, the motif is channelled into domestic space. Amit (Bachchan) had given up his love for Pooja (Raakhee), asserting that their happiness should not be at the cost of her parents’ misery. But he carries and nurtures this loss into adult life, marriage and fatherhood. Construction provides metaphorical imagery here. Amit is a builder and Vijay (Sashi Kapoor), Pooja’s husband by an arranged marriage, is an architect and interior designer. As a builder, Amit is associated with blasts to clear spaces for building, and this metaphorizes an interior devastation resulting from the sacrifice of desire. Building requires a design not only of internal and external structures and public placement, but also a design for habitation and intimate living. Shifted to the domestic field, Bachchan is singularly ill-equipped to fulfil such a design, unlike Vijay. Here the name Bachchan uses (in other films) to incarnate the victorious persona of public revenge is transposed on to another, for he cannot animate the interior, defined as he is by a sense of lack. A remarkable performative juxtaposition articulates this in a discourse of the body. Amit is inward, held in, brooding. Vijay is raucous, lives in the present, refuses to dwell on the past. The deployment of melodrama as a mode of performative excess, a force-field for unravelling expressive energies, is multiplied into the next generation. Vijay’s son Vikki (Rishi Kapoor), a bundle of disco rhythms, romantic and sexual kinesis, must find an outlet for attachment, for otherwise his uninvested drives will destabilize the possibilities of generational renewal (10).
If Bachchan captures the hole in the nationalist imaginary through a powerful melancholia, doomed to revisit scenarios of revenge which can never compensate for the losses he has sustained, there are other, quite contrary modes. The procedures of anti-melodrama achieve eerie force in passages from “Tarang” (Kumar Shahani, 1984). Coming from the experimental side of the New Indian Cinema, Shahani’s film analyses the social transitions of its time, capturing the decline of the trade union movement, the internecine fighting between nationalist and dependent visions of capitalism. Shahani’s treatment is that of the distanced eye which frames, positions and mobilizes figures in a careful “mise-en-scène” of factory family home and office, redesigning space through a scenario of class cohabitation. Janaki (Smita Patil), widow of a worker-activist, is taken in as a servant into the house of the industrialist Sethji. Caught in the conflict between her father and her husband Rahul (Amol Palekar), Rahul’s wraith-like wife, Hansa (Kawal Gandhiok), exhibits a strange lassitude. Rather than pathos, here is the body depleted by spiritual enervation, drained by its capture in a generational conflict within the capitalist class. Shahani renders Janaki’s transcendence of this world through an intricate iconography drawn from the epics. More memorable is his work with Hansa, who assumes the position of an Ophelia but one who gives up her life out of estrangement rather than melodramatic subjection. The figure glides across Shahani’s wide-screen composition, fleetingly glimpses inner machinations, sexual logics and business manoeuvres, and moves on, in a perambulation that echoes and creatively reinvests a Bressonian choreography (11).
Our violent times: the morphology of bodies in space
The narrativization of built environments and home-making is a persistent motif as we enter the contemporary. The question of a dwelling, a habitation, in a city where the state is no longer an impartial arbiter of social justice, is the subject of a major film of the independent documentary movement, Anand Patwardhan’s “Hamara Shahar” (1985). This movement, working outside the domain of the state-run Films Division, started up substantially after the Emergency with films such as Patwardhan’s “Prisoners of Conscience” (1978) (12). His work displays great discretion in rendering the situation of pavement-dwellers, deploying their own voices for off-screen narration. The voice floats, and the film takes time to locate it in a specific person. The director plays his own presence down, except to highlight it as an object of working-class scepticism about the function of such activist documentaries. However, if discretion rules at one level, the film is politically unambiguous in delineating the world of the elite, in their comfortable bungalows, expensive flats, municipal offices, citizens’ and flat-owners’ meetings. The director uses sharp juxtapositions between these worlds, deploying a melodrama of argumentation rather than expressive form to develop a perspective.
If the independent documentary functions within the orbit of an imagination no longer persuaded of the state’s arbitration of social justice, it is suggestive that certain dimensions of this scenario appear to be off the agenda. While investigative journalism takes state and corporate corruption as its main object, in general, neither the film documentary nor the print journalism genre investigates popular and subaltern crime, a crucial dimension of urban reality and of the imagining of the city. Art cinema, too, has by and large left this subject alone, with the exception of Govind Nihalani (“Ardh Satya”, 1983; “Aaghat”, 1985). From the 1950s onwards, Bombay’s popular cinema has taken crime as a key thematic, generic form, and as a mode of urban representation and experience. The earlier forays used criminality to dramatize social injustice and as a metaphoric narrative for situations of illegitimacy and social exclusion; the contemporary cinema, from the mid-1970s, develops a different symbolic narrative of crime. It is perhaps instructive to look at “Hamara Shahar” alongside the popular fictions of the period, for example, “Ankush” (N. Chandra), made in the same year. Surely a life at the margins, on the streets, of the sort depicted in Patwardhan’s film, is also one open to the seductions of petty crime? But this, the documentary format does not take up; apart from the fact that it would deplete the activist focus on issues of injustice, it is also perhaps a more difficult world to enter.
