The Melodramatic Public

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2 The Melodramatic Public

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4 The Melodramatic Public Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema RAVI VASUDEVAN

5 THE MELODRAMATIC PUBLIC Copyright Ravi Vasudevan, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by Permanent Black, Ranikhet, India. First published in the United States in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vasudevan, Ravi. The melodramatic public : film form and spectatorship in Indian cinema / Ravi Vasudevan. p. cm. 1. Motion pictures India. 2. Melodrama in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures Social aspects India. I. Title. PN I4V dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN edition: March 2011

6 for Amma and in memory of Achan

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8 Contents Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 1 Indian Cinema Today and Yesterday 4 2 The Thematics of Melodrama 8 3 The Shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India 10 1 The Melodramatic Public 16 II: DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIES 17 1 The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American Theatre and Cinema 17 2 Melodrama as Generalized Mode of Cinematic Narration 20 3 Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema 26 4 The Post-Colonial Question: Melodrama vs Realism 28 5 Deconstructing the Universal and the National 31 II: THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA 34 6 Pre-Cinema Histories 34 7 Film Form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format 38 8 Melodramatic Interventions 42 9 Horizontal and Vertical Articulations Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood 56 PART I MELODRAMATIC AND OTHER PUBLICS 65 Introduction 67 Narrative Forms and Modes of Address in Indian Cinema 67

9 viii Contents 2 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form 74 1 Critical Discourses in the 1950s 75 2 Popular Narrative Form 81 Visual Figures 82 Appropriations and Transformations of Modern Codes 86 The Street and the Dissolution of Social Identity 88 Iconic Transactions 89 3 Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism 94 4 The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film 95 3 The Cultural Politics of Address in a Transitional Cinema 98 1 Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses of Transformation Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism The Politics of Indian Melodrama Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame 110 The Reconstruction of the Icon 112 Darshan 114 Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity The Political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in Popular Cinema Community Typology and Public Form in Popular Cinema Phalke and the Typological Discourse of Early Cinema The Social Film: Community Typage/Modernity/ Psychology The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and Contemporary Publics The Transcendental Location of Stellar Bodies 150 Raj Kapoor 151 Nana Patekar 157

10 Contents 5 A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray Ray s Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and a History of the Present 166 The Modernism of the Trilogy The Unfinished Agenda of History 181 Charulata (1964) The Contemporary 191 Aranyer Din Ratri (1969) 192 Jana Aranya (1975) 192 PART II CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION IN THE SUBCONTINENT: TAMILNADU AND INDIA 199 Introduction The Formation of a Pan-Indian Market: Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of Social Reform Differentiated Territories of a Subcontinental Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation Voice, Space, Form: The Symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnam s Roja (1992) Kashmir and Tamilnadu The Politics of Identity Tamilness as Intractable Edifice The Connotations of Place The Recalibration of Popular Form Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics Plot Synopsis Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative Structure The Representation of Inter-Community Differences 233 ix

11 x Contents 4 Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The Pattern of Public Events The Navigation of Sectarian Difference: Community and Sexuality Self-Alienation in the Constitution of Decommunalized Space Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of Self-Sacrifice Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999) Plot Synopsis A New History? Publicizing an Unofficial History Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation Marks Reading Hindutva Masculinity Lifting the Mogul Pardha Melodrama: Performativity and Expressivity Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation 277 PART III MELODRAMA MUTATED AND DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN VISTAS, AND NEW PUBLICS IN A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT 291 Introduction The Urban Imagination Differentiated Film Publics Discourses and Practices of the Cinematic Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre Diversification Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas 306 Zanjeer, Deewar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Kabhi Kabhie; Tarang, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Alberto Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai

12 Contents 2 Our Violent Times: the Morphology of Bodies in Space 312 Ankur, Tezaab, Parinda, Nayakan 3 Diagnosing the Sources of Violence 318 Naseem, Zakhm, Maachis, Baazigar, Darr; Bombay Hamara Shehar, Ram Ke Naam, War and Peace, I Live in Behrampada 4 Intimations of Dispersal: The Poetry and Anxiety of a Decentred World 322 Dahan, Egyarah Mile, A Season Outside, When Four Friends Meet, Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories 5 Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended Seductions of Performance: The Work of Aamir Khan Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac Performativity The Contemporary Film Industry I: The Meanings of Bollywood Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the Bombay Film Economy Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian Cinema The Contemporary Film Industry II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch I: Father India and the Emergence of the Global Nation 362 Mothers, Communities, Nations 363 Fathers, Social Order, State Form 366 The Symbolic Functions of the Father: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) 367 The Multicultural Father Deceased and Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004) 375 xi

13 xii Contents 2 Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch II: The Emergence of Genre Cinema 383 Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) 384 Bhoot (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) 387 Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003) 389 Beyond or Within Bollywood? 392 Conclusion and Afterword The Cinematic Public I: Melodrama The Cinematic Public II: Cinema and Film After the Proliferation of Copy Culture 406 Bibliography 415 Index 437

14 Acknowledgements This book has been long in the making, and has accumulated a very long list of debts. At the outset, I need to specially acknowledge certain key institutions and people. In the 1970s Celluloid Delhi University s film society gave me a home and an intellectual world not readily available in college. Jawaharlal Nehru University and its Centre for Historical Studies gave me some excellent teachers, fellow students, and an extraordinary sense of social connection. Thomas Elsaesser has been a wonderful inspiration, a great teacher, supportive supervisor, and a continuing influence through his writings and discipline-shifting initiatives. A number of universities, trusts, and academic institutions have supported my work over the years: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the University of East Anglia funded my PhD; the British Council and the Charles Wallace Trust awarded travel grants to the UK so I could use the British Film Institute and the Cambridge South Asia archives. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for a fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies; and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton for a fellowship which enlivened the final phase of writing. Rachel Dwyer at SOAS and Gyan Prakash at Princeton have been of great support. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, granted me a sabbatical in , without which this book would not have been written. I would also like to remember the late Ravinder Kumar who had the institutional imagination to open the doors of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to new types of research. I thank the following libraries, archives, and institutions, and the people who run them: in Pune, the National Film Archives of India, K. Sasidharan, then director, and Mrs Joshi, its most helpful librarian; the Film and Television Institute of India, Tripurari Sharan, then Director, and Professor Suresh Chabria. Sujit Deb Dada and Avinash Kumar have admirably extended the library resources of the CSDS,

15 xiv Acknowledgements and Moslem Quraishy and Chandan those of Sarai-CSDS. CSDS staff, especially Jayasree Jayanthan, Himanshu Bhattacharya, Ghanshyam Dutt Gautam, Kunwar Singh Butola, Ramesh Singh Rawat and many others have always been of great help. The following colleagues invited me to deliver papers or teach courses which allowed me to rehearse and refine the arguments of this book: Moinak Biswas, Jadavpur; Thomas Blom Hansen and Dudley Andrew, Yale; Priya Kumar, University of Iowa; Kathryn Hansen, University of Texas at Austin; Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania; Mike Shapiro and Shivi Sivaramakrishnan, University of Washington at Seattle; Richard Allen and Nitin Govil, New York University; Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster; Christine Gledhill, University of Sunderland; Ira Bhaskar and Ranjani Mazumdar, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dipesh Chakrabarty and Miriam Hansen, University of Chicago; Manjunath Pendakur, Northwestern University; Anuradha Needham, Mike Fisher, and the Shansi Programme, Oberlin College. The CSDS has been remarkable for its capacity to support research outside mainstream conventions. I am in debt to my colleagues at the Centre and in our research programme, Sarai, for the warmth of their friendship and for their intellectual engagement, especially Aditya Nigam, Ravi Sundaram, Dipu Sharan, Ravikant, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Ashish Mahajan. A special tribute to the intrepid folk who made a success of our media city project, Publics and Practices in the History of the Present : Bhrigupati Singh, Bhagwati Prasad, Lokesh Sharma, Rakesh Kumar Singh, Anand Taneja, and Khadeeja Arif. I also thank Sachin and Vikas Chaurasia for all their help. Ravikant and Sanjay Sharma helped in translating film titles. Chapters 8, 9, 11, and the Afterword are inspired by my work with Sarai. Many friends have been there for me over the years: Monisha and Rana Behal, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Pankaj Butalia, Pritham and Venkatesh Chakravarthy, Rachel and Mike Dwyer, Kathryn Hansen, Imtiaz Hasnain, Steve Hughes, Chitra Joshi, Suvritta Khatri, Peter Kramer, Gail Low, Franson Davis Manjali, Mukul Mangalik, Nivedita Menon, Prabhu Mohapatra, Anne Ninan, M.S.S. Pandian, Smrita Gopal Singh, Brij and Kamini Tankha, Rosie Thomas, Patricia Uberoi. Geeta Kapur has provided long-term engagement and involved me in an exciting curation at the House of World Cultures the basis of Chapter 9. Jyotindra Jain has been a good friend to me and to the

16 Acknowledgements discipline of Film Studies. Jim Cook and Ulli Sieglohr have given me their friendship, the loan of a flat in London, and have read and commented with acumen on the first chapter of the manuscript version of this book. Moinak Biswas, Ranjani Mazumdar, Ira Bhaskar, S.V. Srinivas and Madhava Prasad have all been sterling friends and comrades in the development of our academic field in India. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has been an important resource for anyone working in the area. To him, Lawrence Liang, and Tulika Books my thanks for first drafting the statement on fair use of images in academic books on cinema. I can hardly begin to thank my extended family, who have looked after me in so many ways over the years. Sarada Valiamma, Ammayi, Induammayi, Gokumama, my cousins Chittu, Valchi, Damu-ettan and Kunhi, who introduced me to Cell, and Valli, with whom I share a passion for cinema, if not the classical virtues of Kutti Krishnan. I also remember with great fondness those who are no more, Sreekumaramama, Ammama, Partha-ettan and Valia Valiamma. Over the years, my family resources came to include the Singhas. Rani, Karan, Sanjeev, Neeta, Hema, Aunt Daya, and Kalaam have extended warmth, hospitality, and friendship. Above all, Kaushaliya Masi s love and care has been a great boon to me. Finally, I recall with affection Eno Singha, whose humour and refusal to fuss made him such an easy person to relate to. My family has always pointed out that my mother knows much more than I do about the cinema: I and my brother Hari another film enthusiast and historian would doubtless agree. We would also probably agree that our parents allowed us to do pretty much what we wanted, even if this sometimes left them nervous and bemused. This book is dedicated with love to the memory of that eminently practical man, Methil Vasudevan, who raised us in a reassuringly stable environment; and to my mother, Sreekumari, whose enthusiasm for books, movies, music, and food has been so important to me, and whose fortitude and courage I greatly admire. Many, many thanks to Rukun and Anuradha, for seeing this dilatory author through, and for the many lovely evenings in between. This book would simply not have been written but for Radhika, who did everything possible to make sure I had the mental focus, resources, time, and space to bring it to a conclusion. She has been resolutely unwilling to overcome her Hollywood viewing inclinations xv

17 xvi Acknowledgements and see as much popular Indian cinema as I would like her to. But thanks to her I ve been able to keep in touch with new issues emerging in the field of history. Overall, it s been an excellent deal for me, and I was sorely tempted to include her in my book dedication. However, she deserves a separate book to herself enough motivation for me to write at least one more to make sure she gets her due! I duly acknowledge earlier versions of several chapters published in this book: Chapter 2 was in an earlier form Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture, Journal of Arts and Ideas 23-4, 1993, 51 84, reprinted in Ravi Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001, Chapter 3 was in an earlier form The Politics of Cultural Address in a Transitional Cinema: A Case Study of Indian Cinema, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds, Reinventing Film Studies, London, Edward Arnold, 2000, Chapter 4 was in an earlier form Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Significance of the Cinema, in Anuradha Needham and Rajeswari Sundar Rajan, eds,the Crisis of Secularism in India, Durham and New Delhi, Duke University Press and Permanent Black, 2007, Chapter 5 was in an earlier form Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism: The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray, Journal of the Moving Image 2, Calcutta, Jadavpur University, December, 2001, 52 76; reprinted as The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Ray, in Moinak Biswas, ed., Apu and After: Revisiting Ray s Cinema, Kolkata, Seagull, 2006, Chapter 6 was in an earlier form Voice, Space, Form: Roja (Mani Rathnam, 1992), Indian Film, and National Identity, in Stuart Murray, ed., Not On Any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality and Cultural Nationalism, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1997,

18 Acknowledgements Chapter 7 was in an earlier form Bombay and Its Public, Journal of Arts and Ideas 29, 1996, 45 66, reprinted in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, eds, Pleasure and the Nation, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001, Chapter 8 was in an earlier form Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999), Economic and Political Weekly 37 (28), July 2002, and Chapter 9 was in an earlier form Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema, in Indira Chandrashekhar and Peter C. Siehl, eds, body. city: Siting Contemporary Culture in India, New Delhi, Tulika Books, 2003, , and Chapter 10 was in an earlier form The Meanings of Bollywood, Journal of the Moving Image 7, December 2008, xvii

19 Introduction 1. Indian Cinema Today... The international image of Indian cinema has undergone a remarkable transformation in the very recent past. For a long time this cinema has been the object of an international arts discussion because of a few acclaimed directors such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak, as well as Shyam Benegal, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Popular cinema on the other hand has been something of a curiosity. For a long time it was only noted perhaps for its garishness, its inordinate length, huge investment in song-and-dance sequences, and reliance on melodrama. There was also an implicit, if unexplored, acknowledgement of its wider allure. Thus there were stock references to its significance in the former Soviet bloc, South East Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. Until recently academic attention focused on popular formats only when these intersected with larger political phenomena, as with the star-politicians of South India. However, the ground of public and film-critical attention has shifted, and four areas of Indian cinema have become visible. These are (1) its popular formats, (2) diaspora productions which narrate Indian experience outside India, (3) a cluster of international collaborations including the work of Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta on social experience in India, and finally, (4) documentary films which surface in university, film society, film festival, and sometimes art installation contexts. The Indian art film and author cinema continues to be showcased at home and abroad, but has become somewhat marginal both to public discussion and scholarly engagement. In terms of national and international public positioning, the change appears to emerge from that bewildering transformation which we have witnessed in the last fifteen years or so, described by the term globalization. The earlier certitudes of nation-states and national

20 2 The Melodramatic Public borders, the need to protect local economic production and cultivate a secure market for it, appear to have receded. One driving imperative now is to circulate Indian branded commodities in international markets, to build linkages and seek investment from Indians abroad, and to cultivate foreign investment in domestic production, infrastructure, and markets. This has also led to the deregulation of state control over television and, later, radio, leading to a remarkable change in what Indian audiences could see and hear. The drive to open out a protected nation emerged in the wake of the huge debt accumulated by the Indian economy in the 1980s. This gave the World Bank an opportunity to press for the opening up of Indian markets on the premise that this would galvanize the economy through competition, collaboration, and foreign investment. 1 Paralleling this development was a new status for Indian capital and professional groups in the metropolitan West, which brought Indian cinema out of its ethnically segregated niche into a wider domain of multi-culturalism and made it more visible in the US and British markets. The new purchase of the Indian popular form is also quite transparently linked to multinational drives to deploy hybrid and ethnic forms of fashion and music to target South Asian markets for their products. A parallel and very powerful dynamic is that of a globalization from below, where the manoeuvres of multinational corporations are shadowed by pirate cultures with access to new copying technologies. The availability of cheap compact and digital video technology has moved film and music into informal markets. Design, content, and the original are subject to copying, appropriation, and cheap retail in clothing apparel, domestic appliances, and electronic goods. This has set up crucial contests around intellectual property, as corporate firms seek to develop international laws, and mobilize national policing and enforcement to ward off incursions into profits based on trademarks, copyright, and patents. 2 1 Cheryl Payer, The Debt Trap: The IMF and the Third World, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974; Kavaljit Singh, Taming Global Financial Flows: A Citizen s Guide, Delhi, Madhyam Books, 2000 and London, Zed Books, 2000; Cheryl Payer, Lent and Lost: Foreign Credit and Third World Development, London, Zed Books, 1991; Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, London, Zed Books, Ravi Sundaram, Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation, Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), 3 January 2004, 64 71; Rakesh Kumar, ed.,

21 Introduction 3 What role does the cinema have in this account of transformation? A great deal in terms of global profile, if we take seriously the recent bid by segments of the Indian film industry to cultivate a substantial foreign market extending beyond the Indian diaspora. Such high-end products are said to get over half their returns from markets outside India, and have often consciously organized their storytelling, narrative vistas, interiors, and musical attractions to ensure that world audiences are inducted in terms of geographical location and cultural habitat into the world of Indian popular film. 3 Indeed, something like a genre has been fashioned to address this configuration; or, to be more accurate, a sub-genre deriving from the family social film of older vintage. Here, the primacy of family ties and obligations becomes the basis for the posing, processing, and resolution of problems arising from romantic choices and social and cultural differences. 4 This genre format is now deployed to accommodate identity conflicts as these are mapped amongst Indian populations now visible in a host of new spaces across the globe, but most spectacularly in the USA and UK, the most significant segment of the foreign market. In turn, the Indian state and capitalist associations, such as the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Confederation of Indian Industry, have backed the emergence of this new film economy. For fifty years, Indian governments had ignored the demand that Indian film production should be recognized as an industry so it could get subsidized loans from state-owned banks and benefit from taxation and customs policies designed to foster indigenous industries. 5 Clearly, the goalposts have shifted, for popular cinema seems to have emerged as a powerful vehicle for Indian identity requirements in the newly defined global space of Indian national interests. In this avatar, it is the lynchpin of a global commodity constellation in film, radio, Medianagar, 1 and 2, Delhi, Sarai-CSDS, ; Sarai Filmcity Broadsheets, 1 and 2, 2001, 2004, 3 Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press and Ranikhet, Permanent Black, 2007, ch. 4: The Panoramic Interior. 4 Patricia Uberoi, The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ, Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (2), July December 1998, The standard historical reference is still Eric Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, New York and London, Oxford University Press, 1963, rpnt 1980.

22 4 The Melodramatic Public audio-visual, music, events, shows or FRAMES, the acronym for the annual conference set up by Indian industrialists to promote the entertainment industry and Yesterday To introduce this book I want to step back in time, to consider the longer history of film in India, the different contexts that determined its forms and the public discourse about it. In the foundational years of the nation-state, the official view was that existing forms of cinema were inadequate to the cultivation of citizenship and nation-building projects. The unstable and murky world of film finance and the characterization of the commercial film aesthetic as inauthentic and hybrid gave it low priority on the agenda for the nation s art. Yet there were contradictions in the objectives which governmental elites, an arts intelligentsia, and a reform-minded industrial opinion outlined as desirable for the development of Indian cinema. The government concentrated official patronage for a modern national art on classical and folk forms in painting, sculpture, music, and the performing arts. 7 An intelligentsia promoting the development of art practices through film societies and journals emphasized the importance of realist protocols, although a modernist invocation of folk practices was also in evidence Thus, a dedicated realist of socialist background such as K.A. Abbas would nevertheless invoke ancient classical texts, modern literature, folktales, and exemplary life stories as comprising the rich repertoire that screenplay writers in India could draw upon: there are the novels, the stories, the plays of our great masters from Kalidasa to Tagore and Premchand only a very few of which have been filmed. Strange, is it not, that foreigners should discover the grand possibilities 6 See for information about the activity of this organization, initiated in The Sangeet Natak Akademi was set up by the government in 1953 to document, preserve, and disseminate the folk and traditional performance arts; the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1954 to promote the visual arts, including paintings, sculptures, graphics, photographs, architecture... with a special focus on tribal and folk arts ( gov.in); the Sahitya Akademi was inaugurated in 1954 to foster and co-ordinate literary activities in all the Indian languages and to promote through them the cultural unity of India,

23 Introduction 5 of the legend of the Buddha or of the life story of Mahatma Gandhi, and that even our Panchatantra tales should have inspired foreign and not Indian producers. 8 However, along with classicism, folk forms, and realism, Hollywood cinema also emerged as a standard reference point. The American industry provided a model for emulation on several counts. Its stable economic organization was a key reference point for the Film Enquiry Committee of 1951, composed of industry spokesmen and government officials. 9 Hollywood had consolidated itself through an integration of production, distribution, and exhibition practices, whereas Indian film producers were at the mercy of high interest rates on loans, and on advances from distributors and exhibitors. 10 Further, the committee regarded its economic efficiency as grounded on a finished script that provided the basis for budgetary outlays and shooting schedules and the saving of raw film consumption. 11 The US industry had also managed to avoid state censorship by instituting a production code administration to regulate content. In the committee s opinion state support was essential to refashioning the Indian industry on these lines. 12 Production should be shored up by a system of loans administered through national banks and financial institutions. 13 As for the desirability of a production code administration, the committee believed that a period of state involvement was necessary before full autonomy could be achieved. 14 For those wanting to reform the film industry, therefore, Hollywood provided an important reference point as an economic form which could undertake self-censorship and integrate the script to the economy and organization of filmmaking. Interestingly, a figure such as Satyajit Ray, who was central to the development of an Indian art 8 K.A. Abbas, The Importance and Significance of a Good Film Story Its Power with the Masses, in R.M. Ray, ed., Film Seminar Report, Delhi, Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1956, Also see below, ch. 2, for the film intelligentsia s emphasis on folk and epic forms as well as realism 9 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, Delhi, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1951, hereafter FEC. 10 FEC, Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., 194.

24 6 The Melodramatic Public cinema, also upheld a model of linear causal storytelling, and for the psychological delineation of its characters, with Hollywood as the implicit model. 15 While the art cinema critic and practitioner clearly sought a realism different from that offered by Hollywood, and often caricatured it in terms of its romance narratives and happy endings, Hollywood provided an example of narrative integrity that countered the distractions and excesses of popular formats. From another angle, those concerned with Indian film s export possibilities were worried that failure to implement the Hollywood model of storytelling would limit their success in Western markets. However, they felt that they were constrained by the particular demands of Indian film audiences. 16 Finally, there were clear traces of the way the Hollywood model functioned in the intermittent use of continuity editing and psychological delineation through point-of-view shots, close-ups, and subjective acting signs in Indian films, especially of the 1950s. 17 The idea of a better cinema took shape during the course of the 1950s, when Filmfare, a periodical that urged state support for the industry and for industrial reform, inaugurated the annual Filmfare awards. 18 The first award for best picture, decided by a public poll, went to Bimal Roy s neo-realist inspired Do Bigha Zameen (Two Measures of Land; 1953) and the magazine editorial took this selection as an index of an audience which wanted pictures which, while they entertain, have a more recognisable relation with reality. 19 Roy became the icon of the better cinema in the mainstream industry: the next year he received the Filmfare Best Director award for Parineeta, and government certificates of merit for Biraj Bahu in the same year and Devdas in A different track within the discourse of a better cinema was initiated in 1955 when the government awarded Satyajit Ray s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road; 1955) its national award for best film (while giving Roy s Devdas a certificate of merit). 21 While Do Bigha Zameen was inspired by neo-realism, Roy s other 15 See below, ch. 1, pt II: Thinking about Melodrama in Indian Cinema. 16 M.A. Parthasarathy, Indian in the Film Map of the World, Indian Talkie : Silver Jubilee Seminar, Bombay, Film Federation of India, 1956, See below, chs 2 and 3 for the deployment of Hollywood continuity codes. 18 The Indian Oscar, editorial, Filmfare 3 (5), 5 March The First Awards, editorial, Filmfare 3 (7), 2 April Bimal Roy, The Third Year of State Awards, Filmfare 5 (21), 12 October 1956, Third Annual State Awards, editorial, ibid.

25 Introduction 7 work focused on psychological and behavioural portraits in traditional family settings derived from Bengali novels. His emblematic status then suggests a convergence between state and industrial reform in promoting narratively integrated realist work. Suggestively, Satyajit Ray never fully endorsed Roy s work, perhaps because it relied so heavily on melodramatic elements. These ranged from a system of typage evident in Do Bigha Zameen, to the deployment of a heightened pathos and a markedly artificial studio mise-en-scène in many of his films of family reform. Satyajit Ray himself remained the exemplary figure of the psychological realist mode, and for his sustained use of location shooting. This diversity of opinion casts the question of the cultural legitimacy of cinema, and its viability as a vehicle of cultural citizenship, into complicated perspective. Thus we have the priority given to classical and folk traditions, the evocation of Hollywood as a model for economic storytelling organization, financial stability and self-censorship, and an art cinema tradition that urged a more complex narrative causality and psychological realism. At root, I would argue that the illegitimacy of the mainstream cinema derived as much from state economic priorities as state cultural policy. The government was being called upon to assist substantially in stabilizing the film industry, but this would have meant large-scale financial outlays for production and complicated interventions in distribution and exhibition. 22 Traditional arts, on the other hand, required a more limited outlay, and were more controllable as cultural enterprise. While the industrial validity of the cinema remained in question, officials were nevertheless concerned about the impact of this autonomous, market-driven form on the mass audiences it congregated. So the government laid emphasis on licensing and regulation of both space and content, as embodied in the 1952 Cinematograph Act, and piggybacked on the cinema as an institution of mass publicness by making it compulsory to exhibit government-controlled newsreels and documentaries under the aegis of the Films Division The Film Enquiry Committee had conceived of a system of finance, based on government, producer, and public subscription contributions that would service industrial production as a whole. In this scheme distribution and exhibition were not factored in. However, the recommendations were not followed up, except in a very modest fashion, with the formation of the Film Finance Corporation which, in practice, only financed a few films. 23 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film; Madhava Prasad, The State in and

26 8 The Melodramatic Public In this sense the dominant form of cinema, while public and popular, nevertheless remained illegitimate. What was it being measured against? Without this being specified in any clear policy formulation, the Ray model of naturalism, psychological realism, and narrative integration provided the pertinent aspirational ideal. This itself was part of a complex context. Moinak Biswas has complicated this horizon by suggesting that the moment of Pather Panchali was part of an intricate array of cinematic developments. He stresses the diversity of realist practices at that conjuncture, and the importance of a new type of melodrama. The latter was characterized by the sophistication of its mise-en-scène of domestic interiors interlaced with psychological orientations for the spectator. 24 The bourgeois melodramas of Bengali cinema did not fare much better than the popular melodramas of Bombay when measured against the aspirational index identified with Ray s work, and it is only recently that they have received critical attention. However, the illegitimacy of the cinema was primarily associated with popular rather than bourgeois forms. What was at issue, and what the melodramatic publicness of the dominant commercial format confounded, was a certain ideal of spectatorial immersion in the narrative world. This was the ideal generated by an emergent art cinema public discourse available through film societies, magazines of film criticism, and the practice of Ray after The Thematics of Melodrama I have used the term melodrama several times now, and it is the thematic focus I have chosen to highlight. The subject of melodrama is one I have returned to over the years, initially motivating my PhD thesis about the 1950s Hindi cinema, and sustaining an interest in it right through to the past decade or so, during which much of the remarkable transformation in Indian cinema has taken place. Melodrama has arguably been one of the most debated cultural categories of Cinema, in Partha Chatterjee, The Wages of Freedom, Delhi, Oxford University Press, Moinak Biswas, Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema, PhD thesis, Monash University, The Calcutta Film Society was set up in 1947 by Ray and Chidananda Das Gupta. A number of journals emerged in its wake, including Indian Film Review and Indian Film Quarterly: a selection of their views is examined in ch. 2 below.

27 Introduction 9 in film studies over the last thirty-five years, from its first articulation in the early 1970s. At that time critics argued that American family melodramas and Douglas Sirk s films functioned subversively in relation to classical forms, a position subsequently critiqued by the excavation of melodrama s history in relationship to theatre, the novel, popular spectacle, and the emergent aesthetic hierarchies of the late nineteenth century. Established associations between melodrama and genres of affect, focusing on issues of loss, the suffering of the innocent, the importance of the family and the domestic sphere, and the centrality of women have been extended to accounts of its relevance to a number of different cultural contexts, mostly in relation to popular film cultures. Thus, apart from India, we have had two collections on Asian cinema which have argued for the importance of melodrama to the understanding of film cultures across the continent, including Indonesia, China, Japan, and India. Most recently, there has been a collection of essays on South Korean golden age melodrama of the 1950s and 1960s. In the recent past, some of the standard connotations of melodrama outlined above have been substantially challenged by a scholarship of American cinema invested in an empirical analysis of how the American film trade used melodrama. Here the term was used to refer to Manichaean thrillers, rather than domestic and family-centred narratives. As we will see, other scholars have used this empirical evidence to rather different ends. Instead of shifting the connotations of melodrama from weepies to thrillers, scholars such as Linda Williams argue that the prevalence of the term to describe most genres of American cinema suggest that the mode s Manichaean terms were characteristic of this cinema at large and across genres. In the process, she has challenged the existing codification of the American cinema as a classical cinema and therefore of a cinema governed by norms of balanced composition, invisible editing, and narrative harmony in contrast with melodrama and its mode of excess. Here, we may have come to a significant moment in which historical and filmcritical definitions stand in complicated counterpoint to each other, resulting in a substantial unsettling of previous usages, but without a self-evident direction resulting from the unearthing of new, or at least hitherto unacknowledged, information. I will deal with the problem of melodrama, and the apparent impasse around the history of its usage, in the first chapter of this book. But very briefly let me indicate my own approach. I came to the term

28 10 The Melodramatic Public primarily for its ability to describe and engage certain dimensions of the popular cinema I was analysing, dimensions which conform to the more conventional set of associations. These features included an emphasis on loss of family, of community, and the difficulties of achieving romantic fulfilment, and exhibited high contrivance in narrative mechanisms, for example of coincidence, as if insistently locking dramatis personae to a particular narrative universe. In this book I place emphasis on the importance of melodrama as a public-fictional form deriving from a recalibration of the relationship between public and private spheres which, most scholars would agree, is central to melodrama. The question of the public-fictional form emerges from a narrative structure which places great weight on public functions, including public expressivity in the co-ordination of action, speech, and performative gesture. The material comprising this book consists in the main of essays written over the past many years. They have been arranged to suggest the changing contexts within which melodrama has continued to function as a formal and public mechanism a mechanism of address in Indian popular cinema; but also to indicate the significant changes which have characterized the history of Indian film melodrama. Inevitably, such a thematic focus derives from retrospection, the process of giving a name to identify the main intellectual concerns which have animated a fairly diverse set of writings. This diversity has been determined by a shifting set of concerns within an evolving film studies agenda for India and South Asia. 3. The Shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India While primarily engaged with popular Hindi cinema, the present book also refers to work coming out of Pune, Calcutta, Lahore, and Madras, and documentary and art film practices as well. Prominent amongst the issues I take up include questions of film form, addressing the peculiarity of entertainment cinema in India, its combination of narrative and performance sequences, and the way this contrasted with other models of filmmaking, especially Hollywood cinema. My overall approach has been invested in thinking about how the cinema addresses spectators by drawing upon culturally intelligible narrative and performance codes, along with their adaptation and even outright unsettling by inducting new features in the image and soundtrack, and in techniques for the construction of subjectivity.

29 Introduction 11 This approach is part of a general ambition to understand the social and political significance of cinema. In the Indian context, the political frame has inevitably meant an engagement with questions of colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial history, and has tended to be dominated by discussions about the place of cinema in the discourses, policies, and practices relating to questions of nationhood and citizenship. The latter focus derived from the way fields such as film and cultural studies developed in close association with post-colonial political theory. This disciplinary history of the field has produced fairly intense debates, and much of the material presented here emerges from that context. I would now argue that this particular entanglement between film and political theory may have led to too quick a reading of political structures onto filmic imaginaries and practices, rather than allowing the political to emerge from the specificity of the cinema as a rather distinctive mode of experience in the twentieth century. I have avoided revising the essays (except on occasion to modify awkward writing), as they capture this overall pattern of discussion, where cinema history has been framed through the lens of political theory. Through short section introductions I have signposted certain conceptual problems arising from this short-circuit between film and politics, problems that the articles both represent and, hopefully, problematize. Such alterations in approach also parallel and contribute to recent discipline shifts that highlight the question of audiences and the public world generated around, behind, or parallel to cinema, rather than too narrowly focus on textually specific forms of address. These worlds include, of course, the world of reception, how people see and understand movies, and the types of emotional and even bodily impact such a cultural form cultivates. The field of reception comes into focus in this collection in several places, including a specialist reception deriving from the intellectual film culture of an emerging art cinema public in the 1950s (chapter 2); the more general and politically charged public response available through newspapers and periodicals centred on the film Bombay by Mani Rathnam (1995) in chapter 7; and an engagement with the point of exhibition, the way in which the space of the cinema, its formats (multiplex/cineplex) and its involvement with other forms of consumption define its cultural functions in the era of globalization (chapters 10 and 11). Much of this deals with reception as it is culled from reading print materials, but contemporary scholarly practices have highlighted

30 12 The Melodramatic Public other rich possibilities, as in ethnographies of the cinema space, of everyday practices at the cinema hall, and the life histories which flow into film production and exhibition. Further, even in terms of imaginative involvement with the worlds the cinema calls upon and represents, film studies has started moving away from film spectator relationships to the vista opened by other realms of image- and soundbased engagement. These include music and dialogue, for long staple attractions and separable units of audience appeal relayed through gramophone, radio shows, cassettes, and CDs, and now through the internet; and fashion photography, costume, interior design, and advertising in terms of visual practices. Further, in an exciting initiative, the worlds of cinema and city have opened up a complex series of intersecting views and spatial imaginations, drawing on set design and location shooting, urban planning and reconstruction, photojournalism, and urban spatial practice. To this world of reception and imaginative engagement of film publics we may add the focus on ethnography of the film industry, of how films are made in terms of a thickness of description of component practices. These include finance, techniques and technologies, music, choreography and acting, and all of this both in terms of the overall film product, and as an aspect of everyday practice in the film industry. 26 This rich new range of research possibilities poses a challenge to how we think of the meaning of cinema. My sense is that there will be a period of recalibration, after which a series of possible theoretical directions will emerge. While I am certainly excited by these possibilities, and have drawn on this material in mapping contemporary film cultures in the final section of this book, I should stress that my particular agenda retains film interpretation, including interpretation of the individual film, as a crucial component of film studies. However modified, such an approach still seeks its energies from a critical and interpretive strategy that places considerable weight on what we can see on-screen. In crucial ways, interpretation is the form through which the cinema has circulated in public discourse, both of an intellectual and popular sort. It has also been an important way of discussing the relationship of sound, image, and narrative to social, cultural, and political imaginaries. Let me put it this way. As an object of the 26 For further exploration of these methods, see especially the Conclusion and Afterword to this book.

31 Introduction 13 human sciences, film continues to require greater precisions of delineation as to what its history, sociology, and economics is about; and in turn, how film, and other audio-visual technologies, have crucially structured the nature of human social organization, perception, and action. Such precision is crucial, but it is exactly through interpretation, and the bid of interpretive activity to connect different zones of human life, that the human sciences provide the imaginative engagement to pursue specific explorations, and frame empirical research through a more ambitious design. To structure this selection, my introductory chapter starts with a response to melodrama studies as the field has evolved, by plotting a sense of transformative logics observable in a variety of contexts, in order that scholarship reconsider the discussion even for its European and American context. This mapping of discussion about melodrama provides a frame with which to look at the conceptual articles which follow in Part I. I had no hesitation devoting substantial space to the Euro-American debate, and making an intervention in it for, though this book is on Indian cinema, I believe it is in the nature of the cinema as a highly dynamic cultural form that we cannot afford to analyse it in solely national terms. Further, my personal engagement with film as research object and cinephiliac pleasure inclines me to engage the diversity of world cinema. In my cinephiliac imagination, these other cinemas are mine as much as Indian cinema is mine. The articles in Part I consider stylistic parameters of the popular cinema, and also provisional ways of figuring the cultural and political subjectivity solicited by the melodramatic mode of its spectator in the context of Indian cinema. The introductory chapter offers a distance from some of the ways of framing spectatorship, for example around the argument that collective subjects were engaged through the melodramatic mode of address. This tended to emerge from that shortcircuiting of the political and cinematic that I had referred to, where considerable debate in political theory has problematized the idea of the individual citizen-subject, arguing it is communities that have been political actors and subjects in Indian history and politics. As the reader will notice, I have now tried to control such an assertion whose value for Indian politics as much as for Indian cinema needs to be reviewed, I would suggest by drawing upon the idea of a public form of address. This suggests a form which requires us to engage with various digits of representation, which include social typage, social

32 14 The Melodramatic Public forms, individual characterization, within the format of an encompassing space, that of the public which may contain all these different registers. Chapter 4 is strategically positioned in this revision of my argument about modes of address. It considers the way cinema has addressed the relationship between spectatorship and community in the context of a sociological and political imagination of caste and religious identities. In the process, I seek to create a bridge between earlier and later constructions by focusing the problem of imaginary direct address and the constitution of the public as a component or element of the fictional field. The opening chapter and first part of the book also seek to define melodrama more precisely in relation to the popular. I argue that melodrama and the popular are not coterminous, and further suggest that the popular may be composed of other forms. I reflect here on the possibilities of non-melodramatic modes, both within the popular, and outside it. This is by considering melodrama s standard other, realism, and how it worked in the Indian context, referring to the specific case of Satyajit Ray s work in the Apu trilogy and the idea of a modernist public. Later, in the final part of the book, I also consider the independent documentary form of the 1990s as another instance to think about melodramatic and non-melodramatic forms of representation and address in Indian cinema. Melodramatic publicness also provides a crucial frame within which to consider the body of Tamil films in the 1990s which sought to reframe our imagination of the South s relationship to the pan- Indian nation. In Part II the romance of the couple appears in these films in relation to a Tamil national form that has, since Indian Independence, always appeared to complicate ideas of Indian nationhood, but now appears subject to revision. The couple in a new modernized avatar becomes a vehicle for this narration, and also highlights issues of privacy and publicness in terms of the way characters and situations are articulated via identities of region and community. While melodrama thus provides the main line of investigation in the way the articles have been selected, much of this discussion is relayed through the shifting agenda of film studies I have outlined. So, Part II is introduced through an engagement with the history of film under colonial, national, and globalized formations. I consider the issue of cinema and nationhood as it emerged around the question

33 Introduction 15 of the territoriality of cinema, the way film circulated in the subcontinent and beyond, and as a way of understanding the specific interventions of Mani Rathnam, Kamalahasan, and others in arguing for a changed relationship between Tamilnadu and India. Finally, in the last section of the book I focus on the relationship between cinema and the city. 27 This has been an important thematic and representational dimension of the cinema, involving, in the contemporary period, a significant working over of melodramatic procedures. While we witness a certain persistence of older symbolic structures, even if this is tied up with new ambitions for example the manoeuvring of traditional and family-based identifications into new globalized vistas and subjectivities we also witness the emergence of new articulations of the public and the private in a new roster of genre cinema. If the city has provided the cinematic stage for such revisions of form, it has also been a crucial material space in which institutional changes to negotiate globalization have emerged. This has involved the development of the mall-multiplex as a new site of consumption, with a new genre system targeting niche audiences. And it has produced digitized distribution and delivery, as films circulate in informal markets through VCDs and DVDs, and in turn become objects in a contest around intellectual property. In the process, not only consumption and reception but production have undergone significant changes, with the emergence of digitally-based economies that are singularly local in their catchment area of personnel and audiences. At the same time the cinema as a substantial cultural and economic institution appears to have acquired unparalleled value for a host of other enterprises, signalling a new function that is at once spectacular and glamorous, but also dispersed across a series of practices. 27 Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City; Preben Kaarsholm, ed., Cityflicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, Kolkata, Seagull Books, 2004.

34 1 The Melodramatic Public It has now been a long while since the conventional, pejorative connotations of melodrama have been unsettled. In popular critical parlance the word is still used to dismiss films for contrivance, a reduction of the universe into simplistic moral bipolarity, and excessiveness of speech, gesture, and setting. Much of this is retailed from a viewpoint that places value on the plausible, the realist, and the psychological in storytelling. In European and American theatrical and film studies the common sense use of the term has been substantially challenged by a rich tradition of historical excavation and cultural analysis. I do not want to retrace the archaeology of melodrama as it has already been laid out in great detail. My purpose here is to understand and situate the continued recognizability of many of the features of an apparently archaic narrative, performative, and expressive design in the cinema of the modern and even contemporary post-colonial world. My exploration here is consciously pitted against a historicist mode of reasoning in which the post-colonial world inevitably moves, stage by stage, through the itinerary plotted by forerunners in Europe and America. More precisely, my concern is with a certain public dimension to melodrama as a fictional form, in terms of how character is constituted publicly, and the implications such a publicness has for the way film audiences are addressed. I will consider the narrative conditions which allow for articulation of melodrama as a dynamic, expressive vehicle of meaning; in particular, the articulation of personalized contexts of home, family, and other fields of primary attachment, with public registers. In my understanding, the public field is constituted both by formal and informal structures of power, justice, social identity, and social mobility. In my premise this relationship provides for the expressive energies of the form, and is differently calibrated and organized in specific historical and political circumstances.

35 The Melodramatic Public 17 While the ultimate focus of this book is on the question of melodrama in the Indian context, I essay a consideration of melodramatic forms, and the modes of criticism which have addressed them, from a multi-sited perspective, and my analysis turns back on the debate in Europe and America from the viewpoint offered by other experiences. This entails an exploration of the particular articulation of public and private domains which found the melodramatic mode, the problem of subjectivity framed by melodrama, and the status of Hollywood in relation to melodrama and to world cinema. Hollywood remains important to this discussion for, while Indian cinema proved remarkably ascendant in its home market, Hollywood remained a critical reference point for thinking about industrial models and narrative form. I. DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIES 1. The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American Theatre and Cinema The recent history of melodrama criticism and theory in Europe and the USA has moved away from some of the assumptions about melodrama generated both by conventional critics emphasizing the low status of melodrama, and by an academic-critical scholarship of the 1970s informed by feminist, radical psychoanalytical, and Brechtian orientations. Both conventional criticism and academic-critical scholarship seemed to share the view that melodrama was a strongly emotional narrative form centred on domestic subjects. But Brechtian and psychoanalytical critics proceeded to interrogate family melodramas as texts which foregrounded the repressions of bourgeois society through contradictory narrative drives and expressive mise-en-scène. Feminist criticism of the period also analysed melodrama s avowed appeal to female audiences to explore gendered subjectivity and women s culture in a patriarchal society. 1 Recent currents, however, have stressed that melodrama s historical function exceeds any such segmentation of narrative worlds, their modes of engagement, and address to audiences. This more encompassing register was already mapped in the classic inaugural texts of melodrama criticism. Taking the influential work of 1 The debates on melodrama in Euro-American cinema are excellently documented in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman s Film, London, British Film Institute, 1987.

36 18 The Melodramatic Public Peter Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser as a starting point, we may identify certain crucial dimensions in the exploration of melodrama as a pervasive narrative and performative culture. 2 These relate to questions of meaning, form, and style, and derive from a particular way of addressing transformations in social, political, and cultural life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brooks argued that melodrama as a form addressed the fundamental unsettling of the sacred and of socio-political hierarchies, especially after the French Revolution. The theatrical melodrama of the period generated a mode of excess involving an emphasis on gesture, expressionist mise-en-scène, and a dramaturgy of coincidence and peripeteia. It also deployed a realist mise-en-scène in its procedures, quite in contrast to the subsequent hierarchy that was instituted between melodrama and realism in terms of aesthetic value. Melodrama s quest for truth used the real as a stage for its metaphysical operations, deploying expressionist means to plunge below the surface of things. In Brooks s argument, this allowed for the exposure of the moral occult, the realm in which spiritual values had become obscured. Innocence and suffering framed a new world in which the personality emerged as the crucial vehicle of ethical and experiential truth. Posed here as a critical dimension in the emergence of modern social and cultural forms, melodrama was defined by ambivalence, pitched at the junction between the old and the new, and often nostalgically evoked past harmonies to resolve the travails of its characters, even as it came to be associated with a struggle against the old order. If Brooks emphasized the epochal transformation of social worlds, gestural economies, and expressionist means, Elsaesser tracked the genealogy of the form to popular storytelling with musical accompaniment such as street ballads, highlighting the way music and voice built a repetitive, up-and-down pattern to the relaying of stories, and sometimes in dissonant counterpoint to story content. Sentimental novels, romantic fiction, and theatrical melodrama built on this heritage to chart a historic transformation related to different phases of the bourgeoisie s anti-absolutist struggles. Elsaesser s argument also emphasized the question of the personality in melodrama s tendency to personalize public and political conflicts. This was a personality 2 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, New York, Columbia University Press, 1976; Thomas Elsaesser, Tales of Sound and Fury, Monogram 4, 1972, reprinted in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is,

37 The Melodramatic Public 19 rendered in non-psychologized ways, a figure of conventionalized expressivity. Bourgeois stability rendered the form vacuous and escapist, but it was periodically resuscitated in creative engagement with the mapping of social conflicts at key moments, and through a variety of forms such as the novel of social criticism and ethical contest in Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. In all of this Elsaesser s primary entry point was not the plot, but form and style. Melodrama deployed rhythms of engagement, and rendered dialogue and spatial features in stylized ways that composed them as scenic effects instead of semantic units. Abrupt reversals in dramaturgical calibration would subject ecstatic upward movements in character expectations to vertiginous falls. And through narrational mechanisms of pathos and irony, melodrama offered audiences knowledge exceeding diegetic characters. The sophisticated American family melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s deployed these features with greater or lesser self-consciousness to explore dissonances in their story worlds, generating social frameworks rather than personalized registers to understand the world of the fiction, and to unravel the ideologies of family sentiment, individual self-advancement, and consumer complacency in post-war US life. These works in particular invited a specifically psychoanalytic account of the way repressed feelings and narrative undercurrents worked through condensation and displacement into the very textures of filmic construction. This remarkable essay provided us with a sense of historical dynamics, and showed how style, form, and spectator positioning were critical to the axis of melodramatic engagement. It also implicitly charted a process of segmentation whereby the world of the family became the privileged sphere of melodramatic form. It placed American film melodrama within a broader formulation that American cinema was defined by spectacle and drama, and channelled visceral and psychic energies into different genre formats. Elsaesser differentiated male action films from the family film, though not explicitly on the ground of a gendered differentiation of audience address and reception. Christine Gledhill s wonderful mapping of the melodramatic field built on the formulations of Brooks, Elsaesser, and theatre history to renew links between the cinema and its prehistory in theatre and public spectacle. 3 She provided a rich description of new technologies 3 Christine Gledhill, The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation, in Home is Where the Heart Is, 5 39.

38 20 The Melodramatic Public of visualization, as in scene shifting, the importance of a culture of the pictorial, and of performative cultures such as pantomime and acrobatics in the sensory universe drawn on and contributed to by melodrama in its emphasis on gesture, iconography, and spectacle. The world of the nineteenth century came to be pervaded by melodramatic discourse relayed through church sermons, parliamentary speeches, tabloid literature, and the popular press. And melodrama dynamically reconstituted itself, generating new moral, visceral, and affective meaning from the ground produced by realist discourse and representation. Here, and in a sustained revision of earlier film criticism, she argued that melodrama was a generalized mode of cinematic narration: aesthetic, cultural, and ideological features coalesce into a modality which organizes the disparate sensory phenomena, experiences, and contradictions of a newly emerging secular and atomizing society in visceral, affective and morally explanatory terms... the notion of modality, like register in socio-linguistics, defines a specific mode of aesthetic articulation adaptable across a range of genres, across decades, and across national cultures. It provides the genre system with a mechanism of double articulation, capable of generating specific and distinctively different generic formulae in particular historical conjunctures, while also providing a medium of interchange and overlap between genres Melodrama as Generalized Mode of Cinematic Narration This formulation, attentive to the history of melodrama s imbrication in a post-sacred and modernizing society, also constituted a specifically feminist intervention. For, by arguing that melodrama was used extensively across genres, Gledhill contested the view that it applied only to women s film, family melodramas, and female audiences. This was an association which critics had used to dismiss both melodrama and women s film. In a radical variant, critics who read Brechtian inflexions and ironic forms of spectator address in family melodramas, implicitly sidelined (the dominantly female) spectators who took the address straight. One source of evidence for this 4 Christine Gledhill, Rethinking Genre, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds, Reinventing Film Studies, London, Edward Arnold, 2000, (228 9).

39 The Melodramatic Public 21 formulation was the trade press, in which the term was used to describe a wide variety of genres. 5 Such empirical analysis has, however, been used to make rather different points. Steve Neale, for example, argued that melodrama or meller was commonly used to describe thrillers, noted that the category family melodrama was never used, and that the women s film was commonly considered drama relying on superior literary values rather than melodrama. In practice, most scholarship on melodrama has used such information to identify the nature of the attractions associated with the form, rather than legislate which genres should be considered melodramatic. 6 Thus even Neale, having questioned existing film studies approaches on the basis of the print archive, goes on to consider how melodrama as thriller format can be reconciled with the practice of referring to women s films and family-centred dramas as melodrama--. To my mind, the critical issue for Euro-American studies has been to understand the historical mutation of a mode defined by high stylization, expressionist methods, moral considerations, and affective engagement. Ben Singer s research into early US cinema has shown how melodrama was used to describe films of serial action, and plots this within the dynamics of shock and sensation of a sensorium composed of the accelerated pace of vehicular transportation, and an urban vista of dazzling electronic signage. 7 But how, if at all, did meanings of melodrama transmute in the wake of the normalization of such experience? Neale highlights two terms to provide a bridge for this transformation, that of sensational melodrama and modified melodrama. Sensational melodramas were used in theatrical parlance to describe plays which, along with the more generalized use of spectacle, 5 The industry recognized this pervasive melodramatic base in its exhibition categories western melodrama, crime melodrama, sex melodrama, backwoods melodrama, romantic melodrama, and so on. Gledhill, The Melodramatic Field, ibid., 35. Linda Williams echoes this observation by pointing to how archivists and cataloguers, as represented by the AFI Catalog of Features, , and again in , use melodrama extensively, referring to stunt, society, mystery, rural, action, crook, underworld, comedy and, in the later catalogue, science fiction melodrama. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, 314, n Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London, Routledge, Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001, also notes the use of melodrama for the action serial in the early period of American cinema.

40 22 The Melodramatic Public could showcase assertive female characters involved in roles of action and villainy. Neale speculated that such sensational forms provided a pathway to the domestic and women s films. 8 While offering this concession to feminist melodrama criticism of the earlier period, Neale appeared to assign the original codification overriding relevance. The thriller format, founded on a manichaean drive pitting good against evil, remained central to his formulations and allowed the inclusion of a large number of film genres in the melodrama rubric. To reconcile these two trends within the historical itinerary of melodrama, he follows Michael Wood in bifurcating the mode into melodramas of action and melodramas of passion. 9 The second term, that of modified melodrama, suggests a point of convergence amongst different bids to argue for the generalized function of melodrama in Hollywood cinema. Modifications took place in melodrama once plays entered middle-class theatres, where the canons of taste and aesthetic discrimination required the subordination of sensational attractions to the protocols of narrative causality. 10 We may put alongside this formulation two more. The first is Gledhill s argument that the melodramatic mode continues to stage itself on 8 Sensation melodrama is a rather loose category, encompassing... plays... which are essentially domestic and familial in character and setting and [others]... which were marked by the spectacular staging of spectacular events avalanches, chariot races, train wrecks and the like. One of the things that united them, though, was... an assertive model of femininity [including]... complex female villains... [and] vigorous heroines... What this suggests is that certain strands of sensation melodrama fed into the woman s film while others fed into the serial queen films of the kind discussed by Singer. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, Melodramas of action are the manichaean thriller format, placing secondary emphasis on the love interest, whereas in melodramas of passion the concern is not with the external dynamic of action but with the internal traumas of passion. Michael Wood, Melodrama and the American Cinema, Movie 29/30, 1982, 2 38 (17), quoted in Neale, See Neale, Also: melodrama did not confine itself to the popular theatre, and from this circumstance arises much of the confusion... as to what melodrama is and what it isn t. It spilled over into the theatre of the middle classes... [and] underwent a gradual change... The heart became the target of playwrights rather than the nervous system, and firearms and the representation of convulsions of nature yielded the center of the stage to high-voltage emotionalism, examination of soul-states, and the observation of manners. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, , Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1968, xv, quoted in Neale, 199.

41 The Melodramatic Public 23 the new ground generated by the movement of realist discourse. Gledhill has subsequently specified this as a cultural rather than aesthetic theorization of realism, as a verisimilitude derived from changing social consensus and contest about what is real or plausible. The second is Linda Williams formulation that the conventional distribution of pathos and action between female and male genres needs to be complicated: for all genres are composed of elements of pathos and action, and organized to facilitate a shared melodramatic movement between the pathos of innocence oppressed and misrecognized, and the (generically varied) actions which would render virtue visible and publicly redeemable. I group this problem of modified melodrama, melodrama s (culturally verisimilar) calibration to realism, and melodrama as a system for integrating pathos and action to highlight a particular way in which melodrama, rather than being a system of excess, increasingly appears to acquire the status of a highly adaptable normative system. In my reading, to remain a productive analytical category, melodrama has to enact a large-scale gesture towards the moral domain based on its engagement with a situation of victimhood. 11 While both Williams and Neale would say that the pathos of this condition is generally available across genres, the problem is dramatized if we contrast the situations of powerlessness in action melodramas with those of passion melodramas. To cite an action melodrama referred to by Neale, how can we club the hero of the action film Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), whose powerlessness derives from the overwhelming odds he faces in dealing with the villains, 12 with, say, the male protagonist of Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1957), haunted by fears of impotence, and 11 Neale, Genre and Hollywood, Thomas Elsaesser has interpreted the possibility of various underlying symbolic meanings in the hero s itinerary, including the need to reassert an American, working class, male authority in the face of challenges posed by globalization and an upwardly mobile wife. Following the logic of exploring the spectrum of hermeneutic possibilities offered by evolving methodologies in film studies, Elsaesser keeps his parameters of analysis to those of classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema. If we were to expand the parameters of interpretation, I would suggest that while noting an underlying scenario of melodramatic subjection, the film is overwhelmingly of the manichaean thriller format, engaging audiences through its classical and genre address. See Thomas Elsaesser, Classical/Post-Classical Narrative, ch. 2 in Warren Buckland and Thomas Elsaesser, eds, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis, London, Edward Arnold, 2004.

42 24 The Melodramatic Public the heroine of Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948), who can only bare posthumous epistolary witness to her lover s failure to recognize her? The peculiar intensity of scenarios of powerlessness provided by the last two cases seems to sit rather uncomfortably with the fleeting and, indeed, formulaic vulnerability of the hero of many action films. The intensity of the socially subjugated melodramatic antagonist appears critical, and is often charged by a powerful symbolic blockage. It is as if the narration solicits an intensity of the spectator s investment in the difficulty that assails those lacking power, deprived of a voice, and assailed by doubt as to the possibilities of ethical meaning and individual and social fulfilment in the world presented to us by the fiction. Here I would make the distinction between melodrama as manichaean thriller, and melodrama as a mode of affective engagement with individual and social subjection. While the first allows for a fairly broad range of genres to be included under the melodrama rubric, including action genres, the latter brings to bear a sense of intractable social and historical blockage and a more sustained engagement with victimized subjectivity. 13 Crucial to such a narrative architecture is a space of attachment, most commonly the home, which acts on and is acted on by spaces outside it, in particular the public sphere of power, justice, and a more fluid set of identities based on social and spatial mobility. While the space may in practice be relocated, melodrama s ambiguous relationship to time and historical change invariably pulls protagonists towards memories and desires attached to earlier periods and places. It is the relationship between this space and others which generates the particular excess and formal energy which we associate with melodrama. Partially echoing Gledhill s suggestive formulation about melodrama as modality, I would argue that such a modality works itself through different genres to reveal points of narrative blockage, 13 This is not to say that the action film cannot produce a sustained emphasis on victimhood, and where it does the release into action-based solutions may be much more complicated. In the first of the Rambo films, First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), mentioned by Neale alongside the Die Hard series (Neale, Genre and Hollywood, 198) the film pursues a sustained scenario of male humiliation and culminates in a hysterical form of action. A small-town community despises the returning war veteran as a sign of national failure and ignominy, and as potential hoodlum: the community is no longer a space of belonging but a vehicle of aggression. Here, Neale is right to emphasize that there is no inherent correlation between powerlessness, passivity and gender, but he fails to grasp the structural centrality of powerlessness and passivity in the melodramatic mode.

43 The Melodramatic Public 25 rather than offer a dominant mode of narrative organization in the American cinema. In the case of the women s film and the family melodrama, the melodramatic mode comes to be coeval with genre structures which access public levels only in order to plot their implosion within the orbit of the home. But there are significant occasions when melodrama moves beyond the home to assume a larger figurative register, articulating its historical vocation to draw out the affective links between different levels of experience in public ways. Here the question of melodrama s calibration of sensation and affect remain crucial, but the pathways identified by Neale do not automatically provide an answer for how the form mutated to generically distribute its effects. We need to think of ways of considering textual transformations in American cinema that are alert not only to an overall architecture of cinematic form and subjectivity, as on the model of changes to classical Hollywood cinema, but also to track the different inflexions of subjectivity made available through genre. 14 I would suggest that the distribution of sense perception in narrative form and genre needs to be considered in terms of historical transformations in the relation between the private and the public, how these spheres continue to remain entangled, or are separated out, and the way such changes impact upon the distribution of sense perception within and between genres. Thus, the women s film, melodramas not so much of passion as inarticulate passion, often privilege the closeup as the site of a failed or fatally deferred recognition, mobilize the domestic interior as a space of lack but also of female companionship and solidarity, and deploy a temporality of unfulfilment. Thus both Neale and Williams have shown how the delay in possibilities of recognition of virtue and love provides for a welling of tears in the spectator when recognition is achieved or fatally delayed. 15 Much of these analyses devolve on a division of public and private, however 14 Here, Deleuze s formulation that there was a crisis of the movement image in the aftermath of the Second World War, resulting in the emergence of the affection image, caught in the interval between perception and action, is resonant with some of the issues posed by melodrama. Where his focus was on the emergence of neo-realism, the question of the affection image generates suggestive ties to the powerlessness/passivity registers of melodrama which, of course, have a longer and more popular history. Gilles Deleuze, On the Movement-image, in Deleuze, Negotiations: , New York, Columbia University Press, Steve Neale, Melodrama and Tears, Screen 27 (6), November December 1986, 6 23; Linda Williams, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Film Quarterly 44: 4, Summer 1991, 2 13.

44 26 The Melodramatic Public complicated such divisions prove to be. It will be my concern to consider how melodramatic form is structured in circumstances in which the public and private are not separated out, and even when they are, how mode of address and sensory organization seem to disavow such separation. 3. Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema Arguments that claim an overarching function for melodrama, especially Williams, implicitly or explicitly say that melodrama, rather than classical narrative cinema, provides a better description of American cinema. 16 I engage this as a conceptual debate which has ramifications for an agenda to develop a more globally defined investigation into how discourses and formal engagements with cinema, realism, and melodrama can be undertaken. In my reading, neither Williams nor Gledhill, both of whom argue the case for melodrama s more general significance, take on board the substantial research into classicism as a mode of production. Gledhill targets the classical realist texts as textual forms which reproduce bourgeois ideology because they implicate the spectator in a single viewpoint onto a coherent, hierarchically ordered representation of the world. 17 But classical Hollywood cinema, as presented in the work of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, was a mode of production, founded on a division of labour overseen by the requirements of continuity narrative. Editing, camera movement, lighting, and acoustic registers were organized to serve character-centred narrative causality. 18 Where the classical realist text was primarily a discursive construct, continuity cinema was a discursive and material formation that derived from industrial organization. Further, even in terms of textual characteristics, classical narration highlighted a distinctive set of protocols, composed of foreshadowing, dangling causes, deadlines, overlapping actions, parallel narration, all 16 It is time... to make a bolder claim: not that melodrama is a submerged, or embedded, tendency, or genre, within classical realism, but that it has more often itself been the dominant form of popular moving-picture narrative, whether on the nineteenth century stage, in twentieth century films or... in contemporary media events. Williams, Playing the Race Card, Gledhill, The Melodramatic Field, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

45 The Melodramatic Public 27 of which serve to test and subject characters to a transformative arc. Even if such arguments have been pressed to an excessive degree in asserting the continued importance of classicism, and even in genres such as the contemporary action spectacle, Hollywood as key industrial site for the production of classical cinema continues to be relevant not only for what it explains locally, but how other filmmaking countries perceived Hollywood. 19 Arguably, a revisionist melodrama criticism s privileging of melodrama over classicism tends to make melodrama into classical cinema. 20 This is rendered through the paradigm of modified melodrama, subordinating melodramatic effects to narrative causality, a formulation echoed in turn by Williams argument that Hollywood-as-melodrama integrates pathos and action across genres. Here, it seems to me, Williams reduces melodrama to a linear form in her overall theorization, quite in contrast to her complex analysis of specific cultural works For Bordwell s most recent writings about classical cinema and its persistence, see How Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley, University of California Press, Rick Altman has also argued for the importance of melodrama within classic narrative cinema. However, while stressing the presence of melodramatic types of characterization, forms of spectacle, and excess in Hollywood cinema, he does not finally deny the status of classicism in defining the overall form. Rick Altman, Dickens, Griffith and Film Theory Today, South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (2), 1989, ; rpnt in Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, Durham, Duke University Press, Williams has produced a series of insightful explorations of specific melodramas of race as these traverse different textual and performative contexts, including stage, cinema, and print cultures. Drawing on Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin and narratives which contest it, she sets out a pattern of alternating Tom and anti-tom narratives. In the first, public empathy is solicited for the black man oppressed by the white exploiter while its inversion sees a white American nationalism canvassed by portraying the black as a bestial figure who threatens the virtue of the white woman. These stand in contrast to the linearity of the overall formulation because they move amongst the melodramatic registers of home space of innocence and of the past and those of the public, the political, and the historical through complex patterns of public intervention, disruption, displacement, and return. To take the example of her wonderful analysis of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Williams shows how the melodramatic space of innocence, the plantation house at Tara, is substantially displaced by the civil war. Its very location, familial contents, and racial attributes are subject to change, with the heroine Scarlett O Hara taking over its relocated site, and developing attributes derived from the labouring black housemaid and worker, and, in her resonance, inducting the features of the 1920s and 1930s flapper and

46 28 The Melodramatic Public To emphasize Hollywood s position in instituting the paradigm of continuity cinema is not meant to suggest that classicism exhausts the range of Hollywood s practices, or that it is able to account for the differentiated way Hollywood films move into the world market. I will come back to arguments complicating Hollywood without jettisoning the classical rubric later. 4. The Post-Colonial Question: Melodrama vs Realism The problems I face in these formulations about melodrama are cast into relief when we refer to discourses about Hollywood and melodrama within a global cultural economy. To start addressing this problem, let me shift into what I will refer to as a post-colonial exploration. This subjects the construction of difference, whether between societies, cultural forms, or the use of technologies, to a relationship of power, between metropolis and colony, Western centre and colonial margin that persisted with the emergence of nation-states after the Second World War. Matsushiro Yoshimoto poses this as a sense of lack which animates new nations, a sense that we are always going to be unable to catch up with those who were the original creators of modernity. Where in other cases the colonial context was critical, in the situation Yoshimoto analyses it was the history of Japanese militarism and feudal forms that constituted the debilitating heritage, one whose axis shifted with military defeat and the American occupation. This only further complicated the situation, in that even notions of antifeudalism and the constitution of the liberal modern subject, avowedly independent woman of the world into her persona. And yet there is a relentless return and reinvocation of the space of origins, the melodramatic imagination serving up an intractable temporal blockage, while also providing an image of harmonious (and hierarchical) inclusiveness for a mutli-race projection of the nation on the eve of the Second World War. Rather than linear resolution of the travails of innocence, Williams here shows how a melodramatic imaginary insistently highlights a demand for the security of the unchanged and invariant in its accessing of modern disruptions. Further, it also gestures to the importance of the public register, the play of national history, war, and even new forms of public investment (from plantation economy to lumber factory) in articulating melodrama as a form driven by visceral disruption. There is a salutary engagement here with the public level of the architecture of melodramatic forms, a feature often left inadequately explored by the priority given to the private realm. See Williams, Playing the Race Card.

47 The Melodramatic Public 29 self-determining in her attributes, were contaminated by an imposed modernity. For Yoshimoto, melodrama provided a crucial reference point for this sense of incapacitation, as a form generating an intersection between modern and pre-modern forms in its cultural connotations. In opposing melodrama, he argued, Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s tended to be imprisoned within mimicry of the modern/premodern, realist vs melodramatic divide in their bid to create a modern cinema. 22 Thus, whatever the general and culturally specific ways in which melodrama works, it does this within a geopolitical situation of power, one which has ramifications for the nature and dynamic of cultural forms and practices. This line of enquiry resonates with Eunsun Cho s analysis of The Stray Bullet (Yu Hyun-Mok, 1960), a key work of the Korean cinema. Set in South Korea after the division of the country, the film relates a story of a diverse group of siblings: a battle-scarred war veteran, a struggling bank clerk, and a woman who takes to prostituting herself to American soldiers. Often seen as an icon of cinematic realism, in Cho s analysis The Stray Bullet combines American genre conventions, fragmented story lines, and melodramatic techniques to frame and punctuate its heightened use of a realist mise-en-scène of city spaces, bars, teashops, tramways, streets. Cho argues that the film uses American genres such as the heist film, common in Korean mainstream cinema of the time, as a kind of deliberately failed mimicry that dramatizes the situation of masculine ruin and distances itself from American political and cultural codes. A melodramatic situation of victimhood takes the ruined war veteran as its primary focus, displaying men, their 22 Yoshimoto s analysis deploys the idea of melodrama to capture moments of sudden irruptive force that break through in the narrativization of social and political transformation, as in the manner of a flashback which suddenly presents characters in a different historical light than otherwise available in the main narrative axis. This is a Benjaminian history in which the past surges up at a moment of danger, the point at which it appears threatened with the spectre of extinction. The argument otherwise skirts substantial analysis of melodrama in Japanese cinema, and chooses to dwell on a figure such as Ozu who, through his attention to form, is taken by Yoshimoto as an exemplar of melodramatic deconstruction. The polemical edge of the piece also takes us away from any concrete analysis of the melodrama/realism opposition, something which melodrama criticism invariably complicates. Matsushiro Yoshimoto, Melodrama, Postmodernism and Japanese Cinema, in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama in Asian Cinema, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993,

48 30 The Melodramatic Public wounds, physical mutilation, and humiliation. Overwhelming family responsibilities, low income, and a deadening office routine also grinds down the war veteran s diligent elder brother, the bank clerk. Suggestively, one of the figures who appears to escape this victim scenario is their sister. At first she is caught within the pathos of a love unfulfilled because her crippled ex-soldier boyfriend has lost all belief in himself. She falls into prostitution for the American occupation forces, and when her boyfriend sees her propositioning a soldier the shock of recognition of the truth leads to his complete disappearance from the narrative. The result is the emergence of hard-edged features in the woman, perhaps signalling the supplanting of economies of lack and of longing by a reality orientation. In a modernist intervention, the household to which the family has been forcibly removed from the north, is likened to a prison, shots framed to interrupt perspective by highlighting barred surfaces, a feature given acoustic corroboration by the recurrent wail of the demented, bedridden mother, Let s leave! Home is something that has been left behind, the present habitation and the destinies of various family members only asserting the impossibility of any happiness. 23 Here, The Stray Bullet echoes something of the concerns of another body of work on partitioned lives, that of the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak. He took the Partition of India as his main subject, and inevitably turned to the effects of this division on the dislocations of families. However, while Ghatak also drew upon and framed realist codes through a Manichaean, melodramatic method, he invariably turned to the sedimented, mythic resonances of characters, narrative spaces, and musical references to generate a culturally self-conscious interrogation of modern experience. 24 Both of these instances would be part of the modernist end of the post-colonial spectrum, posed at a distance from mainstream methods. And yet they point to the centrality of the family melodrama that was characteristic of mainstream popular formats. 23 Eunsun Cho, The Stray Bullet and the Crisis of Korean Masculinity, in Kathleen Mchugh and Nancy Abelman, eds, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2005, See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Bombay, Screen Unit, 1982; Moinak Biswas, Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002, ch. 6; Bhaskar Sarkar, Allegories of Partition: Nation and Partition in Indian Cinema, , PhD dissertation, California, University of Southern California, 1999, ch. 5.

49 The Melodramatic Public 31 How do we situate the move to make over American cinema tout court into melodrama in relation to the differently calibrated rendering of melodrama in post-colonial situations? If a modernist melodrama framed and distanced itself both from Hollywood and its own mainstream, it was more common to regard Hollywood as a cinematic form defined by some kind of transcendent universality, a marker of how stories should be told and audiences shaped. Further, and more complicatedly, the understanding of the post-colonial popular cinema s difference from Hollywood was also regarded as one of historical lag and cultural debility, and given the name melodrama. How do we pose one construction which argues that melodrama is the defining narrative mode of Hollywood cinema against another, where melodrama is considered locally as backward form, and in circumstances where Hollywood is associated with Western colonial or former colonial power and is often the dominant power in local film markets? Central here is the persistence of a melodramatic engagement which has often, if not always, been invested with ambiguities, nostalgic tendencies, and backwardness in response to the ideologies, if not the experience, of modernity. While nationalism may indeed frame such cultural drives in colonial and ex-colonial countries, as for example in the rejection of modern Western values of individualism, and the iconographies of speech, dress, and bodily disposition associated with westernized modernity, they cannot be reduced to such national narratives. For example, the framing of cultural specificities, as in the assertion of regional cultures, or deriving from specific traditions of worship, may sidestep and even contest a national framing of cultural heritages. Further, in terms of form, the medley of performance sequences and attractions that compose popular cinema emerged from a much wider geographical provenance, as I will show in Part II. 5. Deconstructing the Universal and the National On the other hand, a post-colonial criticism s tendency to argue that universal models of modernity may function in debilitating ways may invest too much in Hollywood s hegemonic functions. I briefly want to consider a deconstruction of the universal model based on the idea of a vernacular modernity. Miriam Hansen has used this category in a bid to complicate the

50 32 The Melodramatic Public norms-grounded theorization of classical Hollywood cinema by David Bordwell and others. While Hansen s critique targets the eternalism of Bordwell s cognitive theory model of spectatorship, which assigns spectators a foundational bio-mental disposition in making sense of narrative, it is more pointedly an exercise in highlighting Hollywood as a powerful and varied system for vernacular engagement rather than one defined by uniformity. Here Hollywood becomes a crucial component of modernity at large, its protean cinematic incarnation. It provided a narrative, performative, and sensory format which could attend to the register of the everyday, its idioms, linguistic practices, and iconographies. And its very ability to amalgamate a diversity of competing traditions, discourses, and interests on the domestic level may have accounted for at least some of the generalized appeal and robustness of Hollywood products abroad...in other words, by forging a mass market out of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous society (if often at the expense of racial others), American classical cinema had developed an idiom, or idioms, that travelled more easily than its national popular rivals. 25 Thus, in this account, instead of being a universal model for the abstraction of experience, Hollywood s significance lay in the multitude of specific cultural engagements it was able to generate. Hansen goes on to argue that Hollywood was not only an example of vernacular modernity, but also of modernism, for its films embodied and provided a vantage point for reflection on a technologized sensorium of speed, new senses of space and time, and a new orchestration of the body in genres such as slapstick, thrillers, horror movies, sci-fi, and weepies. Hollywood as vernacular modernity alerts us to different nodes or levels of film production and circuits of exhibition, mobilizing a varied fare for different types of audiences. Such a formulation would track Hollywood s differentiated itinerary both domestically and on a world scale. The patterns of cultural difference in world cinema would then shift from the register of national differences, and ideas of difference based on the advanced and the backward, the realist, and the melodramatic, into distinct circuits of film consumption. It could be argued that Hansen s formulation deconstructs Hollywood to the point where she has entirely displaced arguments about its hegemonic functions in 25 Miriam Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses, in Gledhill and Williams, eds, Reinventing Film Studies, (340).

51 The Melodramatic Public 33 world cinema culture and politics. This is clearly not her intention, for in her formulation Hollywood remains a dominant form within the political economy of world cinema, and, despite uneasiness, she continues to use the category classical rather than mainstream or national to describe it. Hansen reconciles the tension by suggesting that there were two types of Americanism observable in the reception of Hollywood films: one referring to an economy of narration and particular stylistic principles (classical scene dissection and continuity editing), that is classicism in the narrower, neo-classicist sense; the other celebrating a new sensibility, to be found in particular genres (especially low genres such as slapstick comedy, adventure serials and detective films, with their emphasis on action and attraction, speed and thrills), as well as in the star system and particular stars that is, aspects of the cinema experience that worked along with the classical paradigm but were also in tension with it, centrifugal to its principles. 26 As I suggest in the second part of this book, we need to look to several transnational vernaculars in considering the cinema experience rather than privilege Hollywood as its pre-eminent form. However, Hansen is right to stress the importance of Hollywood s variety and mutability, both domestically, and as it crossed into new film markets. A remapping of Hollywood s presence in this way would also complicate the map of national and regional film cultures. In the Indian case, Steve Hughes has analysed the importance of Hollywood action serials in the lower film exhibition circuits in the early period. 27 Even after Indian films came to dominate their own market, Hollywood had a differentiated presence, from the quality studio product running in A theatrical chains, through to the B film and action serial in the lower film circuits. Dubbed Hollywood films, mostly of the spectacular sort also achieved intermittent success. People involved in the distribution and exhibition of films were often indifferent to imperatives for forming a national industry and generating a national cinema, and were quick to exhibit foreign films if these could get them returns Miriam Hansen, Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism, Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn 2000, (13). 27 Stephen Hughes, The Pre-Phalke Era in South India: Reflections on the Formation of Film Audiences, South Indian Studies 2, 1996, ; and idem, House Full: Silent Film Genre, Exhibition and Audiences in South India, Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (1), 2006, For further reflections on the circulation of Hollywood films in colonial and post-colonial India, see my introduction to Part II, below.

52 34 The Melodramatic Public On the other hand, as I have noted, state cultural officials, a reformoriented film industry, opinion, and an art cinema discourse saw Hollywood as providing a particular model, both of industrial economy and storytelling styles, one they believed local popular cinema needed to emulate. II. THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA... once the all-important function of the cinema e.g., movement was grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and refinement of technique were only a matter of time. In India it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existing in time was generally misunderstood... Often by a queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action with melodrama... Satyajit Ray 29 Satyajit Ray s remarks on Indian popular cinema contrasted it unfavourably with an understanding of cinema based on movement, and in turn equated movement with a coherent dramatic pattern existing in time. The statement was representative of an aesthetic stance that contrasted the universal to the melodramatic, a contrast which, as I have suggested, has particular resonance within a discourse of national cinema which sought to develop critiques and practices which would properly modernize it. But how adequate is the category melodrama for describing Indian popular forms? 6. Pre-Cinema Histories Unlike the history of theatre and cinema in Western Europe and America, scholarship on Indian entertainment forms in the modern epoch has not as yet thrown light on the use of the term outside the type of high cultural use employed by Ray. Film studies scholarship has nevertheless used the term to describe practices seen to be analogous to the Euro-American experience. I believe it is applicable in this sense, but would first like to consider a more general, popular 29 Satyajit Ray, What is Wrong with Indian Films?, in Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, Bombay, Orient Longman, 1976, (21).

53 The Melodramatic Public 35 format within which melodrama appears as a significant structuring force. Here, a significant context for the cinema in India lies in the previous and parallel history of the theatre. While folk forms such as nautanki, tamasha, and lavani left their impress on the cinema and its musical sequences, I will take here the history of modern urban theatre as a reference point for the development of popular narrative and performance contexts in the cinema. In Bombay, and more generically, this form was often referred to as the Parsi theatre, associated with the initiatives of the Parsi community, an entrepreneurial group which developed close ties with colonial enterprise. While the Parsis were considered iconic figures of modernization in the western part of the country, the theatre initiated by the community from the midnineteenth century displayed a number of linkages with pre-modern narrative and performance traditions. Stories were drawn from the Persian Shahnama by Firdausi, and invariably used Gujarati as their medium. 30 The Persian dastaan tradition, an oral rather than spectacular form that was substantially reinvented in its movement from Persia to Lucknow, was also an important convention drawn on by the theatre. These produced performative types who inhabited a universe driven by a repetitive dynamic, rather than one governed by a transformative, conflict resolving logic. 31 Another important template emerged from the hybrid forms associated with Amanat s Indar Sabha, written in Lucknow in 1853, perhaps under court patronage, and using Persian romance narratives (masnavi), along with musical conventions deriving from North Indian performance cultures in the Brajbhasha language. 32 Parsis themselves initiated the translation of plays into Urdu and supported the emergence of Urdu playwriting to reach a broader public both in Bombay and across the North Indian territory. From the early twentieth century North India became important in fashioning specifically Hindi, as distinct from Hindi/Urdu, 30 Unless otherwise specified, this account of the Parsi theatre is taken from Somnath Gupt, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (1981), trans. Kathryn Hansen, Calcutta, Seagull Books, The Sorceror s Last Tale, Mehmood Farooqui in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury, 4 March 2006, also see Farooqui s continuing research on the form in postings to the Sarai Reader list, 32 See Kathryn Hansen s wonderful article, The Indar Sabha Phenomenon: Public Theatre and Consumption in Greater India ( ), in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, eds, Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001,

54 36 The Melodramatic Public plays, as in the work of playwrights such as Radheshyam Kathavachak and Narayan Prasad Betaab. 33 Critical to the attractions of the urban theatre was the mixing of dialogue and music, and sometimes an overly operatic form that relayed narrative entirely through songs. The urban theatre was also noted for its deployment of technologies to enact scenes of spectacular transformation, with mechanical means for changing backdrops and simulating physical situations such as the crash of ocean waves or the threat of enveloping fire. The Parsi theatre troupes were also highly mobile, traversing the country s big cities and small towns, from Delhi to Calcutta, and moving beyond the territorial land mass to Ceylon, Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, and even England, avowedly giving rise to comparable entertainment forms in these new cultural spaces. It was also part of a vivid print culture, where plays were published, translated, and circulated across the subcontinent. In all this the theatre anticipated the functions of the cinema in highlighting mechanical wonders and traversing the country and beyond. A number of Parsi theatre playwrights were involved as script and dialogue writers in the cinema, and well-known Parsi theatre plays such as Indar Sabha, Laila Majnu, and Shireen Farhad, derived from a wide arc of Persian and Arabic folklore and musical cultures, were made as films. So too were the traditions of Shakespeare play adaptations, an impact registered in the features of the historical genre of Indian film, as in the work of Sohrab Modi in the 1930s and 1940s. In terms of the economic infrastructures of cinema too, Parsi entrepreneurs such as J.F. Madan and the Wadia family were to prove important in setting up distribution networks and studios in the silent and early sound periods. 34 What formal features and modes of address emerge from this cluster of influences, and how were these reformatted through modern urban 33 Language formations in the Parsi theatre have become part of the history of a language politics which seeks to separate out Urdu, Hindi, and Gujarati in terms of cultural lineage and creativity, rather than acknowledge their considerable overlap in theatrical practices and audiences. For an excellent account of these differences, see Kathryn Hansen, Parsi Theater, Urdu Drama, and the Communalization of Knowledge: A Bibliographic Essay, The Annual of Urdu Studies 16, 2001, For a fine account of popular narrative traditions and language formation in North India, see Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India, Ranikhet, Permanent Black, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Parsi Theatre, in idem, eds, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, London, British Film Institute, 1994.

55 The Melodramatic Public 37 theatre? In Mehmood Farooqui s account the dastaan tradition of nineteenth-century Lucknow was about four things: Razm warfare; Bazm assembly of singing, dancing and seducing; Tilism magical effect or artefact created by the sorcerer; and Aiyyari chicanery, trickery, disguise. The aiyyars, the tricksters, are employed by both sides. 35 He laments the demise of such forms through the interventions of modernizing colonial cultures, but notes their continued life in the popular cinema format, with its loose assemblage of comedy, dance and action. However, transformations in the looser assemblage were already observable in modern theatre. Both Hansen and Kapur emphasize the distinction brought to performance cultures by the introduction of the proscenium stage, separating out spectators from the performance, and, in Kapur s argument, introducing a goal-oriented narrative causality in the structuring of performance elements. Kapur goes on to highlight the importance of painted backdrops in generating a sense of realism. However, in her description the backdrops were of two types: one provided for a flattened, shorthand, and low mimetic evocation of the reality referred to; the other one of high illusionism, carrying the spectator s view into a hallucinatory depth perception. 36 The heightened illusionism was added to by the plethora of special effects produced in the Parsi theatre, and referred to in its texts and stage directions. These included both the rendering of realistic physical dimensions of the action, such as the crash of waves, the rising of the sun, or simulations of lightning, but also magical effects, as in the disappearance of characters, the continued movement of figures just beheaded, the magical transformation of a character from the one into the many, the taking of characters to flight. 37 Further, while there were intimations of the hermetic, self-referential features of modern theatre, and realist dimensions deriving from the human portraiture of divine and mythical figures in realist painting and stage acting, ultimately the Parsi theatre appeared to reiterate a highly iconic, frontal mode of address to its audiences that broke the onward flow of a narratively self-enclosed fictive world. Taking a text 35 Farooqui, The Sorceror s Last Tale. 36 Anuradha Kapur, Actors Prepare, in body.city, Delhi, Tulika Books, 2003, Anuradha Kapur, The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century, Journal of Arts and Ideas 23-4, 1993, (85 6), for a description of the magical effects noted in scripts.

56 38 The Melodramatic Public such as Betaab s Mahabharata, Hansen demonstrates the importance of the direct address of ritual forms in securing an environment of auspiciousness for the audience. This included an inaugural invocation of the sacred, conventions providing the performers with sacred sanctions, and highly specific ritual enactments to sanctify the emergence of new discourses. In the case of the Mahabharata, this involved a bid to include Dalit/untouchable communities into the provenance of the performance s symbolic extensions of Hindu community and nationhood. 38 These new elements in fact indicated the maintenance of a heterogeneous narrative world, for such sequences did not contribute to the main narrative line of the play. Scholarship on the variety of forms, and more specifically genres, that emerged from the Parsi theatre has as yet remained relatively undeveloped. Thus, while a certain attention has been devoted to the emergence of the mythological genre, 39 and the specific influence of the Indar Sabha, 40 there has been no detailing of historical, romance, and social genres in the Parsi theatre. And the status of melodrama as a form has not seriously entered the discourse of theatre studies in India. Nevertheless, the formal analysis undertaken by Hansen and Kapur points to an intersection with evolving formulations in the field of film studies around the question of frontal forms of address, and the interruption of narrative flow, both through a heightened frontality, and through a heterogeneous stringing together of scenes. The particular interest of these formulations is that they do not assume a straightforward historical succession of narrative and dramaturgical forms, as in the supplanting of frontality, the narrative integration of musical performance, or the substitution of iconic character portraiture by realist characterization. 7. Film Form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format Frontal, iconic modes of characterization of the popular theatrical format were carried forward into the cinema. We also observe the 38 Kathryn Hansen, Ritual Enactments in a Hindi Mythological : Betaab s Mahabharata in Parsi Theatre, Economic and Political Weekly 41 (48), 2 8 December 2006, Anuradha Kapur, The Representation of Gods and Heroes ; Kathryn Hansen, Ritual Enactments. 40 Kathryn Hansen, The Indar Sabha Phenomenon.

57 The Melodramatic Public 39 persistence of the disaggregated, heterogeneous dimensions of this narrative form, a heterogeneity defined not only by a loose assemblage of attractions action, comedy, romance but also by the sense that the world of the fiction is not singular and may be articulated through different sites, styles, and discursive forms, ranging from the comedic to the socially pedagogic or allegorical. In my estimation, this range of features constitutes the popular format, and melodrama makes a specific intervention in this form. Before exploring what that intervention was about, I would like to pay further attention to the heterogeneous form of the popular in cinema. While work on Indian film genres of the earlier period are as yet too limited to hazard generalization, I will point to certain examples from the devotional or saint films to suggest its heterogenous features. These films of the 1930s and 1940s narrated the travails of saintly figures, mostly of lowly caste status who produced new languages and cultures of worship that challenged Brahmanical control over access to the sacred. Drawing on historical figures from the pre-colonial period, their setting was the medieval village. This was a world defined by caste hierarchies but also by everyday labour in fields and artisanal dwellings, the primary resource for a new sense of community that would undermine caste inflexibility. The films were carried by the impetus to create a transformative compact between labouring constituencies and the saint through his new, popular language of worship. In these films there was a suggestive dispersal to the way the world of the fiction was organized. Thus, in films such as the marvellous Sant Tukaram (Fattelal and Damle, 1936) the saint, Tukaram, does not quite register the identity of his opponent, the Brahmin Salomolo. The film has an episodic structure, composed of a series of challenges and tests, and there are recurrent meetings between the two opponents. Tuka never addresses Salomolo by name, nor does he acknowledge familiarity with him in other ways. It is as if he does not quite exist in the same world as Salomolo, immersed as he is in a spiritual quest for the lord that takes him away from the world of everyday reality and power. However, there is another, more significant mismatch between worlds. Tuka certainly recognizes and registers Jijai, his wife, at once devoted to him and hostile to his immersion in a lord who cannot help his family through its everyday travails. Jijai inhabits her own universe, a highly textured, tactile one, where, standing in the mud, she lovingly washes down her buffalo. A different sensate being, Jijai abides by her own bodily and worldly parameters to go along with

58 40 The Melodramatic Public the invocation of a different divine imprimatur, the goddess Mangalai. Even at the conclusion of the film, Tuka s heavenly transcendence of the earthly life does not impact on her in terms of an economy of loss or of longing. 41 As I will suggest, such an economy is important to the way melodrama intervenes in the format of the popular assemblage. The narrativization of the sacred is crucial to this example, and the devotional film can be seen as a subset of early Indian popular cinema s investment in the genre of the mythological film. Rather than such a focus being suggestive of a pre-modern universe, film studies scholarship on mythological films of the 1910s has suggested their complex relationship to modern cultural and political circumstances. Admittedly, at one level, their popularity was used to argue for the continued influence of spiritual values in the face of the modern colonial West s materialism. While this indigenist, anti-modernist stance seemed strengthened by exhibition strategies calibrating the screening of films such as Phalke s Shree Krishna Janma (1917) to the Hindu religious calendar in Madras, Stephen Hughes has shown how bids to capitalize on their success in the political realm, as in the efforts of nationalist leaders such as Tilak and Annie Besant, intersected with political debates highlighting divisions between Brahmins and non- Brahmins in the Hindu community and the logistics of new representational claims. Mythological narratives could also be complicated by anachronistic references to modern-day settings and technologies, and also to knowingly intercalated political imagery and references, thereby rupturing any coherent reproduction of traditional codes. Further, the essentially commercial drives to gather mass audiences could give rise to a host of attractions, for example scenes of sexual display that ran counter to orthodox sensibilities. 42 If public discourse about the mythological film indicates differentiated responses and the complexity of modern commodity and political constellations in the circulation of films, then an attention to film as a technology of perceptual transformation also complicates our sense of the terms of cinematic address. Dissolves, superimpositions, and stop motion filming produced miraculous changes and invited 41 For further exploration of this mode, see Ravi Vasudevan, Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice and Spectatorship in Indian Film, in Birgit Meyer and Stephen P. Hughes, eds, Postscripts 1.2/1.3, 2005, Stephen Hughes, Mythologicals and Modernity,

59 The Melodramatic Public 41 both wonder but also the imagination of how the bringing together of modern technologies and social subjects could facilitate the mutability of sacred and hierarchical orders. I have suggested how in Sant Tukaram it was specifically the technology of the copy that undergirded a climactic miracle which multiplied and distributed images of the royal personage, remaking members of the assembled public into incarnations of the king. 43 More generally, given the persistence of religious investments to the development of modern technologies of visual representation, formulations which counterpose modern to religious worldviews clearly need to be questioned; and by extension Brooks s formulation that melodrama emerges in the wake of desacralization. Recently, Kajri Jain, examining the history of popular print culture in early-twentiethcentury advertising, 44 notes how multinational firms, targeting an Indian market in modern consumer goods, utilized mythic imagery and narratives to sell their product. She also notes the persistence of a market in mythological prints used for domestic devotion and to create auspicious environments. She uses these observations to question Benedict Anderson s assumptions that modern nations are founded on an imagined community which substituted religiously inflected notions of ritual time with an empty, homogenous, and secularized time. In Anderson s account, under conditions of print capitalism, readers of newspapers, novels, and other forms which mobilize knowledge of simultaneous events dispersed in space are encouraged to think of themselves as part of large-scale communities that lie beyond face-toface experience. Jain s critique is persuasive, and suggests that modern technologies for the reproduction and circulation of images can also provide for the reproduction of religious community. However, if the sacred has not been displaced, this is clearly not the same sacred, for it has been brought into the framework of a mechanically reproduced, easily available image, as in the availability of Shivaji s image to the subjects he rules over in Sant Tukaram. Here, Jain s work sustains another dimension of Anderson s formulation. For popular print culture that takes the sacred as its subject disperses the command over language 43 Vasudevan, Devotional Transformation. 44 Kajri Jain, New Visual Technologies in the Bazaar: Reterritorialisation of the Sacred in Popular Print Culture, Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, Delhi, Sarai/ Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,

60 42 The Melodramatic Public reposed in elites and priestly orders by unleashing the power of lay languages and pictorial representations under the extended conditions of circulation of print and visual capitalism. 8. Melodramatic Interventions If we are to theorize the validity of the melodramatic mode in the Indian case, it must be in such a way as to reformulate the terms of the modernity within which melodrama emerges. In line with Brooks s formulation that melodrama throws up the personality as focus of its investments in the wake of modern social, political, and religious transformation, I would suggest that we need to capture a sense of the specific types of narrative blockage and torsion within which the drama of the personality is enacted. In the first instance, I draw upon a lexicon of contests around traditional, customary, and familial affiliations as the narrative itinerary through which we can pursue the melodramatic subject. Here the family provides one of the critical frames, though certainly not the only one, for the exploration of personality in the organization of the narrative world; and this is observable whether this narrative world is (generically defined) by religious authority, the sacredness of kings, or by secular power. The family so conceived was not a privatized form but, as I will suggest, one that needs to be thought of as entangled with public authority. Indeed, in the reach of its command, it may constitute the very terms and limits of publicness. The public-family form provided a narrative architecture encompassing the apparently differentiated spaces of family, society, and public-institutional life. And it is in its transformation that we are offered a perspective on the changing ways in which melodrama has operated in Indian film. As the integument of the social and political realm, the family form does not simply personalize social and political issues. Rather, it renders the personal and political as nondistinguishable registers of fictional organization. However, the family may itself be displaced or drawn into other registers of attachment, and, through the course of this book, we will observe how primary attachments reside in the register of the popular, 45 and even in the personification of nationhood as a new register of melodramatic belonging. 45 Ch. 3 below, on the Raj Kapoor persona and the evocation of the street as the zone of primary attachment.