Let us track back to the Bachchan persona. His characters derive from realist typage and display a representational capacity, as the worker who has the moral and physical courage to take on exploiters and represent his class. But in films such as “Deewar”, he does this only to sidestep the representational function. For, the film appears to anticipate a world that was increasingly to see the demise of trade union forms (“Deewar” captures this in the destiny of Bachchan’s father), by taking its hero into a world of crime and illicit accumulation of wealth, although, of course, in the name of the mother. This body of work is thus entangled in a particular vision of delegitimization not only of the state as a vehicle of social justice but of critical representational institutions, such as the trade union, which function at the boundary of the civil and the political.
From the mid-1980s, this scenario is reframed, narrativizing new visions of social subjectivity and urban being, and offering a variety of political trajectories. Arguably, the violent trajectories unravelling the earlier consensus are no longer ones of displaced class protest and disaffection. The work of N. Chandra is crucial here, in “Ankush” and “Tezaab” (1988). The off-mainstream “Ankush” generates its own sense of documentary reality. Its evocation of the street-corner, neighbourhood and “bazaar” is distinctive, bringing into being a new semantics of the cinematic city. Later, these spaces would often be more ornately represented in studio sets, but here a realistic “mise-en-scène”, relying on location shooting, is observable. The realism extends into the characterization of the male group that clusters at the street-corner. The film gives us a sense of distended time, as if this could be one day, every day. It also captures the condition of unemployment and of embitterment that provides the film with its political slant. Made in the wake of the decimation of the huge textile labour strike in Bombay and, in turn, the substantial dispersal of the city’s textile industry itself, the four main characters both gesture to this and posit a more general condition: that of the educated unemployed who are unable to adjust to the demands of a corrupt society.
The social configuration speaks of the constituency widely noted to be a critical base of the Shiv Sena, Maharashtra’s chauvinist regional party which later became an important part of the countrywide Hindu majoritarian polity (13). The group’s sense of status is under attack, they are fallen, and this sense of unjust social demotion embitters them. Public assertion is critical and takes the form of contests with gangs who seek to control right of way in the film’s opening spectacle of the “Ganesh Chaturti” procession. The Ganesh festival has been a key feature of the city’s public life and of political mobilization within a chauvinist Hindu politics from the time of the nationalist leader Tilak.
All of this corroborates the thesis that the film is like a Shiv Sena propaganda vehicle (14). It also, in its social configuration, presages the national conflicts that were to erupt a few years later. In 1989, V.P. Singh, Prime Minister of a minority government, decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission on reservation of jobs for historically backward classes. That move sparked a spate of protests. An elite public believed that such policies would cut at meritocracy and put a brake on India’s developmental dynamic. More complicatedly, a high-caste, lower-middle-class population expressed a frustration and despair that saw a number of young people taking their lives. Of course, it is not in the imagination of (Ankush) to capture this last scenario. Male bravado is its chosen route, as its protagonists undertake annihilation of a corrupt bevy of businessmen and accept their guilt and public execution in the manner of martyrs to a social cause.
However, the importance of the film in generating a new language for the capture of Bombay in the cinema should not be underestimated. From the “Ganesh Chaturti” through to neighbourhood, street-corner and bazaar, Chandra would go on to capture the railway tracks and shanty town at the borders of the city in “Tezaab”, his major commercial success of 1988. This film defines an inside/outside logic to the city of Bombay. A sometime starry-eyed naval cadet and patriot, the middle-class Munna, has fallen on evil times because of the machinations of various forces and the failures of the court and the police. Like the mythic Rama, Munna is unjustly exiled from his city; and he undergoes proper criminalization. The ultimate logic of the narrative is to return him to his city on his fulfilment of the “Ramayana”-style rescue of his beloved, here from the clutches of a villainous Muslim criminal, Lothia Pathan. The film charts a history of disappointed patriotism and the reacquisition of symbolic capital through exile and return, setting up new social coordinates for a mythically inscribed renewal of the nation.
That such trajectories were not the only ones possible is indicated by two other films of the 1980s: “Nayakan” (15) (Mani Rathnam, 1987) and “Parinda” (16) (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1988). (Deewar) was meant to gesture to the career of Haji Mastaan, a gangster who was also seen as a godfather figure in the Bombay of that time. While (Deewar) hardly touches on such issues, (Nayakan) alludes to the paternalist legitimacy of the criminal in its evocation of an important Tamil gangster, Varadarajan Mudaliar, for its protagonist Velu Naicker. The narrative could be read as pitted against the emergent Shiv Sena’s sons-of-the-soil vision for the city, whose first target was the immigrant from Tamilnadu and Kerala. The film adapted Coppola’s (The Godfather) (1972) for its story set in the Tamil slums of the megalopolis, doubly marginalized by poverty and ethnic subordination. Here “Ankush’s” iconography of the violent slum neighbourhood is carried on with a different inflection. Kamalahasan essays a bravura condensation of Brando’s and Pacino’s performances, and, perhaps, of the iconic Tamil star, Sivaji Ganesan (17). The iconography of the chaste, “dhoti”-wearing leader is familiar from Tamil politics, and political resonances are echoed, too, in the way art director Thotta Tharani and cameraman P.C. Sriram stage Naicker’s home. Rather than the sepulchral inner world of Don Vito Corleone, this is a brightly lit space blocked to emphasize frontal registers for those who supplicate to the Tamil mobster. There are suggestions here of the architecture of the court and the political realm. The film subtly traverses the field from crime to politics in such a (mise-en-scène), suggesting not only the links but also the rhetorical structures through which constituencies converge around the image of the leader.