61 The Melodramatic Public 43 If melodrama in Indian popular film constructed a subjectivity at once personalized and public, it also addressed its audiences in crucial ways as public rather than individuated. For, in its methods of representation, its construction and articulation of character types and character expression, and the particular way it tied intimate circumstances, perceptions, and familial ties to a drama beyond the individual, this is a species of melodrama which repeatedly highlights itself not only as an insistently exteriorized but also public way of talking about the human condition. This is observable in crucial, symbolically charged passages of character conversation, where speech moves into a register beyond the interpersonal: its idioms and pitch are designed to invoke a larger discursive frame of reference: moral, normative, even critical and contesting. Not only does the speech and visage pose this as supra-individuated, it also suggests that it is aimed at an audience beyond the one presented within the fiction. This type of character articulation is part of the apparatus of imaginary direct address, of which looks into the camera are only a subset. As I will suggest, mode of character construction and expression are also crucial to the organization of body/space relationships, where the capacity of characters to articulate the scene, and offer a perspective, very often devolves on a particular centring of character in narrative space. This has various formal possibilities, ranging from the single-shot set-up of early cinema, through to the way an iconization of character takes place over the time of a multi-shot sequence. Melodrama is not coterminous with the heterogeneous system of popular entertainment in Indian film, but provides a force field for narrative navigation within its loose armature. Thus, the comedy and musical sequences that constitute key attractions of Indian popular cinema do not inevitably contribute to the development of the melodramatic narrative. This is most markedly so of the comic sequences. But musical sequences may also stand in relative independence from the melodramatic shaping of the narrative, as in the manner of prefabricated song and autonomously designed choreography, usually deriving from a menu-driven necessity in the composition of cinematic entertainment. However, the musical sequence may also come to be shot through with elements of melodramatic mise-en-scène and stylization which build on the exploration of narrative blockages, as in songs of romantic and familial separation and narrational songs addressing the injustice visited on protagonists and performed for a

62 44 The Melodramatic Public larger diegetic public. 46 The excess of the popular over the melodramatic is indicated by the way characters acquire distinct inflections as they move across the heterogeneous popular system. This is often discordant, providing consistent characterization in the main story line, while rendering character in rather different ways in other segments. 47 In some exceptional circumstances, character may be entirely of the popular rather than the melodramatic format, entirely abandoning any consistency of character identity, as for example in the case of Shree 420 (Confidence Trickster; Raj Kapoor, 1956), a host of films featuring Dev Anand and Kishore Kumar in the 1950s, and, in a more contemporary register, the work of the comedian Govinda. The effect is strange only if plotted within the logic of a homogenous diegesis. Instead, the heterogeneity of the popular format produces character formations not only disaggregated but also potentially unanchored. The publicness of character derives from the idea that the subject is constituted in and through an address to an audience. This is relayed through public modes of performance and mise-en-scène which the excess acting, acting conventions, and setting impart to a character s narrative functions. While I have noted an escalatory dimension to performance as the lynchpin of its publicness, we should distinguish highly conventional passages from those providing a release from narrative blockages. Madhava Prasad s understanding of the heterogeneous mode of Indian film production argues for the way elements such as dialogue, music, stunts, and choreography arrive prefabricated, their meanings pre-interpreted for audiences already knowledgeable about the semantic range of these conventions. Such conventions include normative speech regarding family obligation, and performance and dialogue centred on moral typages of heroism, villainy, or seduction. However, while acute about the production conditions under which popular cinema has operated, this formulation does not attend to the particular charge that inflects key passages and denouements that solicit affective investments of a different scale. In my understanding, such registers emerge in a vortex of performative 46 The work of Guru Dutt stands out in this regard. See below, and ch. 1, on Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957). 47 This is marked in the way the Raj Kapoor persona is distinguished by a happygo-lucky disposition in the song Main Awara Hoon (I m a good for nothing), and in certain sequences of physical comedy, in sharp contrast to the dark melodramatic characterization of the main story line in Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951).

63 The Melodramatic Public 45 publicness distinct from such conventions, and are formulated with a pitch, sonorousness, and public setting which move beyond any diegetic addressee. 48 My argument here does not aim to dissolve the possibility of interiority in character construction. From the 1930s onwards, key works of the popular cinema highlight the existential crisis of the individual, dramatized, for example in the works of Pramathesh Barua, through distinctively modernist passages. 49 The cinema of the 1950s, which displayed in many works the imprint of Hollywood point-of-view techniques and continuity editing, also displayed an investment in the burden of melodramatic subjection as it was relayed through characters caught in the vortex of social marginality and indignity. This was so of characters fashioned by the performances of Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, Nargis, Nutan, and Waheeda Rehman. 50 While melodramas of social injustice featuring male protagonists generally moved towards a public articulation, suggestive works featuring doomed women characters show how social norms function repressively, even when they come to be masochistically internalized and publicly embraced by women. 51 Perhaps most complicated of all is a particular form of melodramatic construction of the song sequence fashioned by Guru Dutt. While a song such as Yeh mahalon, yeh takhton, yeh tajon ki duniya... jalaa do, jalaa do, isse fooq dalo (burn down this world of palaces, thrones, and crowns...) at the climax of Pyaasa is composed as an incendiary address to a diegetic public, Jinhe naaz hai Hind par vo kahan hain (Where, O where are those with pride in Hindustan?) is 48 Roberta Pearson has demonstrated the transformation of performance codes from histrionic to verisimilar modes in the history of nineteenth-century US theatre and early cinema in Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films, Berkeley, University of California Press, While these distinctions are important, my use relies on distinctions within histrionic performance, where a public form emerges from a narrative and stylistic unravelling of expressive constraints, and where elements of frontality and publicness are crucial. 49 See especially Devdas (1935) and Mukti (Liberation; 1937), both by Barua. 50 Relevant works would include Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949, with Nargis), Bandini (Bimal Roy, 1963, with Nutan), Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (Abrar Alvi, 1963, with Meena Kumari), Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957, with Waheeda Rehman). 51 Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949) is a particularly perverse and fascinating example. See Ravi Vasudevan, You Cannot Live in Society and Ignore It: Nationhood and Female Modernity in Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949), in Patricia Uberoi, ed., Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, Delhi, Sage, 1996,

64 46 The Melodramatic Public quite extraordinarily organized in subordinating the diegetic public arena of its performance, the red light area, as visual and acoustic material for the song. The song here is a register both interior to the character, the poet Vijay, and public. The drunken poet protagonist denounces a world where women are bought and sold in the dark lanes and passages of the city. The prostitutes, pimps, and customers course around, at first seeming indifferent to or unaware of his address, at best finding his drunken demeanour amusing or irritating. However, the impact of his denunciation is registered at the climax of the song, when some toughs forcibly remove him from the space. But there is a mysterious, dis- or re-embodied dimension to the diegetic public, as the soundtrack of the everyday world is arrested, rendered silent, or mobilized as an element within the composition of the song and the interiority of the character. The song fuses subjectivity with a public address that subordinates and enfolds the diegetic public into its sensory orbit, its lyrics, melody, and sound structures, with musical strains impacting the textures of what we see. 52 This is a highly personalized rendering of the public arena, even as its address is of a public form deriving from the modes of the Urdu protest song fashioned under the aegis of the radical Indian literary and theatrical movement of the time. 53 (Figs 1 2, p. 47.) 9. Horizontal and Vertical Articulations How can we identify the social, cultural, and indeed political sources of the melodramatic form that provides narrative structure and mode of address to the popular format? Popular film narratives articulate worlds governed by a hierarchized, interdependent network of subjectivity and others with mobile, escalatory features to characterization which culminate in a publicness of address severed from oppressive social forms. In the first form the extended family has provided a durable lynchpin of the represented social world. The moral economy of the family, the relations of paternal authority and maternal nurture, of filial respect, duty, and emotional attachment provide one of the 52 Corey Creekmur is undertaking a suggestive reading of the melos of this scene. Guru Dutt and Melodrama, paper presented at a conference on The Social and Material Life of Indian Cinema, New York University, April Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority, Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in Colonial and Post-colonial India, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2004.

65 The Melodramatic Public 47 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Figs 1-2: Pyaasa, Guru Dutt, 1957, Interior and Public.

66 48 The Melodramatic Public crucial reference points for how narratives are structured. And, more broadly, the family provides a paternalist frame within which other dramatis personae, in spaces ranging from the village through to urban neighbourhood, and sometimes extending to the very fabric of city life, revolve. The family form as encompassing public universe provided the diegetic space a key strategy for narrative orientation in the popular format. Its drives were often worked out on the basis of a repressive paternal authority, if one sometimes represented as deformed by agents and representatives working outside its ken, as in the case of the estate managers and hangers-on of landed personages. Even when subject to displacement as the main vector of the public world, the family format often remained a crucial reference point for the processing of narrative structures, including, as I will suggest, the ways in which narrative spaces are organized. Melodrama generates a field of narrative force that scatters families and individuals only to bring them back together again in a differently cadenced public format. It does this in order to raise the stakes of narrative meaning by articulating one form of authority, that of the family, to a superordinate one, which may be the family form itself, now revised, the state, or a new form of public-symbolic authority. We may here distinguish different organizations of the melodramatic field. One focuses on family, kin/clan, and paternalist forms, and is defined by a horizontal plane of dramaturgy. Another articulates the paternalist family and the horizon of intimate ties to a vertical axis which brings it into destabilizing collision with a public space which will resituate the family s functions. This is an important difference, for in the first case the family itself is coterminous with the public domain of the narrative world, ruled over by its patriarch. This is akin to what Madhava Prasad refers to as the feudal family romance, a narrative form which channels desires for modern social transformation most simply, a romance which does not have parental sanction in such a way that a reformed family and patriarchal elder becomes the vehicle of reconciliation. 54 Both these modes require 54 Prasad s observations about this form are part of a specifically political reading of its functions. He sees this as characteristic of the passive revolution in India, in which bourgeois transformation had to work through feudal forms, part of the historic pact between the bourgeois and feudal elites in the make-up of the ruling coalition. Such a coalition ruled through to its dismantling in the mid-1970s, when a combination

67 The Melodramatic Public 49 some form of disturbance of the familial form, but the first more often than not finally manages the disruptive energies unleashed under the aegis of the family and the patriarchal elder, while the second requires a superior agency to resolve the conflicts released. Melodramatic modes may articulate a host of genres. The maintenance of a disaggregated fictional universe in Sant Tukaram is not characteristic of the genre of the devotional. Taking other instances, such as Sant Dnyaneshwar (Fattelal and Damle, 1940), we will observe a successful integration of narrative worlds. In this case the Brahmanical household is deprived of its authority and integrated at a subordinate level into the new public form generated by the saint s mobilization of the peasant community. Relatedly, the female protagonist, Manu, attracted to the saint both as a devout worshipper but through an intense romantic attachment, is, unlike Jijai, inducted as desiring subject into the new public field generated by his authority. Manu is prohibited in her desire for Dnyaneshwar at first by her Brahman father, and then by Dnyaneshwar s own withdrawal from the world. Woman and household, imaged in the figure of the desiring woman who looks out from barred household windows at the impossible object of desire, seal the new, subordinated status of former ritual-household authority into Dnyaneshwar s public. (Figs 3 4, p. 50.) What is suggestive here is the way in which the system of typage through which characters are represented here from the beatific saint, the bigoted Brahmin, through to the radiant female devotee while continuous with conventional modes of representation, is nevertheless resituated in the architecture and symbolic functions of a reformulated public space. The domestically subordinated and constrained situation of the female devotee/romantic indicates the way the public-symbolic transactions of popular resistance followed by an exercise in modernizing state authoritarianism brought about a transformation. See Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film. One does not need to buy the political and ideological formulation to accept the insights Prasad provides in his analysis of narrative structure. However, even within these limited terms of engagement, in my reading such a formulation works for the 1940s, but is substantially displaced after Independence by a new form of popular investment in the nation-state, over earlier forms of authority. This in turn does not tell the whole story of the 1950s cinema, a field yet to be adequately explored in terms of the diversity of its productions. Regarding the feudal or patriarchal joint family, I would hazard that it continued to be significant, but as an aspect of the family social film genre, rather than as the dominant narrative form of the popular.

68 50 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Figs 3 4: Sant Tukaram; Fattelal and Damle, 1937, Sant Dnyaneshwar, Fattelal and Damle, 1940: Household Economies.

69 The Melodramatic Public 51 that move the narrative also produce new configurations of familial space and subjectivity as a specifically disempowered niche within it. This, then, is an instance of the vertical axis of melodrama, in which a very specifically melodramatic modality, relating to the transformation of Brahmanical public authority into the disempowered household, is articulated in the image of the desiring female devotee. The oeuvre of the Bombay Talkies studio of the 1930s and 1940s by and large conforms to the logic of a publicness founded in familial authority. The displacement of family authority by a public order superior to it is most evident in post-independence social films. Here the state, as vehicle for the recognition and amelioration of social victimhood and injustice, emerges as a crucial site of action and recognition. As I suggest in chapters 3 and 4, other spaces emerge too, for example a kind of idealized public realm where the protean space of the street, of multi-ethnic commingling and social anonymity, also functions as a powerful register of attachment to distance the audience from the inflexible dictates of a respectable society founded on the probity of lineage. What is suggestive in the dynamic of this reformulated narrative universe is how the mother iconizes suffering, and motivates action on the part of a son against a father, and achieves symbolic restitution on the ground of the newly figured state. So far, I have been addressing only the moral and ideological components of the melodramatic mode as these are channelled through the familial patterns of narrative structure. In terms of the aesthetics of this modality, I would suggest that there is what Brooks would call an expressionism accompanying the shifts in diegetic organization that I have drawn attention to. In the work both of studios such as Bombay Talkies, and even in the Bengali cinema, the horizontal axis of the family narrative exhibited a fairly constrained shooting style. In Moinak Biswas argument, flat lighting, the blocking of discrete spaces without exploration of connective axes, and tableau shots defined a studio style of the 1940s. 55 This was not uniform, and in the work of directors such as Pramathesh Barua there were instances of dynamic effects in camera movement, cutting rhythms, and expressionist lighting in films such as Devdas (1935) and Mukti (Liberation; 1937). Biswas argues that a cinematic dynamism emerged in the 1950s, in the wake of the crisis of the studio system. Several changes 55 Biswas, Historical Realism, 62 3.

70 52 The Melodramatic Public were observable. Under the impact of the radical Indian People s Theatre Association s engagement with folk culture and social realism there was a combination of location shooting and camera movement along with the studio style. An exploration of space through chiaroscuro effects signposted shifts in the deployment of sets both in Bengali and Hindi films made under the influence of the radical theatre movement, and indicated a new capacity to explore the city, its social life, and its moral ambiguities. Through the vehicle of the crime film popular in the 1950s, a new fluidity of representation was in evidence, and a heightened engagement with the perceptual economies of city life, so that in the work of Guru Dutt and Chetan Anand Vision is not only redirected through a play of light and darkness, it is consistently blocked and fragmented car windows, railings, pillars, scaffolds impose frames within frames, oblique vision becomes necessary, and lateral depth is enhanced by the same token. Location shooting in the city is extended into a textural principle of the image and a sequencing principle between images. 56 In counterpoint to location/studio combinations, detailed exploration of social spaces, and the new perceptual dynamics of urban crime movies, the emergence of a bourgeois melodrama in Bengal is also noted by Biswas. Bengali films, such as those featuring the star couple Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, worked on the interior through lighting, the highlighting of elements of décor, musical motifs, point of view, and subjective acting signs. 57 In terms of my formulation about the move of the cinema away from the horizontal, hermetic family register, we could say that the Bombay film, in its urban thriller format, shifted the terms of perception by its move into the city, the street, and in its ultimate highlighting of the state as transcendent point of narrative resolution. The subordination of the familial-social network of authority was differently calibrated in the Bengal examples Biswas draws upon. This related to the production of a realm of interiority which, not unlike the family melodramas of Hollywood, exercised pressure on the repressive co-ordinates of the familial-public nexus. But this did not produce a new, vertical axis and public form. Instead, it generated a privatized fantasy space where the couple could constitute itself untrammelled by the familial form. 56 Ibid., Ibid., ch. 4: Belonging to the Modern: Narratives of Vernacular Citizenship in the 1950s Bengali Melodrama ; and idem, Harana Sur as Melodrama Now, in Ravi Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001,

71 The Melodramatic Public 53 To point to a new melodramatic architecture relating the family to the public realm does not necessarily provide for stylistic expressiveness. But in several cases we may observe how this new architecture of narrative space turned expressively on the family narrative to explore the repressed, occulted levels of the story world. Raj Kapoor s Awara (1951) was a case in point. Raghunath, a reputed judge, marries Leela, a young widow, an act of romantic desire undertaken in the face of social conventions which declare that a widow cannot remarry. A bandit, Jagga, bent on avenging himself against the judge for what he believed to be a wrongful verdict, abducts Leela. He discovers that she is pregnant, and returns her, knowing that the wife s virtue will be questioned. Social pressure and psychological doubt mount on Raghunath. The pressure comes to a pitch in a remarkable passage of melodramatic mise-en-scène. In a darkened, cavernous chamber the pregnant Leela, prostrate on an ornate bed, cries out her innocence in the face of charges that are publicly circulating about her loss of virtue. Chiaroscuro effects abound, as winds buffet the drapes that adorn a high window. Vertical axes build, with low angles composing the judge against a baroque ceiling. The juxtaposition of shots generates perceptual disequilibrium, shot scales, and body dispositions at considerable variance. Melodramatic exteriorization achieves brilliant expression, as a psychology of dread is writ large on actor Prithviraj Kapoor s face. As the woman s pleas and the man s fearful visage alternate, the musical score swells to evoke the pathos of the situation. The camera dollies forward to cherubs on an ornamental clock whose plaintive eyes seem to respond to the swelling music and the piteous nature of the characters plight. (See Figs 5 6.) Suddenly, psychological ambivalence is dissolved, an authoritarian decisiveness breaks through, and the judge casts his wife out. The forlorn innocent trudges out through the enormous doors of the house. The voices of the folk, embodied in a troupe of plebeian singers in the street, denounces this act of injustice in the narrative idiom of the Ramayana, as the judge, now a figure of implacable, unrelenting authority, is framed in between the vertical lines of the window. The household here is the fulcrum for the revelation of an occulted space, that of the inviolable feudal order that has been repressed in the judge s act of individual desire, his marriage to a widow. Using the full panoply of melodramatic effects, the film reveals this space as one which afflicts the judge with dread and bends him to its will. From now

72 54 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Figs 5 6: Melodramatic mise-en-scène in Awara, Raj Kapoor, 1951.

73 The Melodramatic Public 55 the house of the judge will be the fortress of the old order, one the film returns to again and again before, at last, the characters are arraigned on a different ground. Here, in a court of law, the arena of the state, the story of victimhood can be revealed and the judge s guilt recognized. Awara displays systematically deployed codes of continuity editing in certain scenes. It dispenses with these in favour of tableau shots with minimal cutting, and scant attention to continuity at other times. It employs melodramatic mise-en-scène of the type I have described. It also manages a variegated entertainment format, inserting comedy scenes, fights, and song sequences which do not always relate strongly to the onward development of the narrative. But its melodramatic drive, to show the string of injustices meted out to its main characters, is sustained, and climaxes in the appropriate recognition scene and public address. In terms of mise-en-scène, the film moves between a studio-generated realism that evokes the everyday habitus of city streets; but it can swiftly move into a more flamboyant register of baroque interiors and renders the city as an uncanny space, where demonic forces await characters as day gives way to night and gaslit streets, evoking practices in the urban theatre of older vintage, illuminate the peril lurking in the shadows. The film, and a host of other Bombay melodramas, could illustrate Singer s observation about the proclivity of melodrama, its multiplicity of plots, recourse to coincidence and reversals, sensational revelations, and spectacular enactments, to provide a suitable frame to manage the dislocations and distractions, sensory overload, and drive to spectacle that characterizes the cinema s relationship to the history of modern experience. In my argument, however, this loose assemblage is held together on the basis of a melodramatic axis of personalized experience that relentlessly articulates itself in publicly expressive ways. This is marked at the climax, when the drama of victimization is given its full articulation in a speech made by the wronged protagonist that rings through the court, and declares itself part of an ensemble of victimhood. One of the clear objectives of the feminist critique of existing formulations about Hollywood and its genre system is to recover the melodramatic mode as an encompassing one which will disestablish the hierarchies, between male rationality of narrative construction and action orientation and a female emotionality that is caught within

74 56 The Melodramatic Public a circuit of narrative stasis and emotional unfulfilment. It has been my intention to complicate this agenda by pointing to critical differences in the spectrum of practices identified as melodramatic in different historical contexts. My concern has been to highlight an insistently unmodified melodrama. Modification sets up a distance of the narrative world from the world of the personality writ large, at best making its registers of primary attachment into an underlying structure. In contrast, in the typology of melodramatic forms and modalities that I have outlined for Indian popular cinema, there is a remarkable overtness, in contrast to American cinema, of narrative blockages occulting the realm of primary attachments and functioning as obstacle to romance, social mobility, and the achievement of social recognition and respect. Moreover it is the publicness of this cinema s mode of address which distinguishes it from the economies of Hollywood; specifically, those which invite spectatorial immersion in the restraint of individuated characterization, privatized interaction, and plausible, charactercentred narrative progression. My argument here is not a historicist one, where Indian cinema represents a backward point in the spectrum of popular cinema and Hollywood its vanguard, with the understanding that Indian movies will make the grade, one of these days. While industrial conditions have historically prevented the emergence of stable economies in Bombay cinema, films display an awareness of Hollywood codes of narrative construction but mobilize differently calibrated scenes of excess and strongly public registers through song and imaginary direct address. Even as the contemporary industry bids fair to acquire the cultural legitimacy and economic stability that it has been so long denied, and despite the emergence of Hollywood style genre cinema, there is a remarkable persistence of monumental melodrama, if formatted to new social and political co-ordinates and commoditized parameters, as I suggest in the last two chapters of this book. 10. Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood Going back now to Hollywood in the wake of this sketch of the place of melodrama in Indian and other cinemas of the world, it appears to me that melodrama continues to signify at a number of different levels in Hollywood s movement between the classical and the vernacular. Firstly, I would suggest that symbolically defined narrative blockages

75 The Melodramatic Public 57 giving rise to moments of expressive force have a more general appearance in a host of American film genres, including male genres of action. Such melodramatic modalities invite our attention to dimensions which might not govern the dominant generic focus of the story world. To take an example at random: in Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) James Stewart, son of the famous lawman Destry, arrives to put a lawless town into order, but without using force. For much of the film the tone ranges from a Manichaean narrative relating the villainous designs that assail the township to the comedy arising from the spectacle of a non-violent sheriff negotiating a gun-toting opposition. At a crucial moment, Destry s ally, an old man who harks back to the mythic power of the hero s father, is killed, an event which recalls for Destry the death of his father in a gun battle. Expressionist mise-en-scène takes over, as an angled close-up on the hero reveals the dark underside and psychic trauma which James Stewart s folksy countenance has covered over. The suppressed persona of the forceful gunslinger takes over and metes out punishment to the evildoers. The James Stewart persona was, of course, to revisit this scenario at various points subsequently, whether to deconstruct the myth of the law vanquishing the lawless, as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), or in the series of Anthony Mann westerns in which pathological features in the westerner were given free rein, and only belatedly held in check via a morally satisfactory conclusion. In Destry Rides Again Stewart is a victim of traumatic histories which irrupt through a fleeting expressionism, rather than a figure of oppressed innocence. And while the assertion of older forms of meting out justice could be read as melodramatic in its backward temporality, it is perhaps more usefully designated as meeting generic expectations. If Destry s traumatic recall of his father s death indicates the play of a melodramatic modality within a genre format otherwise differently calibrated, a fuller sense of the mode is in evidence when the loss, complication, or marginalization of home and community provide the primary narrative engagement. Home as the space of intimate ties and primary psychic investments is mobile in the spaces it connotes. But arguably, in Hollywood, a special status is given to the family home as a space of victimhood, as in the manner the woman s film highlighted tales of unfulfilment and unrequited love; and also in the selfconsciously Freudian and occasionally ironic narratives referred to by Elsaesser, narratives of home as oppressive spaces that threaten to

76 58 The Melodramatic Public implode into scenically charged repositories of unrealizable demands and desires. These appear to me to be the narrative contexts where melodrama as delimited genre has emerged, in contrast to the way melodramatic modality works its way into a host of genres without determining their overall form. To accept such rubrics does not seem to me to surrender critical space to arguments which have downgraded the significance of melodrama as a sentimental woman s genre. For, such generic forms invariably work at the public/private intersection of melodramatic concerns, and offer critical engagements with the repressive functions of a gendered public authority. Such a bourgeois melodrama has resulted from historical processes differentiating the public from the private. But, arguably, American cinema still provides periodic examples of large-scaled melodrama at crucial moments in American history, in particular where substantial transitions in social forms undergirding citizenship claims have arisen. Here, while I am not persuaded that melodrama can be analysed in terms of national variation, there is a case for considering the way melodrama, its public/private architecture, and its backward looking temporality, is mobilized to drive epically-scaled works that stage an engagement with the reconfiguration of national imaginaries. My hypothesis is that these emerge at critical moments in the transformation of social, cultural, and political circumstances, and are bodied forth in key works which place the home, interpretable as a zone of primary affective attachment, at the critical intersection of the narrative relationship between community, public life, and political structures. Thus Williams excellent analyses of race melodramas such as Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) and Gone With the Wind turn on the affective ties of family life and the securing of a home, properly refigured, against and through the vicissitudes of (racist) history. And, as Williams points out, even in the case of TV trial reportage, such as the race-coded star trial of O.J. Simpson, it is the violation of the home, in the function of Simpson s palatial home as gothic form, which undergirds the narrative. 58 The work of Frank Capra, especially Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), fit the rubric of melodrama in terms of a narrative relay urging the imprinting of the affective ties of marginalized community on the domain of public life, citizenship claims, 58 See the excellent chapters on Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and televised trials with race connotations in Williams, Playing the Race Card.

77 The Melodramatic Public 59 and state structures. Eric Smoodin has situated Mr Smith in a dual context. 59 It was part of a cultural landscape where the government put forward a series of public initiatives, including the Jefferson memorial, presidential fireside radio broadcasts, museum displays, and youth mobilization to highlight America s democratic heritage in the context of the New Deal. Mr Smith became the object of elaborate promotions involving theatre lobby displays with electoral booths that rendered the act of buying film tickets analogous to the casting of votes. But, beyond this conscious bid to bring the state s public initiatives around democratic heritage together with the cinema, the power of the film arose from the way a public discourse used it to criticize the corruption of representative government. The film draws upon the melodramatic scenario of Smith, an idealistic and naïve senator targeted for political destruction by a group of corrupt senior senators, and entangles this with a narrative of psychically charged disappointment: a father substitute, a revered associate of Smith s dead father, carries out the plot against the junior senator. The film also exhibits dimensions of melodrama as public fictional form, rendered through elements of direct address. In a critical scene, Smith becomes the recipient of a transfer of iconic value, when, broken by the plot against him, he recovers moral strength and political faith by a visit to the Lincoln Statue in Washington. (See Figs 7 and 8.) At the climax of the film, Smith s sustained passage of filibustering makes him into a vehicle for the Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Figs 7 8: Transfer of Iconic Value in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra, Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity and American Film Studies, , Durham, Duke University Press, 2004.

78 60 The Melodramatic Public utterance of this heritage, when he enforces his rights to a hearing and subjects the assembled senate to a reading of the constitution. This is done in a mode of direct address, his figure elevated in the frame and appealing both to the diegetic audience, and through the elevation of his look, to a point beyond it, outside the frame. Capra s own biography of the impoverished Sicilian immigrant who eked out a life in an Italian ghetto, and went on to make a living through employments of borderline legality gives way to a triumphalist American story about the self-made man. From engineer involved in wartime weapons manufacture, he went on to a lively film career directing war adventure, slapstick, circus comedy, and screwball genres. 60 The narrative of patriotic military endeavour, whether in weapons manufacture, war movie production, or the subsequent war propaganda documentary series Why We Fight, provides a spectacular and strident route for the absorption of the struggling ethnic immigrant into a non-ethnically defined white nationhood. And his immersion in the idealist little men, the Smiths, Deeds, and Does, makes available to Hollywood a strategy of sublimation where the folk, the popular, and the democratic are identified with an undifferentiated white American identity. 61 The innocence of home and small town is relayed in all its naivety and idealism through the junior senator, and brought into collision with the structures of state. This vertical axis of melodrama provides the mode of narrative articulation for another national epic that I would like to cite. This is a much more complicated example of how home and ethnic community identities imprint the terms of national 60 For a summary of Capra s film career, see Elliot Stein, Frank Capra, in Richard Roud, ed., Dictionary of Cinema, vol. I, Suffolk, Nationwide Book Services, 1980, The sublimation of the ethnic subject into the white American citizen in Capra s film career entangles histories of cinema and war. Capra s visceral engagement in war technology, war genres, and, finally, war propaganda and recruitment targeting a multi-ethnic society provides a suggestive frame for the way the populist subject of Deeds, Smith, and John Doe is so lacking in any ethnic reference point. For a perhaps overstated but suggestive theorization of the links between war, technologies of visualization, attack, and the cinema, see Paul Virillio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London, Verso, Raymond Carney s American Vision tries to situate Capra in a tradition of American transcendentalism going back to the eighteenth century, and is quite indifferent to the ethnic dimensions of the Capra biographical legend. Raymond Carney, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra, Hanover, Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

79 The Melodramatic Public 61 imagination. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) takes the ethnic universe of its Italian gangsters as its main narrative content and plots a melodramatic movement that negotiates a historical blockage to the emotional claims made by this world on Michael Corleone. He is torn between identification with his father, Don Vito, and his ideological commitment to a non-ethnically identified Americanness. His credentials for a legitimate American identity arise from a decorated wartime military service, and Don Vito himself reposes hopes in his youngest son bringing the family into the mainstream. Michael s decisive shift in orientation to the protection of father, family honour, and family home arises from a twofold encounter. When the Turk organizes a near-fatal attack on Don Vito, Michael s feelings for his father are renewed as he acts to defend him; perhaps equally significant, a corrupt white cop assaults Michael and abuses him in racist terms. It is as if the democratic promise of political inclusiveness offered by the submersion of ethnic into American identity in the Second World War has unravelled, and the hard reality of ethnic subordination has erupted. The traumatic affect generated by this attack is highlighted in the noirish quality of the scene, the racist cop s face shadowed and towering over Michael. The Godfather s narrative space is governed by a resolute securing of the world of the family and of the gangs from the legitimate public domain and state structure. The prying eyes of the legitimate public is held at bay, as Sonny Corleone turns on the intrusive photographers and FBI men who ring the marriage celebration of the film s opening sequence, or is only accessed through montages of newspaper headlines and photographs relating to the gang wars. Even the racist cop is not properly of this public, as he works for the Corleone s competitors. And the climactic scenes that intercut the ornate ritual staging of the new Godfather s family authority with the carefully orchestrated decimation of the Corleone family s opponents unravel without any police intervention. This abstraction of the gang world from the larger universe to which it occasionally refers has led some critics to suggest that The Godfather uses the gangs as metaphor for the ruthlessness of America as corporate, competitive capital. 62 In this logic there is no need to represent the space beyond, for what we see allegorically stands for that space. The Godfather Part Two (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) 62 Fredric Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, Social Text 1, Winter 1979,

80 62 The Melodramatic Public does, however, take this broader universe into consideration, whether through the staging of federal enquiries into the Mafia, or in its evocation of the Cuban revolution, at either end of the ideological spectrum of contemporary history. It is important to acknowledge the significance of the Mafia family s exclusion and self-exclusion from both spaces. The neutralization of a witness at the federal inquiry derives from Michael s mobilization of the Sicilian past, using an older pattern of loyalties to secure the gangster world against state incursions. In the second case, Michael s prescient evaluation of the strength of revolutionary forces as rationale for the family s pulling out of Cuba suggests again the non-isomorphism of Mafia family and an American nation which was yoked to US state intervention in Cuba and immersed in the broader cultural and political articulation of the cold war. In terms of narrative strategy, then, these films emphasize the distance of the ethnic frame of the gangster universe from the mainstream, and reiterate at a number of points the ethnic hierarchies which promote its exclusion from that sphere. By moving the legitimate public realm to the margins of the narrative world, the film maintains its main engagement as one of melodramatic alterity, where the illegitimate space beyond the public realm takes centre-stage. Lacking any outlet or possibility of reformation, the gangster family then becomes subject to a melodramatic involution, a turning in on itself, with the ultimate result that home is hollowed out, made empty of all contents except that of the phantom successor and his baleful rule. The film positions home and homeland as an ethnos whose conditions of ruin are provided for by exclusion from social structures, and the self-eviscerating momentum of a gangster genre now revised to exclude the state from its diegesis. This is a world located outside the big picture of the nation-state. And yet it is the big picture, a blockbuster which solicits mainstream engagement. Fredric Jameson suggests that such popularity arises both from the fascination of the film s allegory about contemporary capitalism, and out of a nostalgia for a familial plenitude no longer available for the atomized white majority, and only visible in the ethnicized niches of American society. Arguments about the relationship between Italian and unmarked white identities suggest a more complex pattern. While referring to the ethnic marginalization of the Italian subculture, The Godfather nevertheless participates in a transition in the imagination of whiteness, securing the investment of a post-majoritarian whiteness seeking outlets for an identification of whiteness in a multi-ethnic public.

81 The Melodramatic Public 63 This argument culminates in the way the Mafioso of The Sopranos, for example, secure an investment in the white family while indulging racist distancing from Afro-American and Latin American subcultures. 63 It appears to me that while such readings, inflected by a shifting sociological imaginary, provide certain insights, they do not consider the complex cinematic-institutional work undertaken by these films. Thus, The Godfather emerged as a rather unusual blockbuster, perhaps only intelligible in the political and cultural circumstances of the time. This was a period of national crisis and introspection, in the wake especially of the Vietnam war. In terms of film history, this was also a period of independent cinema of directors such as Dennis Hopper, Hank Jaglom, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, and the brat pack directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, and de Palma, all of whom initially composed part of a post-studio counterculture. 64 Arguably, one way of looking at The Godfather is to see it not only as an ideological reframing of white race ideology, or as allegory about America as capitalist society, but as a film whose form harks back to the handsome studio productions of an era gone by, and also indexes how the cinematic counterculture was both reframed by and transiently impacted the mainstream. Its melodrama of impossible yearnings for home is blighted by home s exclusion from the public realm, and through the logic of genre revision which does not provide the traditional comeuppance to the protagonist, but enshrines him in a dystopian solitude. In the movement of this argument amongst different contexts of melodramatic cinema, I would suggest that what we are dealing with is not different cultural incarnations and national variations in the 63 Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority, New York, New York University Press, 2004; Pellegrino D Acierno, Cinema Paradiso, in The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and the Arts, New York, Garland, 1999, ; Ruth Frankenburg, The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness, in Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klineberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, eds, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham, Duke University Press, 2001, 72 96; Christopher Kocela, Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness, Postmodern Culture 15 (2), 2005; Nick Browne, ed., Francis Ford Coppola s The Godfather Trilogy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, esp. Vira Dika, The Representation of Ethnicity in The Godfather, For a review of the importance of this moment in reconfiguring Hollywood, see Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, and Alexander Howarth, eds, The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2004.

82 64 The Melodramatic Public itinerary of melodrama, but instances of how melodrama works as mode, modality, and genre in specific historic, political, and film industrial contexts. Quite crucially, the American instance provides us with a certain trajectory of bourgeois cultural transformations, where melodrama gets separated out into genre, into modality penetrating different genre habitats, and as a mode deploying a characteristic sensory collision of home and community with civil society and the structures of state. A postcolonial cultural politics has stressed the distance between the Euro-American path and the history of cultural forms elsewhere, and especially in former colonial contexts. I would suggest this difference needs to be acknowledged but also interrogated. It requires to be acknowledged because of its significance within critical discourses and state policy formulation in countries such as India. And the difference also needs to be recognized as a structuring force of narration and address in Indian popular film that appears to disavow the protocols of bourgeois political and cultural segmentation of the represented world. This particular mode of fictional articulation has displayed a remarkable persistence in its bid to annex fictional forms to public forms of address. As I will suggest in chapters 3 and 4, this was related to the history of cinema in the Indian context, one of unprecedented public congregation outside the constraints of ritual and social hierarchies based on caste and community proscription. An illegitimate form that flew in the face of priorities generated by state cultural officials and elite publics invested in national culture based on the classical and folk forms and realist imperatives, the cinema provided an alternative public realm, if one rather different from the countercultural connotations of that category. And yet this particular discursive construction, and historical practice of cultural difference, also needs to be questioned or qualified. For, in the very variety of its practices and exhibition contexts, the cinema always offered much more in terms of variety, and, as a result, much less than the ambitions a universal cinema conjures up. Thus Hollywood could be many things as it circulated into different segments of the world film economy. And, as I have tried to suggest, there could be unexpected overlaps in the melodramatic articulations of Hollywood and Indian cinema as well, drawing normally differentiated cinemas into a comparable narrative architecture and public form.

83 I Melodramatic and Other Publics

84 Introduction Narrative Form and Modes of Address in Indian Film My exploration of public-cinematic form is introduced through three articles which aim to capture and complicate a sense of the dominant discourses about the cinema in India. Specifically, these focus on the idea of a national cinema in a developing or transitional world, the apparently conflicting and paradoxical relationship between cultural traditions and cultural modernity in such national projects, and, finally, the function of discourses of realism and melodrama in the institution of critical paradigms on these cinemas. The critical discourses analysed in chapters 2 and 3 centre primarily on realist and anti-realist logics, and the status of melodrama within these formulations. The first goes back to the formation of film societies and an art cinema enterprise in the 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 2 pursues this angle, considering some of the writings of the journals emerging from the film society in the 1950s, as in pieces by Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Das Gupta, and Kobita Sarkar, to understand how they used the key categories of realism and melodrama. My evaluation of the second, anti-realist logic in chapter 3 considers the overlapping premises between the realist critic Chidananda Das Gupta and the anti-realist, anti-modernist Ashis Nandy, despite their being apparently ranged against each other across the modernity/tradition divide in their discussions of popular cinema. I then go on to consider the most systematic attempt to transcend these kind of oppositions in Madhava Prasad s analysis of Indian popular cinema s peculiar disavowing relationship to discourses of modernity. The dissection of critical discourses about the popular is followed in these chapters by trying to understand the popular through its own storytelling methods and narrative logics, its modes of address, and its deployment of cultural imagery in character construction and song sequences. Through this set of writings I engage concepts such as the icon, and traditional idioms and protocols associated with visual and

85 68 Melodramatic and Other Publics lyric practices such as darshan and the kirtan, to understand the complex, hybrid dimensions of a modern cultural form such as the cinema. For the popular brought together these local traditions of visual and oral culture, the narratively disaggregated comic function, socially defined representations and spectator address (the tableau form), and the codes of individuated perspective (point-of-view shots and continuity cutting in the mode of Hollywood cinema). Chapter 3 in fact argues that Indian popular cinema was a transitional cinema and suggests that this might in turn explain its ability to exercise an appeal to its domestic market that successfully saw it ward off competition from Hollywood, and could have been the source of its attractions for crossover audiences in foreign markets as well, for example North and East Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, and the Soviet Union, in the earlier period. However, I would now say that the definition of the transitional needs to be altered, or the category dropped altogether. For, the way it was originally used in The Politics of Cultural Address (chapter 3) tended to tie formal structures to sociological imaginaries, (e.g. the priority given to kinship ties, loyalties, and obligations in Indian cinema) if with the rider that such transitions did not necessarily have to follow the path charted by European modernity. We probably need to fashion a different term, one which can address the persistently heterogeneous form of the cinema in India, despite the appearance and even institutionalization of Hollywood-style filmmaking, especially in the last five years or so, as I indicate in chapter 11. A further clarification needs to be made against the possible tendency that the invocation of local aesthetic parameters and modes of address suggests a zone of specificity not easily discerned elsewhere. However, my outlining of these parameters was not intended to suggest a clear cultural identity opposed to other identities, or even a modern vs pre-modern culture; I even suggested that there could be a mobility to the way modern codes function in traditional ways but often in a manner which unsettles the traditional. This complexity remains in the context of other aesthetic parameters, as for example in my drawing on the tradition of analysing iconic features in the evocation of characters, their facial and gestural appearance, sartorial features, and mode of oral expression. In chapter 1, I have suggested that, rather than deriving from a strictly local habitat, such iconicity is more generally observable, and that even comparable darshanic features and modes of direct address are observable in the American cinema, for

86 Introduction 69 example in the work of Frank Capra. All of this is not to underestimate the local, but to suggest that even here we need a comparative, and perhaps interconnecting, series of investigations which traverse the boundaries of national cinemas. In Part II, I try to outline how a regional film history, connecting a swathe of film culture traversing North Africa through the Middle East, North India, and on to South East Asia indicates shared cultural and performative resources which tend to get obscured by a discourse of national cinema. My critical approach in these writings was refracted through a particular interdisciplinary moment that argued for a connection between cultural and political structures. Specifically, the theoretical debate argued for a connection between disciplines of representation and modes of readerly and spectatorial engagement on the one hand, and regimes of social and political representation, of citizenship on the other. Realism, and related dynamics in the sphere of literary and film art, became the privileged aesthetic and representational reference point for prescriptions by governing elites and an arts intelligentsia in fashioning policies and priorities in the arts. Academic political and cultural theory went on to suggest that this was indeed the aesthetic realm with which a civil social discourse and classically modelled public sphere of rational debate and discussion found its easiest fit. In this argument, such an idealized realm was not only relatively small in terms of its overall representativeness, it was also potentially blinkered in understanding the deeper cultural logics and political drives which animated society. The privileged other term for the exploration of this deeper logic, one which suggested a different order of cultural and political subjectivity, lay in the idea, often tentatively formulated, of community. In chapter 3 I explored this possibility through analysis of certain passages which highlight the iconic figure, direct address, and a tableau mode of representation which removes the spectator from any specific character s point of view. Such parameters of address draw upon a narrative community when deploying conventions of visual and musical figuration of long cultural standing (mythic figures and allusions in the formation of characters, folk and semi-classical forms in music, especially in the realm of devotional music). However, they may also assert a social rather than communal point of view, in visual fields such as the tableau otherwise unmarked by culturally specific features.

87 70 Melodramatic and Other Publics In chapter 4 I further modify the idea of cinematic address being divided between individuated and communal forms to argue that the elements of direct address in Indian popular forms imagine a cinema audience defined not as an idealized community, but as a public which is a component of the fictional field. This formulation seeks to unsettle the apparent fixity of community identities and forms, and to argue that popular film storytelling both mobilizes typages of community identity and then complicates the security conjured by these forms of knowledge and perception. It is my hope that the idea of the imaginary public releases us from the division in film studies between a sociological understanding of audience and its meaning-making proclivities, and a textually inscribed spectator position. It creates in its very imaginary location a potential meeting point between the screen, the spectatorial public addressed by screen practices, and the mobilization of discourses of publicness which exceed screen spectator relations. This publicness anchors a complex range of effects and, as I have suggested in chapter 1, does not preclude audience engagement with heightened states of interiority; indeed, quite novel relations may be developed between character interiority and the diegetic public, as I have suggested in my analysis of a song sequence from Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957). In chapter 4 I consider stardom as providing a crucial vector of public investments in the cinema, specifically in terms of the cinematic public s knowledge of the star s screen biography, both in its regular, repeated features, and in the challenges posed by its alteration or outright disruption. The star personality captures a distinctive node to think about iconicity and typage. Studies of stardom have emphasized the importance of the relationship between off-screen and onscreen personalities in the development of the star institution, the way in which the resulting play of information and perception cultivates curiosity and investment in spectators now motivated to interpret the relation between the fictional and the authentic. Scholars such as Neepa Majumdar have addressed the different ways in which the institution developed in the Indian context. 1 Noting the presence of the Hollywood model of stardom in 1930s discourses about the shaping of cinema in India, she draws attention to its selective implementation in publicist endeavours, with a persistent obscurity in relaying offscreen information. She relates this feature to the institutional need 1 Neepa Majumdar, Wanted! Cultured Ladies Only: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2009.

88 Introduction 71 for respectability in the face of public discourses about the disreputable origins of film industry folk, but also to the particular inner/outer formulation of national imperatives theorized by Partha Chatterjee. 2 Here, as with other nationalist projects, the cinema has to secure its inner life against the threat of the world of glamour and the allure of commodities. In a significant shift in her discernment of industry logic, Majumdar goes on to argue that in the 1950s there was a notable change in the relation between levels of information about the star, with the screen itself offering a suggestive space to contemplate different levels of the articulation of personality. Here she examines the way the narrative function of the double is used to address a certain fraught off-screen knowledge about stars such as Nargis. In chapter 4 I take this suggestive argument in a slightly different direction. I restrict focus to the screen personality, specifically as a figure who relays significant biographical shifts as these work out in the relation between films. This is with a view to hold, perhaps a little artificially, to the relation between the screen image and the spectator. Here the screen personality of the star offers a series of possible investments. Positioned within these parameters, the star draws upon the motif of the social type, but significantly enlarges it and may indeed invest it with a certain narrating authority. At once type but standing above other characters, s/he offers the spectator a particular condensation of the social realm which orients the film public, through their knowledge of the history of the screen personality, to a shifting set of public concerns. Here I suggest how the Raj Kapoor character immediately alerts the film public to a certain populist, even agitprop view of the street personality as the vehicle of meditations on issues of social injustice and community bigotry. The figure is at a crucial level produced through a desire to distance the public from investments in a social field shot through with the claims of lineage. This was particularly important not only for an imagination of a more egalitarian society, but one also unencumbered by the anxiety arising from a scrutiny of blood ties which could compromise the purity of ethnic religious communities in the wake of the Partition. This chapter concludes by looking at a rather different star, Nana Patekar, specifically in relation to a certain aggressive, communally coded star personality, and the way such identification has been subject to disruption. 2 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1993.

89 72 Melodramatic and Other Publics Chapter 4 also explores the relationship between the screen and the spectator in terms of how the spectator is positioned in the arc of generic/historical time. I use the particular way imaginary direct address is organized in the historical film Pukar (The Call; Sohrab Modi, 1939) to launch an enquiry into the way the film spectator is positioned in relationship to the past constructed by the genre of the historical film. Here, the courtly format of the historical genre is used to highlight modes of address and viewer situations as these develop inside the world of the fiction, and to suggest how this is counterpointed to another viewing position that ultimately finds an outlet in a startling, extreme frontal close-up. This momentarily breaks the parameters of the fiction, and sets up an address between the past configured by the genre, and the time of the present, that of the film public. Following my outline of issues posed by melodrama analysis, the first part of this book draws on the idea of melodrama as a form that engages with the ideology and experience of modernity. Its publicness provides a particular angle of engagement on the terms of modern subjectivity, in particular the relationship between the social and the individual, the public and the private, the traditional and the modern. The form refuses any simple trajectory whereby one term of engagement supplants another, as in a modernizing telos, but provides a public field in which their relationship and simultaneous embedding is the source of spectatorial engagement. As I have suggested, the construction of the mode of address draws upon aesthetic resources and conventions to provide an aura of the familiar and the recognizable, even as it draws on new resources to complicate its rendering of the field of subjectivity offered the spectator. In all this, the attempt in chapter 4 is to propose an idea of the cinematic public that creates an asymmetry between cultural and political structures, contra the premises that underlie chapters 2 and 3. My aim here is to argue for a distinct autonomy for the cinematic and cultural realms, with a view to capturing the specific types of engagement which these fields mobilize. It appears to me that the ideological readings involved in building the relationship between the political and cultural realms, while often offering highly subtle and complex analysis of narrative strategies, perhaps veer away from the visual, audittory, and tactile modes of filmic engagement. This is not to do away with questions of ideology, power, and the realm of the political, but to ask us to specify these within the distinct modes of

90 Introduction 73 engagement offered by the cinema, and in its specific institutional logic. This is a specification that I believe will prompt the formation not only of a richer sense of what the cinema offers, but a more complex and layered understanding of the political as well. Holding onto the idea of public address, and the asymmetry of the cultural and political realms, I conclude the explorations of the opening part of this book by invoking a very different body of practices, that of the art cinema of Satyajit Ray. At one level Ray provides us with an entirely different mode of cinematic engagement. Cultivated within a sophisticated array of resources, ranging from the literary-psychological to the painterly and caricatural, he also drew upon the international armature of the cinema. This included exposure to Hollywood, Renoir, and French poetic realism, the Italian cinema after the Second World War, the work of Kurosawa, and a dynamic engagement with new currents as these emerged, as for example in a sensitive exploration of Godard. 3 In line with this range of resources and engagements, Ray s oeuvre provides a complex array of narrative formats, which my essay only briefly touches on. Its inclusion here seeks to expand our understanding of the spectrum and modes of engagement of cinematic publics as these are relayed through the experience of modernity. I argue that, despite Ray s fashioning of a cinema of narrative integration, realism, and psychological delineation rather than simply setting up certain ideal terms on which cinema, and cinematic realism, makes an input into discourses of citizenship his work undertakes a certain modernist rupturing of an integral, self-enclosed narrative universe, and any complacency about modernity. On occasion this surfaces as a dramatic intervention through shifts in style, jettisoning our view from its alignment with diegetic characters. Such stylistic distancing also works systematically, as I indicate in my analysis of Charulata (1964). The formal manoeuvres carving out a position for the spectator is a way of marking a distance from the past, a gesture to the present, and an ambiguous outlook towards a modernist telos that would sever us from earlier states of being but for an insistence on acts of remembering. 3 Ray s genuine interest in new developments is indicated by the range of films he writes about in Our Films, Their Films.

91 2 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form In the Indian context one could argue that in the 1950s high culture for the cinema existed as a series of propositions given expression only in the very restricted confines of Bengal art cinema. Commodity forms were represented in indigenous and foreign (largely American) commercial cinema. These forms constituted the dominant culture, but the domestic commercial cinema was the main element in this dominant formation. Critics often held Hollywood up as a model against which the failings of the Indian cinema were measured; and the cinema industry often drew upon Hollywood as a model of industrial efficiency, and as a wellspring of film style. But it was nevertheless the commercial Indian cinema which held the unassailable position in the domestic market. This does not mean that the commercial cinema was an entirely reified phenomenon. As I will suggest, because of the complexity of its form and the crossclass nature of the audiences for certain genres, the commercial cinema constituted a significant arena for popular innovation and creative social and political discourse. I employ the term popular for the way in which cultural products intervene in the imagination of social perceptions and desires, but without clear observation of aesthetic codes and practices. Therefore, while dominant as a mode of film culture, the popular was also often anathema to an arts public otherwise seeking to cultivate institutions and aesthetic objectives in line with a by turns realist and modernist vision. In this chapter I want to focus on certain aspects of Hindi commercial films from the 1950s to draw out the logic of the popular

92 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 75 which I have outlined here. I start with how notions of the popular were produced within a critical discussion of the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. This discussion elevated notions of realism, psychological characterization, and restrained performance and, in an unexpected fashion, was echoed in the apologias offered by commercial film-makers for their product. A dominant intellectual discourse about the cinema seemed to be well in place; at the same time, I will not call it a hegemonic discourse, as we can hardly assume that the audience for the commercial cinema accepted its terms of reference. Even the standard film magazines pandering to an English-reading middle class, Filmindia and Filmfare, do not subscribe to these criteria of judgement in a consistent way. I will then shift to an analysis of the strategies of narrative form of the popular cinema in this period to suggest the ways in which diverse systems of visual representation were brought into relationship with each other. I argue that this phenomenon, together with a narrative manipulation of characters social positions, offered a certain mobility to the spectator s imaginary identity. Finally, I will reframe the problem of popular modes of narration in relation to questions of melodrama, realism, and the idiosyncratic articulation of democratic, nationalist points of view Critical Discourses in the 1950s My basic premise about the dominant critical discussion of the cinema in this period was that it was related to the formation of an art cinema, that it addressed a (potential) art cinema audience, and, in turn, was premised on a notion of social difference. The pertinent first reference here is to Satyajit Ray who, when introducing his essays on cinema from the 1940s through to the 1970s, noted that the formation of the Calcutta Film Society was related willingly to the task of disseminating film culture amongst the intelligentsia. 2 In his 1948 essay on the drawbacks of the commercial film, he noted his dissatisfaction: 1 I will not be analysing the place of performance sequences in this article, although they are central to an understanding of the popular aspects of the commercial film. For a preliminary attempt to evaluate their status, cf. Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance, Screen 30 (3), 1989, Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, Introduction, 6.

93 76 The Melodramatic Public once the all-important function of the cinema e.g., movement was grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and refinement of technique were only a matter of time. In India it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existing in time was generally misunderstood...often by a queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action with melodrama... 3 Ray was therefore outlining, for a middle-class intelligentsia, a formal opposition between the contemporary cinema with its external, melodramatic modes of fictional representation, and an ideal cinema which would develop an internalized, character-oriented movement and drama. Some thirty years later Ray implied that the norms for such an ideal cinema had already been met in the West, despite periodic discoveries and changes. 4 Whatever its adequacy for explaining Ray s own work, clearly Hollywood, or a refined version of the Hollywood norm, was being projected in Ray s advice that Indian film-makers should look to the strong, simple unidirectional narrative rather than convolutions of plot and counterplot. 5 I will come back to these distinctions, especially the opposition between movement and stasis, in the next section. For the moment I will pass on to certain writings in of the Indian Film Quarterly and Indian Film Review, journals of the Calcutta Film Society, which are in a direct line of descent from Ray s 1948 essay. Kobita Sarkar s Influences on the Indian Film and Black and White develop, at a more literary and thematic rather than aesthetic level, the discourse set in train by Ray s essay and the release of Pather Panchali in Sarkar characterizes commercial cinema in terms which have now become familiar: as theatrical, tending towards a markedly melodramatic strain and exacerbation of sentiment and accumulation of coincidence, 7 and as failing in the analysis of individual character 3 Satyajit Ray, What Is Wrong With Indian Films?, ibid., Introduction, ibid., What Is Wrong With Indian Films?, ibid., The two essays by Kobita Sarkar appeared in, respectively, Indian Film Quarterly, January March 1957, 9 14, and Indian Film Review, December 1958, Kobita Sarkar, Influences on the Indian Film, 10. Marie Seton also remarked that the commercial film never entirely freed itself from the influence of the theatre... National Idiom in Film Technique, in Indian Talkie, : Silver Jubilee Seminar, Bombay, Film Federation of India, 1956, 58.

94 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 77 and psychological make-up. 8 What may be called the disaggregated features of the commercial film, performance-foregrounding songand-dance sequences, were criticized for being infused arbitrarily into most varieties of film with a fine disregard for their appositeness. 9 These criticisms were coloured by the image of a critic dealing with an infantile culture which needed to grow up. Thus, signs of greater character complexity in post-war cinema were welcomed as more adult, 10 what she perceived to be the tedious, moralizing aspects of film narratives were opposed to a more mature approach; 11 and acting styles were rejected as being more appropriate to a form considered the most child-oriented of entertainments: even... our more serious actors are frequently found cavorting in a manner more appropriate to the circus than the cinema. 12 A negative, pejoratively defined outline of the commercial cinema emerges from these accounts. Its negative features are: a tendency to stasis at the level of narrative and character development; an emphasis on externality, whether of action or character representation; melodramatic (florid, excessive) sentimentality; crude or naïve plot mechanisms such as coincidence; narrative dispersion through arbitrary performance sequences; and unrestrained and over-emotive acting styles. But Sarkar saw hope yet for the commercial cinema in that thematically at least a realist element seemed to be taking shape: drama is provided by the conflict of the individual against social and economic encumbrance rather than by inner complexities... This emphasis... is not to be lightly derided, for though the preoccupation with a larger framework might diminish the importance of the human character, it makes for greater social realism. 13 Evidently, that realist framework would not carry such weight with the critic unless it was given substance at the level of mise-en-scène. The decisive historical influence here was the International Film Festival of Sarkar 8 Kobita Sarkar, Influences, 10; and, the greatest potential weakness of our cinema is the general lack of characterization..., idem, Black and White, 6. 9 Kobita Sarkar, Influences, Kobita Sarkar, Black and White, Ibid., Ibid., Sarkar, Influences, 10.

95 78 The Melodramatic Public argued that a certain depiction of social reality in Indian commercial films, whether through location shooting or the more fabricated realism of the studio-set, reflected features of the Italian neo-realist work exhibited at the festival. 14 However, for this critic these positive features, of realist observation and thematic engagement, were clearly limited by melodramatic characterization and narrative. Achievement was ultimately measured against the model of Pather Panchali, seen to represent a logical progression in the development of such realist imperatives. 15 The commercial cinema audience was evidently being measured against an ideal social subjectivity. Pointing to the gross moral oppositions and simplified conflicts of the commercial cinema, Sarkar hazarded that perhaps... this element... is dictated by the type of audience for unless it is sophisticated enough, it is difficult for them to appreciate the significance and nuances of characterization. For a less sensitive audience, this exaggerated disparity is morally justifiable She went on to note that till there is a radical change of approach on the part of the audience... rather meaningless turgidity seems to be an attendant evil. 17 I would suggest that there is a definite project under way here, in which the commercial cinema is seen to represent a significant failure at the level of social subjectivity. To counter this, critics and filmmakers began to take it upon themselves to formulate an alternative order of cinema, conceptualizing a different, more sensitive, psychological, humanist and adult order of personality. What is surprising, however, is that these very attitudes were also apparent in the opinions of certain commercial film-makers of the time. In 1956, M.A. Parthasarathy, head of Gemini International, noted of the Indian commercial film that the barriers to its achievement in the Western market did not spring from the constraints of language but was due to the method of expression... not only the gestures 14 Ibid., Ibid., Sarkar, Black and White, Sarkar, Influences, 13. Sarkar allows the occasional flicker of doubt about absolute standards of taste in art: [The Indian film] is derided by the more sophisticated largely because they have accepted more sophisticated standards of judgement. As it is not yet possible to set any absolute values as to what constitutes good cinema, perhaps it is rash to pass final judgement. Influences, 14.

96 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 79 and movements of our artists, but also the entire psychological approach of the construction of scenes and themes in our films. 18 Again, Parthasarathy tied the imperative of reorienting the cinema to a redefining of the character of the audience. He noted that the economic headway that would be achieved through state policies such as planning would increase the domestic demand for films. However, in consonance with these new developments, a new type of film would have to be envisaged: a type which is more in line with the changes in social attitude that will go hand in hand with economic prosperity. This will mean a more realistic Indian film, where the method of telling the story is more like that of films made in the west. 19 Just the year before, S.S. Vasan too had drawn out a connection between the economic situation of the audiences and their viewing inclinations: Film artistry is, unfortunately, compelled to compromise with the people s standards in living and life... The mass audiences are generally not so well equipped to appreciate artistic subtleties... The great majority of cinema audiences tend to favour melodrama and other easier forms of emotional expression... The prevalent low standards in art are due, in a large measure, to our economic standards. 20 There is an echo-chamber effect here, with the insensitivity of Sarkar s audience being reprised as the incapacity of Vasan s audience to appreciate artistic subtleties. Of course, the first view is an explanation related to the need to change matters while Vasan s is an apologia for why he makes the films he does. In Vasan s and Parthasarathy s accounts an economic explanation is proffered. Once economic circumstances were altered, the citizenspectator would be more attuned to humanist-realist cinema; exactly the terms of Sarkar s definition of her ideal spectator. Although Parthasarathy s exercise was also a prognosis about what would go down well with a foreign audience accustomed to American norms, it is possible to argue that these different views were in fact complementary and sprang from the ideology of the domestic context: that of the Nehruvian 18 M.A. Parthasarathy, India in the Film Map of the World, Indian Talkie , Ibid. 20 R.M. Ray, ed., Film Seminar Report, New Delhi, Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1956,

97 80 The Melodramatic Public state, with its emphasis on economic transformation and a critically founded individualism. These lines of convergence should not suggest that discussion of the cinema was entirely monolithic. In this connection, one curiosity of this period is Chidananda Das Gupta s In Defence of the Box Office (1958), 21 an essay which tried to envisage an adjustment of the cinema to the popular perceptions of its clientele: The starting point must be not one s own mind, but that of the audience. 22 In trying to evaluate audience dispositions, Das Gupta referred to the aesthetics of representation, the two-dimensional, linear quality which distinguishes almost all forms of Indian art and the flatness of Indian painting, its lack of perspective. 23 In his argument, The vast unlettered audience of the East are yet a long way from acquiring the bourgeois prejudices...it is only the urban middle class which... will question the distortions of the human figure in painting He believed this fact left the film-maker and artist freer to experiment with form and to rediscover his indigenous traditions. 25 Finally, he also tried to address the peculiarities of storytelling observable in the commercial film, and the significance it gives to the performative sequence. 26 The Indian audience, he argued, was oriented to an epic tradition which you can read from anywhere to anywhere, as long as you like...the Indian film audience... delights more in the present than in the past or future. 27 He urged Indian film-makers to look to these traditions of narrative and aesthetics rather than rely on too many preconceived notions derived from the form of the film as seen in the West. 28 Das Gupta was not underwriting the investment which Indian audiences made in the contemporary commercial cinema as it existed. He was pointing to the potential this audience held for experimentation with forms of representation and narrative. Thus, while folk paintings of the Krishna legend were valued, the mythological film was 21 Chidananda Das Gupta, In Defence of the Box Office, Indian Film Review, January 1958, Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. 27 Ibid., Ibid., 13.

98 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 81 condemned as the very worst expression of Indian cinema. 29 Film moghuls, he wrote, have fully sensed these traits of the audience... In answer they have produced Bradshaws of entertainment, vulgar in taste and low in level but appealing all the same to the man for whom it is meant. 30 Ironically, even the realist mise-en-scène and thematic content, regarded by Sarkar as signs of achievement in the commercial film, are dismissed in Das Gupta s analysis for derivativeness (from the International Festival) and an essential incapacity to rise above the more conventional cinematic entertainment. 31 Although Das Gupta focused in his article on the epic and formal qualities of popular traditions, his underlying emphasis appears to have been on film-makers and intellectuals rather than the audience. Indeed, the article appears to be a case of an Indian intellectual rediscovering the traditions of his country though an abstraction, the audience, rather than making a radical political investment in that wider society. To suggest a pertinent contrast, the Third Cinema also writes of aesthetic recovery and reinvention, but relates this project to an intense political and historical analysis of social exploitation and resistance, 32 an engagement singularly lacking in Das Gupta s reference to the unlettered masses of the East. Nevertheless, while his observations about aesthetic and narrative forms tend to be essentialist, they indicate that there were other strands in the intellectual discourses of cinema in this period Popular Narrative Form I want to draw upon this contemporary discussion in so far as it registered certain dissonances within a clear-cut model of the commercial film. I consider Sarkar s pinpointing of realism as one such complication, as also Das Gupta s identification of aesthetic and narrative 29 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. 32 Pines and Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema. 33 These references are quite unelaborated, and the study of Indian cinema has only recently started investigating these issues seriously. Cf. Geeta Kapur, Mythic Material in Indian Cinema, Journal of Arts and Ideas 14 15, 1987, ; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology, ibid., 47 78, and Neo-traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India, Framework 32 3, 1987,

99 82 The Melodramatic Public dispositions in the audience s mental make-up. Contrary to their point of view, I suggest that these features were not exceptions to the norm but were part of a cultural form which was more complex than these critics would allow. Visual Figures In the Bombay cinema of the 1950s the social film, from which I take the illustrations here, was the genre which the industry understood to address the issue of modern life. 34 Within these films, and much more widely in the cinema of that time, a number of modes of staging and narrating story events are in evidence. There is the iconic framing, an organization of the image in which stable meaning is achieved, 35 whether of an apparently archaic or contemporary nature. This could range from the mythic articulations of woman, whether by herself or in relation to a man, to mythic formations stemming from contemporary iconography, such as Monroe in American culture or the Raj Kapoor Nargis emblem of romantic love emblazoned on the R.K. banner. Another arrangement is that of the tableau which, unlike the icon, presumes an underlying narrative structure: characters attitudes and gestures, compositionally arranged for a moment, give, like an illustrative painting, a visual summary of the emotional situation. 36 The tableau represents a moment caught between past and future, a pregnant moment, to quote Barthes. 37 Both the iconic and tableau modes are often presented frontally, at a 180 plane to the camera and seem to verge on stasis, enclosing meaning within their frame, and ignoring the off-screen as a site of reference, potential disturbance, and reorganization. 38 Perhaps this was what Ray was reacting against when he complained of the static features of the commercial film. 34 To quote a contemporary publicity release, a social film was based not on historical tales, but on life as it is lived at the present time : Bombay Chronicle, 27 October 1951, I draw upon Geeta Kapur s usage here: an image into which symbolic meanings converge and in which moreover they achieve stasis : idem, Mythic Material in Indian Cinema, Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 48. Brooks here relates the tableau to the moral aspects of melodramatic mise-en-scène. 37 Roland Barthes, Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, in Image, Music, Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath, London, Fontana Paperbacks, 1982, As Barthes notes of the tableau, it is a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined

100 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 83 However, the codes of American continuity cinema are also used in the Hindi cinema of the period. These codes the eyeline match, point-of-view shot, correct screen direction, match-on-action cuts 39 generate the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity and a systematic relation between on- and off-screen in their generation of narrative flow. In doing this they centre and re-centre the human body for our view, thus presenting us with a mirroring sense of our own bodily centrality and coherence. 40 It is this American system which has defined ways of representing character subjectivity in a universal, almost hegemonic sense in world cinema, and it is the absence of this which Kobita Sarkar appeared to regret in the commercial film. In fact, these codes are not absent, but they are unsystematically deployed and are often combined with the other modes of visual representation I have described. To illustrate this combination of codes, I will describe a scene from Mehboob Khan s Andaz (1949). The story of the film details the troubles which engulf a young upper-class woman, Neena (Nargis), when she risks a friendship with an attractive bachelor, Dilip (Dilip Kumar), although she is engaged to another man. The particular scene I describe relates to Neena s birthday celebrations, and begins and ends with a top-angled shot on her birthday cake. Neena s friend Sheila lights the candles on the cake; the camera cranes down, as if paralleling Neena s movement down the hillside steps, and we see her father looking back at her as he moves into the foreground. The second shot goes into a closer view of the first, dissecting it, and shows Neena joining her father. He proceeds to introduce her to a family friend, Shanta, whom they have not seen since the passing of Neena s mother. The framing of this shot shows Neena standing next to her father, and in front of Shanta. Neena greets Shanta, moves on to greet a doctor and then another woman guest. At this point there is a match-on-action cut from edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view... [it] is intellectual, it has something to say (something moral, social) but it also says it knows how this must be done. Ibid. 39 For an outline of the classical system, see Kristin Thompson, The Formulation of the Classical Style, , in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, eds, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Stephen Heath, Narrative Space, in idem, Questions of Cinema, London, Macmillan, 1981, 30.

101 84 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 9: Andaz, Mehboob Khan, 1949, Tableau Shot. Neena s movement of greeting in shot 2 to her touching this unnamed woman s feet in shot 3. The woman s back remains turned to the camera. I suggest that shot 3 has the structure of an iconic representation. This woman is an unidentified, unseen figure; it is her very lack of identification which is suggestive. For the father has just mentioned the absence of the mother, the first time any reference has been made to her. Neena s introduction to an anonymous woman at this very moment can be said to reiterate and emphasize the absent figure. The woman s invitation that Neena sit next to her seems to be issued from the position of the absent mother, and is like an act of nomination: Neena is invited to enter the space of the mother. This space is subverted by the deployment of a look away from the absent mother, as Neena s look is attracted to someone off-screen. The iconic possibilities of the arrangement are then diffused. And yet, instead of the story moving directly into Neena s conversation with Dilip, the figure whom she has seen off-screen, the next shot, shot 4, places them in a tableau shot that assumes portentous dimensions. In this composition, Neena and Dilip meet in the frame s mid-ground (Fig. 9);

102 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 85 the father stands to the left in the background; and Sheila begins to move forward. The tableau-like characteristics of this repositioning are underlined when the next shot is not bound to shot 4 through a match-on-action cut on Sheila s movement. For, at the beginning of shot 5 she is already stationary, having been placed at the appropriate position, next to Neena s father. Sheila s placement with the father signals how the tableau shot functions as a form of commentary. The arrangement of the frame bristles with contradictions. The look of the father at the couple indicates that they enact a spectacle of transgression. In the logic of the narrative it is Sheila, standing with the father, who should be with Dilip, while Neena should be where Sheila stands, in the space of the absent mother. However, as the narrative requires the temporary suspension of this illegitimate arrangement, the father s reprimanding look is effaced when Sheila moves towards the couple, to stand at Neena s left. Sheila s presence sets up a buffer, as it were, between Neena and Dilip, allowing the father to move away. The rest of the sequence follows this logic, using a series of shot-reverse-shots that ensure the couple are not isolated again. But traces of the transgression remain in the final shot of the sequence when Dilip is positioned next to Neena, amidst the larger crowd, as she cuts the cake. In this sequence there is a diegetic flow tracking Neena s movement, glancing off her possible iconic placement and moving on to focus her (apparent) desire. That flow is brought to a halt with the frontal tableau frame, in which society exercises a censuring gaze through the look of the father. The flow is then resumed, through the shot-reverse-shot arrangement. While this procedure makes it possible to implicate the spectator in the eye contacts of the actors... to include him or her in the mental and physical space of the diegesis, 41 in this segment, Sheila s intrusion functions as a residual trace of the tableau s social commentary, setting up a buffer within the transgressive intimacy of the scene. The intrusion of the tableau is quite significant in the formulation of the spectator s subjectivity. While we have shared the movement and awareness of Neena, we are suddenly asked to situate that awareness within the space of the social code. That this is represented through an integral narrative space rather than a dissected one Neena s father s 41 Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, London, Scolar Press, 1979, 158.

103 86 The Melodramatic Public awareness could as well have been registered through a close-up indicates that it is not through a play of individual subjectivities that we are being asked to register the space of the social code, but as a structural field with definite points of authority and notions of convention. This does not prevent us from empathizing with the object position within this field, but the address has an encompassing, normative aspect to it which momentarily throws us out of the flow of individual awareness. Appropriations and Transformations of Modern Codes It is my suggestion that this relay through different forms of narration and address relays the spectator through different cognitive and perceptual fields appropriate to different orderings of subjectivity the desiring individual, the socially normative which functions as a kind of balancing act. The cinema is attractive because of its constant striving for novelty, here rendered by introducing a perceptual dynamic in the relation of visuality and modern subjectivity. And yet the challenge lies not in simply reproducing this but, as if corroborating Sarkar at a visual level, making this configuration rub against another one that insists on the importance of the social realm. I have argued elsewhere that both Andaz s narrative strategy and the elements of its publicity campaign were oriented to generate an image of modernity for the Indian audience. 42 In terms of narrative strategy the film employs Barthes s hermeneutic code, the mechanism whereby information is deferred in order to engage spectatorial curiosity. 43 Although there are allusions to Neena s being involved with a man other than Dilip, these are elliptical, placing us very much within Dilip s field of knowledge, and his desire for Neena. As a number of writers have pointed out, Indian popular cinema is singularly indifferent to mechanisms of suspense and surprise; 44 the moral universe of the fiction, the figuration of guilt and innocence, is always already known. The induction of codes associated with American cinema into Andaz may be seen in combination with the publicity strategy used by Liberty, the 42 See Ravi Vasudevan, You Cannot Live in Society. 43 Roland Barthes, S/Z, London, Jonathan Cape, Ashis Nandy, The Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles, India International Centre Quarterly 8 (1), 1981, 89 96; Rosie Thomas, Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity, Screen 26 (3 4), 1985, ; Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema.

104 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 87 cinema hall which showed Andaz as its inaugural film. The exhibitors drew attention to the modern projection equipment and elegant auditorium, suggesting that the viewing conditions met the standards of an audience used to viewing Western films. The experience of seeing Andaz was therefore meant to generate a modern self-image through an appropriation of the symbolic social space occupied by watching American films. And yet, at the same time, the experience would not merely reproduce that of the American film. The film uses its woman character to set limits to the image of modernity. Through her the narrative negotiates a notion of Indian social codes and a larger, national identity for the spectator of the film. The controlled mobilization of American cinematic spectatorship into the commercial cinema is not untypical. The much maligned imitativeness of the Hindi film may be seen to set up a relay of appropriated and adapted narrative modes and spectatorial dispositions: as organizing premise, as in the induction of codes of continuity and character subjectivity; but also as attraction, in the sense that Tom Gunning has used the term, where narrative is less significant than an amalgam of views, sensations, and performances. 45 Works of the 1950s such as Aar Paar (Guru Dutt, 1954), Taxi Driver (Chetan Anand, 1954), and CID (Raj Khosla, 1956) deploy bank heist and car-chase sequences, but in ways which are not properly integral to the narrative development, nor wrought with a strong rhythm of alternations. Along with the appropriation of narrative codes and sensationalist attractions from the American cinema, the Hindi social film also appropriated elements of American genre films in structuring the imaginary social space of its narrative. In the American film noir of the 1940s the hero exhibits ambiguous characteristics, an ambiguity reinforced or engendered by a duplicitous woman whose attractions are explicitly sexual. As a result the heterosexual project of familial reproduction is jeopardized. As Sylvia Harvey has noted, the point about film noir... is that it is structured around the destruction or absence of romantic love and the family This repetitive narrative trajectory has been accompanied by stylistic features of a much 45 Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde, Wide Angle 8 (3 4), 1986, Sylvia Harvey, Woman s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir, in E. Anne Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir, London, British Film Institute, 1980, (25).

105 88 The Melodramatic Public more variable nature, from a constrained, distortive framing, to lowkey lighting and chiaroscuro effects, these strategies being oriented to generating a sense of instability in character perception and moral situation. 47 These generic elements, which American film-viewing audiences would have been familiar with from the 1940s, are reproduced in the cycle of crime melodramas of the 1950s, particulary Baazi (Guru Dutt, 1951), Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951), Aar Paar, and CID; but the elements are restructured into a melodramatic bipolarity, the stylistic and iconographic elements siphoned off into the world of vamp and villain, counterpointed to the realm of morality and romantic love. The Street and the Dissolution of Social Identity Nevertheless the hero s moral attributes are in jeopardy, and it is the narrative s work to move him through this bipolar world before recovering him under the sign of virtue, an objective often publicly and legally gained. 48 For my analysis of the popular ramifications of the commercial film narrative, what is of significance here is the way in which this melodramatic routing complicates his social identity. 49 It is the hero s very mobility between spaces, spaces of virtue (the mother s domain), villainy, and respectability (the father s domain) which problematizes social identity. Often the street, the space of physical and social mobility, is also the space of the dissolution of social identity, or the marking out of an identity which is unstable. In Baazi Ranjani s villainous father espies Madan s tryst with his daughter on the street, causing him to conspire against the hero; in Awara, the glistening rain-drenched streets so familiar from the American film noir are the site of the uprooted Raj s birth, his subsequent tormented 47 For a summary of analyses of film noir in terms of narrative structure, sexual economy, and stylistic features, see David Bordwell s remarks in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, eds, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, This is characteristic of the way melodrama moves between familial and public registers: Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 31 2; and below, in the subsection titled Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism. 49 The following analysis of relations between family and society in narrative structure is summarized from ch. 3 in Ravi Vasudevan, Errant Males and the Divided Woman: Melodrama and Sexual Difference in the Hindi Social Film of the 1950s, PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1991.

106 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 89 encounter with street toughs, the place where the villain Jagga plants the seeds of criminality in his mind, and the terrain on which he is involved in car thefts, bank heist preparations, and murderous assaults. The taxi-driver hero Kalu of Aar Paar is by definition associated with this unstable space, one which draws him unwittingly into a criminal plot. Even the respected inspector of police of CID, Shekhar, framed for a murder rap, loses all social anchorage and is precipitated into the street. This is a drama of downward social mobility. Most of the characters identified here originate in respectable middle-class families. But the upheaval in the hero s circumstances is never so irreversible as to prevent the recovery of his virtue and of the possibilities of social renewal. Very rarely does the transformation of identity extend as far as a specifically working-class moment in the trajectory of loss. Loss and uprooting are contained by a moral opposition between the proper middle-class image of respected householdership and its other, the thief, who battens on that which is not his. 50 Narratives state and complicate these oppositions, suggesting how a respectable position is anchored in illicit gain, a bigoted social exclusiveness and, repeatedly, as a basic aspect of narrative structure, how its strictures and exclusions articulate an oedipal contest, a problem of generational transaction between father and son. Iconic Transactions The family is the remarkable symbolic, if not literal, locus of the narrative s organization of both conflict and resolution. At its centre lies the iconic presence of the mother, stable in her virtue and her place, a moral orientation for her son but also a figuration of the past; for the space of the mother must give way to the changes introduced by the shift of authority from father to son. The family binds the son back into its space, securing him from the perils of the social void by restoring his name, his right to an inheritance and his social place. But it is a transformed family, one over which he must now exercise authority. The nucleated space of this new formation often emerges under 50 Ravi Vasudevan, The Cultural Space of a Film Narrative: Interpreting Kismet (Bombay Talkies, 1943), Indian Economic and Social History Review 28 (2), April June 1991,

107 90 The Melodramatic Public the benign agency of the law, suggesting a complicity between state and personality in the development of a new society. There is a remarkable instance of the mother s iconic presence, the kind of gravitational pull she exercises over the narrative s progression, and indeed over the very process of narration, in a sequence from Awara. Raj, who has been working for the bandit Jagga, without his mother Leela s knowledge, returns home. His look is arrested by sight of his childhood friend Rita s photograph on the wall. Feeling that the photograph s look upbraids him for his moral duplicity, he turns the photo to the wall, only to have Leela turn it over again. Raj declares that childhood friends can never be recovered and leaves the house for an assignation with Jagga. Leela, unpacking for Raj, is shocked to find a gun in his case. The camera tracks in from Leela to the photograph, and there is a dissolve which takes us to a cabaret performer dancing before Jagga and his gang. At the end of two short sequences, that of the dance performance witnessed by Jagga, Raj, and the gang, and that relating to a discussion between Jagga and Raj, we return to Leela as she now turns the photograph to the wall. (Fig. 10.) The crucial feature of this sequence is of how the look of the female figure is relayed between the mother and the photographic image Fig. 10: Awara, Raj Kapoor, 1949, The Authority of Rita s Photograph.

108 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 91 of Rita and how, quite unusually, this relay is used to elaborate the sequence as a macro-sequence, one which authorizes a moral perspective on the sequences in between. The mother is the original repository of this moral look: the Ritaimage reiterates or doubles her function. When Raj seeks to evade the look of the photograph, his mother prevents this. Both the mother and the photograph s look now focus on the hero, who abruptly leaves the space, and their surveillance, as it were, in order to meet with the villain at a nightclub. The mother now discovers what business Raj is involved in, when she discovers a gun in his suitcase. We shift to the Rita-image, which now dissolves onto that of the tainted dancer, suggesting not so much a moral contrast as the extension of the photograph s surveillance into another space. It is as if the image looks and see its other, and, mirrored in that other, the figure of the male subject who should ideally be constituted within its own moral gaze. 51 The surveillance functions are corroborated when there is a completion of this circuit of looking two sequences later, when the narration returns to the photograph, indicating that the photo-icon has participated in a remarkable macro-narration. Aligned in Raj s perception to a moral gaze whose scrutiny he cannot bear, the photograph s gaze oversees the transgressive sexual and criminal instances of the sequences in between. Leela then turns this gaze away from such scenes, as if it may from now on only oversee the moral renewal of the protagonist; and this, indeed, is how it functions throughout the rest of the film The apparently paradoxical phenomenon of an image which has power is quite a common one within Hindu visual culture. Lawrence Babb has noted that whether the gods are represented as idols in the temple or the domestic space, or in the more pervasive phenomenon of photographs, the devotees desire the darshan (sight) of the God or religious preceptor (guru), a sight he grants to his devotees as a sign of his favour and grace. Babb emphasizes that this is a question not only of the devotee seeing but being seen; and that such a constitution of the devotional subject may afford him not only the grace and favour of the deity, but may also empower him. Lawrence A. Babb, Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism, Journal of Anthropological Research 37 (4), 1981, The subordinate position of the devotee in this relation has also been emphasized by Diana Eck: the deity gives darshan (darshan dena), the people take darshan (darshan lena) and so seeing in this religious sense is not an act initiated by the worshipper. Diana L. Eck, Seeing the Divine Image in India, Chambersburg, Pa., Anima Books, 1981, 5. Raj s evasion of this visual field stems from his transgression of its moral boundaries. 52 Vasudevan, Errant Males and the Divided Woman, 114.

109 92 The Melodramatic Public Young Rita s photograph is without depth, pure surface, a frozen moment of the past which, ironically, also represents a future state of grace for the protagonist. But it does not represent Rita, a figure whose narrative functions are bound up, from her introduction into the film, with sexuality. It represents, in fact, a time of innocence, before the advent of the oedipal contest with the father and the drives of desire and aggression. In this invocation of a past moment in the psychic trajectory of the subject, there is a strong correspondence between the image and the mother. And, indeed, the sequence plays upon the interchangeability of the gaze of image and mother, the latter reintroducing its look, substituting for it, and associating her censure with its withdrawal. 53 But that authoritative moral function must be displaced, or at least subordinated, before the onward trajectory which is also, of course, one of return whereby Raj will recover his familial identity. This is an objective in which the character Rita will be decisive. The mother, the still centre of the narrative, must be moved, her place dissolved and her functions eliminated or transferred to the appropriate figure of the heroine. The mixture of codes, generic and sensational elements, and a narrative undermining of social identity makes the social film of the 1950s an imaginary space in which a popular audience of mixed social background were offered a rather fluid system of signs, modes of address, and social positions. Industry observers had their particular explanation for this mixture. They believed that the social, initially 53 There is a fetishistic aspect to the photograph here, a disavowal of lack in the psychoanalytical sense; but the lack involved or feared here is not that of the phallus, but that of the mother. As Kaja Silverman has noted, the equation of woman with lack [is] a secondary construction, one which covers over earlier sacrifices... the loss of the object is also a castration... the male subject is already structured by absence prior to the moment at which he registers anatomical difference : idem, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1988, In this sense the photograph in Awara bears distinctly fetishistic features, covering over as it does a masculine lack of the maternal. In narrational terms, too, in the opposition between photo-icon and cinematic movement, the invocation of the photograph has the fetishistic aspect of denying movement, and thereby loss, and seeking a return to stasis. As Gilles Deleuze has noted, the fetish in this case is a frozen, arrested, two-dimensional image, a photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration... Gilles Deleuze, Sacher-Masoch: An Interpretation, trans. Jean McNeill, London, Faber and Faber, 1971, 28.

110 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 93 conceived of as a conventionally middle-class genre, had become an omnibus form in which different social groups were being catered to by different elements of the film. One observer noted that, whereas in the 1930s dramatic and story values appealed to the middle and upper middle classes, and stunts and action dramas appealed to workers, in the 1950s a new type of social realism also came to occupy the screen. Actions, thrills, magic and stunts were introduced into the stories to attract the masses. 54 I would like to suggest, however, that the different modes do not necessarily correspond, by some reductionist sociological aesthetic, to particular social segments of the audience. Aesthetically, continuity codes mingle with, give way to, and even take over the functions of codes more widely observable in the visual culture of society. An iconic construction is often observable in the arrangement of the new bearer of patriarchal authority in the story; and point-of-view structures formulated in a classical Hollywood way are used to shore up this quite traditional framing. 55 Conversely, the tableau framing, while in some sense communicating an ordered, socially coded view for the audience, does not necessarily determine their perception of the narrative situation. In this sense, it is difficult to separate out traditional from modern address, or to suggest that such addresses correspond to distinct audiences. Even the sensational action sequences can hardly be regarded as attractive only to a lower-class audience. I have argued elsewhere that a masculine culture was being addressed through such elements, one not restricted by class, and perhaps contributive to a new, more sharply differentiated sexual image for the male subject. 56 However, there is a strong tendency to subordinate movement and vision towards a stable organization of meaning, in an iconic articulation. This has a parallel in the way in which the narrative reorganizes the family so as to secure a stable position for the middle-class hero. To my mind, this feature brings the complexities of the popular cultural form into alignment with a certain normalizing discourse and hegemonic closure. 54 The Hindi Film, Indian Talkie , p Ravi Vasudevan, Errant Males and the Divided Woman, especially ch. 2, in the analysis of Devdas (Bimal Roy, 1955) and Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957); also see below, ch. 3, The Politics of Cultural Address, for this analysis. 56 See Ravi Vasudevan, Glancing Off Reality: Contemporary Cinema and Mass Culture in India, Cinemaya 16, Summer 1992, 4 9.

111 94 The Melodramatic Public 3. Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism The formal complexities of the 1950s social film had, in a sense, been acknowledged in Kobita Sarkar s and Chidananda Das Gupta s pronouncements on its narrative and stylistic features. But they insisted on seeing these elements as constrained or unrealized. By subjecting the cinema to a certain purist criticism, they failed to grasp the complexity of popular forms such as melodrama. Recent work shows that, along with stereotypical, morally bipolar characters, melodramatic narratives have been known to deploy narration through the awareness of a single character. 57 Further, as Peter Brooks has noted, melodrama as a form has, from the nineteenth century, been associated with realism. 58 In changing the way in which fiction organizes meaning, melodrama marks the transition from the prevalence of sacred and hierarchical notions to a post-sacred situation in which the sacred is striven for but meaning comes increasingly to reside in the personality. 59 The terrain of the personality is a social and familial matrix in which the reality of everyday life becomes an inevitable reference point. In the Hindi social film such a mise-en-scène is vividly in evidence. Whatever the degree of fabrication, the street scene of the 1940s and 1950s is animated by the activity of newspaper hawkers, vegetable peddlers, construction workers, mechanics, urchins and shoe-shine boys, petty thieves, pedestrians going about their business. Vehicles cycles, trucks, cars, trolleys, buses, and significant places railway stations, cafes, the red light area, are also deployed in the semantics of the street and of movement. Above all there is the street lamp, signifier of both street and of night and therefore of a physical, social, and sexual drive. 60 But the melodramatic narrative s invocation of the real is merely one level of its work. As Brooks notes, melodrama uses the things and gestures of the real world, of social life, as kinds of metaphors that 57 Rick Altman, Dickens, Griffith and Film Theory Today, The South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (2), Spring 1989, Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, ch Ibid., The street lamp is also a recurrent, metonymic element in songbook illustrations and movie posters of this period. The National Film Archives of India, Pune, has a substantial collection of both.

112 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 95 refer us to the realm of spiritual reality and latent moral meanings. Things cease to be merely themselves, gestures cease to be merely tokens of social intercourse whose meaning is assigned by a social code; they become the vehicles of metaphors whose tenor suggests another kind of reality. 61 Routing itself through the real, melodrama then penetrates to repressed features of the psychic life and into the type of family dramas I have referred to. Certain dramaturgical features, such as that of coincidence, are central to this process of making meaning, especially for relaying the significance of the social level to the audience. For coincidence insistently anchors figures who have a definite social function to relationships of an intimate and often familial, generational order. 62 In this sense cinematic narratives address the spectator in psychic terms, mirroring the most primal conflicts and desires and refracting all other levels of experience through that prism. The conceptual separation of melodrama from realism, which occurred through the formation of bourgeois canons of high art in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America, 63 was echoed in the discourses on popular commercial cinema of late 1940s and 1950s India. This strand of criticism, associated with the formation of the art cinema in Bengal, could not comprehend the peculiarities of a form which had its own complex mechanisms of articulation. In the process the critics contributed to an obfuscating hierarchization of culture with which we are still contending. 4. The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film As a result of this obfuscation, perhaps we have not quite understood the particular political articulation of the popular cinema of the 1950s. Nationalist discourses of that time about social justice and the 61 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, Coincidence also has an important temporal function: the apparently arbitrary separation and coincidental reunion of characters is actually motivated by the narrative requiring a certain time to elapse. These durations are related to the evolution of a set of substitutable functions (whether between characters, or within a character) in which the timing of the substitution depends on the exhaustion of one figure, and a maturation and acquisition of lacking functions in another. See Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema. 63 Christine Gledhill, The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation, in Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is, 33 6.

113 96 The Melodramatic Public formation of a new personality were then routed through familiar, if modified, cultural and narrational reference points. These were family dramas, iconic and tableau modes of representation. I would suggest that the cinema of that time communicated a popular democratic perception which worked through some of the rationalist and egalitarian approaches of the liberal-radical intelligentsia, but on its own terms. Of popular modes of representation and thought in late medieval Europe, Ginzburg has suggested that they recall a series of motifs worked out by humanistically educated heretical groups. But such representations are original, they were not derivative from a high rationalist culture. He thus urges that despite divergences of form and articulation (e.g., literate/oral) he is investigating a unified culture within which it was impossible to make clear-cut distinctions. 64 Mutualities of influence and features of common participation break down simplistic notions of cultural difference and hierarchization. When the intelligentsia started firmly associating popular forms with the common people, such stances were related to an active process of their dissociation from forms in which they had previously participated. 65 However, once these distinctions are crystallized, it would be foolhardy not to pinpoint the ideological implications of the formal and narrational distinctions which emerge between art and commercial cinema; peculiarities which are quite central to the ways in which perceptions of change find expression in popular forms. I will not go into this at length, but both the deployment of the icon, and the narrative transaction around generational conflict, are centrally founded on the manipulation of woman. In particular, with rare exceptions, such a manipulation actively divests women characters of the modern, professional attributes which they exhibit, placing them as objects of exchange within the generational transaction. Further, the social film of the 1950s also tends to split the woman in terms of the figuration of her desire. Legitimate figures are held close to patriarchal hearth and diktat in terms of narrative space and symbolic articulation, and a more overt sexuality is displaced to another figure Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, xxii xxiii. 65 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London, Maurice Temple Smith, 1978, Vasudevan, Errant Males and the Divided Woman, esp. 86 9,

114 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities 97 Having said this, perhaps we should conclude by remembering that the art cinema is perfectly capable of such a subordination of women characters. This is so of the way Ray s Ganashatru (1989), for example, reduces the woman to moral voice and sexually threatened figure. Of course, psychological nuance and realist acting styles are evidently meant to prevent such a reduction of character to narrative function. However, not only does the commercial cinema exhibit such acting styles, as in the work of Nutan (for example, in Sujata, Bimal Roy, 1959; and Bandini, Bimal Roy, 1963); perhaps, as in song sequences such as Aaj sajan mohe ang laga lo in Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957) and O, Majhi in Bandini, it has richer resources to express a desiring and divided subjectivity than naturalist canons would allow for.

115 3 The Cultural Politics of Address in a Transitional Cinema Recent discussions of cinema and national identity in the third world context have tended, by and large, to cluster around the concept of a third cinema. Here the focus has been on recovering or reinventing local aesthetic and narrative traditions against the homogenizing impulses of Hollywood in its domination over markets and normative standards. One of the hallmarks of third cinema theory has been its firmly unchauvinist approach to the national. In its references to wider international aesthetic practices third cinema asserts but problematizes the boundaries between nation and other. In the process, it also explores the ways in which the suppressed internal others of the nation, whether of class, sub- or counter-nationality, ethnic group, or gender, can find a voice. 1 A substantial lacuna in this project has been any sustained understanding of the domestic commercial cinema in the third world. This is important because in certain countries such as India the commercial film has, since the dawn of the talkies, successfully marginalized Hollywood s weight in the domestic market. This is not to claim that it has functioned within an entirely self-referential autarchy. The Indian popular cinema stylistically integrated aspects of the world standard, and has also been influential in certain foreign markets. But it constitutes something like a nation-space against the dominant norms of Hollywood, and so ironically fulfils aspects of the role which the avant-garde third cinema proclaims as its own. Clearly, the difference in verbal, as opposed to narrative and cinematic, language cannot be the major explanation for this autonomy, 1 For a representative selection of articles, cf. Pines and Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema.