There are the workings here of a complicated relay between spaces of politics and criminality via the axis of the cinema. This is done in ways that take the new lexicon of slum/crime/politics in a direction different than that which N. Chandra’s films of this period configure. But there is also, powerfully, an intra-cinematic relay in the reimagining of the contemporary. If “Nayakan” offers a riposte to N. Chandra’s work, then Vinod Chopra’s “Parinda” takes the figure of the Tamil gangster, strips him of political functions or references, and makes him the ambiguous psychotic villain, Anna (Nana Patekar). This is not so much a depoliticization of the ethnic narrative of Bombay’s subaltern life as a generic and, indeed, realistic description of the cross-ethnic dimensions of the criminal world. As Ira Bhaskar has pointed out, gothic elements now emerge strongly in the genre.18 Bombay is a night city alternately composed of anonymous crowds or an empty canvas for the staging of erupting violence. And it is a city where the subject is never quite remote from the enquiring eyes of a malevolent network that may penetrate law courts, sacred religious spaces and the household itself. The specifically gothic rendering emerges in the revelations about Anna’s factory system, the city’s under-belly. Apparently organized to produce drugs under the guise of an oil press, perceptually it is only available to us as a dis-assembly line for the production of death. An assembly of steel vises, industrial mixers and chutes mangle the bodies of Anna’s opponents and betrayers, and produce them as destroyed end-product.
The penetration of the household will become a major thematic later, but is a focus for a specifically generic inquiry in this film. As Ranjani Mazumdar has shown, the putative formation of a couple who make a bid to escape from the criminal nexus is constantly interrupted as the domestic idyll is threatened by anonymous telephone calls and sudden black-outs (19). Film noir and gothic elements function to destabilize the romance fiction otherwise available in the Bombay cinema of the time.
Remarkably, the popular cinema has captured these transitions in the cognitive map of the city of Bombay much more powerfully than the art cinema. While Nihalani’s work addresses the complex relations between law and criminality, there is a strong pedagogic insistence in the make-up of the parallel cinema. This is perhaps represented most strongly by the work of Saeed Akhtar Mirza who, with “Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai” (1980), “Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho” (1983) and “Salim Langde pe Mat Ro” (1989), essayed a series of films on ethnic subalternity and other forms of marginality. Arguably, these exercises, inspired by a Brechtian form of engagement, speak a language of conscientization that fits the imperatives of the realist art cinema and documentary film of this time: to strengthen a civil social discourse of reasoned representation, communication and debate. Much of the power of the popular cinema lies exactly in outflanking such a discursive terrain and setting up scenarios of the city, its violent landscapes and subaltern experience, that are not easily admissible within such a discourse. This breaching of the vistas of the developmental dream of nationalism is effected by outlining new senses of frustration and violence. There is a generative grammar of urban criminality that can speak about a range of experiences, from twisted forms of subalternity and new locales for urban meaning in the neighbourhood, down to the cinema as a mode of urban experience. As we have seen, the politics of such an outflanking can go in different directions, providing the possibilities of both reassembling the national on a more chauvinist ground and side-stepping its discursive frames in order to look at the social as social, without clear ideological and political trappings.
Diagnosing the sources of violence
One of the most startling of popular films steps outside the sphere of the urban and looks to the countryside for its diagnosis of the sources of contemporary violence. In “Maachis” (Gulzar, 1994), the state is arraigned for the terror it unleashed to quell the Sikh militant movement from the mid-1980s, resulting in arbitrary targeting and torture of many youths. The director of the film, Gulzar, functions at the intersection of the popular, middle-class and parallel cinemas, and this is suggested in the combination of realist narrative causation, civil libertarian quotations from newspaper reports and song sequences that carefully dovetail with narrative requirements. The latter evoke the nostalgic bonding of young men who, in the face of arbitrary state terror, have exiled themselves into a vengeful identification with militancy. Violence, hitherto associated with the genre of urban action, is now accessed through a social realism that captures an eerily silent Punjab countryside. Gulzar’s scenario positions the spectator with the wronged innocent, and at a distance from the militant. And it deploys a melodramatic and mythic structure, invoking the narrative of Savitri who would bring her husband back from the dead, with startling consequences.
If the violent resonances of the contemporary have a series of sources, ranging from the complicated transformations of the city through to entanglements of nation-state and ethnic movements, it is nevertheless the movement of Hindu majoritarian chauvinism that provides an epochal transformation in the violent contours of the contemporary. Increasingly influential from the mid-1980s, with the movement’s parliamentary wing acquiring a powerful political presence in the elections of 1988, its leader L.K. Advani unleashed violent encounters through a series of public processions evoking a mythic symbolism, the “rath yatra”. Parliamentary and extra- parliamentary strategies by the Hindu right maintained an atmosphere of political brinkmanship around the cultivation of an imagined Hindu mass constituency, culminating in the symbolically devastating destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Riots followed, as did something akin to a pogrom of the Muslim population of Bombay in January 1993 (20).
The independent documentary movement provided a powerful engagement with these developments. Patwardhan’s “Ram ke Naam” (1992) undertakes a kind of field research of the Hindutva movement, testing its historical claims against versions that contest these, and uncovering its high-caste mobilization to counter the democratizing impulses of the 1989 implementation of the Mandal Commission. Madhusree Dutta’s “I Live in Behrampada” (1993) renders the attacks on a locality in Bombay during the 1993 riots through a dynamic, whiplash capturing of different testimonies. The art cinema too produced one of its best works of recent times in Saeed Mirza’s “Naseem” (1995). Mirza retains elements of his pedagogical form, this time to extol the ideal of female education against the characterization of the Muslim community as oppressive of female agency, which is quite important to the Hindutva ideology. The film also provides a rich evocation of an earlier, secular–nationalist Muslim intelligentsia in the figure of the legendary left-wing poet and lyricist, Kaifi Azmi. The character’s death converges with a dark sense of impending doom for the secular dream of inter-community amity, following as it does upon the destruction of the mosque.
Powerful, sensitive testimonies to the changing face of nationalism, the histories and experiences its aggressive transformation has challenged and suppressed, these works are part of an ongoing series of reflections offered by the cinema on the shape of the contemporary. As always, the popular format provides intimations of such drives in much more ambiguous terms. Films such as “Baazigar” (Abbas Mustan, 1993), “Darr” (Yash Chopra, 1994) and “Gardish” (Priyadarshan, 1992) access political changes via ambiguous character motivation, splitting of spectatorial identification and disorientating narrative methods. They also constitute a suggestive picture of the city as a space of uncertain identity and anonymous threat. At one level, these films pose questions about identity — how well we know someone, where they come from — and this uncertainty itself can make the city into an uncertain, even terrifying place. But there is also the terror arising from the attempt to use identity claims to include and exclude from the sphere of social and political legitimacy. We have observed how the state becomes the main culprit for the violent targeting and attribution of militant identity to innocents in “Maachis”. Mahesh Bhatt’s “Zakhm” (1998) takes the security, indeed arrogance, of a domineering, politicized Hindu identity and submits its transparency of identity claims to historical dissection. Bhatt inaugurates his favoured exploration into the ramifications of illegitimacy with the killing of a woman during the Bombay riots. The killer is a Muslim youth, angered by the assault let loose on his community by the Hindu right in January 1993. In fact he has killed a Muslim, and Bhatt goes into the history of this suppressed identity and its impact on the children of the dead woman. As in another landmark film, Yash Chopra’s “Dharamputra” (1961), one of the children has grown up believing he is Hindu and has become a rabid anti-Muslim fanatic. The revelation of his parentage brings a devastating halt to his fanatical activity. As in his 1983 film “Saaransh”, Bhatt captures urban violence through minimalist means — a fire, a burnt car, a group of straggling youth; and he uses flashback structures to recount the earlier history of a Hindu–Muslim romance. This is done inventively, especially in the scene where the children burst into the studio of the film-maker father. They come upon a mythological film shoot, with Hanuman bearing down upon them. The monkey god, a threatening figure within contemporary Hindutva mobilization, invokes here the pleasurable, tacky fabrications of the cinema, reawakening our memories of a more benign and playful iconography.
In films like “Maachis” and “Zakhm”, the popular cinema steps back and offers possibilities of a quieter, less fevered perspective on the violent history and identity conflicts that undergird them. In turn, new departures in the independent documentary format move from the logic of the activist form seeking to open the parameters of civil society, into a more exploratory dimension. The register of the intimate rather than the public surfaces, along with essays in self-interrogation and richly textured explorations of the documentary form and its characteristic subject-matter.
What constitutes our relationship to the history of violence? How to explore this as a relationship between spectator and audio-visual material, between the film-maker and his subject, between the individual subject, present experience and historical memory? How to capture a vista, a space, a perspective, that can talk about violence but in ways that do not exclude the viewer from the spectacle? In “A Season Outside” (1998), film-maker Amar Kanwar’s voice-over is not an expository one, leading us from one shot to the next, but one that insistently regards a space and reflects on its meanings. He looks at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan, a camp for the display of Sikh military prowess, a Tibetan refugee camp, and chooses to look from a distance, from a window above Chandni Chowk, at the Independence Day parade. Distance and a brooding, enquiring disposition compose a new relationship of viewer to image, break up the documentary transparency of the relationship between image and event, everyday routine, ritual forms, marginal spaces. In contrast to the campaign or activist documentary, with its own, very important field of pertinence, the reflective form opens up possibilities of inquiry rather than making definitive truth claims and establishing clear-cut critical paradigms.