116 The Cultural Politics 99 for other national cinemas have succumbed to the rule of the Hollywood film. Instead, it is in the peculiarities of the Indian commercial film as an entertainment form that we may find the explanation for its ascendancy over the home market. In the Indian case the theoretical silence around the specificity of the commercial cinema is due not so much to third cinema discourse but to the discourses and institutions of art cinema in the 1950s which refused to seriously consider the commercial film as a focus of critical discussion. Indian commercial cinema has exerted an international presence in countries of Indian immigration as in East Africa, Mauritius, the Middle East, and South East Asia, but also in a significant swathe of Northern Africa. 2 Here it has often been regarded by the local intelligentsia and film industry in as resentful and suspicious a way as the Hollywood cinema in Europe. 3 On the other hand there are instances when the Bombay film s penetration of certain markets is not viewed as a threat. The popularity of the Hindi cinema in the former Soviet Union is a case in point. Such phenomena make one think of a certain arc of narrative form separate from, if overlapping at points, with the larger hegemony exercised by Hollywood. From the description of the cultural peculiarities of the Bombay cinema which follows, one could speculate whether its narrative form has a special resonance in transitional societies. The diegetic world of this cinema is primarily governed by the logic of kinship relations, and its plot driven by family conflict. The system of dramaturgy is a melodramatic one, displaying the characteristic ensemble of Manichaeanism, bipolarity, the privileging of the moral over the psychological, and the deployment of coincidence in plot structures. And the relationship between narrative, performance sequence, and action spectacle is loosely structured in the 2 M.B. Billimoria, Foreign Markets for Indian Films, in Indian Talkie, , A substantial deposit of Indian films distributed by Wapar France, an agency which catered to North African markets, is in the French film archives at Bois D arcy. For the importance of Indian film imports to Indonesia and Burma, cf. John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry, London, Christopher Helm, 1990, 202, 223; and for patterns of Indian film exports at the end of the 1980s, M. Pendakur, India, in ibid., none of these cinemas [from Morocco to Kuwait] is doing well... markets are flooded with Rambos, Karate films, Hindu [sic] musicals and Egyptian films..., Lisbeth Malkmus, The New Egyptian Cinema : Adapting Genre Conventions to a New Society, Cineaste 16 (3), 1988, 30 3 (30).

117 100 The Melodramatic Public fashion of a cinema of attractions. 4 In addition to these features, the system of narration incorporates Hollywood codes of continuity editing in a fitful, unsystematic fashion, relies heavily on visual forms such as the tableau, and inducts cultural codes of looking of a more archaic sort. At first glance, there would appear to be a significant echoing here of the form of early Euro-American cinema, indicating that what appeared as a fairly abbreviated moment in the history of Western cinema has defined the long-term character of this influential cinema of another world. What is required here is a comparative account of narrative forms in transitional societies which might set out a different story of the cinema than the dominant Euro-American one. However, to talk about transition might imply that such cinemas are destined to follow paths already set earlier. In fact, these cinemas may pose problems which will not admit of similar solutions. The problem of transition poses a cultural politics centred on the way local forms reinvent themselves to establish dialogue with and assert difference from universal models of narration and subjectivity. Recent currents in international film study have sought to recast the opposition between local and universally hegemonic norms of narration into a dialectical relationship. Here the specificity of particular cultural histories European and American as much as third world have been constructed to understand the national and regional contexts in which the cinema was instituted, 5 how it came to assume an identity, became 4 The term comes from Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction. There is a more elaborate discussion of this term in relation to the Bombay cinema in section 3 below. For reflections on other attraction -based cinemas, cf. Laleen Jayamanne, Sri Lankan Family Melodrama: A Cinema of Primitive Attractions, Screen 33 (2), Summer 1992, ; and Gerard Fouquet, Of Genres and Savours in Thai Film, Cinemaya 6, , For example, Ginnette Vincendeau, The Exception and the Rule, Sight and Sound 2 (8), 1994, which demonstrates that Renoir s Rules of the Game (1939), invariably highlighted in the canon of world cinema by critics, should be understood within a set of local parameters of narrative form, performance tradition (boulevard plays), and cinematographic style (long takes and shooting in depth) that were shared by a number of French films of the time. Other stimulating writing on the importance of local industrial and cultural contexts includes: Ana M. Lopez, Tears and Desire: Women and Melodrama in the Old Mexican Cinema, in John King, Ana M. Lopez, and Manuel Alvarodo, eds, Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London, British Film Institute, 1993, 67 80; Thomas Elsaesser, A Second Life:

118 The Cultural Politics 101 ours. 6 At issue then is how traditions of identity, aesthetic form, and cultural address are deployed for a politics of creative adaptation and interrogation of social transformation in a colonial and post-colonial world. To examine this process, I will take examples primarily from the Bombay cinema, but will also refer to films from other regional film cultures in the period from the 1930s through to the first decade after Independence in In exploring these issues, I want to analyse the various types of cultural adaptation involved without losing sight of certain larger political frames. For the problem of Indian popular cinema lies not only at the interface between the local and the global in the constitution of a politics of cultural difference, but must also be seen in terms of the internal hierarchies that are involved in the constitution of a national culture. The formation of a national market is a crucial aspect of these multi-layered relations of domination and subordination. Bombay became ascendant in the home market only in the 1950s. Earlier, Pune in Maharashtra and Calcutta in Bengal were important centres of film production, catering to the Marathi- and Bengali-speaking regional audience as well as to the Hindi audience, the largest linguistic market German Cinema s First Decade, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1996; James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1987; Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film, London, British Film Institute, 1994, for an understanding of how the historical film reflected popular perceptions about British history; Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, London, Routledge, 1993, who notes the importance of systems of gesture and morphology in condensing social and political consensuses through the vehicle of the star. More generally, there is the elegant introduction on the problems and possibilities of the notion of popular cinema in Ginnette Vincendeau and Richard Dyer, Popular European Cinema, London, Routledge, Such writing is yet to evolve substantially for the third world cinema, as much recent writing has been centred on avant-garde third cinema studies. 6 This agenda would also re-set the terms of an ethnographic cultural studies seeking to recover the many ways audiences interpret texts. Distinctions have arisen between ethnographic cultural studies for the West and those applied to the third world. Where the former is governed by democratic assumptions, and the possibilities of multiple viewpoints in the construction of texts, the latter tends to be monolithic in its characterization of the cultural basis of interpretation. But clearly, once the West too is remade into a series of specific cultural histories, the possibility of putting the democratic and cultural together within an ethnographic approach generates a more universal agenda.

119 102 The Melodramatic Public in the country. While these regional markets continued to exist, Bombay became the main focus of national film production. This ascendancy was curtailed by the emergence of important industries in Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, producing films in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. From the 1980s these centres produced as many and often more films than Bombay. 7 There has been a certain equivalence in the narrative form of these cinemas, but each region contributed its distinct features to the commercial film. In the Tamil and Telugu cases the cinema also has a strong linkage with the politics of regional and ethnic identity. In recent times the cinemas of the South have also made a greater effort to diversify their products than the Bombay industry. The domestic hegemony achieved by the commercial cinema has had ambivalent implications for the social and political constitution of its spectator. All of India s cinemas were involved in constructing a certain abstraction of national identity; by national identity I mean here not only the pan-indian one, but also regional constructions of national identity. This process of abstraction suppresses other identities, either through stereotyping or through absence. The Bombay cinema has a special position here, because it positions other national/ethnic/ socio-religious identities in stereotypical ways under an overarching North Indian, majoritarian Hindu identity. The stereotypes of the southerner (or Madrasi, a term which dismissively collapses the entire southern region), the Bengali, the Parsi, the Muslim, the Sikh, and the Christian occupy subordinate positions in this universe. Bombay crystallized as the key centre for the production of national fictions just at the moment that the new state came into existence, so its construction of the national narrative carries a particular force Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses of Transformation Arguments for cultural transformation have defined Indian cinema from very early on in its history. The key theme in these discussions was 7 For the standard account, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film; also Manjunath Pendakur, India, in Lent, The Asian Film Industry, For reflections on the subordinating implications of Bombay s national cinema, see Ravi Vasudevan, Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in 1950s India, Oxford Literary Review 16, 1994,

120 The Cultural Politics 103 the social and cultural implications of film genres. In the initial phase, Indian cinema was dominated by the mythological film, which used Hindu myths as their major resource. Very soon other genres developed, including the social, which addressed issues of modern-day life, the costume film, or the historical, the spectacular stunt- or actiondominated film, and the devotional film which recounted tales of popular saintly figures who criticized religious orthodoxy and hierarchy. Our knowledge about the terms on which the industry addressed spectators through genre, and the way spectators received genres, are as yet rudimentary. Stephen Hughes s work on exhibition practices in early South Indian cinema argues that Hollywood and European action serials catered to lower-class audiences. 9 And a 1950s essay by an industry observer noted that stunt, mythologicals, and costume films would attract a working-class audience. 10 The film industry based this evaluation on two assumptions: firstly, that plebeian spectators would delight in spectacle and emotion, uncluttered by ideas and social content; secondly, publicity strategies used by the industry suggest that exhibitors believed such audiences were susceptible to a religious and moral rhetoric. In the industry s view, therefore, the lower-class audience was motivated by visceral or motor-oriented pleasures and moral imperatives. On the other hand, the film industry understood the devotional and social films, with their emphasis on social criticism, to be the favoured genres of the middle class. A running theme in social films was the need to maintain indigenous identities against the fascination for Western cultural behaviour. While this has become part of the armature of films devoted to contemporary society down to the present day, a substantial vein of social films was devoted to making a critique of Indian society and setting up an agenda for change. Recent discussions of Tamil film of the 1930s and 1940s argue that there were repressive and disciplinary elements to the agenda for a modern social grounding of film narratives. 11 The agenda here was for the social film to displace the mythological, and the superstitious and irrational culture it founded. In the 1930s a host of studios emerged which employed 9 The Pre-Phalke Era in South Indian Cinema, South Indian Studies 2, 1996, All references are to The Hindi Film, Indian Talkie, Tamil film studies workshop, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, 1997.

121 104 The Melodramatic Public script-writers to develop reformist narrative, and an alliance emerged in these decades between literature and cinema, with films adapting important novels as their source material. 12 However, by the 1950s the industry reformulated genre and audience appeal. After the collapse of the major studios, Bombay Talkies, Prabhat, New Theatres, the new, speculative climate of the industry encouraged an eye for the quick profit and therefore the drive for a larger audience. This encouraged the induction of the sensational attractions of action, spectacle, and dance into the social film, a process explained by industry observers as a lure for the mass audience. Industry observers clearly believed the genre label to be quite superficial, and, indeed, there is something inflationary about a large number of films released in the 1950s being called socials. The label of the social film perhaps gave the cinematic entertainment that cobbled sensational attractions together in a slapdash way a certain legitimacy. However, arguably, the mass audiences earlier conceived of as being attracted only by sensation and themes of moral affirmation were now being solicited by an omnibus form which also included a rationalist discourse as part of its attractions. 13 We will observe a replaying of these discussions in more recent paradigms of the Indian popular cinema. One of my arguments will be that, rather than oppose different types of audience disposition on the ground of genre and subject matter, one needs to explore how forms of address may set up certain similar problems in constituting spectatorial subjectivity, whether this is played out within the domain of the mythological or the social. Especially important here is an agenda of moving beyond the deployment in Indian cinema of a rhetoric of traditional morality and identity to a focus on how cinematic address 12 Moinak Biswas, Literature and Cinema in Bengal, 1930s 1950s, paper presented at seminar on Reading Indian Cinema, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, The reasons for the restructuring of the social film are complex. Artists associated with the Indian People s Theatre Association (IPTA), which had ties with the Communist Party of India, had started working in the film industry from the 1940s. Amongst these were the actor Balraj Sahni, the director Bimal Roy, and the scriptwriter K.A. Abbas. The latter was involved in Awara (The Vagabond; Raj Kapoor, 1951), a film representative of the new drive to combine a social reform perspective with ornate spectacle. However, the years after Independence were characterized by a broader ideological investment in discourses of social justice associated with the image of the new state and the personality of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

122 The Cultural Politics 105 the way spectators are positioned in terms of vision, auditory address, and narrative intelligibility may complicate and re-work the overt terms of narrative coherence. 2. Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism Here I want to briefly summarize some of the dominant currents in the contemporary criticism of the Indian popular cinema and the nature of its spectator. The dominant view is that of a tradition of film criticism associated with Satyajit Ray and the Calcutta Film Society in the 1950s. This school of criticism, which has proven influential in subsequent mainstream film criticism, arraigned the popular cinema for its derivativeness from the American cinema, the melodramatic externality and stereotyping of its characters, and especially its failure to focus on the psychology of human interaction. In these accounts the spectator of the popular film emerges as an immature, indeed infantile, figure, one bereft of the rationalist imperatives required for the Nehru era s project of national reconstruction. 14 Recent analyses of the popular cinemas in the non-western world have indicated that the melodramatic mode has, with various indigenous modifications, been a characteristic form of narrative and dramaturgy in societies undergoing the transition to modernity. 15 Criticisms of this prevalent mode have taken the particular form that I have just specified, and have had both developmentalist and democratic components. The implication was that, insofar as the melodramatic mode was grounded in an anti-rationalist ethos, it would undercut the rational, critical outlook required for the development of a just, dynamic, and independent nation. 16 This premise of modern film criticism has been taken in rather different directions. Chidananda Das Gupta emerges from this earlier tradition, being one of the founder members of the Calcutta Film Society in But his book, The Painted Face, 17 pays greater attention 14 For an exploration of this influential critical tradition, see ch. 2 above. 15 Cf. the collection of essays in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, For example, Mitsushiro Yoshimoto s account of the post-war domestic criticism of Japanese cinema, Melodrama, Post-modernism and Japanese Cinema, in Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema,101 26, esp New Delhi, Roli Books, 1990.

123 106 The Melodramatic Public to the commercial cinema than realist criticism ever has. Here his analysis develops certain insights about the narrative structure of the popular film, but it is still dogged by assumptions which spring from the earlier terms of reference. These relate to the belief that the commercial film of the early period and again after the 1950s primarily catered to a spectator who had not severed his ties with the countryside and so had a traditional or pre-modern relationship to the image, one which incapacitated him or her from distinguishing between image and reality. 18 Another of Das Gupta s theses is that the pre-rationalist spectator, en route from countryside to city in his mental outlook, was responsive to Bombay cinema s focus on family travails and identity, a focus which displaces attention from the larger social domain. He describes the spectator caught up in the psychic trauma brought about by threatened loss of the mother and the struggle for adult identity as adolescent and self-absorbed or totalist. 19 We have echoes here of the realist criticism of the 1950s in its reference to the spectator of the commercial film as infantile. Following on from earlier discourses underwriting the cinema as a vehicle of modernization, he exempts the social-reform-oriented cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s from this general formulation, and underwrites its attempts to transform social perception in rationalist directions. Such a conception of the spectator ultimately has political implications. Das Gupta sees this social and psychic configuration reflecting the gullible mentality that enabled the rise to power of the actor-politicians of the south, M.G. Ramachandran and N.T. Rama Rao. 20 The naïve spectator actually believed his screen idols to be capable of the prowess they displayed on-screen. In Das Gupta s view the rational outlook required for the development of a modern nation-state is still lacking, and the popular cinema provides us with an index of the cognitive impairment of the majority of the Indian people. There is a sociological underpinning to this argument, that the middle classes are bearers of a rationalist discourse and the attributes of responsible citizenship, and that the popular cinema in its earlier and later manifestations is the domain of first a pre-modern, and then a decultured, lumpenized mass audience. 18 Seeing is Believing, in Das Gupta, The Painted Face, City and Village and The Oedipal Hero, ibid., and The Painted Face of Indian Politics, ibid.,

124 The Cultural Politics 107 This psychological and social characterization of the popular spectator is pervasive, even if it is not used to the same ends as Das Gupta. The social psychologist Ashis Nandy, while working outside the realist tradition, shares some of its assumptions about the psychological address of the commercial film. 21 He argues that the dominant spectator of the popular cinema holds on to a notion of traditional community quite remote from the outlook of the modern middle class; as such, this spectator is attracted to a narrative which ritually neutralizes the discomfiting features of social change, those atomizing modern thought patterns and practices which have to be adopted for reasons of survival. Nandy embraces the cultural indices of a subjectivity which is not governed by the rationalist psychology and reality-orientation of a contested modernity. In this sense he valorizes that which Das Gupta sees as a drawback. So a psychical and sociological matrix for understanding the address of the commercial Bombay film to its spectator, deriving in some respects from the realist criticism of the 1950s, has been extended into the more explicitly psychoanalytical interpretations of spectatorial dispositions and cognitive capacities. Ironically, these premises are shared both by those critical of the commercial film and its spectator for their lack of reality-orientation and those who see popular cinema resisting modern forms of consciousness. The most complex attempt to transcend these oppositions between tradition and modernity in thinking about Indian cinema is the work of Madhava Prasad, which argues that many of the dimensions identified as composing a non-modern outlook in Indian popular films are in fact constructed under the aegis of an ideology of modernity. 22 For the rhetoric and narrative form of modernity has to produce a traditional other in order to overcome and institute a new form of subjectivity. Prasad situates this cinematic project in terms of certain overarching political and ideological formations in post-colonial India. Foremost here is the concept of passive revolution, where a modernizing state and its constituency in the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy has to adapt 21 All references are to Ashis Nandy, An Intelligent Critic s Guide to the Indian Cinema, Deep Focus 1 (1 3), December 1987, June 1988, and November 1988, 68 72, 53 60, and 58 61, rpnt in Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996, M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, Delhi, Oxford University Press 1998.

125 108 The Melodramatic Public its transformative agenda to the realities of pre-capitalist power. In terms of narrative form, the political compromise at the level of the state is represented by what Prasad calls the feudal family romance. This form releases a series of new drives to individual romantic fulfilment and the formation of the couple for the nuclear family, consumerist orientations, affiliations to an impersonal state form but ultimately subordinates them to the rule of traditionally regulated social relationships. This regime of narrative coherence depicts landed gentry, urban gentlemen, and representatives of the social and religious orthodoxy as ultimately capable of fulfilling or neutralizing the energies unleashed by new forces. In this regard, the feudal family functions as a way both of disavowing change and, more subtly, of allowing for it without disturbing social hierarchies. This dominant narrative form exists over a long period in Prasad s rendition, running from the 1940s through to the end of the 1960s, when the ruling configuration changes and the cinematic institution is diversified under the aegis of state support and through new developments within the film industry. 3. The Politics of Indian Melodrama Where for Das Gupta the popular form subjects the spectator to premodern perceptions, for Prasad the pre-modern is an ideological construction rather than a cognitive problem. The ideology of his feudal family romance echoes, but is significantly distinct from, melodrama theory as it has evolved in the West. For Peter Brooks, as we saw, melodrama emerged in the nineteenth century as a form which spoke of a post-sacred universe in which the certainties of traditional meaning and hierarchical authority had been displaced. 23 The melodramatic narrative constantly makes an effort to recover this lost security, but meaning comes to be increasingly founded in the personality. Characters take on an essential, psychic resonance corresponding to family identities, and work out forbidden conflicts and desires. In the process, the social dimension collapses into the familial and, indeed, the family itself becomes a microcosm of the social level. The distinction is that the issue posed by melodrama for Prasad is not simply one of striving to recover sacred forms and traditional 23 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

126 The Cultural Politics 109 hierarchical meaning, but a deployment of this desire for a strategy of transformation. Here, Prasad sees the imbrication of familial and social levels as political, as a register of the way pre-capitalist enclaves function as the ideological integument under conditions of social transformation. He compares the dominant Indian narrative form of his construction to the aristocratic romances of early European stage melodrama. Implicitly, the drives to alter this form are, in turn, comparable to the more democratic social vision of later melodrama. Prasad s identification of a hierarchical coding of address in popular narrative form leads to a suggestive thesis about the informal prohibition on the private sphere and individuated characterization in Indian popular cinema. The argument centres on the prohibition on kissing. Whereas conventional discourses on the cinema argue that the prohibition maintains a sense of national identity against the inroads of Western cultural behaviour, Prasad places it within the co-ordinates of power of the dominant narrative form. He suggests that the feudal family romance seeks to contain those romantic drives that threaten traditional social authority with the spectre of secession. Here the kiss marks the incipient space of privacy and the nuclear family, understood as an infringement of the overwhelmingly public monitoring of sexuality and subjecthood under feudal scopic regimes. Prasad argues that the pre-emption of such types of characterization has ramifications for the forms of knowledge and modes of performance in popular cinema. Instead of a narrative form constructed around enigmas, the popular cinema is governed by forms of speech and narrative mechanisms deriving from the domain of the already known. 24 The spectator of this cinema is then addressed through the presentation of a pre-interpreted symbolic order in contrast to the spectator of classical realist cinema who is complicit in the conversion of the raw material of representation into narrative meaning. I would like to hold on to Nandy s insight about community forms of address in complicating the terms of this very original and systematic thesis. Here one should consider Nandy s invocation of tradition, 24 Several writers have anticipated this part of the argument. See Ashis Nandy, The Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles, in Pradip Krishen, ed., Indian Popular Cinema: Myth, Meaning and Metaphor, India International Centre Quarterly, Special Issue, 8 (1), March 1980, 89 96; Rosie Thomas, Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity, Screen 26 (3 4), 1985, ; and Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema, Screen 30 (3), 1989,

127 110 The Melodramatic Public often rendered in a way that leaves the historical coordinates of how tradition is constituted unexamined, as a heuristic, an enabling function or stance with which to critique modern forms of political and cultural organization. In terms of narrative form, the popular imperative engages in a series of transactions, both with methods and idioms marked as traditional or culturally distinctive as well as those defined as modern. Here, I would like to consider the location of the spectator s position around three issues: (i) how is the ideology of the traditional constituted in cinematic narration? (ii) what are the functions of cinematic techniques of subjectivity in the construction of narrative space? (iii) how does the overall attraction-based and presentational, rather than representational, field of the popular film system address the spectator? These questions amount to an engagement with a history of the methods of film narration, film-style, as well as a history of the relationship between screen practices and audience reception. 4. Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame The question of mode of address concerns how objects and figures are located with respect to the look of the spectator within the spatial and temporal coordinates of scenic construction. Central here is the aesthetics of frontality and iconicity noted for Indian films in certain phases and genres by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Geeta Kapur. 25 The iconic mode is not used by these writers in its precise semiotic sense, to identify a relation of resemblance, but to identify a meaningful condensation of image. The term has been used to situate the articulation of the mythic within painting, theatre, and cinema, and could be conceived of as cultural work which seeks to bind a multi-layered dynamic into a unitary image. In Geeta Kapur s definition the iconic is an image into which symbolic meanings converge and in which moreover they achieve stasis. 26 This concept of the iconic needs to be grounded within a conception of mise-en-scène, and it is here that the question of frontal address surfaces. At one level frontality would mean placing the 25 Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era, 14 15, rpnt in Tejaswini Niranjana, et al., eds, Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 1993, 47 82; Kapur, Mythic Material in Indian Cinema, rpnt as Revelation and Doubt: Sant Tukaram and Devi, in ibid., Kapur, Revelation and Doubt, 23.

128 The Cultural Politics 111 camera at a 180 plane to the figures and objects constitutive of filmic space. These may display attributes of direct address, as in the look of characters into the camera, but a frontal, direct address is relayed in other ways, as in the way the knowledge of the spectator is drawn upon in constructing the scene, through the stylized performance, ritual motifs, and auditory address that arise from a host of Indian aesthetic and performance traditions. 27 This position of knowledge is not one which relays the spectator through a hermeneutic play, the enigma of what is to come, but through existing paradigms of narrative knowledge, although these may be subject to reworking. In genres such as the mythological film, the narrative process assumes audience knowledge of the narrative totality it refers to, so that a fragmentary, episodic structure can be deployed. The film song displays this function of frontal address across genres, reaching over and beyond the space of the scene, locking the spectator into a direct auditory relay. Frontal planes in cinematic composition are used to relay this work of iconic condensation and also to group characters and objects in the space of the tableau. In Peter Brooks formulation the tableau in melodrama gives the spectator the opportunity to see meanings represented, emotions and moral states rendered in clear visible signs. 28 And Barthes has noted that it is a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view... [it] is intellectual, it has something to say (something moral, social) but is also says it knows how this must be done. 29 Barthes also argues that the tableau has a temporal dimension, what he calls the pregnant moment caught between past and future. 30 In the course of this argument, I will show that the temporality of the 27 Kapur defines the formal category of frontality as arising from the word, the image, the design, the performative act... This means, for example, flat, diagrammatic and simply contoured figures (as in Kalighat pat painting). It means a figure-ground design, with notational perspecitve (as in the Nathdwara pictures, and the photographs which they often utilize). It means, in dramatic terms, the repetition of motifs within ritual play, as in the lila; it means a space deliberately evacuated to foreground actorimage performance, as in the tamasha. Frontality is also established in an adaptation of traditional acting conventions to the proscenium stage, as when stylized audience address is mounted on an elaborate mise-en-scène, as in Parsi theatre. Ibid., Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, Barthes, Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, in Image, Music, Text, (70). 30 Ibid.

129 112 The Melodramatic Public tableau can be deployed cinematically, its shape setting the geometrical terms of the temporal construction of the scene as it extends over a series of shots. The tableau also displays interruptive, interventionist functions in the flow of scenic construction. In my argument, the function of this spatial figure is to encode a socially and communally defined address to the spectator. The Reconstruction of the Icon I will illustrate the dynamic employment of the frontal, iconic mode, and of tableau framing in a sequence from Mehboob Khan s saga of peasant life, Mother India (1957). This segment presents, and then upsets, a pair of relatively stable iconic instances. The mother-in-law, Sundar Chachi, is centred through a number of tableau shots taken from different angles to highlight her authority in the village just after she has staged a spectacular wedding for her son. This representation of Sundar Chachi takes place in the courtyard of her house. The other instance is of the newly wedded daughter-in-law, Radha, shown inside the house, as she massages her husband s feet. It is a classic image of the devout Hindu wife. 31 The two instances are destabilized because of the information that the wedding has forced Sundar Chachi to mortgage the family land. The information diminishes her standing, causing her to leave the gathering and enter her house. Simultaneously, it also undermines Radha s iconic placement as submissive, devout wife. As the larger space of the scene, the actual relationship betwen the inside and the outside, remains unspecified, the relationship is suggested when Radha, hearing the conversation, looks up and away towards off-screen left. The likelihood of this positioning is further strengthened when Sundar Chachi enters the house, and, looking in the direction of off-screen right, confesses that she has indeed mortgaged her land. (Figs 11 and 12, p. 113.) There is the use here of a Hollywood eyeline match, where the direction of looks cast is consistent with the convention that characters separated into successive shots face each other in space. The 31 Reference may be made here to a panel from the eighteenth-century Hindu text analysed by I. Julia Leslie in The Perfect Wife: The Orthodox Hindu Woman according to the Stridharmapaddhati of Tryambakayajvan, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1989.

130 The Cultural Politics 113 Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Figs 11 12: Iconic Transfer in Mother India, Mehboob Khan, 1957.

131 114 The Melodramatic Public women are narrativized out of their static, iconic position through narrative processes of knowledge circulation and character movement, and by the deployment of Hollywood codes of off-screen sound and eye-line match. The mobilization of Radha out of one convention of iconic representation is completed when she assumes maternal functions extending beyond her family, and over the domain of village community and nation. In turn, she becomes the focal point of community norms, and her gaze acquires punitive functions in delineating the limits of permissible action. A process of the narrative dispersal of one iconic figure is thus finally brought to a close by instituting a new iconic figure to ground subjectivity. Central here is a particular reinscription in the cinema of a discourse of the image and the look in indigenous conventions. Darshan I refer here to darshan, the power exercised by the authoritative image in Hindu religious culture. In this practice, the devotee is permitted to behold the image of the deity, and is privileged and benefited by this permission, in contrast to a concept of looking that assigns power to the beholder by reducing the image to an object of the look. 32 Darshan has a wider purchase, being invoked in discourses of social and political authority as well. In a certain rendering of the category of darshan as an authoritarian form, social status derives from the degree of access which social groups and individuals have to a central icon of authority, whether of kingship, divine authority, or the extended patriarchal family and its representatives. 33 This eligibility then rests on very hierarchically coded criteria of social rank. There is a task here of identifying how the darshanic locates characters and is responded to by them within cinematic narration. One hypothesis would be that an authoritative figure, symbol or space (temple, landlord s house, court of law), is mobilized to order the place of characters within a scene and over the time of the narrative. But if such a diegetic instance is located, it is not necessary that characters abide by the positions they 32 For darshan, see Babb, Glancing, and Eck, Seeing the Divine Image. 33 Madhava Prasad uses the concept in this fashion, to outline the way narrative relations are organized in the feudal family romance. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, ch. 3.

132 The Cultural Politics 115 are assigned by it, nor that filmic techniques subordinate the spectator to the sway of darshanic authority. Indeed, to assume otherwise could lead to the conclusion that the cinema is merely the vehicle of an archaic way of inscribing power on the visual field. Instead of seeing the discourse of darshan framing cinematic narration, we need to think of darshan as being enframed and reconstructed by it. Here, the localized deployment of filmic techniques in the micro-narration of a scene editing, shot-distance, and angle, camera movement, lighting, sound elements alert us to how characters and spectators are being cinematically positioned in relation to the darshanic. The darshanic is not static, and generates new sources of authority from it, and in ways not entirely comprehensible in terms of established conventions. Thus, while much of the moral authority of Radha in Mother India derives from the preservation of her chastity, and thereby the assertion of her devotion to her absent husband, this patriarchal rhetoric is condensed along with other features, including a solidarity with other women, and an insistence on the maintenance of community norms. The cinematic process of iconic reconstruction may in fact deploy and subordinate modern methods of subject construction modelled on Hollywood narration. By convention, the continuity system, and especially its point-of-view editing, is associated with the drives and perception of individuated characters. However, it is quite common in popular Hindi cinema to observe the yoking of such views to the bearer of darshanic authority. But the emergence of such enshrining views is tied to the dynamic of reconstruction, and is mobilized to the end of a patriarchal transformation. To suggest the transactional basis on which popular cinema inducts those methods of narration marked as modern, I will cite an example from Devdas (Bimal Roy, 1955), a film based on a well-known Bengali novel by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. Devdas, the son of a powerful landed family, is prohibited from marrying the girl he desires, Parvati, because of status differences. He is a classic renouncer figure of the type favoured in Indian storytelling, a figure who is unable or refuses to conform to the demands of society, and wastes away in the contemplation of that which he could never gain. I want to refer to a scene which employs continuity conventions to the highly traditional end of deifying the male as object of desire. The sequence deals with Devdas visit to Parvati s house, and indicates a strategy of narration whereby Parvati s

133 116 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 13 Fig. 14 Figs 13 and 14: Devdas, Bimal Roy, 1995, Parvati and Devdas.

134 The Cultural Politics 117 point of view is used to underline the desirability and the authority exercised by Devdas image. In this sequence, Parvati returns to her house to find her grandmother and mother discussing Devdas arrival from the city, and the fact that he has not yet called upon them. Devdas, off-screen, calls from outside the door. From this moment, Parvati s auditory and visual attention dominates the narration. Before we can see Devdas entering the house, we withdraw with Parvati to her room upstairs, and listen to the conversation taking place below along with her. Devdas announces that he will go to see Parvati himself. In anticipation of Devdas arrival Parvati hurriedly starts lighting a diya (devotional lamp), and the melody of a kirtan (traditional devotional song expressing Radha s longing for Krishna) is played. We hear the sound of Devdas footfalls on the stairs, and Parvati s anxiety to light the lamp before Devdas enters her room is caught by a suspenseful intercutting between her lighting of the lamp and shots of the empty doorway. The door-frame in this sequence suggests the shrine in which the divine idol is housed. Devdas entry is shown in a highly deifying way; first his feet are shown in the doorway, followed by a cut to the lighted lamp. Finally his face is revealed. There follows a cut to Parvati, suggesting that this is the order through which she has seen Devdas arrival. As she looks at him, conch shells, the traditional accompaniment to the act of worship, are sounded. The future husband as deity, object of the worshipful gaze, is established by the narration s deployment of Parvati s point of view. Her lighting of the devotional lamp and the extra-diegetic sound of the kirtan and conch shells underline the devotional nature of the woman s relationship to the male image. (Figs 13 14, p. 116.) Here we see how the cinema reinscribes darshan, locating it within a new figure, that of the emergent if ultimately ineffectual patriarchal figure of Devdas, who cannot be assimilated to the reigning feudal order. It does this in such a way as to both enable and limit the conditions of subjectivity. For, while the film mobilizes point-of-view codes to represent the subjectivity of the woman, this is done in such a way as to constrain the field of her look by focusing the beloved within a discourse of divinity. This setting of certain limiting coordinates for the woman s look also significantly institutes a division between the incipient formation of a new domesticity and the wider external world: Devdas enshrinement in the doorway converts the public space beyond the door into his domain, restricting the woman to domestic space.

135 118 The Melodramatic Public Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity A more complicated version of this pattern of looking is observable in Guru Dutt s Pyaasa (Craving; 1957), a film which refers to but in many ways controverts the narrative of Devdas. In the pertinent scene, the poet-hero Vijay refers to the prostitute, Gulab, as his wife in order to protect her from a policeman who is pursuing her. The prostitute is unaccustomed to such a respectful address, especially one suggestive of intimate ties to a man she loves, and is thrown into a sensual haze. Vijay ascends a stairway to the terrace of a building where he will pass the night. Gulab sees a troupe of devotional folk-singers performing a Vaishnavite song, Aaj sajan mohe ang laga lo (Take me in your arms today, O beloved) and follows Vijay up the stairs. The scene is structured by Gulab s desire for Vijay, expressed in the song, and these relations of desire are simultaneously relations of distance, as the woman follows, looks at, and almost touches the man she loves (who is entirely unaware of all this), but finally withdraws and flees as she believes herself unworthy of him. The relation between devotional voice, devotee, and object of devotion determines the space of this scene, providing the coordinates for the extension and constraining of space. The relationship between characters is not one of the iconic frontality of traditional worship. The desired one is not framed in this way, for continuity codes dominate the scenic construction. Even in the scene I have cited from Devdas, continuity codes construct space and it is a shot-reverse-shot relationship which defines the ultimate moment of looking. The spectator is offered a rather complicated position. If we think of the male icon as a traditional marker of authority and desire which anchors the view of the female devotee, as in Devdas, then the scene conforms to the logic of darshan. However, within the bhakti or devotional tradition, while the female devotee s energy is channelled directly into the worship of the deity, without the mediation of the priest, the Lord still remains a remote figure. The devotional act thus becomes a somewhat excessive one, concentrating greater attention on the devotee than the devotional object, and this is only underlined in the maintenance of Gulab s distance from Vijay, and his failure to see her. This rather complicated structure of spectatorship needs to be framed within the address

136 The Cultural Politics 119 relayed by the devotional voice. 34 The space assigned this voice emerges from Gulab s look off-screen, but it remains autonomous, never sharing her space. The narration periodically cuts back to the singer and cutting and camera movement closely follow the rhythms of the song. The soundtrack maintains a steady pitch to the singing, irrespective of how far the action moves away from the singer s (imaginary) space, and places it thereby at an extra-diegetic location. 35 (Figs 15 17, pp ) The relatively stable articulation of these three points in the narrative construction devotional voice, desiring woman, and her object efects a dynamic, temporal deployment to the essentially spatial category of the tableau. The result for the spectator is neither the subordination of subjectivity to darshanic authority, whose circuit is left incomplete by withholding Vijay s authorizing darshanic look, nor the unmediated identification with the desiring woman, but a framing of these elements of scenic composition within the narrative community solicited by the kirtan. Here the audience is invited to participate in a culturally familiar idiom that reinvents itself by providing a supportive frame to the cultivation of new techniques for the representation of an individuated feminine subjectivity. However, the supportive frame of narrative community, while inducting a new view through the deployment of modern perceptual codes cannot, it would seem, abjure the anchorage given by the authoritative object. In this instance, where the darshanic circuit is not completed, the woman ultimately lies outside the sanction provided by the man returning her look. Later, however, the darshanic circuit is completed, instituting a new paternalist form in the conclusion of the film. Gulab s view enshrines Vijay, as travelling point-of-view shots punctuate her running down towards the beloved as he appears at the doorway of her 34 Kumkum Sangari has noted the following effects of the female devotional voice: The orthodox triadic relation between wife, husband and god is broken. The wife no longer gets her salvation through her godlike husband... Bhakti offers direct salvation. The intermediary position now belongs not to the human husband or the Brahmin priest but to the female devotional voice. This voice, obsessed with the relationships between men and women, continues to negotiate the triadic relationship it simultaneously transgresses and reformulates patriarchal ideologies. Kumkum Sangari, Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti, Economic and Political Weekly, Part One, 25 (27), 7 July 1990, , and Part Two, 25 (28), 14 July 1990, I owe this observation to Jim Cook.

137 120 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 15 Fig. 16

138 The Cultural Politics 121 Fig. 17 Figs 15, 16, and 17: Pyaasa, Guru Dutt, 1957, Keertan and female subjectivity. dwelling, and his return of her look acknowledges her eligibility to reside within the orbit of his gaze. How the cinema deploys these discourses of visual and auditory authority, how it hierarchizes them into its levels of narration, is the issue at stake: who authorizes a view, locates a figure in narrative space, who speaks, who sees, who listens. Where these relations are organized to highlight the compact between the narrating instance and the spectator s attention, the place of the third look of the character is subordinated to the spectator s knowledge that it is s/he who looks and listens. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha has argued, in such instances the concept of a third look codified by the requirements of an integral continuity narration emerges as a transaction between narrator and spectator, and does not acquire a decisive autonomy. 36 The discourse of narrative community is one such instance. But, in terms of Barthes 36 Rajadhyaksha, Who s Looking? Viewership and Democracy in Indian Cinema, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.

139 122 The Melodramatic Public analysis of the tableau, narration may deploy an interventionist, intellectual rather than emotive, use of this spatial figure, suggesting a distancing perspective rather than a shaping of spectatorial subjectivity into identification with characters. Thus, we may observe the emergence of a space in which the main characters are composed separate from the flow of character-grounded narrative awareness and development. The narration places us in a position superior to that of all the characters, and we are alerted to how different character attitudes are framed within normative and hierarchical social discourses. This address does not, I would argue, ask us to accept the norm, but highlights the inevitability of a social frame to meaning. I have suggested how this works in Andaz (Style; Mehboob Khan, 1949). 37 However, while these community grounded and socially coded modes of direct address constitute a fundamental aspect of cinematic narration for the popular cinema, the character-driven codes of subjectivity and narration associated with Hollywood may stand quite independently of such an address, inducting another set of subjectivities or storytelling conventions into the architecture of filmic narrative. I have suggested how Andaz drew upon Hollywood narrative conventions in order to highlight the enigmatic dimensions of its female character s desires, and especially the conventions of hallucinations and dream to define her in terms of an ambivalent psychology and a transgressive if involuntary sexuality. Such conventions were drawn upon to be contained and disavowed. A nationalist modernizing imperative had to symbolically contain those ideologically fraught aspects of modernity that derived from transformations in the social position and subjectivity of women. The result was a fascinatingly perverse and incoherent text, one whose ideological drives are complicated by the subjectivities it draws upon. 38 I would suggest that these examples indicate that for the popular Indian cinema the categories of public and private, and of feudal and modern scopic regimes may not adequately comprehend the subjectivity offered the spectator, and that this would in turn have implications for the culture of citizenship. The rupturing of an integral, self-referential narrative space via direct address suggests a circuit of imaginary 37 See ch. 2 above. 38 Vasudevan, You Cannot Live in Society, in Uberoi, ed., Sexuality, Social Reform and the State,

140 The Cultural Politics 123 communication, indeed, a making of audience into imaginary community. The authorizing voice of narrative community is not fixed, however. To complicate Prasad s insight, while speech may be preinterpreted in the sense that characters do not speak in the register of everyday, naturalist conversation, but are vehicles of existing language systems, cinematic narration subjects these to a reconstitution which enables an inventive, dynamic address to contemporary issues. As I have suggested, the solicitation of the cinema audience into a familiar community of meaning via direct address may afford a certain movement, an outlining of new forms of subjectivity on the grid of the culturally recognizable. We have seen how this works in terms of a transgressive rendering of romance. An overt political address, bearing directly on questions of citizenship and state legitimacy, also emerges in new languages of direct address. The development of a new linguistic nationalist community in the direct address of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-influenced Tamil cinema would be an obvious example. 39 In fact, Indian popular cinema has, throughout its history, deployed such modes of address to constitute imaginary political communities, around issues of social reform and nationalist mobilization. Here, direct address may argue for change on somewhat different grounds than the protocols of narrative continuity, realism, and individual characterization. Community authorization then rests alongside and complicates feudal and modern ways of organizing narrative. Song sequences deployed from a host of musical traditions have often worked in this way, and in cases such as the one I have cited from Pyaasa, have assumed the role of a narrational authority external to the main story. This is enacted by a source other than any of the fictional characters, and sometimes in a space separated out from theirs. In this sense the narrational song can be identified with the properties of extra-diegetic music. They both inhabit a location outside the fiction and shape a cultural space for the representation of characters. We are both inside and outside the story, tied at one moment to the seamless flow of a character-based narration from within, in the next attuned to a culturally familiar stance from without. Not only does this narrating instance function to outline new types 39 See M.S.S. Pandian, Parashakthi: The Life and Times of a DMK Film, rpnt in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema,

141 124 The Melodramatic Public of subjectivity that in a sense emerge from within the community of meaning; it may be deployed to offer a critical view on narrative development. In Awara the judge, Raghunath, expels his wife, Leela, on suspicion of bearing another man s child. The event is framed through a song critically invoking the mythical King Rama s expulsion of his wife Sita, and performed by a troupe located separately from the main action. The critical stance offered by the song renders the iconic figure of the judge as an oppressive one, subjecting the darshanic to censure. 40 The comic, deriving from earlier theatrical traditions of the vidushak, also left his mark as one of the staple figures of the commercial cinema. 41 Here he sometimes plays the role of a narrator external to the main narrative and is often engaged in a relationship of direct address to the audience. There is a certain didacticism involved in his functions, but this is a didacticism gone wrong, relaying authoritarian discourses voiced elsewhere through a figure entirely lacking the status and integrity carried by a darshanic rendering of such discourses. For example, in Andaz, V.H. Desai, as the charlatan and freeloading Professor Dharmadas Devdas Trivedi or DDT (the assigning of a Brahmin name to the comic sends up the pretensions and parasitical features of upper-caste status claims), is a spokesman and even a narrative agent of what he claims to be authentic indigenous attitudes to marriage. Such attitudes are similar to those voiced by the film s patriarchal figure and his delegates, but when the comic is made their vehicle they are subjected to a lampooning idiom. In a more commonplace function, it is the very absurdity of the comic figure, quite obviously opposed to the larger-than-life attraction of the hero, which invites a less flattering point of identification for the audience, and thereby a certain narratorial distance towards the story. Further, in the very superfluousness of his functions, we could say that the comic was the spokesman within the story for a different order of storytelling, one which celebrates the disaggregative relationship to narrative and, indeed, makes coherent meaning within the world of the narrative a problematic agenda. 40 For a more detailed account, see Ravi Vasudevan, Sexuality and the Film Apparatus: Continuity, Non-continuity and Discontinuity in Bombay Cinema, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair, eds, A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1998, For an account of narrators and comics in traditional and folk theatrical form, see M.L. Varadpande, Traditions of Indian Theatre, New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 1978, 84 5.

142 The Cultural Politics 125 This would imply that, instead of only looking to the overall work of ideology that officially organizes the text, perhaps one should also attend to the fissiparous qualities of cinematic form to focus on the importance of non-continuity in evaluating the narrative worlds offered the spectator. In terms of sensory experience, non-continuity would suggest a characteristic modern culture of distraction, where the spectator s world is governed by a multiplicity of focuses and not by a carefully calibrated, goal-oriented channelling of her investment in the narrative process. At issue here is the subjectivity arising from the development of this particular type of cinematic modernity. 5. The Political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity The terms of cinematic narration I have sketched here are rather different from the notions of spectatorship which have emerged from that model of the successful commodity cinema, Hollywood. Historians and theoreticians of the American cinema have underlined the importance of continuity editing in binding or suturing the spectator into the space of the fiction. The undercutting of direct address and the binding of the spectator into a hermetic universe on-screen heightens the individual psychic address and sidelines the space of the auditorium as a social and collective viewing space. This very rich historiography and textual analysis, excellently synthesized in works by Miriam Hansen and Thomas Elsaesser, 42 speaks of the fraught process through which American cinema s bourgeois address came into being. This work describes how social and ethnic peculiarities were addressed in the relation between early cinema and its viewers. The sites of filmic performance were institutions such as the vaudeville, in which the oneand two-reel film was one in a series of acts on the programme; all of these items, including films, tended to solicit audience interest by referring to the ethnic particularities of the audience. The process by which the cinema took over and came to develop its own entertainment space was a process of the formation of a national market in which the spectator had to be addressed in the broadest, non-ethnic, socially universal terms. Of course, what was actually happening was that a 42 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991; Adam Barker and Thomas Elsaesser, Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, London, British Film Institute, 1990.

143 126 The Melodramatic Public dominant white Anglo-Saxon norm came to be projected as universal. Along with this process there developed the guidelines for the construction of a universal spectator placed not in the auditorium but as an imaginary figure enmeshed in the very process of narration. The mixed address of the Hindi cinema, along with the spaces which open up within the commercial film, the song-and-dance sequences and comic skits, might suggest a rather different relationship of reception. Indeed, it recalls the notion of a cinema of attractions, the term developed by Gunning to theorize the appeal of early Euro- American cinema. 43 In contrast to the Hollywood mode of continuity cinema or narrative integration, Gunning argues that early cinema was exhibitionist. The character s look into the camera indicated an indifference to the realist illusion that the story tells itself. The films displayed a greater interest in relaying a series of views and sensations to their audience rather than following a linear narrative logic. These elements were to be increasingly transcended in the Hollywood cinema s abstraction of the spectator as individuated consumer of its selfenclosed fictional world. In the process, the audience, earlier understood to be composed of workers and immigrants, was civilized into appreciating the bourgeois virtues of a logical, cause-and-effect driven and character-based narrative development. 44 However, something rather more complicated is happening here. For the direct address of popular Indian cinema, while certainly inviting immersion in fragmentary ocular sensation and exhibitionist performance, does more than this by founding elaborate scenic construction. The address, whether voiced directly by characters or relayed through song ensures a mediated relationship to processes of identification. At one level, this form of spectatorial subjectivity can deny the atomizing modernity associated with the construction of individuation and a privatized sphere for the couple. The comedian, for example, often disrupts a scenic construction that verges on an intimate moment or kiss, and thereby brings the couple back within the purview of a public view, but one which entirely lacks the disciplinary drives of an authoritarian gaze. Instead, the intervention could be said to draw the couple away from a hermetic space and back into a more expansive communitas. On the other hand, this non-atomistic form of spectatorship may also be harnessed to cultivate an aesthetic of the private. 43 Gunning, A Cinema of Attractions. 44 Hansen, Babel and Babylon, chs 1 and 2.