Intimations of dispersal: the poetry and anxiety of a decentred world
The remarkable “Eleven Miles” (Ruchir Joshi, 1991) is an ambitious engagement with the conventions of the ethnographic documentary. The film’s exploration of Baul folk performance, philosophy and experience is framed within a structure that accommodates very different tonalities, cognitive orientations and sense-making enterprises. The challenge is to recontextualize the fixed ethnographic object, the folk form deprived of a relationship to an ongoing history. This, in a sense, is already present in the itineraries of Baul history: from the singing conventions of the pre-Partition period through to a contemporary situation of ideological mobilization (commemoration by the left front government of the French Revolution), cultural interaction (with Grotowski in Poland), cultural export (the engagement with the exotic in contemporary France). The itinerary is composed not only of a new geography but, critically, by the way the Baul philosophy, idiom and narrative form access modern experiences: of technologies, say of electricity, of course of musical form, and, more generally, the everyday life of the city. It is in the tracking of this expanding experience that spaces become defamiliarized, as when a performer wanders through the night city, its shopping arcades, its pavements festooned with the different argot of popular entertainment forms. The night city becomes a city of reverie, which in turn recalls how earlier cities of the cinema looked (Mohanlal, like a wraith, drunkenly wandering down the street in another Calcutta film, “Jagte Raho” — Shambhu Mitra, 1956). This induction of a different performativity into the textures of the city unlocks perspective, asks us to start looking and thinking about images around us all over again: a city stripped of people, sheer built environment, objects without people.
There is a powerful sense of familiar narrative forms and documentary procedures unravelling here, as if demanding a starting over. Such dispersal of narrative procedure as in “Eleven Miles” is also evident in other work at the level of the thematics of urban experience. “Dahan” (Rituparno Ghosh, 1998) is based on a well-known incident, subsequently novelized, where a woman reporter observed and intervened in a case of sexual harassment outside a Calcutta metro station. Ghosh takes the incident as a critical intersection of a number of lives: the intrepid citizen, a schoolteacher in the film; the victim, a woman who has married into a conservative, lower-middle-class family; and the girlfriend of the attacker. The last is the most fleetingly captured of these different narratives. The attacker too comes from a well-to-do family, and his girlfriend, while appalled at what he has done, is nevertheless borne down by the pressures internal to her space. After the initial incident none of these women meet, and a particularly fragmented image of the city emerges from the secluded spaces in which each of them confronts the constraints of her own positioning. Ghosh interweaves testimony from passers-by and delineates micro-social pressures—extending to outright sexual aggression—at home and in the workplace with a fine sense of detail. At times, the form suggests the complex serialized television film, indicating the emergence of a new dynamic in the intersection between art cinema and the televisual space it now inhabits.
In our traversal of the movement of the cinema from the crisis of the 1970s, we have witnessed the emergence of a landscape where icons of earlier vistas have been deracinated, and new senses of space and organization of subjectivity have emerged in a post-industrial city. Such intimations of dispersal are captured with a sense of density in Surabhi Sharma’s “Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories” (2001). The household, and female labour, become sources of stable reference in the shifting labour situations of the contemporary. Men move from place to place seeking employment, while a new putting-out system provides women with work at home. The preservation of this space becomes crucial to familial stability and reproduction. Surabhi Sharmameets with woman after woman in these domestic workplaces — small, hemmed-in dwellings which build, over the time of the film, into an intricate miniaturized aesthetic of work. Along with the vendor, and images of movement and transience, the miniature form provides a tapestry of dispersal that shapes a new sense of the contemporary. The former cloth district lies adjacent to the airport from where flights constantly take off, connecting this space to a world economy for commodities and labour. In all this, the film-maker displays a residual investment in older forms of trade union organization, as she captures a failed union mobilization of workers. In these dispersed vistas, the invocation appears strangely anachronistic. What innovations will emerge in thinking about these new spaces and forms of work, where women are so central to the contemporary situation? (21)
Social transvestism and the open-ended seductions of performance Rarely does one get the opportunity to see this invisible tapestry. As we have noticed, it is men, and usually violent men, who have dominated the cinematic field outside documentary and art cinema practice. But men have increasingly come into focus not simply as figures to identify with but as objects of enquiry. Rahul Roy’s “When Four Friends Meet” (2000), a documentary on young men in a northwest Delhi neighbourhood, provides pause for thought. Not only does it enable us to reflect on the sources and problems posed to masculinity in the contemporary epoch, it may also provide us with a bridge to open out the status of fiction and performance in the rendering of experience. In the film, a significant reference point for male identity is the affective unit of the family and the space of the household. However, this is not necessarily a productive setting for Roy’s subjects to express themselves, their memories and desires. Rather, it is the male group that proves particularly potent for the expression of inter-personal memories, a continued sharing of experiences and a context where they appear to be at ease and can take shelter from society and its expectations. It is a crucial emotional resource and outlet. In temporal terms, the realm of the everyday is central to this group subjectivity, one whose pleasures lie in repetition rather than the cycle of personality development. Even in the case of individual interviews, it would appear that the film-maker found the best setting to be a place outside the domain of the family, on the balcony of the family dwelling, or a terrace, or in the personalized space of one of the men.
The group both represents individual male views and exceeds them, generating an inter-subjective field. I would suggest that male group subjectivity is governed by performativity, the practice of assuming a role, character attributes, nuances of style and speech which are lived in, through and for the group. The anecdote is a typical vector for addressing the group, performing for it and with it, in the mode of the ensemble. For example,
the recounting of sexual events, such as the one relating to group sex amounting to gang rape of a mentally unbalanced woman, is a trigger for group hilarity. This is humour of the nudge-and-wink sort, performing a worldly knowledge of what men get up to and what women really want. The film-maker’s voice then intervenes, disturbing the rhythms of group performance and inducing a more reflective and moral discourse.