144 The Cultural Politics 127 This constitutes a narration of desire in which the relationship between zones of intimacy and socio-political arrangements need not follow a model of opposition and separation of public and private experience. As I have suggested, narrative communities, both relayed and produced afresh by the cinema, may provide sanction to privatized story-telling codes such as character point of view. One needs to think this through in terms of the relationship between socially symbolic narrative forms and their political resonances. I would suggest that fictional processes parallel, interrogate, and question the authoritative functions communities have exercised under the colonial and post-colonial Indian states. While espousing the standard repertoire of democratic principles civil liberties, universal suffrage the nationalist movement also mobilized people in terms of community appeals, and this inevitably left its stamp on state and civil institutions after Independence. Governments have regarded the rights of minority groups over their civil and familial laws, such as those of the Muslim community, as an area to be regarded with caution, apprehending that arguments for universal codes would take on an oppressive dimension. This has often meant the state shoring up the most retrograde patriarchal community authority in the field of women s rights to property and maintenance. 45 And the historical backwardness of ritually lower groups in the Hindu hierarchy lower castes, and those outside the caste hierarchy have given rise to state policies of affirmative legislation on their behalf. The assertion of the rights of such groups in government service and educational institutions have generated multi-community strategies in larger political formations, as well as distinct political parties catering to particular swathes of the socially deprived. While one democratic agenda urges the state to disperse such forms of community authority in favour of individual rights, others have tended to problematize the characteristic institutions of modern democracy, emphasizing the unequal, assymetric terms on which modern forms of political and cultural representation have been instituted. Such theoretical work has argued that modern civil society, the domain 45 For an outline of the complexity of these issues, see Nivedita Menon, State/ Gender/Community: Citizenship in Contemporary India, Economic and Political Weekly 30 (5), 31 January 1998, PE 3 PE10. For a historical account showing that the boundaries of state law and personal law were not immutable, see Archana Parashar, Women and Family Law Reform in India, New Delhi, Sage, 1993; for the mixture of codes in colonial criminal law, see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998.

145 128 The Melodramatic Public of freely associating individuals who contract to generate institutions of representation, is not the uncomplicated vehicle of democratic politics. The individualist dispositions and educational and cultural capital associated with such representational politics is, in operative terms, the preserve of a relatively small segment of society. This argument does not so much invalidate these forms of representation, and the types of rights to freedom of expression and civil liberty which they have developed, but suggests that digits of representation of a more collective order need to be developed for strategies of social change and gender justice. The category of community has thus become central, even when contesting oppressive community practices. In this paradigm, rather than entirely vacate the discourse of community in favour of that of the individual citizen, other dissenting traditions of community need to be mobilized to develop a consensus for change. 46 In terms of how this broader frame impinges on cultural practices, I would suggest that rather than regard the pre-modern or the traditional merely as a repressive construction engaged in by the state and ruling elites we need to see it as a source of creativity, where traditions are reinvented in accord with the dynamics of social and political transformation. In this context, I would like to draw attention to how the cinema deploys traditions such as darshan to enable the redefinition of collective rather than individual identity. As I have pointed out, bhakti constituted a form of worship which sought to circumvent the traditional mediation of the divine by the priest. As represented in saintly devotional figures of low-caste origin, the bhakt or devotee was dedicated to the worship of the deity through popular language rather than sacred texts monopolized by a priestly class. The establishment of direct links between worshipper and the sacred thus subverted ritual hierarchies and afforded a new sense of self. The devotional genre of the 1930s and 1940s is a case in point: critiquing brahmanical 46 Sudipta Kaviraj, Democracy and Development in India, in Amiya Bagchi, ed., Democracy and Development, London, St Martin s Press, 1995, ; and Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India, in Adrian Leftwich, ed., Democracy and Development: Theory and Practice, Oxford, Polity Press, 1996, ; Partha Chatterjee, Beyond the Nation? Or Within?, Economic and Political Weekly, 30 (1 2), 4 11 January 1997, 30 4; and Partha Chatterjee, Community in the East, Economic and Political Weekly, 33 (6), 7 February 1998, ; Veena Das, Communities as Political Actors: The Question of Cultural Rights, in Veena Das, Critical Events, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996,

146 The Cultural Politics 129 orthodoxy, films such as Sant Tukaram (Fatehlal and Damle, Marathi, 1937), have the reformist saint of the seventeenth century invoking the deity to provide an alternative vision of social conditions and political self-determination for the character/spectator. In a key sequence of the film, the saint, Tukaram, is involved in expounding a discourse of duty to the Maratha king Shivaji, and this extends into a more general address, as the film frames Tukaram in relation to other segments of the general public who have assembled in the shrine of Tukaram s deity, Pandurang. Tukaram s discourse of duty is designed to persuade Shivaji not to abjure his kingly role for a life of devotion, and it would appear to have conservative dimensions, fixing people to the roles they are assigned. But Tukaram s message emphasizes that all will find their path to the divine, and the film then goes on to replay this message of ultimate, transcendent equality in terms of an earthly political equivalent. Shivaji s enemies, taking advantage of his absorption in the religious dialogue, descend on the shrine, and at this point Tukaram appeals to Pandurang to save his devotee. Cuts from Tukaram to Pandurang ultimately culminate in a series of phantom images of Shivaji being released from the deity and coming to repose in the assembled public; wherever the invaders look, they see Shivaji, but when they grasp the figure, he turns into a startled member of the public. This dissemination of kingship amongst the public, an image of popular sovereignty that undermines political hierarchy, is rendered through a transfer of looks: the spectator looks at the saint, who beseeches the deity, who then looks back, releasing images of the king which transform the identity of characters and spectators. In this instance the transfer is effected via a cinematic materialization of the miraculous. 47 But redefinitions of subjecthood through image practices are more widely observable across genres. Indeed, one may observe a plurality of cinematically constructed darshanic motifs within a film, setting up a conflicting political forcefield of images and image-constituencies. 47 See Ravi Vasudevan, Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice and Spectatorship in Indian Film, in Hughes and Meyer, eds, Postscripts 1.2/1.3, 2005,

147 4 Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in Popular Cinema Secularist discourses critically turn on ideas of tolerance and transcendence. Tolerance presumes bounded identities, and assigns an ontological determination to otherness in the way social cognition is organized. Transcendence, on the other hand, projects a space beyond the bounded identity. Often, in political prescriptions, a modernizing imperative insists on the centrality of the state to such projects of transcendence. This could be by evacuating religion from the terrain of the state, or by insisting that the state be equidistant from all religious communities and practices. 1 On the other hand, a certain strand of criticism insists that the state itself, and modernizing imperatives more generally, are the main culprit in the crystallization of community differences and antagonism. Writers such as Ashis Nandy have argued that secularism is the ideological support of modernization. 2 Modern governmentality and secularist discourse tend to fix religion or religious identity, through censuses, by asserting exclusiveness of national identities, and by subordinating porous forms of belief and religious practice. Rather than state, it is faith, and the refusal to abide by the hard identities induced by secularism, which provides the resources for tolerance. 1 For an overview of the debate, see Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics, Delhi, Oxford University Press, Ashis Nandy, An Anti-Secularist Manifesto, Seminar 314, October 1985,

148 Neither State Nor Faith Community Typology and Public Form in Popular Cinema Indeed, we will find that the state is often startlingly marginalized in popular narrative discourses about the relationship within and amongst communities. Storytelling seizes on other energies, and assigns the social realm a significant autonomy and authority. What are the sources of transcendence within this determinant of social space? Does such transcendence have something to do with the renewal of or recovery of faith? My suggestion is that while faith may be invoked, it does not remain unchanged; and it is certainly not the only source of transcendent mediation. Here, not only transcendence, but what transcendence mediates is critical. How are social and religious differences described within popular narratives? Central to popular narratives is a description of society as a typology of groups, rendered in terms of the typical characteristics and iconographic components that compose community. Systems of typology date from the work of Company painters and a wider body of photographic interventions in the late nineteenth century. A significant strand of this output is aligned with the colonial state s drive to know and identify its population. These media were used to ethnographically freeze community essence through physiognomy, dress, work practices, and behavioural dispositions. 3 When we come to narrative forms such as the Indian popular cinema, there is a more dynamic demand on the deployment of the type as it is opened to the processes of temporality and diegetic interaction. In turn, there is also the positing of a non-typological mode of representation, vested in the drive to psychologize and formulate the idea of character as opposed to the type. However, we will observe that there are complicated transactions between these two apparently opposed categories. The cinema introduces a new dimension to these dynamics. As a cultural institution, it introduces a specific relationship, that of spectatorship, into the narrative process. This relates to the question of a visual and auditory address that places new demands on the human sensorium. The cinema generates a new form of imaginary investment, where the images and sounds it presents refer to people and objects 3 See Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, London, Reaktion Books, 1997.

149 132 The Melodramatic Public which are not there; only their shadow, their trace, is present on the screen. This screen is a thing out there, in front of us, but it is also the internal screen where the sequencing of images and sounds impacts on us. Film theorists such as Christian Metz have analysed this distinctiveness of the cinematic signifier, and how it impinges on the spectator in a psychically intimate fashion. 4 In both the colonial and post-colonial contexts, it was notable how much anxiety was attached to the potential power of cinematic narratives, especially those derived from local mythologies with a suspected allegorical power. 5 Often, such panics have also taken the form of a rationalist critique of the superstitions of a traditional society. 6 If we accept Metz s argument, the spectator is not part of the scene generated on the screen. Physically removed from that scene, s/he regards the screen as a mirror to another space reflected in it, where the shadows of that other space flit before her eyes, inviting a distanced immersion in its inherently fictive, because dematerialized, space. The mythological focus so beloved of early cinema thus unravels not as a space of spectatorial submission, but exactly of a staging and allegorical window onto another world. In this account, the spectator primarily identifies with the apparatus itself and, braided to the camera s look, becomes an all-seeing figure. This notion of a transcendent viewing position needs to be complicated. Laura Mulvey described three types of looking: the first that of the camera, the second that of the spectator at the screen, the 4 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti, London, Macmillan, This is observable in discussions documented in the Indian Cinematograph Committee in See Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, Calcutta, Government of India, Central Publications Branch, 1928; also Ashish Rajadhyaksha, A Viewer s View, in Suresh Chabria, ed., Light of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema , Pune, National Film Archives of India, 1994, This was most marked in the response of an artistic intelligentsia who argued for the development of a realist aesthetic. These arguments date to the 1930s: for example, Dhruba Gupta, Biren Das Sharma, and Samik Bandyopadhyaya, eds, Indian Cinema: Contemporary Perceptions from the 1930s, Jamshedpur, Celluloid Chapter, 1993; and the debate on Tamil cinema involving the literary figure Kalki, available in Tamil Cinema, Chennai, Madras Institute of Development Studies, For a more recent reiteration of this rationalist critique of the pre-modern sensibility of the popular cinema, see Das Gupta, The Painted Face.

150 Neither State Nor Faith 133 third the look between characters in the fiction. 7 In the study of classical Hollywood cinema, emphasis has been placed on how this identification with oneself or with the apparatus has been significantly displaced onto identification with characters (the third look). Techniques of editing and scene construction have fashioned the world generated by cinematic fictions as self-enclosed. Through techniques such as the eyeline match, point-of-view shots, shot-reverse shots, the viewer s attention is focused on character interaction. It is as if the world has a coherent self-referential dimension, with the spectator s view being mobilized, voyeuristically, into this world, and distributed over a number of characters and spaces. A fetishistic disavowal (I know, but...) captures the spectator s relationship to the screen world. While the spectator knows that the on-screen world is manufactured, that figures aren t really there, s/he suspends this knowledge in favour of the immersive pull of the cinematic fiction. In recent debates, the intra-referential dimensions of Hollywood narration have been historicized. Research has been undertaken into an early cinema history which had not yet developed the codes of the third look. 8 And there has also been the exploration of a host of other contexts, ranging from an avant-gardist address, to even populist forms, which highlighted a system of direct address from screen to spectator. 9 Debates in Indian film studies parallel such a complication of the Hollywood paradigm, and have argued that such a design has not been characteristic or, at least, not systematically applied. 10 Rather than develop a virtual world on screen, Indian popular cinema recurrently breaks the seamlessness and self-referentiality of the fiction. This is done through a pronounced register of frontality, with the scene shot at a 180 angle to the characters or objects, rather than through oblique framing. The latter suggests a look into the world of the fiction, 7 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16, 3, Autumn Barker and Elsaesser, eds, Early Cinema. 9 For the US cinema, such a system of direct address is perhaps best demonstrated by the work of Frank Capra in the 1930s and 1940s, in films such as Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1943). See my analysis of this work in the Introduction, above. 10 See Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era ; Kapur, Mythic Material in Indian Cinema ; Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film; Biswas, Historical Realism ; and ch. 3 above.

151 134 The Melodramatic Public the former a breaking of its cordons, as if addressing a world beyond the fiction. This may be summarized in the notion of direct address, where characters look directly into the camera, as if addressing the audience rather than another character in the fiction. Such a refusal or indifference to norms developed as cinematic standard in Hollywood is compounded by a heightened emphasis on the declamatory and the typological in speech and dress. The figure, in dress and verbal articulation, articulates itself as condensing the already known. This is counterposed to a characterology in process, constituted through character interaction and situation, and on the grid of psychological development. I would like to hold on to the idea of a transcendent position as a condition generally posited for the cinematic apparatus and viewing situation. However, my focus here is not on the all-seeing eye, but rather on the ontology of dematerialization. In Metz s account, the dematerialization refers to what we see, the thing not being there. But, to look at the phenomenon in a different way, if the object viewed is not there, then the viewer is not here, either. We acquire a dematerialized aspect, the eye and the ear disembodied, or rather, entering into a compact, our sensorium becoming part of the imaginary domain rendered through the cinema. The nature of this imaginary articulation varies, as we have observed in the distinctions within the history of American cinema, and in the distinctiveness of other cinematic traditions such as emerged in India. Such forms of imaginary articulation are not entirely separable, and we may observe changes even within the body of a single film. But the point here is the particular impact rendered by the mutual dematerialization of image and audience. On the ground of this observation, could we argue that the cinema provides a different locus through which to think of sources for the outline of a transcendental subject? The cinema as industrial form and mass social institution posits a specific problem here, for anxieties of state and an elite public invariably relate to the power images can exercise in circumstances of low literacy. This anxiety is also captured in the hostility of the state, and indeed, of elite public discourses, to the characteristic narrative forms of the popular cinema. Such hostility was manifest for a long period, in terms of crippling financial exactions and a low cultural status. This non-legitimate cultural form nevertheless had a mass constituency, and was a crucial vehicle of mass

152 Neither State Nor Faith 135 publicness. This was the case at least until the emergence of privatized audio-visual technologies after 1982, with the spread of television and coming of the video recorder. In occupying this position that of the mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legitimated by the state the cinema s function is to provide a distinctive route for the social imaginary. Its imaginary is composed at once of the reality of perceptual processes, the dematerialized nature of what is perceived, and, I would suggest, of the perceiver. As such, it provides fertile ground on which to think about a distinctive field for the emergence of a transcendental subject. The spectator is transcendent not because part of civil social discourse, but because s/he accesses a distinct imaginary publicness. The spectator is invited to be out there, in that imaginary domain of the cinema, and to constitute a public not only as addressee and audience, but as imaginary component of the fictional field. To explore this imaginary in relation to discourses of secularism, I will highlight how the cinema addresses the public as a critical fictional component through: (a) logic of co-living, co-existence, inhabiting the same frame rather than different frames, and crucially dependent on the look of the spectator for its constitution. The example I draw on is from the earliest period of the cinema, relating to the imagination of caste. (b) The spectator subject as a virtual entity in the fiction, differentiated from the protocols of how characters within the fiction look. Here I draw upon the popular genre of the historical film and its discourses of secularism to suggest that this duality of looking within the fiction is also one which constructs a relationship between imagined pasts and futures on the grounds of the presentness of the spectator s look. (c) the exceptional agent, the heroic entity who will provide a model of transcendence, a figure who is both type but may also shade into the individuated, psychologized character. Critical here is the discourse of the star image. The star mobilizes a strategy of transcendence based on a screen biography and the interpretive charge of performativity. The star constitutes a distinct component of the cinema s dematerialized imaginary: s/he is a virtual biographical entity who can only be made sense

153 136 The Melodramatic Public of in and through the screen, constituting the spectator as a special vehicle of knowledge and interpretation in a metafiction of the star. Critical here is the question of star performativity, where the compendium of actorly attributes the repertoire of gesture, speech, and bodily dimensions may suggest both the distinctiveness of the star sign and the possibilities of arbitrariness and interpretation. For the uniqueness of the star may be deployed to emphasize the non-identity of actor and character, making of the actor s body an arbitrary signifier, not clearly attached to the social referent it may inhabit. Such arbitrariness may operate either through the armature of the individual film, or, more complexly, across the screen biography of the actor/ star. For the purposes of this essay, this phenomenon is addressed at two moments and across two registers: (i) How this persona is governed by a consistent iconography, one which may extend its foundational thematics into new territories of exploration without compromising the original codification. I take the case of Raj Kapoor who bears the logic of a plebeian secularisation. The character habitually uses the city as an experimental space to undermine the feudal certitudes of birth and lineage. (ii) How, rather than work through a consistent logic and extension of the persona into different fields, there emerges a logic of performative destabilization and play, where screen persona render the possibility, and imponderability, of rupturing the continuum of the image. Here I focus on the career of the key contemporary actor, Nana Patekar. Finally, there is the transcendence afforded by the spectator s identification with the cinematic apparatus itself. This does not deny the commonly experienced identification with characters in the fiction, but announces, sometimes in a very emphatic and spectacular fashion, the technology which brings these characters into being in the first place. This, perhaps, is the instance where the spectator enters into a compact with the all-seeing camera eye of Metz s formulation. I have undertaken the beginnings of this analysis elsewhere See Ravi Vasudevan, The Exhilaration of Dread: Narrative Form, Genre and Film Style in the Contemporary Urban Action Film, in Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of

154 Neither State Nor Faith Phalke and the Typological Discourse of Early Cinema Sudipta Kaviraj has argued that, in the Indian context, a language of community emerged as the characteristic form of representational discourse rather than that of the individuated citizen. 12 Addressing issues of collective identification and solidarity, this formulation can address the representational trope of the type. Kaviraj s formulation requires to be elaborated into a theorization pertinent to both cinema theory and political theory: what is the transformative logic which defines community identities and solidarities and, in turn, a dynamic typological imagination of the social? I will examine this by charting the transformative logic of such typologies within cinematic narratives. Arguably, typage provides the spectator with certain conditions of knowledge, an epistemology which both frames codifications of social reality, but also immerses the spectator in a play with the image of the social, and, indeed, her own image. I start this analysis not with the overt consideration of secularist narratives, that of Hindu Muslim relations, but how popular film constitutes Hindu society. Javed Akhtar has remarked that preceding other taboos and restrictions, such as Hindu Muslim sociality and intermarriage, there is the foundational problem of social differences and untouchability in Hindu society. 13 Associated with prohibitions around bodily contact and communication, we may consider how such foundational taboos extend into the domain of Hindu Muslim relations. This has been particularly observable of the violence in Gujarat, where a revulsion and bid to eradicate the other have motivated Hindutva s Everyday Life, Delhi, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2002, and ch. 9 below. 12 Kaviraj, Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India, in Leftwich, ed., Democracy and Development. 13 This is actually part of a larger taboo area in popular cinema... The real taboo is that a high-caste Hindu girl will never be shown marrying an outcaste boy. Never. If at all the great caste divide has to be bridged, it will be done via a high-caste boy falling in love with an outcaste girl as in Achoot Kanya, Sujaata, or Parineeta. Similarly, the one who rebels against the Hindu Muslim divide will never be the Hindu woman, it will be the Hindu man. Ratnam s Bombay bears this out. Interview with Javed Akhtar, The Great Evasion, Times of India, Sunday Review, 23 April 1995.

155 138 The Melodramatic Public most bestial forms. 14 We may thus start with a tentative formulation. A critical strand of secularist transcendence involves strategies to neutralize high-caste Hindu senses of authority and hierarchy. Arguably, such transcendence can suggest both an opening out of the Hindu high-caste self, and a bid to reacquire power over the subordinated other. The notion of Hindu society as a unified form transcending historical differences, especially of caste, is arguably one of the most consistent themes of the colonial and post-colonial periods. We thus witness the ongoing attempt by high-caste Hindu reformers to annul these differences, and of Dalit critiques of such attempts as hegemonic in intent. 15 The cinema recurrently represents the former drive, and the tensions inherent to it. Let us look at the key figure of early Indian cinema, D.G. Phalke. There have been arguments that Phalke represents a Hindu nationalist point of view, and that his films exclude or subordinate women, Dalits, and Muslims. 16 Phalke was associated with Tilak, and wrote his articles on cinema as a swadeshi cultural enterprise, in Tilak s Marathi newspaper, Kesari. If all of this sounds as if Phalke s ideological stance was self-evident, perhaps an examination of his films will suggest something slightly more complicated. In his 1918 film Shree Krishna Janma, the fragmentary remains of the film highlight several episodes. These include Krishna s emergence on the Shesh Nag, the celestial vehicle of Vishnu and Lakshmi, a miracle enacted through cinematic dissolves before a line of fervent devotees. There are fragments, too, of episodes relating to the beheading of the wicked Kansa, and Yashodhara s maternal idyll with the baby Krishna, rocking his cradle. Finally, there are a series of tableaux outlining the varnashrama dharma. It is the construction of these tableaux that I would like to draw attention to. (Fig. 18, p. 139.) Each tableau is announced by an inter-title, highlighting the varna which is to appear in front of Vishnu. A young man who exhibits a 14 See, for example, Siddhartha Varadarajan, ed., The Making of a Tragedy, Delhi, Penguin Books, See, for example, D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet, Bangalore, South Forum Press, 1993, for a discussion of the debates between Gandhi and Ambedkar. 16 Somnath Zutshi, Women, Nation and the Outsider in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, in Tejaswini Niranjana, et al., eds, Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 1993,

156 Neither State Nor Faith 139 Fig. 18: Shree Krishna Janma, D.G. Phalke, 1918, The Gathering of Castes. childlike radiance as he stands atop a pedestal, posed frontally for the camera, incarnates the deity. The varna announced appears in front of the benign deity, seeking his blessings while stealing covert looks in the direction of the camera. Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra varnas are brought on stage in this way, each announced by a preceding inter-title. We see in these four tableaux a certain duality. Each of the varnas shares the deity, who exercises a benevolent presence for them all. However, they are strictly divided off one from the other, through the intercession of the inter-title. The social hierarchy of separation is replicated cinematically, through editing and inter-titles. Significantly, though, there is an excess. One social group, that of the untouchable, is clubbed with the category of the Shudra, but enters the frame only after the farmer has left; the broom sways in the frame, as if involuntarily disclosing a tension within its composition. The untouchable figure here is also unspeakable, or at least unwritable, as there is no inter-title heralding his arrival. But the visual excess of the broom which identifies him remains insistently present within the strategy for the dissolution of differences. Using the same camera set-up, with Vishnu frontally posed at the back of the frame, all the varnas enter

157 140 The Melodramatic Public the frame, crowding it and almost jostling with each other, the broom again moving ostentatiously in the frame. In a sense, a transcendent deity is being accessed differentially, separately, and it is his intervention, or the intervention of his message, that dissolves this rigorous separation. Leave all religion and come under my protection, declares a superimposed title. This is an important ur-text for images of inter-community mingling and self-transcendence. The transcendence is accomplished through the figure of Vishnu, and the Vaishnavite porousness of self. It is also accomplished through the cinematic frame as the basic unit of perception, in which the simple, single-shot set-up is organized to create a dynamic of reconstitution. But at another level it is also rendered as a form of direct address, aimed at the spectator. Rather than creating a sequence, there is a to and fro between the figures on-screen and the spectator, the former presenting themselves for the latter s view. The spectator rather than figures on screen becomes the primary reference point for the presentation. We could say that the cinema s invocation of a transcendent, mediating image is based on a narration and viewing situation that posits the viewer as a crucial condition of its presentation. Of course, the complications arise when we consider that this is not a discourse of inter-community amity, but of the reformation and consolidation of Hindu society. Historians of lower-caste and Dalit assertion have shown us how modern narratives of caste history invariably refer to the caste as a community, with a distinct mythic narrative about its relationship to land and environment; a narrative of origins displaced by Brahmanical incursions and the institution of caste hierarchy. 17 It was during this period that movements of assertion were taking place, and film narratives such as Phalke s could be interpreted to reassemble the coordinates of a ritual form threatened with dissolution. In this sense the narration could be read as consistent with the attempts of a Hindu nationalism, also in the process of ideological and political formation, to consolidate society via the eradication of untouchability, but not necessarily through a questioning of social hierarchies. 17 Mark Jurgensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in Twentieth Century Punjab, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982; Rosalind O Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth Century Western India, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

158 Neither State Nor Faith 141 I would suggest that the reading here can be somewhat more open. Rather than a hegemonic modernized Brahmanical reference point, Gandhi would be the more apposite figure for such a bid for reunification. 18 His symbolic resonance is carried on into the devotional genres which emerged shortly after, and had their most sustained production in the 1930s and 1940s. Above all, we need to hold on to the particular imaginary virtuosity, and, indeed, virtuality, of cinematic fiction: the way an immaterial world of light and shadow can figure forth an image condensing the social world, while holding onto all the iconographies of difference and hierarchy within that frame. The frame of Hindu society is filled to the edges, ready to burst, and the broom that swirls suggests a tangential, centrifugal impetus, underlining the apparently impossible perceptual logistics of maintaining a centripetal orientation for the spectator. 3. The Social Film: Community Typage/Modernity/Psychology The social film, or the genre of modernity, carried on the primacy of the discourse of community into its reflections on intercommunity relationships. Characteristically, it sought to resolve community differences on the ground of mutual understanding and trust. An instance of social films dealing with the theme of inter-community amity was Shejari (Neighbours; V. Shantaram, Marathi, 1940), about the effects of modern technological change on relations within a village community. An Indian nationalist public saw the film as a riposte to the declaration of the Pakistan objective by the Muslim League. It is a moving story about how a grasping modern businessman seeks to break village opposition to his schemes of modernization by manipulating conflict between Jiwaba and Mirza, the leaders of the village community. Interestingly, the manipulation aims, at one level, only to break up village unity by creating a split between two village elders. But the fact that these are Hindu and Muslim is clearly motivated to draw upon contemporary anxieties about inter-communal ties. The estranged friends are ultimately reunited when they sacrifice their lives to save the village, and a grieving village community builds a shrine to their memory. 18 Kapur, Mythic Material in Indian Cinema.

159 142 The Melodramatic Public Suggestive hierarchies emerge in the construction of a transcendent location in the film s opening scene. A devotional hymn to the Hindu god Rama is invoked on the soundtrack and over a tableau frame of a village scene, a cottage and sacred pipal tree in the background. A cutin anchors the voice to the village elder, Jiwaba, who sits by the tree. As he sings, we observe his good friend and neighbour, the Muslim Mirza, arrive with his prayer mat in hand. Mirza stands at a discreet distance, waiting for Jiwaba to finish. As Jiwaba concludes, he notices Mirza, and wryly remarks that he should have said that the time had arrived for his prayer; Mirza responds, what is the need when one gets one s requirements without asking? (Figs 19 20, pp ) The film opens on a Hindu devotional space. This is first articulated by voice, and then by a figure associated with sacred symbols who is iconized as vehicle of the discourse. Jiwaba sings from within the depth of the frame, and it is initially difficult to locate the source of the song. This is then an auditory address that envelops the audience and stitches us into the symbolism of voice and space. Jiwaba, its expressive vehicle, is overwhelmed by the feelings it arouses in him, and wipes away a tear at its conclusion. In narrational terms, the enveloping address is of sustained duration, and its diegetic reference is to the perennial. A definite sense of time and sequence only emerges with the arrival of the Muslim, for whom a specific moment is required to conduct his prayer. The emergence of time, sequence, and narrative Fig. 19

160 Neither State Nor Faith 143 Fig. 20 Fig. 21 Figs 19, 20, 21: Shejari, V. Shantaram, 1940, community address, neighbourly protocol, Keshavrao Date.

161 144 The Melodramatic Public development is authorized by a privileged, because prior, Hindu discourse of emotive community. Jiwaba gives Mirza time, and thus is inaugurated an incipient, if never quite actualized, discourse of national origins. From the 1920s, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideologues had developed an argument that India was originally composed of Hindus, who therefore had prior rights to the country over those, especially Muslims and Christians, who arrived subsequently. 19 Their writings have provided the foundations for a Hindu majoritarianism whose objective is to assign a subordinate status to other religious identities in the make-up of the modern Indian nation-state. Later the film implicitly invokes anxieties about Muslim dominance in the medieval period, when Mirza heads the village council that has to rule on charges levelled against Jiwaba s son. Jiwaba s feelings of ignominy and powerlessness condenses a whole, specifically modern ideology of the historical subordination of Hindus to other communities, and provides the emotional ground for drives to assert Hindu authority over the nation-state. However, the complexity of the narrative lies in its taking recourse to a modernist dismantling of these stable reference points of community authority. While Jiwaba remains the main focus for spectatorial engagement, as his beatific form is dismantled, the film elaborates a new, expressionist characterology. As the character comes to be increasingly assailed by threats to his dignity and standing in the community, the actor Keshavrao Date appears driven by a symptomatology of dread: an inability to make sense of the world is registered in an unseeing, almost hallucinatory performance. He drew here on the work of the modernist natyamantwantar group in theatre, which was at the time experimenting with European modernism. The figure of the failed patriarch echoes the actor s work in Shantaram s Kunku (Marital Mark, 1937), which strongly recalls the acting of Emil Jannings in Von Sternberg s The Blue Angel (1931). (Fig. 21, p. 143.) The registering of paranoia in the Hindu patriarch extends to his son, Raiba, who determines to undertake a suicidal bombing of the dam, perceived to be the root cause of the village s descent into community discord. At the climax, the father tears the burning torch from 19 See Tapan Basu, Pradip Dutta, Sumit Sarkar, and Tanika Sarkar, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right, Delhi, Orient Longman, 1993, for an analysis of these aspects of Hindu nationalist ideology.

162 Neither State Nor Faith 145 his son, and accidentally flings it onto the fuse. Caught amidst the detonations which explode the dam, 20 he retreats into himself, drawing a chessboard which invokes his friendly contest with his alienated neighbour. Mirza arrives to save his distraught friend, but it is too late. Riven by the forces of modernity, their friendship is now retrieved for eternity. At the conclusion, villagers gather to worship at the shrine of the martyrs. The peculiar power of this film arises from a strange dynamic. At first it evokes for the spectator a discourse of prior and transcendent Hindu community and authority, that which gives order and meaning to the world, including the conditions for the coexistence of communities. But it then goes on to dismantle this through a modernist strategy. This dismantling ultimately results not in the emergence of the Muslim other as source of threat although there is an impacted narrative of such a possibility but, rather, an image of the post-sacred realm as a cavernous void. The void is then covered over by the recovery of the harmonious understanding of the village elders. However, this resolution is not a return to the original invocation of transcendence. For that is irrevocably riven by a modernizing imperative which has split its meaning system. Instead, the conclusion is properly utopian, drained as it is of the original hierarchy inscribed on the basis of a traditional Hindu authority. In a sense then, it is the cinema itself which, having stated and narrated the traditional sacred, now creates its own transcendent moment of intercommunity amity, in the image of the martyred elders enshrined by the survivors. 4. The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and Contemporary Publics We will find something of the complexity of these moves replayed in other generic forms. At this time, discussions about genre surfaced as one of the key arenas in which cultural differences were conceptualized, and central here was the historical film. Historical films developed a number of subjects: the glory of ancient, pre-islamic India (Chandragupta, Jayant Desai, 1945); Mughal kingship and its relation to local 20 This inaugurates a tradition of narratives of modernization which showcase the dam as vehicle of an ambiguous, and potentially destructive, set of transformations, as with Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) and Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1982).

163 146 The Melodramatic Public Hindu ruling groups, the Rajputs (Pukar [The Call], Sohrab Modi, 1939; Humayun, Mehboob Khan, 1945); the heroism of the Maratha king Shivaji; and, after Independence a set of films based on Indian resistance to colonial rule (Anandmath, Hemant Gupta, 1950; Jhansi ki Rani [The Queen of Jhansi], Sohrab Modi, 1953). The historical genre provides an account of the relationship between foreign invaders and rulers and local Indian kings and ruling groups. Contemporary secularist discourse regarded some of this work as exemplary of the bid to forge amity amongst the communities. However, a careful reading of these films will suggest how they offer a subtle rewriting of Indian history: the foreign ruler s formal authority is shown to be ultimately contingent on the real hegemonic authority that Hindu aristocrats and ruling groups exercised over indigenous society. Pukar provides a particularly suggestive instance of these narrative operations, and one which arguably alerts us to the privileged position of the spectator. The film is punctuated by a series of spectacular public assemblies centred on the Mughal king Jehangir. The camera at first places the spectator at a respectful distance and through low angles to the royal personage, echoing the heraldic discourse which warns the assembled subjects to look away from the sacred form of the ruler as he arrives in court. But subsequent scenes continuously alter these spatial relations and, in turn, the authority of the kingly figure. The film spectator is brought closer to the king, entering his personal domain, and is close witness to his relationship with his beloved queen Nur Jehan. In a sense, these spatial relations develop a distinction between the diegetic audience and the cinema audience, privileging us in the historical re-enactment. This narrational pattern climaxes when a Rajput subject, Sangram Singh, intervenes between the king and the diegetic audience of the court. Mangal, Sangram s son, had killed members of another Rajput clan when they attacked him for his romantic liaison with the daughter of the family. Jehangir s inflexible justice refuses to consider the extenuating circumstances, and Mangal is sentenced to death. Later, Nur Jehan, in showing off her prowess with bow and arrow, accidentally kills a dhobi, a washerman. Sangram, determined to test the King, and to bring him to a different perspective, arraigns the grieving widow of the washer man in the court to demand justice. The Rajput s move can be interpreted as a discourse of power: the lowly dhobin would not normally have taken recourse to imperial justice. The Rajput s insistence that she lay claim to the emperor s

164 Neither State Nor Faith 147 Fig. 22 Fig. 23 Figs 22 23: Pukar, Sohrab Modi : The Command of Jehangir; 23: Sangram Singh intervenes.

165 148 The Melodramatic Public justice is akin to a demonstration of the social authority exercised by the aristocrat over the most subordinated of his society. It therefore also appears to pit society against the state, and to show that imperial authority is contingent on a prior Hindu social authority. In the extraordinary climax to this narrative force field, the film s operations on spectator parameters acquires a particularly charged dimension, opening the historical genre to a startling meditation on the dialogue between imagined histories and futures. In particular, the image of the transcendent state, here reposed in the figure of an impartial Mughal justice, is subject to extreme pressure. Posing the emperor with a traumatic possibility the execution of his wife for her killing of the dhobi the Rajput s arraignment of societal authority in the court brings the transcendent state to the brink. In terms of a discourse of power, to back down and qualify his stance, Jehangir would be giving way, and accepting another, Hindu logic of authority. The plot pulls a surprise: the emperor will compensate the dhobin s loss by ordering that Nur Jehan s punishment will be to forfeit her husband s life to the dhobin. This is a moment of narrative daring. Playing with the parameters of difference between the diegetic and filmic spectator, Jehangir s command to the dhobin to shoot him is rendered in a series of escalating close-ups. The address here is thus also one made by the Mughal king to the cinematic spectator. For the order issued by the emperor to his subject is presented in an enormous frontal close-up that inducts the spectator into an overwhelming direct address. It is as if the narrative places the iconic historical figure in a force field of Hindu authority whose ultimate logic is one of negation the annihilation of the transcendental state in the face of Hindu authority, indeed the annihilation of history by the pressure of the present. This challenge to Mughal rule and the medieval Indian past is governed by an imperative of recovering Hindu pride for a present and future organization of nationalist culture, and is defined by leadership grounded in hierarchy rather than community. The threat is arrested when the Rajput commands the dhobin to desist, and thereby restores the spatial balance of spectatorial relations to the diegesis. (Figs 22 23, p. 147.) It should be noted that the Rajput challenge does not represent an egalitarian rendering of Indian society against Mughal absolutism, but deploys the power the upper-caste aristocrat can exercise over <the lowest of this society, an untouchable washerwoman. In turn, the

166 Neither State Nor Faith 149 display and withdrawal of authority is responded to in the garb of a restoration of the transcendent state, as Jehangir graciously grants a general amnesty to those condemned to death. Mangal Singh is thus only one in a host of beneficiaries of imperial magnanimity. Pukar was understood at the time to be a film about the historical amity between Hindu and Muslim communities, and a salient corrective to the emerging sectarian animosity. We may note that another reading, one inevitably governed by the current imprint of Hindutva politics, and its drive to ethnicize the contemporary nation-state, has led us into a different estimation of narrative meaning. One form of transcendence, that of an impartial system of state justice, is recoded as based on Muslim authority, and is displaced in its arbitrating functions by a Hindu locus of power. Nevertheless, as with the case of Shejari, we may consider that contextual reception cannot be held to be wrong or naïve. I have offered a reading here, a deciphering of meanings on the grounds of oppositions between the Mughal and the Rajput, and despite the overt rhetoric of loyalty used by the Rajput subject. And the reading emerges in the wake of a subsequent history. If in Shejari a utopian imaginary emerges to compensate the losses incurred in the modernizing imperatives and manipulations of a postsacred (Hindu) universe, in Pukar it is as if the cinematic audience is brought to an awareness of the potential crisis that rereadings offer. This brinkmanship of the fiction almost appears to offer the possibility of imagining the apocalyptic rending of the historical referent. 21 At the conclusion, Sangram Singh reasserts not only the realm of history, but asserts the inviolate position of the emperor in the design of the world. The legitimacy of the Mughal order, and thereby of the historical ideology of Mughal-Rajput fealty, is reiterated, if perhaps with a sense of the greater say the Rajput has in this polity. What has subtly shifted, however duplicitous and hedged in this may be, is that this rule is now grounded in the more democratic dimensions of the polity, where the subject can exercise a voice. That this voice is the voice of social authority and hierarchy rather than equality is indicated by the text, even if it is not acknowledged in contemporary reception. 21 For another, more contemporary example, which deploys the armature of the video game to imagine history as a game with the possibilities of different game outcome, see ch. 8 below.

167 150 The Melodramatic Public 5. The Transcendent Location of Stellar Bodies Unlike the overwhelming emphasis on social and community mediations of differences notable in the popular cinema, with the complicated exception of the Mughal historical film, the cinema of the post-independence period exhibited an investment in the capacity of the state to redress social injustice. This is observable in a host of films centred on a new engagement with criminality and its social roots. The genre of the crime film assigned central significance to the bigoted exclusiveness of social hierarchies in determining attitudes to the marginal and dispossessed. This context was recurrently acknowledged by the police and in courts of law, where the transcendent, equalizing imprimatur of the state is staged in film after film. In films such as Awara (Vagabond; Raj Kapoor, 1951), Shree 420 (Mr Conman; Raj Kapoor, 1956), Jagte Raho (Stay Alert; Shambhu Mitra, 1956), Baazi (The Wager; Guru Dutt, 1951), Aar Paar (Heads or Tails; Guru Dutt, 1954), and CID (Raj Khosla, 1956), corrupt businessmen and old elites manipulate and marginalize the claims of those without educational or social capital, pushing protagonists into the world of crime. However, if the state is presented as a benign entity that will intercede in the just reordering of society, it is only one component of the transformative agenda. The cinema of this period strongly engages with the city as a crucial laboratory of transformation and mode of experience. The latter is distinctively a cinematic mode. As Moinak Biswas has pointed out, films such as Baazi and Aar Paar are perceptually charged with a new sense of speed, their mise-en-scène organized to highlight darkness and mystery, camera angles and editing facilitating a sense of the city as a space of disequilibrium. 22 Within this cinematic armature, the street affords the functions of a narrative shifter. It offers the possibility of encounters with strangers, and renders even intimate figures, lost in a melodramatic shroud of time and dispersal, into alien entities (the famous lost and found formula of the popular). Thus, in a number of films, fathers and sons pass each other by without recognition. In terms of a thematics of society, the dynamics of estrangement are at once traumatic and liberating, registering the hurt of social anonymity and ignominy, but also embracing the exhilarating 22 The Urban Adventure, paper presented at Delhi, Sarai, October 2003.

168 Neither State Nor Faith 151 possibilities of escape from social hierarchy. The popular, and the city it delineates, emerge here as a field of energy in romance, sexuality, and social fluidity, and as retailer of the visceral effects of exploring the city s criminal underbelly. I want to consider this trajectory in terms of a specific form of transcendence. The transcendence of city and street, affording a release from hierarchy and defined identity is complemented by a performative transcendence. This lies in the particular presentational dimensions used by actors, and, more particularly, stars. It is as if a new self-consciousness emerges in the inflection of these narratively ordered displacements. The perceptual world undergoes a series of displacements, induced by the narrative order, and through a performative economy that alerts us to the difference between actor and character. These displacements and disconnections acquire particular force as the actor s body moves across a series of films. These are obviously general issues for how to understand a logic of star formation, how to place it and make sense of it. But they open into our particular concerns here in that they speak the language of mutability, play, and invention, and in that sense make of the body an arbitrary signifier. However, the interplay of systems of typage and star discourse build historically to constitute a constellation that suggests regularities and disruptions. It is in such movements of the body across a screen, and indeed across many screens, both in the depth of time, and in its simultaneity and therefore comparability, that we may discern a significant locus of meaning. Raj Kapoor I want to take two star personalities, or at least significant segments of their careers, to explore this formulation. I attend to those dimensions of their imaginary biography that specifically address the representation of communal difference, and, through this imaginary, function also as a marker of transcendent intervention. Firstly, I will isolate one dimension of the star personality of Raj Kapoor. This is that of the petty thief and confidence trickster whose biography is strongly associated with the illicit dimensions of the city, and a performative dimension specifically associated with the street. In Awara, performativity, here the pleasurable display of bodily dexterity, in picking pockets, staging a fictive heroism, are highlighted in the song sequence Main

169 152 The Melodramatic Public Awara Hoon, and in scenes played for comedy. The cheerfulness of this presentation of self is counterpointed to an overweening dark melodrama of the main narrative line, a bitter tale of social dispossession and marginality. Rootlessness and homelessness are transmuted when performativity becomes a major reference point in another social justice narrative, Shri 420. Here the hero, apparently a naïve figure, even a simpleton, arrives in Bombay from Allahabad, to encounter the corruption and exploitation of the big city. But here, even more markedly than in the disjunctions of Awara, character is specifically defined as unstable, as governed by a putting on and taking off of persona. The simpleton exhibits unexpected skills, as in his dexterity as a cardsharp, and then elaborates his instability by abruptly shifting social locales and sartorial habit. Thus the Kapoor protagonist shifts registers from his high-waisted, loose-fitting pants and coat and splayed gait to take on the persona of a suave gentleman attired in evening lounge suit who easily inhabits the precincts of the nightclub. The unanchored personality, here entirely dispensing with a consistency of psychological characterization, facilitates the transcendental drive which I am concerned to explore here. In the trajectory of the 1950s, we notice this development coming together suggestively with the orbit of intercommunity representations at the end of the decade. In Chhalia (The Cheat; Manmohan Desai, 1960), the Kapoor tramp figure, prefiguring the tapori (street conman) of the 1990s in terms of his emphasis on performativity over character integrity, is shifted from the field of social justice narratives into those of intercommunity tolerance and renewal. The film is an extremely important one in the annals of popular secularist discourse, so I will spend some time unravelling its narrative organization. The story addresses issues which have recently been explored by feminist historiography: the problems posed by the repatriation and rehabilitation of women after the partition of the subcontinent in The drive to repatriate was complicated by the response of families to the returned women. There was suspicion about what had happened during their years away from the family, and social anxiety, too, about how the community would regard the reintegration of the 23 Kamala Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India s Partition, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1998; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, Delhi, Kali for Women, 2001; Das, Critical Events.

170 Neither State Nor Faith 153 Fig. 24: Chhalia, Manmohan Desai, 1960, Chhalia addresses the Ram Lila gathering. possibly tainted rescued woman. Chhalia s exploration of this issue rapidly reassures the spectator of the virtue of the female protagonist, Shanti (Nutan). 24 Newly married, she is left behind in Lahore as riots erupt. To her good fortune, a Pathan, Khan (Pran), takes her in and protects her from the marauding Muslim crowd. The Pathan is a violent criminal, but is redeemed by his desire that Sakina, his sister, left behind in Delhi, will receive protection if he provides Shanti with protection. On her return to Delhi, Shanti s in-laws and parents refuse to acknowledge her, the latter with considerable heartbreak. Only 24 The career of Nutan at this time is suggestive. In 1959 she played the untouchable heroine of Sujata (Bimal Roy), and in 1963, in Bandini, another Bimal Roy film, she played the role of a woman who had courted social ostracism by her commitment to a revolutionary terrorist. Her being used in such unconventional roles suggests not only the commitment of the Bombay industry at the time, both in its left wing and liberal tendencies, to explore subalternity, but also the deployment of a star discourse to make such explorations more palatable. Thus the casting of Nutan, the impeccable high-caste actress, daughter of Shobhana Samarth, the Sita of Vijay Bhatt s Ramayana (1946), probably affords the spectator a reassuring distance from the social referent of these films.

171 154 The Melodramatic Public Kewal (Rehman), her husband, is willing to sunder ties with his family in order to reunite with his wife. However, he too becomes estranged when he sees that Shanti has a son who bears the name Anwar. The ostracized Shanti contemplates suicide, but is saved from this fate by the Chhalia of the title, Kapoor s petty thief. In this variant of the tramp, the obscurity of the character s origins is cheerfully accepted, in contrast to the traumatic ramifications of uncertain origins in the world of Awara. Here, in the character s own account, such obscurity makes him akin to a saint; knowing no origins, he transcends all religious affiliations, and can treat all with equal respect. The equality here is comically that of an equalization in criminal targeting: he makes no difference amongst Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Christian as to whose pocket he will pick. Chhalia becomes the vehicle for the saving of Shanti, and her reunion with her husband. As often happens with such a discourse of the transcendental subject, other dimensions of narrative framing suggest something slightly more complicated. Without identifiable family origins, Chhalia nevertheless has regional origins, in the city of Amritsar, where he was caught in criminal rivalry with Khan, the Pathan who had saved Shanti in Lahore. The two men meet each other again, when Khan comes to India looking for his lost sister. If he fails, he has determined to find Shanti and take her life. Chhalia defends Shanti, and it is the heroine s arrival which prevents Khan from killing Chhalia. Khan, shocked at what he has almost done, is spiritually broken, and prepares to leave. Like Saadat Hasan Manto s character Toba Tek Singh, he does not understand where Pakistan or India are; Chhalia explains that Pakistan is that which Hindustan is not. This is ironic testimony to the fatality of national boundaries. He alerts the Pathan to the expiry of his entry permit, and sees him off at the railway station. The narrative enacts compensatory exchange on the fulfilment of this fatalistically conceived division and return. Miraculously, the Pathan finds that Sakina too is on the train, thereby compensating for the division which the newly constituted nations on either side are burdened with. Shobhana Samarth, who enacted the role of Sita in the 1946 Vijay Bhatt Ramayana, is grief stricken when her husband permits her to visit the rehabilitation camp to see, but not acknowledge, the daughter who has returned to her. Do these tears emerge from a mythical and a cinematic locus, as the mother recognizes in the destiny of her own daughter (who is, of course, her daughter in real life) the re-enactment

172 Neither State Nor Faith 155 of the Ramayana s tale of abduction, exile, and a recovery dogged by suspicion? The imagery of the Ramayana is deployed here, as it is in other 1950s films including the earlier Awara, and, appropriately, the reunion of the couple takes place under the aegis of the Ramlila. No longer is this, however, an issue of the abductor and the abducted. The other is that which lies within, in Kewal s unwillingness to accept Shanti. (Remarkably, this does not prevent him from accepting his son.) In a melodramatic conclusion, Kapoor s address to the assembled public, and to the dramatis personae, urges an end to the Ram Sita kahani, and finally sees the couple united in jointly protecting their child from the falling effigy of Ravana. (Fig. 24, p. 153.) The Kapoor persona is critical to the architecture of the narrative. He carries with him, from Awara through Shree 420, the imagery of the uprooted, the déclassé, the criminal, and, in terms of spatial resonance, the semantics of the street and the field of the popular. It is the very lack of legitimacy which offers him the possibility of interrogating social hierarchy, and the ritual boundaries, of birth and descent, which undergirds this hierarchy. The virtual biography of the star as screen persona a persona who resides on the internal screen of the spectator s cinematic memory can then be mobilized, with a sense of thematic consistency, into a new focus by addressing and resolving the possible tainting of community boundaries raised by the figure of the abducted woman. The thematic has not really changed, it still has to do with questions of birth and descent, but it is now refocused as an issue of community rather than class. Critically, the arena of resolution is not the state. The state can only set up the possibility of resolution. It is the left wing cultural terrain that has provided a critique of the mythic reference point for patriarchy that provides the mise-en-scène of social restitution. In fact, at another level, the state is almost negatively coded. While the street conman can problematize the constraints of community, this remains within a discourse of the nation-state. When Chhalia and Khan are pitted against each other, at one level, it is a reprise of an older rivalry going back to Amritsar. However, when this is transposed to post-partition Delhi, such a face-off now carries a nationalist resonance with it, the hoodlums now pitted against each other as national entities. The critical function of the nation-state here is observable when Chhalia, who flouts the law, nevertheless reminds the Khan of the expiry of his entry permit. Nevertheless, there is a peculiar redemptive dimension to the way this is uttered, as a law, that

173 156 The Melodramatic Public of the nation-state, which one cannot evade. The figure of the street relays this empathetically, with a sense of compassion and fatalism. The complexity of this development of a transcendent mediation by the star persona gives one pause for thought. The figure of the star may sometimes stand, may indeed condense, the experience of the cinema in crucial ways. If the cinema has a persona, a figure who stands for it, captures its allure and the power it exercises over memory, it is perhaps in this figure. Is this a superego which shadows the function of superego carried out by figures of political and public life, mobilizing popular discourses to complement the orientations of the wider political realm? 25 Bachchan carried something of what Kapoor did for the post-independence period on into the 1970s. There is, however, a distinction in the way the screen persona is mobilized for the mediation of intercommunity difference: this is by assuming the position of the other, as, for example, in Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) and Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1982). In the former film, a characteristic melodramatic narrative ensures the dispersal of the children of a Hindu family into a set of multi-community foster families, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. The film mirrors the conventions of a sociological imagination, suggesting the socially superior position of the Hindu in a middle class, professionalized setting, one carrying a symbolic, normative function, that of the policeman. The other figures again run true to social typage, one a Muslim weaver and qawwali singer, the other the Christian bootlegger. However, this representational grid rubs up against the stellar constellation. The Christian and Muslim figures are played by the more popular actors, Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor, while the lesser star, Vinod Khanna, plays the Hindu 25 Moinak Biswas in fact suggests that the popular cinema of the 1950s, especially the work of Mehboob Khan and Raj Kapoor, better represents the ethos of the Nehruvian mandate of social justice than, say, the art cinema of Ray, which employed strategies distancing the spectator from a Nehruvian telos of modernity. Biswas, Urban Adventure. Arguably, the power of the popular, as with other forms of creativity, may derive ultimately from exploring the trauma involved in identifying oneself with modernizing imperatives. The trauma arises from sacrificing a portion of one s being, inevitably represented, from Kapoor to Ray to Ghatak, in the mother, a figure who evoked a sense of lack and loss in a protean, melodramatic way. With Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) and Deewar (Yash Chopra, 1974), there is an epic revision of this narrative format, as an engulfing sense of trauma arises from the mother having to sacrifice her son. See ch. 11 below for a reflection on the symbolic coordinates of this narrative structure.

174 Neither State Nor Faith 157 policeman. The knowing mismatch between the narrative of star authority and that of social authority and respectability affords the spectator with the pleasures of a playful, carnivalesque inversion, where an authoritative and respectable Hindu society is shown up as somewhat strait laced and repressed (as in the triptych of romances presented through the song sequence, Hamko tumse ho gaya hai pyar kya karein... Nana Patekar Nana Patekar, who had earlier been trained in theatre acting, brought a new performance idiom into mainstream cinema, with his tautly controlled body, and a bravura, staccato dialogue delivery that 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, this performance style has been deployed 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 more broadly with a Hindu right politics at the national level), the actor s screen persona is not so straightforward. Thus while films such as Ankush (The Goad; N. Chandra 1986), Krantiveer (The Brave Revolutionary; Nana Patekar, 1991), and Prahaar (Assault; Mehul Kumar, 1994) would appear to confirm this political characterization, his roles in Salaam Bombay (Mira Nair, 1988) and Disha (Direction; Sai Paranjpaye, 1990) are of the mould of the social realist genre. Others, such as Parinda (Flight of Pigeons; Vidhu Vinod Chopra 1989), Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye (Let s Have a Little Romance; Amol Palekar, 1990), Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (And So Raju Became a Gent; Aziz Mirza, 1992), and Ghulam e Mustafa (Mustafa, the Loyal Slave; Parto Ghosh 1998), suggest a tapestry of types. These include the psychotic gangster, the 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 middleclass mores. It is this last instance which I want to draw upon for more sustained analysis. Patekar had played a Muslim character earlier, that of a gangster in Angaar (Ashes; Shashilaal Nayar, 1992). This was part of an emergent trend in Bombay cinema, where the Hindu hero was pitted against a villainous character specifically marked as Muslim. In

175 158 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 25: Ghulam e Mustafa, Parto Ghosh, 1998, The Comedy of Cohabitation. Ghulam e Mustafa, Patekar plays a Muslim gangster once again, but this time as a hero. He is of the breed of the orphaned hero, who does not know his parents, and has to survive the demands of a ruthless city. He comes under the tutelage of a Hindu, a mafioso who gives him the loving care of a father. Mustafa is hitman for the Hindu don, and he is a magnificent specimen. Sartorially, he is a visual spectacle, harking back to grandiose images of medieval courts and public arena in his flowing colourful robes. He is also devout, meticulously performing his prayers before unleashing brutal punishment against his master s enemies. Ultimately, like other heroic Muslims on the Bombay screen, he is destined to die. The death is redemptive, for it follows on his refusal to carry out his master s orders, or, indeed, to participate in what he comes to see as exploitative acts demeaning to the common citizen. What is distinctive to all this is the centrality of Hindu Muslim relations to the narrative experimentation of the film. Mustafa comes to be impressed by the upright character and dignity of a struggling, petty bureaucratic Hindu family. When the father of this family refuses to take a bribe for the award of a government contract, his family is put

176 Neither State Nor Faith 159 at grave risk. The reformed Mustafa decides that he will protect the family, and to do this, he must takes up residence in their home. There follows a comedy of social adjustment. The mother of the household, in particular, gives voice to all the taboos of Hindu society in the face of the other. Mustafa s very presence in the household as she undertakes her daily puja is disturbing, as is his Muslim habit of touching the glass to his lips. (Fig. 25, p. 159.) There are a spate of social anxieties as well: the influence Mustafa exercises over her son, teaching him to ride and repair a motorcycle, seems to threaten his abduction into the different world of the street. Mustafa also functions as a substitute parent to the daughter in spheres the parents are too conventional to handle, as when he oversees her safe passage from a date. Ultimately, even the mother is won over, and is overwhelmed with grief when Mustafa pays for his refusal to kowtow to his former bosses. How do we situate this performance? The historical landscape has decisively shifted from the earlier instances of the 1950s and 1970s. Patekar s career emerges almost uncannily alongside that of a new phase of the Shiv Sena: his 1986 film Ankush is often associated with this polity in its profiling of neighbourhood youth, restless, frustrated figures who rail against the injustices they have been meted out by a corrupt society, and ultimately giving violent outlet to their simmering rage. Subsequently, Prahaar, in its story about a Rajput commando trainer who takes on the local hoods terrorizing a Bombay locality, is also considered a landmark film. It showcases with a new, sadistic economy, the violent assertion of Hindutva s symbolic authority over the nation. The next film, Krantiveer, emerges almost simultaneously with the demolition of the Babri Masjid, that catastrophic assault against India s Muslim minority. Here, Patekar as a child ridicules the heritage of anticolonial patriotism, and, as an adult, is driven only by loyalty to his adoptive family, that of a Hindu baniya. However, when the manipulations of politicians, real estate speculators, and the police lead to a communal conflagration in the locality, he is traumatized and undergoes a change of perspective. He declares the absurdity and irrationality of intercommunal violence before the assembled public of survivors. However, the proof of his argument lies in a rather shocking, and ambiguously coded act of bloodletting. Before the assembled post-riot crowd, he draws out a Muslim marauder, and proceeds to smash his fingers along with his own, to demonstrate that they have the

177 160 The Melodramatic Public same blood. Significantly, it is the Hindu who has a modern, scientifically grounded perception of the world, and the Muslim who has to be taught a basic lesson in biological science. This rather common narrative of the Hindu moorings of modern, rationalist perception is, perhaps, undergirded by a gesture to a more primordial cognition. In the histories retailed by Hindutva, Islam and Christianity have converted the original, Hindu inhabitants of the subcontinent, threatening the rights of this primordial identity to oversee the modern nation. 26 Underneath the discourse of biological equivalence retailed by Patekar s sermon may then lie another one, of a primordial order rather than one constructed by modern science. But even here the primordial is hierarchized. The Hindu protagonist enacts a symbolic register of violent reintegration, in which the other comes across as a vagrant gene pool, as biological proof for he who knows himself, the nation, and can command the other to be a subordinated, functional component in the playing out of this national-ethnic destiny. Such a deconstruction of a humanist morality tale emerges from the history of previous narratives, and of the function of the star s screen persona in these. How then to reconcile the narrative world and screen personality of Ghulam e Mustafa with this master narrative of the star personality? One of the ways of dealing with this is to see the performance as the strategy of a Hindu symbolic authority to assume the guise of the other in order to transform itself. On what grounds would this be? Here, one can invoke a series of accounts of the desired transformation of Hinduism in the modern era, especially from the time of the colonial period. This emphasizes the firming up of Hinduism, its acquiring a more disciplined theological cast, and a more structured set of protocols through which to integrate and orient its following. Such drives, manifest in writers as diverse as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya and Savarkar, 27 and in the desire reposed in the refashioned figure of Ram, places stress on a harder, more aggressive sense of self. Here the self is cultivated by mirroring the perceived definitions of the other, the Muslim and the Christian. In such a lineage, Mustafa 26 Alok Rai, Religious Conversions and the Crisis of Brahmanical Hinduism, in Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others. 27 For these two figures, see, respectively, Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001; and Gyanendra Pandey, Which of Us Are Hindus?, in Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others.

178 Neither State Nor Faith 161 becomes the other the self must cultivate in order to assert oneself in the world. More than a benefactor, a servant, and a sword-arm for the moral probity of Hindu society, he is also a role model. But surely he is too large, too magnificent to be emulated? But so too is the refashioned Ram, who either appears in contemporary versions as a muscular marquee figure mobilizing for Hindutva, 28 or, again, in Kamalahasan s Hey Ram! a somewhat remote, hyperbolic displacement of the hero into a mythic register. These are entities that rule the cosmos. Film narratives, by and large, require more pedestrian registers to supplement the movement of the superego. 29 The magnificence of the figure dwarfs that which surrounds him, and must find grounding in something more quotidian. Thus I prefer to focus on Mustafa of the net vest and filigreed cap, the figure sipping his tumbler of coffee before the aghast eyes of a pollution fearing Hindu matriarch. The register of comedy here slips into the everyday conundrums of cohabitation. It also lampoons the insularity of the Hindu self, its cordoning itself off from a certain sensual, tactile universe. Is caricature here the vehicle of an urging that one must change oneself, enter the world and commingle with the other? Is there a subaltern register to the lampoon, sending up the middle class from the perspective of the sweaty, messy this worldliness of common folk across the ethnoreligious board? Patekar is a master of the scathing verbal demolition of the other. But this is an affectionate sending up of the goodly Hindu housewife. Whatever the film s invocation of limits, Mustafa s externality to the household sealed by his ultimate function of the martyred protector, there is a point of departure for the popular cinema in this scenario of cohabitation. A space appears to open up, signalled in this interpretation by a will to performance and imagination. We have seen that Patekar has essayed a number of other roles, quite at variance with those which have been most highlighted in his oeuvre. But nothing, perhaps, has prepared us for this particular break in the virtual biography of his screen persona. And it would have meant that much less if it appeared in the oeuvre of any other present-day star. It is here that a fissure affords 28 Anuradha Kapur, Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram, ibid., I have suggested how this duality of personality types is observable in other Kamalahasan films such as Hindustani: see ch. 8 below.

179 162 The Melodramatic Public us with the possibilities of a transcendence of community boundaries: through the register of performance, play, and imagination the imagining, if not of the other, then of the limits of the self. The fissure has nothing to do with the biographical character Patekar, his attitudes or motivations. It is a break in the virtual persona we, as film spectators, have invested in. In rendering a break, the fissure or dissonance produces a crack, a glimmer of light, where we may insert our own subjectivity.

180 5 A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray Running against the thematic focus in this book, this chapter will look at a different dimension of the institution of the cinema in post-independence India through the work of Satyajit Ray. It continues, however, the engagement with the critical discourses that surround the popular cinema after Independence, of which Ray s writings and work were a key constituent, and also articulates my concern with the idea of the cinema as a vehicle of public address, if one very different from that of popular form. His work of course highlights the question of realism, psychological characterization, and narrative integration. Realism was the pre-eminent feature of the critical discourse instituted by art cinema critics and practices. The criticism appears to emerge from evaluating the status of the narrative form through which the real would be articulated through what means of representation, styles of acting, aesthetic strategies the real would be invoked. As I have argued in chapter 2, the popular compendium studio shooting, melodramatic, externalized forms for the representation of character psychology, non- or intermittently continuous forms of cutting, diversionary story lines, performance sequences was not acceptable within the emergent artistic canon, for they undermined plausibility and a desirable regime of verisimilitude. Art cinema criticism also addressed another dimension the popular cinema avowedly lacked, that of authenticity to cultural traditions, an issue central to bids to lay claim to a distinct lineage for national culture in the wake of decolonization. Issues of authenticity in the constitution of a post-colonial politics and culture take on different

181 164 The Melodramatic Public resonances as we move through different domains within the cinematic institution, and across art institutions. Central here are varying constructions of what composed an authentic art practice and what functions such authentication performed in relation to the requirements of state formation, in response to wider processes of modernization and, quite crucially, in terms of the imagining of the publics that art works and commercial cultural products would seek to bring into being. Historians and theorists of modern Indian art have argued that, under colonialism and after, what was always at issue was the drive to uncover differences from Western canons of aesthetics which, in the modern period, were heavily determined by arguments for realism. Earlier debates from the colonial period sought to argue that Indian art traditions were differently constituted, oriented to a certain iconographic and decorative character. Geeta Kapur suggests that the three lynchpins of this anti-colonial discourse were an aristocratic folk paradigm emerging from the romanticism of Tagore and the Santiniketan artists, the canonical, craft-oriented aesthetic of Coomaraswamy and the artisanal base of Gandhian ideology. It is Kapur s argument that Ray combined the influence of the Santiniketan tradition with other modern traditions in the novel and cinema, and qualified it and shifted it to a middle-class sense of conscience and destiny that was intimately tied to the project of modern nationhood. In contrast to the long and problematic history of colonial modernity, in which modernity was seen as an imposition and dissembling means had to be evolved which would contest the modern even while deploying modern apparatuses and procedures, Ray worked out a strategy which would authenticate the modern, and its middle-class vehicle, by showing it as emerging from out of previous aesthetic traditions. 1 In order to do this, his films bridged the chasm between civilizational identity and modernity, but in ways which his critics have faulted for glossing over the traumatic and concrete history defined by peasant immiseration, and the horrendous social and political bloodletting of Partition. 2 1 Geeta Kapur, Sovereign Subject: Ray s Apu, in Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Delhi, Tulika Books, 2000, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Satyajit Ray, Ray-movie and Ray s films, Journal of Arts and Ideas 23 4, 1993, 7 16.

182 A Modernist Public 165 Rather than see Ray playing out a destinal narrative that provides for a redemptive and authenticating identification with modernity for the protagonist, I want to suggest that he was involved in a rather more complicated dialogue with the modern, showing it to be necessarily and irreducibly split in the forms of subjectivity it gave rise to. In a sense this is the condition of modernity, and authentication lies in the articulation of a split position which constantly gestures to some antecedent self that has been displaced and is in danger of entirely disappearing from consciousness. The force of this particular modernist move lies in the bid not only to find a form that can articulate this splitting and hold on to both parts, but in determinedly seeking out the repressed dimensions of that former self, and laying claim, on behalf of modernity, to the ability to bring it into view. Some of the following argument analyses this modernist doubletake through discussions of realist strategies, as these were the dominant terms on which post-independence discourses of the cinema developed. I will pay attention here to both the potentially repressive and expressive dimensions of Ray s realist strategies. Locating these discourses within a problematic of authentication, I want to see how realist form achieved a surfacing of the present in ways which could speak to the double-take of modernity, persuading the spectator of the connections, however disrupted, submerged and phantom-like, of present being with past selves; and, beyond this, how these often unrealized pasts could reframe and reanimate the present. Ray s grappling with the emergence of the present can be seen as engagement with a Bengali public s massive investments in the history of literary form, but also as an intervention in the category of genre. Often, art cinema is not subject to categorizations along these lines, as if the field inhabits a transcendent location vis-à-vis the mundane play of similarity and difference through which popular industrial products fabricate themselves and are publicized to an audience. However, my suggestion here is that there is an active working over of the category of genre in Ray s practice, one perhaps quite distinct from popular film genres but, like them, often immersed in the difficulties of finding a route, of finding the images and sounds and narratives to articulate the present into perception. In a word, the difficulties are those of imagining the present as a distinct moment separated from previous times and generically coded imaginaries. And with this difficulty there comes a distinct politics, one of defining how the present

183 166 The Melodramatic Public is to be negotiated into existence, which traditions need to be drawn upon and how these should be reframed and new questions asked of them. This particular intervention suggests connections with the development of a wider genre formation within the cinematic institution of the time, the move towards the present through the constitution of the Social as a genre of contemporary experience. Finally, I will surmise that we cannot fully attend to Ray s oeuvre without at the same time seeing it as having to deal with the formal energies arraigned at its boundaries. In particular, I will call upon the register of the popular as specifically worked out within Bengali culture, that body of caricatural representation available through bazaar productions in which respectable society is cast in bizarre and irreverent light. Of course, high art forms can draw upon such energies through quotation, framing them within a larger narrative discourse; at issue here is what these energies are aligned with in the dominant perspectives of the narrative world. There is also the possibility that such a dominant narrative frame does not successfully contain these energies. In the last section of this chapter, I will look at Jana Aranya to suggest how there is a waning of conviction in Rays work, an incapacity to generate a plausible protagonist and provide a perspective. In the process the other the immoral world of seedy deals, sharp practice and pimping riotously overruns the diegetic world. I should stress that this is not a criticism but rather an acknowledgement of skills of observation and powers of capturing that which is alien and anecdotal to you, only to find that these powers exceed those of narrative integration and moral calibration. This failure of the film may be read as the failure of a form whose historical moment has passed, and is therefore suggestive, simply as caesura, as an insurmountable chasm in narrative cognition that allows other knowledges to surface into view and command our attention. The result is a shift in the terms of authentication away from the privileged middle-class recipient of Ray s imagination. 1. Ray s Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and a History of the Present A particularly influential way of talking about realism has been in terms of the classic realist text, in which a superior or metalanguage level uses quotation marks to render different levels of object language within the diegetic world, and then hierarchizes these to produce

184 A Modernist Public 167 an understanding of what is true. Unlike the other languages placed between inverted commas, regarded as certain material expressions which assert certain meanings, the metalanguage is not regarded as material; it is dematerialized to achieve perfect representation to let the identity of things shine through the window of words. 3 This form of narration has been called an excessively obvious one, as the metalanguage level does not reveal itself to the reader-spectator, as if the story were telling itself rather than being recounted. In terms of film form, classical realism is associated with that jointless, seamless mode of filmic story-telling practices described by Noel Burch: The reader s relationship with the traditional novelistic discourse is based on non-perception, on the invisibility of the material articulations sustaining this discourse: in other words, syntax, grammar, and the perceptual form of words and symbols. In the cinema, this nonperception corresponds to a reading which sees neither the edges of the frame nor the changes of shot the two materialities which in fact tend to challenge the illusion of continuity that... underlies the credibility both of the traditional novel and of the cinema which had adopted the same specifications. 4 In the context of Indian film studies, the classical realist text has been given a particular inflection, where it has been aligned with the development of a culture of modernity with certain political ramifications. These comprise the understanding that realist cinema addresses, indeed seeks to constitute a modern spectator invested in the cognitive practice of individualized perception central to the development of a civil society of freely associating individuals. A realist art cinema is then part of a culture of civil society which in practice is the preserve of a small segment of society quite at a remove from the wider weave of social and political subjectivity. Its form and its thematics invite the spectator to assume modern perceptual practices that can objectify and distance her from the traditional and the feudal. Insofar as social subjectivity is much more complex in terms of the meshing of the social forms that it institutes, then this too functions as a repressive frame within which the citizen spectator is situated. 5 3 Colin McCabe, Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses, Screen 15 (2), 1974, Burch, Fritz Lang, in Roud, ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film; Prasad makes this argument in relationship to the parallel cinema of the 1970s, supported by state institutions such as the National

185 168 The Melodramatic Public On the surface, much of this seems to resonate with Ray s work, especially the trilogy: the focus on individual perception, the carefully calibrated, invisible style of narration which does not draw attention to itself, the emphasis on modern destinies that finally transcend previous states. It would also conform to the argument that Ray s camera seeks to conquer or subordinate reality for the requirements of ideological stability, in this case a tale of the seamless emergence of a nationalist modernity. However, I will argue that the modernist dimensions of Ray s work disturb any such straightforward organization of narrative material and spectatorial perspective. In particular, the foregrounding of the stylistic elements signals a process of irruption that drives a wedge between the contemporary and the force of unresolved pasts. The Modernism of the Trilogy In addressing these issues, I would first like to consider the way in which the trilogy undertakes some of the work of symbolization and historical distantiation which I take to be important to Ray s intervention in the cinema. I want to identify a certain dynamic in the way this distance emerges within a naturalistically calibrated representation. I use the term advisedly, in that the way this mode of representation is developed in Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), for instance, acquires a level of formal equipoise, a concern with balance and pace that is very different from that concrete duration of time extolled by Andre Bazin for the neo-realists. 6 What is suggestive to me is not only that this naturalism is subjected to disruption within Ray s work, but that its very form undergoes different articulations through the trilogy. I have argued elsewhere that Pather Panchali undertakes a transformation of symbolic economy, charting changes in the forms of attachment and temporality represented by the different characters in the Film Development Corporation. It would be interesting to know if Prasad would see this argument holding for Ray as well. For a different perspective, see Ravi Vasudevan, Cinema and Citizenship in the Third World, Van Zelst Lecture on Communication, Northwestern University, 1999, condensed and reprinted as An Imperfect Public: Cinema and Citizenship in the Third World, in Sarai Reader 01, Delhi, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2001; and idem, The Politics of Cultural Address, in Gledhill and Williams, eds, Re-inventing Film Studies, rpnt as ch. 3 above. 6 See esp. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema, vol. II, ed. and trans. by Hugh Gray, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971.

186 A Modernist Public 169 story. Central here is the opposition between Durga and Apu, where Durga is framed as continuous with nature, governed by the instincts, and associated with an immersion in resources (an orchard formerly owned by the declining Brahmin family) and desires that are foreclosed to her. Durga s fascination with a past plenitude is the attribute of a doomed entity, while Apu is symbolically placed to escape the desires that snare his sister. 7 If this past/future temporality provides one axis of the film s narrative, then another is that of the gruelling present, caught in the disposition of the mother Sarbajaya. In the history of Sarbajaya and her struggle for familial survival we are certainly not presented with anything like the histories of conflict which characterized the Bengal countryside. Neither does the film seek to capture the politically induced scarcity that erupted in the catastrophe of the Bengal famine of However, what we witness is likely to evoke this traumatic moment for a Bengali audience of the 1950s, even if the film uses a narrative structure with very different emphases, one aiming to communicate a sense of the relentless cycle imposed by the rigours of scarcity on recently impoverished lives. The sequence relating to Apu s sighting of the train is in fact inaugurated by this multiple sense of time, with a view of Sarbajaya, inanimate, inward, and conflicted in her relationship to the grandaunt, Indir, whom she has had to expel from the household for reasons of family survival. Indir leaves the Roy house, into an encompassing, dwarfing nature where she will find her final resting place. The movement of the children is woven out of these different logics, of present time and the cyclical one of death, into a completely different register, and an entirely new one for the film. The naturalism that has governed it so far has been a carefully calibrated one, and highly formal in terms of its attention to framing, perspective, and the simulation of a naturalist continuity, day unravelling into evening and night and into the next morning. Its formalism is at a remove from the contingencies of neo-realist time, and there is a strong sense of images corresponding to the descriptive procedures of a literary naturalist mode. However, this is a dissembling naturalism, whose high investment in formal equipoise is displaced by the concentration of viewer attention on character perspectives and emotions rather than on what frames them. 7 Ravi Vasudevan, Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in 1950s India, Oxford Literary Review 16, 1995.

187 170 The Melodramatic Public Here we may discern the significance of classical narration for the form of the film. Kapur has noted of the train sequence that it provides for a seamless sense of the emergence of time within the landscape of Santiniketan painterly modes, a spatial strategy presenting new figure ground relations to induct the movement of the train, and of history, into the frame. 8 In contrast, I would suggest that there is an emphatic disjointment exercised at the level of representation, drawing the viewer into a new economy of perception, one that works through the thematics of history not as a seamless emergence but as a rupturing and a positing of a new and distancing perspective. Interestingly, it is through the realm of the instincts and senses, one contrasted to the realm of verbalized language, that Ray draws us into this new field of perception. For it is through Durga that the spectator is routed into new sense perceptions, as, moving ahead of Apu, she registers strange vibrations and sounds, capturing the tremor of modernity as it is relayed in the tactile form of a quivering telegraph pole. (Fig. 26.) Fig. 26: Durga at the telegraph pole. 8 Kapur, Sovereign Subject.

188 A Modernist Public 171 As if needing to work disruptive effects of the sensation into filmic structures, Ray resorts to a rare discontinuity, a temporal gap intruding in the abrupt cut that shows Apu entering the space around the telegraph pole after Durga has left it; the compulsion to repeat, to go through again, highlights the moment and the space as symbolically charged, as marked off from the seamless flow of previous time. And then, almost mystically, the frame itself is shot through with a denaturalizing impulse, high key effects rendering the kash fields in which the children move as a graphical field defined by the textures of light. This instinctual, sensate space is one that cannot admit of verbal enunciation. When Apu asks Durga for an explanation of the mysterious sense impressions which course around, she merely gestures him to silence, to listen. The billowing cloud of smoke that emerges on the horizon releases the children into movement, Durga slipping awkwardly to fatally fall behind. If the spectator has already been invited to enter a different, graphic realm of perception, there is now a foregrounding of our looking, as a swish pan, entirely going against the tonality of anything in the film, swings to catch Apu moving towards the railway line. (Fig. 27.) Fig. 27: Swish pan finds Apu.

189 172 The Melodramatic Public Our look here is dislocated from the smooth flow of characterfocalized narration, where the choice of frame is justified by the presence of character. For we briefly lose our object, and in the process are alerted to the phenomenology of the moving camera at the very moment the character becomes aware of the moving train. This double articulation of the perceptual registering of modern machinic energies for character and spectator is not, however, merely a clever and ironic reflection on the impinging of two different forms and moments in the history of modernity, although it is that as well. The moment of dislocation is developed into a full jettisoning of the spectator s view from the framed character. We are denied the function of virtual looking that tracks the characters, and come to be entirely split from the character, as the camera captures the moment of the train s impinging on little Apu not from his perspective, but from the other side of the tracks. The character is abstracted and made graphic along with the thing he watches, and the whole is offered up for a view from outside. (Fig. 28.) In terms of a psychoanalytical register, we could say that the Imaginary domain which offers a play of recognition and identification to the spectator within classical realist strategies has here given way to revealing the Symbolic register through which the Imaginary is Fig. 28: Apu from the other side.

190 A Modernist Public 173 constructed. Our position, now radically other from that of Apu and Durga, is only fleetingly registered, before the film goes back to the cadences of its naturalist mode. But in this moment, our dislocation is not only that of spatial disjointment, but a temporal one. The deployment of a modernist cinematic stylistics itself marks the passage from the literary naturalist mode Ray invokes, and in the process enforces a temporal distance. The stylistics points to the articulation of the here and now. And, in doing this, it also alerts us to the fact that what we are bearing witness to is not a seamless, organic narration of origins, as if the nation can aesthetically inscribe an uninterrupted narrative of itself. This, I believe, also puts a question mark over the formulation that the modernist art of this period functioned in uncomplicated ways to fulfil the images required of the state in its tale of origins. Not only does the art cinema emerge independently of the state in this initial phase although in the case of Pather Panchali the West Bengal government comes in at a later stage it also appears to set its face against a position of organic identity for its spectator. Ruptured from the flow of narrative, invited to look at the fictive world and its literary origins from a distance induced by a selfconscious cinematic stylistics, the spectator occupies the emergent terrain of the present. The significance of a position of externality and distance is highlighted by the progressive induction of distanced spectatorial attributes in the character of Apu. Let us return to the train, this time as it carries Sarbajaya and Apu back to the countryside in Aparajita (The Unvanquished, 1956). The journey has been precipitated by two developments. During the initial sojourn of the family in Benares, we have been provided intimations of the vulnerable status of Sarbajaya in the tenement, as she wards off the intrusiveness of a male neighbour. With Harihar s death these presentiments are reprised, and there looms up Sarbajaya s status as widow in a city which ritually incarnates the renunciatory status of the woman who has lost her husband. The return, however, is precipitated very abruptly, at the point that Sarbajaya and Apu are offered a position of service within a well-to-do Bengali household. Presentiments of this subordinate and marginalized position leads to a moment of introspection and a jolting cut to the train crossing the Ganga and back to countryside. It is as if the mother has forsaken the subordinated security offered her to start the story again, from its original location, in a move to neutralize the losses that have arisen in between.

191 174 The Melodramatic Public The journey back has something of the status, however, of a visit rather than a return. For the time that has elapsed in between, carrying with it the heavy burden of loss, can never be recovered (neither can the space; Sarbajaya and Apu come to Mansapota, rather than Nischindipur, although Sarbajaya hopes that they can ultimately return to their home village). In a remarkable passage, Apu enters the house of an aged relative of the family, and runs to the doorway on hearing the sound of the train in the distance. He calls excitedly to his mother, in anticipation of the sight he is about to see. But at the moment of the sighting, his face drains of animation. Of course, Apu has just been on the train, it is no longer a mysterious and wondrous object heralding new experiences. But what is remarkable is not only the deflating function of this moment of disenchantment, where a structure of mundane spectatorship has entered into the experience of the character, but also the production of a moment of pathos. For what is built into the moment is a secret sharing and exchange of spectatorial positions; if Apu has in a sense assumed the symbolic position we were fleetingly offered in Pather Panchali, then we are provided the one he had occupied, a situation of impending lack. Durga s fatal fall, her inability to achieve the vision Apu attained, is here reiterated with deadening effect, as if her absence is inscribed into the space of vision now, dragging it down, making it go quiet and look inwards. Ray s achievement here, without taking recourse to flashback, spelling things out for us, honours our capacity to read the image, layer it over previous images in order to register the internalized lineaments of loss built into the transformation of horizons. This is in no way a terminal moment of disenchantment, but part of a spiral that feeds back into cycles of re-enchantment and loss. So Aparajita follows on from the first film in its opening out of vision and experience for its protagonist. This is charted by the leitmotif of the observational camera in Aparajita. Attractively, the camera is employed with a less rigorous attention to frame and duration than marked Pather Panchali, gaining a less cadenced, more rambling effect. 9 In contrast to the somewhat flexibly structured sequences concerning 9 The influence of Renoir is often noted for Ray, but it is only in Aparajito that he evokes that director s more open, searching relationship to bodies in space, especially in such films as Toni (1934) and La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game; 1939).

192 A Modernist Public 175 Fig. 29: Aparajita, Satyajit Ray, 1956, The View of the Mother. Apu s expanding world, it is perhaps significant that Ray adopts a quite different mode of framing to evoke the position of the mother and the space of the countryside. This space, of a bank curving around a large pond, adorned by an overarching tree, is the space Apu comes into and leaves, and which his mother looks to for signs of her son s arrival. The frame functions in the fashion of a mise-en-abyme, a structurally precise and recurrently deployed unit of aesthetic composition. Ray s usage of this space as counterpoint to Apu s evolving, expanding world, functions not so much as a counterpoint of stasis/movement, but as governed by an asymmetry of desire, where the mother s desire, to recover her son, can never be fulfilled. (Fig. 29.) The son of course knows this desire, but he is helpless to respond to it, carried as he is by a different momentum and temporality. Here, as with the case of Durga, the film evokes a moment, finally, through its absence, as Apu returns to this space to find that its occupant can never be regained. The distinct stylistics of this evocation, the returning of the protagonist to the moment of earlier being from which he is now forever severed, conjures up a certain irreducibility of time.

193 176 The Melodramatic Public Here, in a very distinctive way, Ray conveys not only a passage within the protagonist, but a nurturing and cultivation of memory against the depredations of modern processes and subjectivities. The full logic of the modernist method Ray uses, signalling at once distance and separation along with the imperative of remembering, is something to be drawn out over a number of films. What is striking about the last film in the trilogy is the way it appears to change track, abandoning this particular double movement of enchantment and loss, and confronting the protagonist with a terminal scenario of renunciation. In Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), we have a recurrence of several motifs, especially of alienated viewing, but now modelled on a separation from the here and now rather than the past. In an extended sequence the adult Apu looks for a job, to find that he is considered too qualified for the teaching jobs or unable to cast himself in the role of routinized and deadening work. The last is a superbly realized segment, Apu looking into the typesetter s room, a scene wonderfully dense in its evocation of humdrum labour. It should be stressed that this has nothing to do with arrogance. The narrative cannily draws upon the fact that Apu has been engaged in the very same labour in the past, to facilitate his education. Driven by the desire to Fig. 30: Apur Sansar, Satyajit Ray 1959, An Intimate Space for Modernity.

194 A Modernist Public 177 write, he appears perfectly indifferent, at the level of material wants, to his penurious condition. And, indicating a social commitment that is also a mark of the work s context, it is significant that Apu has refused to take a job that would have infringed the norms of a strike. While the earlier films always sought to capture different temporalities, Apur Sansar constitutes a bid to be of the present, but on terms distinctive to the hero s desires. Involved here is, pre-eminently, the desire of the subject to write himself into significance. His novel, whose themes he relates to childhood friend Pulu in their walk over the rail tracks that lead to his rooms, is clearly autobiographical in content. It deals with a character who is ordinary, whose everyday life is a struggle, but who nevertheless lives life to the full. Encapsulated here, against the background of the preceding observation of dulling work routines and the setting of the crisscross of rail tracks, is what Geeta Kapur refers to as the trilogy s transcendence of the realm of necessity. But, as Pulu points out, the writing is incomplete, lacks adequate experience, for it lacks the experience of romantic engagement in the writer s life. I would suggest that this is the realm of the present, as opposed to the realm of necessity or of freedom, for it has to be invented in the here and now. For, in a sense, Apu lacks a social frame. He lies at the margins of the reality which surrounds him, even if this is a self-willed distance. To make the present real to him, he has to carve it out, and the enterprise is conducted within the discretion of a space, that of the conjugal dwelling. It is here that the film undertakes a substantial task, a working with and containment of iconographic resources. Kapur has pointed out that in Ray s bid to develop a secular aesthetic, he took characters whose names carried mythic resonances, such as Durga in Pather Panchali, and decoded them, rendering them into ordinary characters. Here he adorns Apu with a flute to draw on the mythic figure of Krishna, specifically his erotic resonance. In a set of remarkable sequences, Ray works through iconographic elements to constitute an intimate space for modernity. The first of these follows on from Apu s return from the job hunt. He enters his room, takes out his flute and lies down on the bed. As he starts playing, the shadowed figure of a woman emerges at the window across the tenement. Apu, suddenly aware of the woman s look, stops playing, recedes from view, and carefully uses his flute to push the window shut. As he does so, we see the woman withdrawing, as if accepting the prohibition on her look. (Fig. 30, p. 176.)

195 178 The Melodramatic Public This is the first time a distinct erotic play has emerged in the trilogy excepting, of course, the sensuality of Durga in the first film and Apu s location as object of desire is associated with a Krishna symbolism which is then disavowed. The use of the iconographic instrument not to solicit desire but indeed to ward it off suggests the issues at stake; Ray here transforms iconic functions to displace attention onto the space itself, as the place for a different order of desire the symbolic, privatized space of the conjugal couple rather than a more diffuse order of desire. In a sense, the space is being prepared for the arrival of the beloved; and, almost immediately there arrives Pulu, who will prove to be the narrative agent who so fortuitously leads Apu to his future bride, his cousin Aparna. Pulu invites Apu to take a holiday, and enjoy a visit to his family home in the country where Aparna is to be wed. We have here the imagination leading back to the idyllic space outside the city, though one very different from the impoverished hamlets of Nischindipur and Mansapota of the first two films. For this is the estate of a well-to-do landed family. The romanticism of the countryside, with Apu reciting poetry as he gracefully lounges on the boat that carries them across the river to the house, stems from the rapturous invocation of another world which only the urban imaginary can invoke with such pleasure. Later, as Apu lolls on a hillock above the bustling activities of marriage preparation, he again draws out his flute; and indeed, when Aparna s mother first meets Apu, she likens him to Krishna. But these references are developed only to be refigured. When it is discovered that Aparna s betrothed is mentally impaired, the mother refuses for the marriage to take place, which would leave Aparna unmarriageable if the ceremonies are not completed within the specified time. Pulu appeals to Apu to step into the breach and save his cousin; Apu cannot at first believe what is being asked of him, but after reflection accepts his friend s plea. What is ironic about this entire chain of events is the implausibility of what takes place. A man from poor background would normally never be acceptable for the daughter of a well-to-do family, and it is only a catastrophe that could explain the match. This the narrative offers, but the stretching of the plausibility function, normally so important for a realist narration, suggests that something symbolically charged is at work. There has been a build-up, through the previous scenes and the iconographic evocation and containment of mythic functions for Apu, whose ultimate goal is the constitution of a companionate, conjugal marriage. The symbolic structures here seem to

196 A Modernist Public 179 posit an imperative, that of not only generating an adequate semiotics of secularized, privatized romance, but also a social transformation, where the space generated for Apu can posit the possibility of dissolving other social ties of a hierarchical order. Apu s acceptance of Aparna withdraws her from an order whose (extreme and contingent) sign is the compulsion to marry within appropriate social rank even at the cost of personal ruin. Equally important is the fact that Aparna can actually fit into Apu s newly constituted space despite its penury, and can provide the companionship of Apu s romantic idyll. The narrative clearly transcends any plausibility criteria here, although the entire relationship between Apu and Aparna from its arrangement, through the romance after marriage to the death of Aparna in childbirth has been explained by certain critics as a sociologically observable phenomenon, and Ray is extolled here for identifying with and capturing traditional Indian realities. The point is missed by pondering whether such things happen, don t happen, or should happen. 10 Evidently, these events could have happened, but the question is, why have these been chosen over others, and what symbolic purpose do they serve? I would argue that what is at stake is a weaning of the central characters away from the symbolism of earlier mythic forms and contemporary traditional realities, into an image for a new society. This making present of an ideal form is transient, and is abruptly brought to a close with Aparna s death in childbirth. Yet another defining loss found on the death of a woman. Is the narrative form Ray explores taking an obsessive shape, something to be explored in rather different terms in Devi (The Goddess, 1960) and Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964)? I will suggest that it is, and clarify its ultimate symbolic trajectory, a direction that may help us place the ramifications of the trilogy more clearly. For the moment, in the context of Apur Sansar, the function can be clearly and specifically delimited. If in the earlier films the death finally severed the protagonist from the past, here it provides a decisive way of rending his agency in the 10 Fate had brought together a perfect idyll of happiness; then reality ended it (death in childbirth was a common fate of women in those days) and grief had to give way before duty... Apur Sansar... is informed by a deeply, freshly felt Indianness going back to the archetypes of tradition in a kind of personal discovery. It is suffused with warmth and compassion without any awareness of the old worldly values it is internalising. The director is at one with his characters, reaching out into the heart of the traditional realities through them, seeing them as part of the great, timeless process of life. Chidananda Das Gupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Delhi, Vikas, 1980, 45.

197 180 The Melodramatic Public present, his will to generate new forms within the contemporary, suggesting that there is something fatalistically conceived about the possibilities of a plenitude in the present. The modernity enterprise is, to draw upon Sudipta Kaviraj s evocative phrase, doomed to inhabit an unhappy consciousness, an unhappy present. 11 Apu renounces his son, Kajol and the world, and retreats into nature to dissolve himself into labour, here a mining enterprise. The renunciation is symbolically sealed with Apu s casting to the winds of the pages of his manuscript, his inscription of ideal form into the present. The present, doomed to provide only an unhappy habitation, nevertheless has to be returned to. Pulu seeks Apu out, and urges him to accept responsibility for his son. The space Apu returns to, the landed estate where Apu married Aparna, once a teeming, animated space, now emerges as a hollow form, depleted of human presence. Everyone seems to have died or left. All that is left is the taciturn grandfather he who had been prepared to sacrifice his daughter into a disastrous marriage to uphold traditional norms a paterfamilias increasingly unwilling to shoulder the burden of looking after his daughter s unruly son. The space is suggestive of expressionistic tonalities that will surface with a rather different symbolic weight in the following year in Devi. Before our eyes, a space that had provided a romanticized retreat for the city-dweller now acquires the aura of a haunted house, a bhoot bangla, a ghostly form now enveloped in the past. The little boy Kajol suggests the dissonances at work, with his startlingly contemporary look, clothed in shorts and a T-shirt, and flaunting a brash and irreverent disposition. Iconically, he has no place in the dying space, and the father, vanquished in his bid to manufacture his own time, carries him away into an unspecified future. In contrast to the earlier films, with their emphasis on traditional spaces and beckoning futures, Apur Sansar suggests a bid for telos, an unravelling of past desires within the armature of the present. With its tramways, coffee houses, contiguous railway lines, and everyday bustle, it produces an image of the contemporary, but as a time which can never be settled, and must give way before unspecifiable futures. It is as if this is the symbolic register, the place of narrative authorization, through which all previous representations can be made sense of, where they were destined to arrive. But, at the point of arrival, the 11 Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness.