It is tempting to deploy Roy’s sensitive film as a deconstruction of the new subjectivities that we have observed emerging from the ground of the disassembled nation. Surely it bounces off films like “Ankush” or “Tezaab”, uncovering what lies beneath male braggadacio? Similarly, perhaps “Jari Mari” can also be intercalated as a text of deconstruction, laying bare the composition and content of slum neighbourhoods for what really holds them together? Such a stance counterposes and privileges the real over the fictional and performative, denying the latter a meaningful and truth-bearing function. The strength of “When Four Friends Meet” lies not only in its non-judgmental method of documentation (which is not the same thing as failing to develop a point of view) but further, in attending to the performativity of the male group, the inventiveness they conjure up when they come together, and in giving that performativity an affective force, in discerning that it is a mode of self-realization.
The popular, in fact, does not necessarily contest truths by laying reality bare. As we have observed, reality may provide a “mise-en-scène” and launching pad for a performativity displaying fantasies of action and potency (22). These fantasies have a definite narrative structure and symbolic economy, they are not without narrative controls. For example, the Bachchan performance is charged by a discourse of subalternity and representational politics manqué, one driven by a sense of lack. Ultimately, the character gains fantasy achievement that is simultaneously hollow and dramatizes the impossibility of self-realization. This is a species of melodramatic tragedy but one that at the same time mobilizes visceral gratification for the spectator invested in the motor excitements of urban action genres. The counterpoint to this performativity may, in fact, lie in another register of performativity. In a series of brilliant comic turns in “Amar Akbar Anthony” (1977: the drunken and rather less-than omnipotent Christian bootlegger), “Laawaris” (1981: the illegitimate offspring involved in high melodrama but also the comedy of female transvestism), “Sharaabi” (1984: the drunkard again), “Don” (1978: where his small-town yokel in the city is the double of a powerful mafioso), not to mention domestic comedies such as “Chupke Chupke” (1975), Bachchan generates his own other.
The main performative personality of the contemporary is, arguably, the comic hero Govinda. With a physical appearance somewhat at variance with the conventions of the popular hero, Govinda lampoons many of the stereotypical narratives of the subaltern achieving unlikely success as a hero or in romantic pursuit of glamorous, socially remote women. He has developed a signature style composed of nonsensical repartee and frantic jock dance moves, mimicking and sending up a genre of phallic performance. This performer requires an extended inquiry, but for this essay, in keeping with the dualities and overlaps in my twin focus around violence and performativity, I will now look at two stars who have created a rather complex and variegated screen biography for themselves.
Nana Patekar, who had earlier been trained in theatre acting, brought a new performance idiom into mainstream cinema with his tautly controlled body and bravura, staccato dialogue delivery that functions as verbal assault. He lashes his opponent with a cascade of ironic comment and irreverent wit, the whole laced with a mordant gallows humour. Intriguingly, he has deployed this performance style in very different ways. While Patekar has increasingly come to be associated with a machismo regional and national right-wing politics (of the chauvinist Maharashtrian party, the Shiv Sena, and of a Hindu right politics at the national level), the actor’s screen persona is not so straightforward. Thus, while films such as “Ankush”, “Prahaar” (1991) and “Krantiveer” (Mehul Kumar, 1994) would appear to confirm this political characterization, his roles in “Salaam Bombay” (Mira Nair, 1988) and “Disha” (Sai Paranjpaye, 1990) are of the mould of social realism. Still other films, such as “Parinda”, “Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye” (Amol Palekar, 1990), “Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman” (Aziz Mirza, 1992) and “Ghulam-e-Mustafa” (Partho Ghosh, 1998), suggest a tapestry of types: the psychotic gangster, an emissary of the monsoon and romance, a narrator–character retailing scathing social critique for the ‘small man’ of an earlier socialist imagination, a Muslim gangster who sends up Hindu middle-class mores. Thankfully for admirers who are revolted by the brutish nationalism of recent years, there are intimations in these of a will to performance, of actorly exploration and reinvention, that complicate any clear-cut identity, at least for the actor’s screen persona.
Aamir Khan started his career with “Raakh” (Aditya Bhattacharya, 1988), in many ways a deconstruction of the male revenge saga so long a staple of the Bombay industry. However, he swiftly moved into the standard groove, featuring as a strutting, confident, macho teen hero in films such as “Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak” (Mansoor Khan, 1988) and “Dil” (Indra Kumar, 1990), both major box office successes. Other films suggest a slightly more complicated screen persona. “Dil Hai ke Manta Nahin” (Mahesh Bhatt), “Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar” (Mansoor Khan) and “Andaz Apna Apna” (Raj Kumar Santoshi), all suggest a playfulness verging on a perverse, manipulative disposition. A slump in the mid-1990s signalled a time for reinvention of persona. Aamir essayed the yokel in the city (“Raja Hindustani”) with great success, and then went on to try on a “tapori” (street conman) mask in Ram Gopal Varma’s “Rangeela” and Vikram Bhatt’s “Ghulam” (1998). Just when the urban street mask seemed to have settled in rather well, he assumed the role of an educated, middle-class patriot, a policeman pitted against terrorists from within and beyond India’s borders, in John Mathew Mathen’s “Sarfarosh” (1999). Both here and in the “tapori” films, the Aamir persona appears to grapple with the reassertion of a secularist legacy under threat from the Hindu right, even if in rather ambivalent ways in “Sarfarosh”. Aamir’s urbane screen persona contributes a certain darkness to the innovations of Farhan Akhtar’s “Dil Chahta Hai” (2001) which, the director says, was consciously aimed at a sophisticated, ‘yuppie’ audience, evoking an attitude to love, work and friendship different from that constructed by mainstream cinema convention. Finally, of course, “Lagaan” (2001), the much-touted foreign Oscar nominee and Aamir Khan’s own production. This rural saga, avowedly about a peasant encounter with British imperialism through the medium of a cricket match, draws upon the national passion for a game in which India is a world player. The film in a sense thus addresses globalization rather than earlier historical experiences in the life of the country. It is the image of the nation that is arresting here, composed as it is of a highly inclusive representation of social groups and types, even if in sometimes patronizing ways (as in the case of the ‘untouchable’ character). Aamir renders this play with typage in a series of “Coke” advertisements featuring a Muslim street-stall vendor, a tough Punjabi peasant and a Bihari contractor. While these constitute entertaining play with the idea of an unanchored persona, in “Lagaan” and other mainstream features there is a distinctive way in which this star persona continues to deploy his cinema to revive older, more generous forms of national self-perception.
Let me now turn away from domestic production to look to the instance of British Indian culture. Until recently, fictional forms dwelling on the problems of an Indian experience at the intersection of migrant ethnic culture and local mores tended to be restricted in their appeal; on the other hand, ‘Bollywood’ was and continues to be largely consumed by ethnic Indian and Pakistani audiences. However, recently there have been signs of the development of a cross-over culture in a clutch of new films, as with the local and international success, beyond the ethnic or art cinema audience, of “East is East” (Damien O’Donnell, 1999), “My Son the Fanatic” (Udayan Prasad, 1997) and “Bend It Like Beckham” (Gurinder Chadha, 2002). The first two films have made Om Puri, primarily an actor of India’s parallel cinema, an internationally recognized star. Arguably, these films are in some fashion continuous with British social realism, now reframed through the comedy and melodrama of people’s negotiation between ethnic cultures and the dominant British culture. The inventive “Goodness Gracious Me” is, perhaps, of the same cultural derivation, though its strategies are rather different. Here, once again, performativity appears to provide a force that unpacks cultural differences. Deploying elements of stand-up comedy, musical skit/cabaret and the comedy routine, this television series sends up Indian ethnic mores with a daring assurance that is unprecedented. Perhaps this is in some part because the skit form can be indifferent to the humanizing requirements of social realist fiction. At the same time, the series is very much apiece with scatological British body humour, with its profuse recourse to bathroom jokes and gross out-representations.
I will conclude by looking at a specific type of performativity: the performativity of the cinema itself, as vehicle of an aesthetics of astonishment, where technology announces itself as a primary attraction and where the love for cinema constantly quotes, annexes and redeploys cinema history to mediate what we see and how we see it. I take as my example a film that works at the intersection of violent and performative imaginations about the city, and about contemporary experience and politics.
In Ram Gopal Varma’s “Satya” (1999), a gang fight is orchestrated via a highly self-conscious camera. A massive crane movement sweeps down the length of an apartment block to meet a gang as they exit from a lift. Subsequently, character and camera movements parallel each other, creating a dynamic doubling of presence and culminating in a top-angle pan from the rooftop as we look down on a chase in the streets below. In a particularly resonant segment, the chase climaxes at an overhead suburban railway bridge, quoting from Friedkin’s “The French Connection” (1971) and then crescendoing via Scorsese’s De Niro/Pesci double-gun burst in “Goodfellas” (1990) as the protagonists, Bhiku and Satya, dispatch their opponent Guru Narayan. The scene is cast against the backdrop of a train hurtling below. Apparatuses of cinema and everyday urban speed double each other, referencing the moment through a kind of world cinema parallax. Characters and actions shadow each other in phantom relay, the baton of form being carried into another territory of social experience. We have here an act of transposition of form where the experience of cinematic looking is not merely self-referential and auto-erotic but enabling of a heightened perception of reality.
Omniscient camera-framing in “Satya” is such that there is both recognition and a strange sense of hyper-location in the way the film privileges the spectator with perceptions about how the everyday social world and the world of terror are contiguous and threaten to overlap. A top-angle shot of a bar terrace above a crowded Bombay street allows us to see goons mercilessly beat down on Satya as an unaware everyday concourse streams by on the street below. As Bhiku, Satya and their gang torture an opponent in a basement, we see Satya’s beloved, Vidya, through a skylight that opens out on to the street above, walking along, unaware of what we are privileged to see. Systematic deployment of the steadicam, of seamless bodily movement and character focalization, essayed by Varma earlier as an abstract formal exercise notionally yoked to the horror genre in “Raat” (1991), is recurrently deployed in “Satya” to problematize the inside/outside world of the city. The camera’s bodily pursuit of a character highlights how privatized spaces may be rapidly infiltrated, often with violent results. Such hyper-location, braiding the spectator into spaces that are differentiated, draws upon the omniscient conventions of classical narration and, above all, foregrounds the technology through which our perception is organized. Separated spaces can be figured as adjacent, as collapsing into each other and as rapidly negotiable, via that key apparatus of contemporary communication, the mobile phone.
What does such a braiding of the violent, the performative and the cinephiliac signify in terms of political imagination? As I have pointed out, there are ways in which contemporary political transformations are echoed in the films I have discussed in this essay, as in the phenomenon of the extended male group founded on neighbourhood ties and united by a perceived sense of deprivation and fallen status. I have suggested how a variety of narrative strategies have emerged from this new lexicon of the cinematic city. However, the overall political framing of experience through the cinema is probably more complicated. Can we come back to the political through the play of sounds and images that compose our relationship to the genre? Let me end by pointing to a motif in “Satya” which may be construed as the cinema’s performative intervention in contemporary forms of political spectacle.
Satya, determined to avenge his comrade Bhiku, arrives at the “Ganesh Chaturti” on the beach, an urban spatial practice associated with over a century of nationalist mobilization, and a crucial cultural form in contemporary Shiv Sena and Hindutva politics. Bhiku’s assassin, Bhau Thakre, a gangster-successfully-turned-politician, presents himself and his followers before the deity. As Satya moves in, the camera focuses on the red cloth which he has swathed around a knife. The red sheath bobs along in the crowd, reminding us of the scene in Coppola’s “The Godfather, Part II” (1974) in which Vito Corleone moves through Roman Catholic festivities to target the local gang-leader. Satya stabs Bhau Thakre to death and, as the scene dissipates in chaos, we are left with a haunting image. The camera is positioned at the lofty elevation of the deity, looking down on the solitary figure of the dead villain as the ebb and flow of the tide tugs at his body. His followers dispersed, his command over spectacle voided, his rag-doll body is offered up for a view that at once assumes the cosmic perspective of the deity and the cultural momentum of the cinephiliac camera that enframes it. We do not need to recognize the cinematic reference to be caught in the allure of the moment. It is as if the film invites us to be carried along by the rush of a sensorium specifically composed by our investment in the cinema. The energy of that very particular compact between screen and audience is then channelled as an intervention into the contemporary, disembowelling one form of political spectacle by our heady engagement with another.
NOTES:
(1) Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, in Preben Kaarsholm, ed., City Flicks: Cinema, Urban Worlds and Modernities in India and Beyond (International Development Studies, Roskilde University Occasional Paper 22, 2002); and Madhava Prasad, ‘This thing called Bollywood’, Seminar, 525 (May 2003).
(2) See Partha Chatterjee, ‘Is the Indian city becoming bourgeois at last?’ in this volume, for a discussion of the new forms of governmentality that emerged in the 1970s.
(3) David Selbourne, An Eye to India: The Unmasking of a Tyranny (London: Pelican, 1977); Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the ‘Emergency’ in Delhi (London: Christopher Hurst, 2003).
(4) Aditya Nigam, ‘Dislocating Delhi: a city in the 1990s’, Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2001); A. Sharan, ‘Claims on Cleanliness: environment and justice in contemporary Delhi’, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2002).
(5) Madhava Prasad, The Ideology of the Hindi Film (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
(6) Geeta Kapur, ‘Articulating the Self into History: Ghatak’s Jukti Takko aar Gappo’, in When Was Modernism: Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000); Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982).
(7) See Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The Exhilaration of Dread: genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films’, Sarai Reader 02.
(8) Ravi Vasudevan, ‘The double take of modernism in the work of Satyajit Ray’, Journal of the Moving Image, No. 2 (Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 2002).
(9) A brilliant analysis of this process features in Harun Farocki’s documentary essay, Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988).
(10) For further information about this film and the work of Yash Chopra, see Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra (London: British Film Institute, 2002).
(11) For the work of Kumar Shahani, see Framework, 30–31 (1986): Dossier on Kumar Shahani.
(12) Vinod Pavarala, ‘Other Voices: exploring the “cinema of resistance”’, Indian Darpan (Hyderabad, 2000).
(13) On the Shiv Sena, see, for example, Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
(14) This is the argument put forward by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen in Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Delhi: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1999), p. 469.
(15) For Nayakan, see Lalitha Gopalan, A Cinema of Interruptions (London: British Film Institute, 2002).
(16) Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Ruin and the Uncanny City: memory, despair and death in Parinda’, Sarai Reader 02.
(17) I thank Indira Chandrasekhar for this observation.
(18) Ira Bhaskar, ‘Melodrama and the urban action film’, paper presented at the workshop, ‘The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in the Urban Action Film’ (Delhi: Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, November 2001).
(19) Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Ruin and the Uncanny City’.
(20) For the Hindutva movement, see Tapan Basu, P.K. Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Sambuddha Sen, Khakhi Shorts and Saffron Flags (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (Columbia University Press, 1998).
(21) For an analysis of such dispersed work situations, see Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
(22) Richard Dyer looks suggestively at the relationship between representations of the humdrum everyday, performative excess and utopian transcendence, in ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
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