198 A Modernist Public 181 present slips, lacks a sense of possibility, and can only project itself forward in time. 2. The Unfinished Agenda of History This present is then the place of a historical perspective, that symbolic register of temporal distance outlined across the rail tracks in Pather Panchali, fleetingly registered by Apu in Aparajita, and then sought to be made over into an embodied form in Apur Sansar. It is foundationally governed by a sense of unresolved pasts and a lack of present certitudes. Having deferred its realization, Ray turns back once again into formal history, in two significant films of 1960 and 1964, reiterating the caesura of the present by seeking to understand the logic of irresolution, to understand why the present cannot emerge into view and through the conviction of embodied being. I only want to refer to Devi to draw attention to a significant continuity with the formal structures and symbolic hurdles deployed by Apur Sansar. This is the scenario of the father daughter relationship, and the enveloping, shrouded entity of the feudal household. It is remarkable that what we see as a cantankerous, unwilling repository of authority at the conclusion of the Apu trilogy should emerge, full blown, as overwhelming power just a year later in Devi. Chhabi Biswas envisioning of his daughter-in-law, played once again by Sharmila Tagore, in the role of the goddess, is of course framed as a critique of superstition, and therefore revisits the terrain of the nineteenth-century reform movement. Significant here is not only the opposition of rationalism to dark and irrational imaginings, but also the delineation of a field of persistent power. Here, in Ray s first directly political film, the failure of the present to come into view derives from the way the power of unresolved pasts has crystallized as the unconscious of the contemporary. There is a strange and asymmetric mirroring of past forms of power in the two films. In Apur Sansar past forms are bereft of authority, while in Devi, they exercise an encompassing and erotic regime. It is as if, registering that the moment of arrival has fatally slipped, there is a turning back, a bringing of the past back into perspective to capture the insidious logic of its hold. One trajectory we have tracked lies in the fashioning of a narrative form which, through the death of women characters reiterates the significance of the past, and, in Apur Sansar, the slipping away of the

199 182 The Melodramatic Public present from the grasp of subjectivity. With Devi there is a return to the past as inescapable locus of the present, not as something to be remembered, nurtured and cultivated, but as a place of nightmares and cloistered space. Here the loss of the woman comes across as the product of specific relations of domination and subordination, in which the woman is rendered a figure who does not know herself, who has submitted to the desires of the other. In all these films the city and modern experience is constituted through a male protagonist, but in this case it is not so much an issue of the necessity of remembering that which you no longer are, but of confrontation with a past which will not allow you escape, which is not memory but insidious presence. As opposed to the succession of enchantments that have defined the narrative trajectory of Apu s opening world, Devi essays a dark mesmerism to immerse the contemporary spectator. One should point to the ambiguity that surrounds the source of this anxiety. For the opening images of the film conjure up not only the obsessions of feudal authority, but of popular fascination with the Kali image. In its opening passage the image is rendered in the manner of iconic form whose increasingly shorter distance from the camera suggests a hypnotic interiorizing of the image for the spectator. In this sense the film draws on a widely influential cultural artefact to interrogate a deeper anxiety about popular perceptions, not only their authoritative embodiment in the figure of power. This critique of not only older forms but of the way popular perception has been subservient to them is, of course, quite foundational to an art cinema involved in cultivating a rationalist sensibility in the spectator. This project leaves a somewhat constrained imprint on this work, as if the particular method it employs to negotiate the thickets of history to understand the impasse of the contemporary has limited the possibilities of perception. Something of the nature of the impasse is suggested in the way one form of the popular, that subject to the sway of feudal authority and superstitious belief, is pitted against another, older form, harking to a pre-modern phase of devotional culture. Kapur s insightful analysis of the film turns on the way the plebeian recipient of the fateful miracle, the poor man whose ailing child has been healed by Dayamoyi, returns to invoke Ramprasad s keertan and turns a pitiful gaze on the entrapped girl-goddess Kapur, Mythic Material in Indian Cinema,

200 A Modernist Public 183 If Devi writes the unfinished agenda of history as the unconscious of the contemporary, and is therefore an overtly political statement in Ray s early work, it may do so in such a way as to foreclose on a certain dynamic way of thinking through the power of myths, images, and the popular energies they channel, constraining the possibilities of a complex stance on the legacies which the contemporary is heir to and which have been transposed into the domain of modern popular visual culture. 13 This is surely one of the fields Ray gestures to in the way the image captures audience perception in the opening passage of the film, and then seeks to enframe it, to put quotation marks around it, and construct a perspective and a distance on the compendium of power and superstition that compose it. In contrast Charulata, the extraordinary film which marks the end of a certain phase of Ray s engagement with the past, reinscribes the popular in such a way as to forge not a distance but an alliance with it for modernism. In this film the director s obsessive return to the subordinated place of women in discourses of history and modernity in the early work lays bare a certain logic of aesthetic inquiry, finding resources to provide a voice for a hitherto inarticulate subjectivity. The zoom is a remarkable invention not just as a time-saving substitute for tracking, but in its own right for its power of varying the emphasis. Charulata (1964) Partha Chatterjee has argued how the emerging nationalist discourse of the late nineteenth century fashioned an inner world secured against 13 I think this is Kapur s stance; however, there may be a wariness, in her own account, of seeing the main objective of Ray s critique as both the modern popular as well as the feudal. I would also think her very suggestive analysis of the film sits a little too easily in the paradigm of oppositions which have been the bane of studies of Indian cinema, the opposition of Ghatak to Ray as someone better equipped to deal with the complex mesh of signs, symbols, and narratives that compose our contemporary. While the power and complexity of Ghatak is not at issue here, my attempt has been to show the imponderable moments and layered strategies that the rationalist other accesses as well, significantly complicating, and perhaps enabling us to recover, a possible rationalist project; in a sense then, to pluralize our recovery of filmmaking traditions which we should attend to as part of a contemporary practice.

201 184 The Melodramatic Public the inroads of colonial modernity. Whatever the travails encountered by men in the outer world of colonial disempowerment, this inner domain would shore up nationalist identity against the inevitable adjustments to modernity of social, political, and intellectual attitudes. 14 Feminist scholarship has argued that the home in fact functioned in the 1870s and 1880s as the place where the difficulties faced by the middle-class male in an unequal and racist public life were compensated. This space of tradition was the realm over which he could reign supreme, even if, as in many other domains of colonial experience, concepts of the traditional had been reshaped in terms of modern codes, in this case those of house management and child rearing. But this home was a space subject to repression, and women had to shoulder the burden of representing a traditional identity protected from the inroads of a hierarchical colonial culture. 15 In the character of Charu s husband Bhupati, Charulata focuses on a character who precedes this understanding of nationalist politics, one who embraces Western ideas and is focused on England as the birthplace of progressive values and drives to liberty. The film subjects this view to a critique, suggesting that Bhupati s liberalism depends on his wealth, and there is something ironic about the way a celebration of political victory for the English liberals is presented within the format of a musical evening modelled on the patronal traditions of the landed elite and urban gentry. Bhupati s indifference to cultural practices, especially here poetry and novels, deprives him of an understanding of the sources of energy in his wife. In the film s portraiture of Charu, this energy is centred on memory, on the interior, and on the creative possibilities of speaking to the cultural resources of the village past. The film also appears to develop a somewhat affectionate critique of the rather timeless ruminations and metaphorical relationship to life embodied in the brother-in-law Amal s poetry. Nevertheless, while distancing itself from these male characters, Charulata draws on the reformist tradition to critique it from within, as it were. This does not so much generate nctives on it, but recalls and reiterates perspectives, such as those represented in Tagore s story, which existed at the time. 14 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments. 15 Sarkar, Hindu Wife; also Partha Chatterjee, Nationalism and the Woman s Question, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Delhi, Kali for Women, 1989.

202 A Modernist Public 185 Ray s intervention is not simply one of transposition and reiteration, but, as in the case of the transformation of Santiniketan practices, is one of constructing a modernist perspective on earlier practices and representations by carving out a distinctive niche for the spectator through the cinematic frame. And it is here, I think, that a new articulation of modernist and popular practices comes together. Over the previous films, we observe the way in which the popular emerges in distinct comic fashion in films such as Parash Pathar (The Philosopher s Stone, 1957), and subsequently in Mahapurush (Holy Man, 1965); and Monihara (1961) exhibits Ray s engagement with popular genres such as the ghost story. Ray himself draws on the lineage of the caricaturist Sukumar, his father, for this work, but in Charulata it would appear that in the crucial opening sequence of the film, he mobilizes the popular in alliance with the distancing, scrutinizing intent of a modernist style. In the justly famous opening sequence, we are alert to a highly selfconscious deployment of the camera, with Ray taking recourse to elaborate travelling shots, zooms and an assertion of the symbolic functions of the frame and the scene as spatial orders. The veranda running along the house s first floor is recurrently used to define relations between people, and to provide the spectator with a perspective, across the landing, other than that of the characters. The opening sequence describes Charu s exploration of the living space of the house. The space is divided between Bhupati s workspace, and that of the library and recreation, a division between politics and culture. Looking through the books on Bhupati s library shelf, Charu chants the name of her hero Bankim (displacing the embroidering of a B on the husband s hanky in the opening shot onto an intimately felt cultural register). This invocation invites the spectator to share with the character a common interiority shaped by the literary domain. This is about reaching into oneself, into a register of the interior that the film elevates into a domain of substantive meaning, where subjectivities which are deeper, more valid, than the world of the political public are reawakened. The opera glasses then playfully taken by Charu to look at the street below, ironically emphasize her separation from the world outside. Her spectatorship of the street scene, relayed across a series of window frames, whimsically renders the world of everyday street life as a spectacle remote from the subject s experience. The spectacles here function not so much as a vehicle for enhancing

203 186 The Melodramatic Public visual powers, as for providing a visual distraction from the isolation and monotony of the cloistered space of the household. The development of a thematics of externality/interiority comes full circle when Charu subjects her husband to the ironic, exteriorizing gaze of the opera glasses. (Figs 31 33, pp ) At one level, what Ray provides here is a modernist framing of a history through devices of spatial staging and distantiation, as something being enacted for a spectator at a remove from the events being narrated. Ray himself spoke rather allusively about the possibilities of the zoom for varying the emphasis, but the rhythms of his usage of this device come to be distinctly jolting rather than functional, jettisoning us into a closer view or into sudden distance. What is remarkable too is the way the female protagonist comes to participate in this distantiation, as she too is privy to the systems of knowledgeable distance provided by Ray s framing for the spectator of the film. Of course, our gaze is different from hers; where ours is akin to the distance visited on the world of Apu in the first two films of the trilogy, as emerging from outside the diegesis, in the case of Charu it is a distance to dominant ways of thinking of the world within the narrative. Fig. 31

204 A Modernist Public 187 Fig. 32 Fig. 33 Figs 31 33: Charulata, Satyajit Ray, 1964, Bazaar Vision.

205 188 The Melodramatic Public Equally significant, I would argue, is the mobilization of the popular into the perspective. The particular figure who draws Charu s attention, a pot-bellied man who is rolling along on the street, is the type of figure favoured by the comic imagination of bazaar art and satirical humour, of which latter tradition Ray is of course an inheritor. 16 Charu s playful tracking of his perambulation also allows her to look at other items of street life, such as an entertainer with a monkey, and to catch the aural rhythms of the vendor. We may recall earlier scenes, in Pather Panchali, which conjure with the fascination of children for the world heralded by the itinerant bioscope peddler, and indeed, there is a childlike quality to Charu s mimicking of this vision, this invocation of mechanisms of vision for distant views which are actually physically proximate but socially estranged. But this is not merely ironic reflection on the conditions of a particular alienated situation. In form, this vision is very much aligned to a different order of representation; normally, one could say that a dominant, realist form of representation embeds another within it, by quoting it. However, there seems to be something a little more happening here. For we cannot but recall that the bazaar form especially cultivated a sending up of bhadralok pretensions to status, though often from a strictly chauvinist perspective which mocked the man who would allow his westernized wife to dominate him. 17 Here, there is an adaptation, where Charu s opera glasses, charged with the energy of bazaar vision, aligns with this vision to turn it on her husband, Bhupati, caught in the pose of serious contemplation. The cut to the viewing subject registers a glittering, amused look, as if animated now by a caricatural energy. The marginality of the protagonist is thus converted into a position of articulate perspective on the world through the energies both of a 16 Tapati Guha-Thakurta has suggested that this invocation of the popular is closer to Sukumar s satirical form, as in Abol Tabol, than to the bazaar realism of Kalighat patachitra. (See Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Artists, Artisans and Mass Picture Production in Bengal, South Asia Research 8 (1), May 1988, 3 45.) While this distinction is probably accurate, the form Ray employs is clearly at a remove from a pre-modern popular of the type Kapur has identified for Devi. In this sense Ray here moves into the domain of modern print culture and its representations, a moment of representations within modernity where the distinctions between high and low were not so marked. See also Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, : Occidental Orientations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, for an account of Sukumar Ray s work. 17 See Guha-Thakurta, Artists, Artisans and Mass Picture Production in Bengal.

206 A Modernist Public 189 literary imagination and a street culture. Ray subsequently deploys other mechanisms of popular, melodramatic contrivance, such as in the representation of Charu s cunning brother who embezzles from Bhupati, and also the melodramatic effects of storms to signal emotional peripeteia. As I will point out later, the specifically popular genre of visual representation is also returned to, and in a rather suggestive way. Ray builds a suggestive echoing weave around a significant, swinging motion: from a focus on the opera glasses swinging at Charu s side, through the rise and fall of Charu on the swing during her dalliance with Amal in the garden, to the literary magazine that dangles at Charu s side as she rushes to meet Amal. There seems to me to be a complex set of exchanges in this visually condensed, elaborated and recondensed echoing chamber. The devices of visualization and publicization which bookend this series, through the opera glasses and the literary publication, define different forms for an interfacing of self with the outside, and are mediated by the crucial reverie of the garden, where we are invited to physically register the lineaments of Charu s erotic being as it opens out through her relationship to Amal. This elaboration of the earlier motif into a fully fledged phenomenology is abruptly subject to a rending when it is revealed that Amal s companionship derives not from any independent desire or interest in Charu, but from Bhupati s request that his brother look after and cultivate his lonely wife. Charu gets Amal to promise that what he has been inspired to write will remain private, and, when he transgresses this injunction, she is determined to teach him a lesson, and to upstage him in his writerly aspirations. For her struggle to write about her most intimate memories of village life in the essay My Village, Ray generates a suggestive montage. Some of this recuperates the lost world of his early village films, conjuring up an uncontaminated, pre-modern experience. There are also elements of folk performance, jatra, in the medley of images Charu conjures up. One way of thinking about this montage is to see it as the interior pitted against the modern and the urban; but there is an intriguing discrepancy where, breaking the logic of the images which apparently inhabit Charu s interior life, there emerges the shadowed, profiled figure of a young boy with top hat and whisky bottle tipsily weaving around. We have here the surfacing of a performative figure that again smacks of the bazaar, doesn t quite belong with the pristine images of village life, and recalls Charu s

207 190 The Melodramatic Public earlier encounter with popular forms. This articulation of a fragment, a trace, of mediations that have come to reside within the character s subjectivity is strangely liberating, refusing a coherence in the constitution of a self entirely other from modern urban experience. The secret and productive compact of the first sequence thus resurfaces, charging Charu s face-off with her opponents with a sense of complicated resources and alliances. Whatever the complications of the way this interiority is figured, the triumph of its assertion through Charu s publication in a betterknown magazine than Amal has managed is an emphatically bitter one. For the interiority within which Amal has come to acquire an affective presence was not something to be publicized, to be brought out into the open, but to be secretly nurtured. There is a strange violence to the way Charu has been driven to reveal herself, as if she has been drawn into the hitherto distanced external world of her male adversaries desires. At one level the politics of articulating Charu s subjectivity as inhabiting a different world from that of the men would seem to resonate with that opposition between inside and outside that has been theorized in the constitution of nationalist consciousness, the laying claim to a more authentic consciousness. As we know, this authenticity is processed through modern forms, and the montage of the interior has suggested how exactly this is composed of a series of mediations from Ray s earlier representations of village life, through to the mediated forms of popular representation. However, it is more than just laying claim to something truer, for Charu s expression of self comes across as a bitter submission to her articulation into an order with which she does not identify. It is the revelation of something not only different but something personal that is connected with an unacknowledged desire fraught with transgression. It is here, through the thickets of Charu s desire, that Ray can both put a particular critical slant on the subordinated modernity of his forebears without succumbing to an essentialist cultural formulation, for the village of Charu s interiority is connected with desires that would not be admissible within traditional formulations about womanhood. The unfinished agenda of history that Ray plots here has a distinctly interventionist quality quite at a remove from the dark ruminations of his Devi. It is with Charulata that some of the structure of the double-take, the spirals of enchantment and loss, of romance and alienated viewing that have recurrently centred on women characters now assumes a

208 A Modernist Public 191 clearer frame, urging a retrospective view. It is as if the sacrifices and sacrificing of Durga and Sarbajaya, while obviously in a different and traditional cultural register from the character of Charu, are opened to scrutiny from a new, elaborated perspective. In the process, so too are the destinal narratives against which these lives are located. The question becomes then not only one of an inevitable movement away from these figures and the traditional forms of being they embody, but an introspection about the very route the spectator has, willy-nilly, been taken along. It is when a particular form of the modern has crystallized into a determinate hierarchy, into the world of politics and letters, of inside and outside, of the home and the world, within an elaborated urban configuration, that a definite pause is given to the movement of modernity. At this point its male vehicle appears contrived and self-indulgent, fundamentally lacking in the inner life and imaginative resources. What is suggestive is that this de-authentication is not founded on a counter-identification with a fiction of organic being, but rather on a contrary image, in the heroine, of an involuntary and conflicted psychology, and an interiority pictured as a modern montage of forms rather than one of sacred and pristine essence. The figure of Apu s little wife stands outside this retrospective configuration, because, in terms of character focalization, she is a subset, a product, of Apu s desires, conforming to an image congruent with the bid to authenticate, constitute, and embody the modern within the privacy of personal relations. Her tragedy is not her own, but that of Apu s failed tryst with the present. Sharmila Tagore s Dayamoyi is similarly a plaything of superior authorities, though replayed to capture this subjection as a form of tragedy. 3. The Contemporary Through the actress Madhabi Mukherjee, Ray was to carry his reflections on the discontents of modern womanhood forward into the contemporary with works such as Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) and Kapurush (Coward, 1965). For my purposes here, I want to track the complex negotiations of his formal response to the contemporary through two instances which capture the difficulty of his project, Aranyer Din Ratri and Jana Aranya, the latter probably his last substantial film. The reason I choose these films is that they appear to engage the contemporary as a problem for representation, as something which cannot be accessed coherently because the sources

209 192 The Melodramatic Public of authentication cannot be firmly figured. Deprived of the doubletake of modernist method which had provided such rich ambiguity to the earlier work culminating in Charulata, the work from now on provides, at its most productive, the trope of irony, a kind of remote, comic view on an increasingly dystopian perspective on the middle class. The bid to develop a countervailing moral economy to contain this irony, and to locate a moral voice, invariably in the figure of a female character, underlines a steady thinning of politically purposeful engagement. Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1969) Ray s 1969 film provides the prelude to what is often referred to as his city trilogy, Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Seemabadha (Company Limited, 1971) and Jana Aranya (Middleman, 1975). It is also very much a city film; although it takes place in the forests of Palamau, it arguably captures the interactive dynamics, unthinking behaviour and arrogance, and hierarchies of an urban middle class in an inventive and playful way. The group, composed of two business executives, a sportsman, and a hanger-on, carry ties from the days of school and college, and reproduce within their social ensemble a microcosm of a certain type of city relationship. The story functions as a moral tale, where the men are meant to be shown the petty inwardness of their ways, and urged to reflect and reform at least this is intended for those who are capable of such self-analysis which, admittedly, is only pertinent to two of the group. The moral frame that Ray s narrative presents is routed through the character played by Sharmila Tagore as Aparna, part of a family who periodically visits the area. But, for our purpose, it is the combination of this moral register with two other registers that is of significance, that of the tribal environment within which the story takes place, and the presence of Aparna s sister-in-law, Jaya, the widow played by Kaberi Bose. The wonderful ensemble of the Calcuttans, played for a comedy of comeuppance, their dignity undone, lack of values exposed, veers towards a darker, serious denouement. Issues of repression and desire surface in the latter part of the film, and in a way in which signifiers of identity become detached and mobile. Strangely, the most glaring instance of contrivance, of blatantly inadequate representation in Ray s

210 A Modernist Public 193 Fig. 34 Fig. 35 Figs 34 and 35: Aranyer Din Ratri, Satyajit Ray, 1969, Tribal Semiosis.

211 194 The Melodramatic Public realist trajectory, the performance of Simi Garewal, in blackface, as a sensual, childlike tribal woman, may provide a somewhat off-colour clue. In the final section of the film Ray interweaves three different spaces and relationships: a sexual encounter between the sportsman Hari and the tribal woman in the forest, followed by a payment of money and an assault on Hari by the servant whom he had unjustly charged with theft and had beaten; Asim (Soumitra Chatterjee) and Aparna, as they wander towards the resthouse; and Jaya and Sanjay, as they retire to her bungalow for a cup of coffee. The last is one of the most extraordinary passages in Ray s work. In the expressionistically lit interiors of the widow s bungalow, Jaya emerges, heavily adorned in tribal jewellery, an overwhelming image of desire that the man is completely bewildered by. If Asim and Aparna provide a normative centre to the film, in which the woman provides a moral education for the man and the possibilities of carefully calibrated romance in the future, the figures on either side do not abide by any such normative frame. Forest and sexually charged interior provide the mise-en-scène for the grasping, petulant sportsman from the city and the widow whose desires have been repressed for so long. The mobility of tribal signs in this interwoven tapestry is suggestive. Part of Asim and Aparna s exchange takes place against the stylized backdrop of the plains along which tribal peoples move, a backdrop that frames a moral discourse with which it has no intersection. 18 Quite contrary are the developments on either side of this rather anaemic centre, in which the mise-en-scène of nature and primitivist signification course through expressively and through displacement. Whatever the intention of the director, Ray s use of Simi Garewal, a figure of urban chic to masquerade as a tribal serves to loosen the sign and relay it to the figure of the widow, releasing turbulent energies that cannot be articulated through the normative discourse of the civilized centre. (Figs 34 35, p. 193.) None of this has to do with the adequacy or otherwise of the film s representation of the tribals, or, indeed, to a thematics of authenticity. Like its main characters, Ray had fled a city where political and 18 One may recall that these were the years in which Miklos Jancso s work was being showcased in international festivals. In the stylization of this scene there is something of the choreographed forms of the Hungarian s work, but in a way which does not resonate within some larger organic movement, but as drained signification, an abstracted form against which the moral discourse of the middle class can play itself out.

212 A Modernist Public 195 economic circumstances had become increasingly difficult in the Naxalite years, and something of the irony he visits on his characters tourism, their voyeuristic externality to the places they visit, is surely self-ironic; the environment is used to bounce off the characters, as a stylistic vector against which to articulate different forms of urban subjectivity, rather than a properly narrativized entity in itself. Nevertheless, it becomes a crucial resource within the diegetic world, and brings to visibility what urban middle-class forms do not seem to have the wherewithal to relay. Clearly, the realist form employed here constantly seeks to address other forms to speak about itself, its interiority, its repressions, its desires, above all, and once again, in relation to the figure of a woman deprived expression of desire within respectable society. The function of the popular employed in the urban environs of Charulata gives way to another set of energies within the environment tracked by Sunil Ganguli s story. In the most interesting of Ray s city films of the 1970s, Jana Aranya, we find that the increasingly strident moral discourse which Ray has used to define his relationship to the contemporary through the Sharmila Tagore characters of Nayak (The Hero, 1967), Aranyer Din Ratri, and Seemabadha, has now come to a point of crisis and, in my view, a productive one. For the voice is no longer the articulating centre against which excesses are managed on either side, as in Aranyer Din Ratri. Instead it itself starts to lose a sense of clear conviction, lacks the force of characterization, even of enigmatic construction of the type represented in the characters played by Sharmila Tagore. Ray took recourse to the work of Shankar in this film, in order to catch some of the energy of street life and observation, especially the caricatural domain which he himself was so adept at. But a clear mismatch starts developing between the drives of coherent character formation and the multiple diegesis through which the narrative world is put together. Ray here uses the following narrative forms: (1) the main story line, centred on the lead character, Somnath, and centred on the family, composed of an upright, retired father, a cynical elder brother and a nurturing sister-in-law. (2) the simulation of a documentary mode, as in the opening scene in the examination hall, or the ironic tracking of an application through the postal system; this also incorporates the

213 196 The Melodramatic Public anecdote, in which marginal narrative characters and situations are shown to effect the overall course of the narrative; this is the realm of contingency, puttivng a face and a name to an anonymous process, for example the person who examines Somnath s script has misplaced his spectacles, effecting his exam result, which in turn leads to his downfall. (3) a performative mode, deployed for the glittering gallery of characters who provide Somnath with an immoral education. It is the latter which steadily displaces the other types of narrative world, producing a singularly discordant text within the Ray oeuvre. And the very anonymity of Ray s lead character, whose lack of strong personality and screen presence is underlined by the shrouding effects of Ray s lighting strategies, indicates the fulfilment, unwitting or otherwise, of a structural effect. For the thematic of a man without personality, suitable as it might be to Ray s vision of a corrupt and corrupting society, also provides for a peculiar evacuation of character point of view. This is significant, if we consider that the classical deployment of shot-reverse-shot for the induction of Ray s gallery of types into the film may be said to strangely obscure the figure in the reverse field. Although this may be to stretch a point, it is as if the cinema of narrative integration that Ray had been singularly adept at constructing within the Indian context has been combined with a cinema of attractions. Film studies has generated the opposition of these forms to contrast a cinema which successfully linked shots and sequences within a stylistically consistent logic of narrative causality, and a cinema which functioned in a segmented, intermittent, and tonally discordant way. 19 The cinema of attractions, originally employed to describe the sheer, unnarrativized pleasure of looking observable in the singletake films of early cinema, could be transposed to highlight a form that invites the spectator to enjoy a joke, take pleasure in a song, or immerse oneself not in the real but in its excessively relayed performance, as in caricature, mimicry, and masquerade. Such a soliciting of the spectator s engagement does not necessarily require that these segments have to be subordinated to the narrative logic within which they are placed. In this sense the perverse pleasure these segments conjure up appear irreducible to the moral narrative that frames them. This does not mean 19 Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions,

214 A Modernist Public 197 that such fragmentation offers the possibility of an alternative reading of the text, or suggest an alternative ethics to the moralism which seeks to compensate the spectator for the de-authenticated subject of Ray s late films. But the distracted rather than focused disposition of the story-telling suspends form precipitously, casting a shadow not over the later work, but over the very possibility of a classicism and integrity of form, and thus the bid to conquer the real ideologically. It has been the argument here that such a classicism was never a straightforward matter in Ray s oeuvre. The conflictual fields of naturalism and modernism in the trilogy, the subterranean alliance of modernist method with popular representational practices, and the centrifugal formal pressures to decentre the perspective of the later work through displacements and fragmentary irruptions all suggest the tensions at work. If the process of authentication in Ray s work at first glance draws for its resources on painterly modes, literary naturalism, and Tagore s novels in the early work, it does so through an enframing of these forms through a foregrounding of the cinematic apparatus, placing the spectator at a self-conscious remove from the original source. Putting the spectator phenomenologically out of phase with this point of representational origin, these films correspondingly displace the locus of authentication onto the double-take. This constitutes an awareness of the way perception is split between knowing that you are watching this here, now, through this medium, and desiring to recover a there, then, and the lineaments of another sensorium, of painterly images and words. Moinak Biswas argues that this does not amount to the successful displacement by the cinema of other media, and other histories, as was increasingly argued for in the drive to create an autonomous cinema sense in 1950s Bengal; rather, it signalled a layering of forms and histories into the cinematic. 20 Nevertheless, one would argue that in Ray s work there is a transposition of literary into audiovisual elements of a very distinct type, and that there is a stylistic intervention that alerts you, the spectator, that it is you, not a character within the fiction, and not only the camera, looking Moinak Biswas, Bengali Film Debates: The Literary Liaison Revisited, Journal of the Moving Image 1, Calcutta, 1999, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Viewership and Democracy, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema,

215 198 The Melodramatic Public My suggestion has been that this casts a different light on the politics of authentication, and displaces Ray s films from the bid to authenticate the nation-state by constructing a national narrative that seamlessly traverses a point of origin to the modernity of the present. In highlighting the double-take, the dual temporality of Ray s modernist method interrogates and distances us from the passage into modernity by reinvesting that we have lost. Charulata elaborates this interrogation of a male modernity, while laying claim, in the name of the modern, to the unravelling of a complicated montage and a transgressive rendering of the interiority repressed in the history of modernity. Along with the rather differently calibrated destabilization of a moral-classical form that sought to offer a pedagogical tale to the deauthenticated middle-class addressee of Ray s later films, where do these observations leave us in terms of a politics of culture? It would appear to me that formulations positing a straightforward relationship between politics and culture, as in the argument that modern classical forms confirm and reproduce the cultural limits of citizenship in a post-colonial context need to ponder whether a classical realism has ever worked in such uncomplicated ways. As Kapur notes, [even] if art practice is ostensibly harnessed to the operation of the ideology and cultural policy of the new national state, creative practice is usually heterodox. There is a certain rebellion and also a dissembling radicalism among artists. Quite often there may be utopian formulations or, on the other hand, subversive symbols that have political import. Complemented by even an episodic intransigence on the political front, it is enough to confound generalized theses on politics and culture Kapur, Sovereign Subject,

216 II Cinema and Territorial Imagination in the Subcontinent: Tamilnadu and India

217 Introduction In the second part of this book I want to consider some of the existing formulations about the territoriality of Indian film, specifically in relation to the categories of the national and the regional. This section uses the vantage point of Tamil film interventions in the Hindi market to consider the question of the territories within which films circulate and to which they refer, and the larger question of the relationship between identity and territory posed by nationalism and successive changes in the nation-state form. This is primarily explored through the director Mani Rathnam s bid to draw the narrative of Tamil identity into a relationship with the pan-indian nation. I also here further my exploration of the melodramatic mode by considering certain shifts in the contemporary architecture of popular film form, specifically in relation to the new functions of the couple and modernized family forms in channelling spectatorial engagement. Taken in a strong sense, the term national suggests an invented ethnic identification, seeking out and prescribing the commonalities of language, territorial habitation, customs, heritage, and history. This identification can function in various ways, bidding for maximum inclusiveness, but also threatening to exclude and marginalize subjects in a multi-religious, linguistic, and regional culture such as India s. Such an invention of the national was generated out of an encounter with colonialism, involving, as I have argued in chapter 3, a complicated relationship to an imposed modernity, and emphasizing a traditional and archaic identity against the seductions of modern social, cultural, and sexual dispositions. However, as Paul Willemen has argued, there is a distinction between the national and the nationalist. In his theorization, the national relates to the specificity of a political, economic, and cultural formation, its complex layering and conflicts, and cannot be assimilated to the identity and territorial protocols of

218 202 Cinema and Territorial Imagination the nation-state or of nationalist identity movements. 1 Further, the national may connote a relatively unselfconscious condition of habitation and social and cultural intercourse. Here shared histories, everyday life, the regularity and repetition of circulatory/migratory forms, and a historical familiarity and interpenetration of linguistic and religious practices all compose a less prescriptive, lived relationship in a historically and politically determined territory, its inhabitants and its modes of cultural consumption. Arguably, the emergence of the nation-state, with determinate borders, rules of inclusion and exclusion, and the deployment of representational politics, exercised a pressure on such fuzzy senses of nationhood; however, in its very representational logic, and the multiple constituencies it has to manage, the nation-state can also function as a field of resistance to a more monolithic nationalist ethnos. I would like to think about how the national is differentially and often pragmatically composed in the cinema, both under colonialism and after; how we need to distinguish between nation-state projects for cinema and a differentiated spectrum of the cinema of the subcontinent. This involves engagement with several national projects rather than one, and may even skirt the national in favour of a wider arc of cultural engagement. In this last sense, we have the outlines, yet to be properly explored, of a transnational vernacular form in the cinema quite at a remove from the Hollywood model. 1. The Formation of a Pan-Indian Market: Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of Social Reform One of the issues which recent historical scholarship has raised is the question of the territories within which the film product circulates. At one level, these are language territories, with the Hindi territory being the demographically largest and most lucrative. However, the relationship between culture and language is a complicated one here, because of the long history of dual versions and dubbing in Indian cinema. 2 I need only reiterate the well-known histories of the dual versions 1 The National, in Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, London, British Film Institute, 1994, The standard account is, as noted earlier, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film.

219 Introduction 203 which were undertaken by studios in Calcutta, Poona, and Bombay in the pre-independence period; the significance of Madras-made Hindi films, especially after the success of Gemini s Chandralekha in 1948; the flow amongst Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam cinema of films, filmmakers, technicians, and actors; and the renewed success of dubbed Tamil films after the substantial returns reaped by Roja (1992) in the Hindi market. The possibility of translatability suggests a significant level of replication, reiteration, and even interconnectedness of social, cognitive, and perceptual histories. One of the conditions of such a convergence was the multiplication and interconnection of social reform perspectives and movements which emerged to engage with the ideology and experience of modernity across the colonial territory. Many of these centred on the status of women within the formation of caste and religious community. This is represented in the cinema of the studio period, in films such as Balayogini (K. Subrahmanyam, 1938) in Tamilnadu, about the phenomenon of the child widow; Kunku (Marital Mark; V. Shantaram, 1937) and Aadmi (A Man; V. Shantaram, 1939) in Maharashtra, both about women characters subordinated, respectively, by oppressive marital arrangements and marginalized by the strictures of an orthodox Hindu social order; Achut Kanya (Untouchable Girl; Franz Osten, 1935) and Achut (Untouchable; Chandulal Shah, 1939), about the problems of untouchability as represented in the fate of women protagonists. The spread of a certain social reform logic relating to the Hindu social order found its echo in the delineation of women suffering under Muslim religious and social orthodoxy in a spate of Muslim socials between 1943 and 1948, such as Najma (Mehboob Khan, 1946), Nek Parveen (Virtuous Parveen; S.M. Yusuf, 1948), and Elaan (The Announcement; Mehboob Khan, 1948). The work of social reform under colonialism has in some historical arguments been analysed as part of a repressive dimension of Hindu middle-class nationalism. Here, goes the argument, there was a historic alliance between colonial authorities and Hindu elites to fashion a modernizing imperative. This turned on the salvation of female victims of the ritual order, and reduced the space for female autonomy as well as social and cultural diversity. 3 However, recent feminist work has argued that there was considerable middle-class 3 Mani, Contentious Traditions.

220 204 Cinema and Territorial Imagination patriarchal resistance to such reform initiatives, and that the state often entered this contentious legal arena out of public compulsion rather than deliberate intervention. 4 In the films I have cited we can indeed observe a powerful representation of women characters who contested middle-class orthodoxy and inevitably met with a tragic fate. In films such as Kunku and Devdas, such features could in turn be related to a highly dynamic modernist move in filmmaking practices. A certain network of engagements deriving from educational and reform initiatives and formations of the public sphere situate the film genre of the social as part of a remapping of colonial territory into an overtly modern social enterprise. Another realm of film genre convergence lay in the phenomenon of the saint or devotional film. Working in particular through musical traditions of worship, these films spoke to a more local emphasis on accessing the divine beyond brahmanical scriptural control. These were selectively moved into the Hindi market, but demonstrated certain similarities. For example, many of them drew upon Vaishnavite traditions of worship, and were centred on a variety of local versions of the child god Krishna. Here was a deity who could offer the possibilities of a social and gendered porosity in his allure and in the constitution of a more variegated audience culture. While a pan-indian intelligentsia tended to underwrite the value of the modern social film, and even of the devotional film because it developed a critique of social hierarchies, such a stance was often pitted against the persistence of mythological films and their avowedly obscurantist features. The emergence of the mythological film has often been interpreted as an aspect of a nationalist, anti-colonial culture, asserting an indigenous culture against the domination of American and British films, and instituting a local industry. 5 However, the proponents of modern social change castigated producers and audiences for the continued hold of the genre over the industry. 6 The stunt film, another popular genre, was also never the focus of critical engagement. 4 For example, Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation. 5 Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era. 6 For example, D. Bhaskara Rao, Attention Viewers! It is Your Duty to Ban Mythological Films!, Roopavani, June 1948, translated from the Telugu by Uma Maheshwari, a publication for the Workshop on Telugu Cinema organized by Anveshi, Hyderabad, and CSCS, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Similar arguments against the mythological film developed in Tamilnadu: see the publication by the Madras Institute of Development Studies entitled Tamil Cinema.

221 Introduction 205 Both with the mythological and the stunt film we have instances of the differentiation of film-exhibition circuits which, in the case of the stunt film, acquired popularity across the subcontinent, both in its foreign and local versions. The national market was then substantially differentiated, both by regional differences and differentiation in the genre attractions that pandered to different audiences. 2. Differentiated Territories of a Subcontinental Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation Dual versions, and the mobilization of social-reform films then provide only one orbit to think about a cinematic geography of the social realm as it extended across the subcontinent. Recent research has indicated how film production mutated to induct and address changing cultural configurations of the film market. In a wonderfully rich social and cultural history of early Bombay cinema, Kaushik Bhaumik has pointed to a number of crucial moments in the changing configurations of business enterprise and regional literary, theatrical, and musical cultures for the Bombay cinema. 7 Looking at first to the importance of Gujarati and Parsi entrepreneurs, particularly until the late silent era, he suggests the importance of stage plays, urban intrigue and romance novels, and tabloid sensationalism in the make up of the cinema. He goes on to develop a picture of the trans-regional format of Bombay productions in the late silent and early sound period, referring here to the importance of Punjabi entrepreneurs, and also the traditions of what he refers to as an Islamicate culture of the bazaar in the North Indian market. Here, performance cultures centred on the tawaif (courtesan) and under court and landlord patronage were mobilized into the new regimes of mechanically reproduced entertainment, in the gramophone and cinema industries. Bhaumik alerts us to a dynamic set of interpenetrating media and popular cultural productions for this new moment in cinema history. Here he points to the importance of modern Urdu genres, including the urban masnavi or romance literature, theatrical backdrop manufacture for historical and costume plays, and the performance cultures of the tawaif as key dimensions of the mise-en-scène, musical forms, and narrative cultures 7 Kaushik Bhaumik, The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, , D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, Oxford University, 2001.

222 206 Cinema and Territorial Imagination of the cinema. Of particular significance were productions deriving from a wider arc of Arabic and Persian culture, including romantic narratives such as Laila Majnu and Shireen Farhad. Lahore in Punjab was to prove an important production centre for this efflorescence of the North Indian region as production space and market. Bhaumik argues that the autonomous significance of this cultural space was neutralized as its finance, industry personnel, and its very entertainment format was inducted into Bombay during the 1930s. This argument forecloses too abruptly on the significance of this territory both as production centre and market, a history which was to continue into the 1940s, and, as I shall, argue, even after its partition in the wake of decolonization in In the 1940s, productions undertaken by the Pancholi and Shorey production units were very popular, and their distinct position as a market was also significant. New Theatres in Bengal, a studio largely associated with a different type of film production, one which under B.N. Sircar laid claim to cultural capital for the cinema on the basis of literary adaptations, also produced costume films featuring Prithviraj Kapoor and K.L. Saigal for this segment of the all-india market. 8 What is suggestive, too, is the way the type of productions associated with this region, what Bhaumik refers to as the Islamicate repertoire of musical performative cinema, moves into a wider arc of film production and distribution beyond the subcontinent. Here, we can only gesture to the foreign markets for Indian film productions, as these traversed territories from North Africa and the Middle East through to South East Asia in the period before nation-state formation. Other frames of reference than the national are clearly required in this itinerary. The Bombay industry manufactured films for Iran, with Ardeshir Irani s Imperial Studios, as well as Krishna Studios, making several films for the Iranian film entrepreneur Abdul Hossein Seponta. 9 And, as William van der Heide notes, Indian business and filmmaking experience produced films in Malay as early as 1934, starting with Laila Majnu. The film was made in Singapore, produced for the Motilal Chemical Company of Bombay by its owner K.R.S. Chisty, and directed by B.S. Rajhans, a Punjabi 8 Bhagishwar Jha, ed., B.N. Sircar, Calcutta, National Film Archives of India and Seagull Books, Massoud Mehrabi, The History of Iranian Film, Part One, com; also Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, eds, Encylopedia of Indian Cinema (hereafter EIC), entries on Ardeshir Irani and Imperial Talkies.

223 Introduction 207 who had gained filmmaking expertise in India. This is suggestive not only of how important Indian film entrepreneurship had already become at this early point in its career. 10 The choice of Laila Majnu derived, van der Heide points out, from the musical conventions and performers of the local Bangsawan theatre, a form similar to the Parsi theatre. Egyptian cinema also drew upon the Laila Majnu plot, as Viola Shafik has noted, 11 and publicity for the film also highlighted the attraction of Egyptian and Arabic dances. 12 This suggests the significance of a subject and a form not so much for its association with contemporaneous subcontinental culture, but as index of the sway held by Arabic/Persian/Urdu narratives and a musical performative cinema across this territorial swathe. Again, amongst the significant titles commissioned by Seponta were Laila Majnu and Shireen Farhad. If the Punjab and North Indian production space and market was an important pre-independence territory for the cinema, one which was part of a cultural formation beyond the subcontinent, another was the emerging Tamil film network, which also extended into South East Asia. Van der Heide points to the importance of the Tamil filmmaker L. Krishnan, who came to be a key icon of the Malaysian film industry. 13 Madras studios also constituted a distinct regional film culture in the subcontinent. Madhava Prasad has drawn our attention to what he calls the Madras Presidency cinema, which traversed the Tamil-, Telugu-, and Malayalam-speaking areas. 14 While these became separate linguistic states and, over time, found there own local film industries, a commerce of film-makers, actors, and dubbed versions has continued, especially between Tamil and Telugu films. And this region tips over into the film market in Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, where Tamil and Hindi films dominated, and early Sinhala films were also entirely shot in South India This is not to underplay the presence of film-makers of Indian origin in the Malay industry. At the height of the studio system, in the 1950s, Indians were estimated to have directed 105 out of 149 films made. William van der Heide, Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2005, Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema, London, British Film Institute, Van der Heide, Malaysian Cinema, Ibid., The Madras Presidency Cinema, paper presented at a workshop on Tamil Film Culture, Madras Institute for Development Studies, Chennai, Wimal Dissanayake and Ashley Ratnavibhushana, Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema, Boralesgamuwa, Asian Film Centre, 2000.

224 208 Cinema and Territorial Imagination In all of this wider pattern of cultural flows, we may consider a significant pre-nation-state context, that of empire. Historians of empire have recently indicated the complex movements of merchants, labourers, sailors, soldiers, and pilgrims in the inter-colonial vista set up by the British empire. These movements were at one level initiated by an imperial design aiming to build infrastructures, supply labour for plantation economies, move goods, and deploy forces for empire. However, such mobilization required a porousness of borders and frontiers, and in turn allowed for less controlled movements as people went in search of trade and employment in a host of enterprises, a pre-nation-state constellation of movement which the cinema participated in. 16 Thus the importance of the cinema in places of Indian settlement such as Fiji, the West Indies, East Africa, Malaysia, often as a cultural form consumed by the multi-ethnic and linguistic populations of these territories. The formation of nation-states in the subcontinent significantly altered the regional territories for film in the northern and eastern territories, if not the southern, where the Tamil industry continued to have a separate wing devoted to the film trade in Malaysia and Ceylon in the 1950s. 17 But with the formation of West and East Pakistan, the territories for Punjabi and Hindi Urdu in the North and Bengali cinema in the East were affected. With a view to developing the local industry, something that had to start from scratch in terms of studio plant (two of the Lahore studios had been decimated in the violence following the Partition of the subcontinent) and relatively meagre personnel, the Pakistani government sought to control Indian imports into the new state. 18 The profound ties to the old film territories of Lahore, and the Hindi Urdu cinema produced there and in Bombay, are testified to in the account of this period provided by Mushtaq Gazdar. He notes that many film people believed that the nation-state division would not effect the industry, and that after a short period following the strife of the Partition there would be an easy movement and 16 Cf. Radhika Singha, Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India, Studies in History 16, 2001, ; and A Proper Passport for the Colony: Border Crossing in British India, , 17 Thus through most of the 1950s the Indian magazine Filmfare s section on South India featured Ceylon and Malaysia as part of this territory. 18 The following account is from Mushtaq Gazdar, Pakistani Cinema , Lahore, Oxford University Press, Also see Alamgir Kabir, The Cinema of Pakistan, Dhaka, Sandhani Publications, 1969.

225 Introduction 209 collaboration between film industry people in Lahore and Bombay. Something of the power of the cultural and territorial bonds involved are indicated in Gazdar s construction of the origins of Pakistani cinema: he invokes the idea not of a national cinema but of a subcontinental cinema as the common resource both nations were to draw upon. In particular, he took as the lineage for Pakistani cinema the traditions of Hindi Urdu directors and networks, from Kamaal Amrohi in Bombay to the Bhatti group in Lahore, and underlined the importance of the Punjabi cinema as well. Contra a two-nation theory dividing Hindu and Muslim culture and society, Gazdar s construction of the cinema lineage of Hindi Urdu film is not confined to Muslim film people, and he places a value on the work of the key non- Muslim producers Dalsukh M. Pancholi and Roop K. Shorey as well. If a crucial film territory had been split up in the northern area through nation-state formation, as I have noted the emergent Tamil industry retained its broader territory. Its productions also targeted the Hindi market, as in the work of S.S. Vasan, A.V. Meiyappan, and, in the Telugu industry, L.V. Prasad. The emergence of the DMK film, the non-brahmin film which critiqued the caste order and the bid to impose Hindi as a national language, signalled an important movement in Tamil cinema away from the pan-indian market. The DMK film s significance lay not in terms of its weight in local production, but the way it promoted a consensus centred on anti-brahmanism, and, for a time, a strong emphasis on an autarchic Tamil nationalist viewpoint pitted against the pan-indian nation-state. This was to be consolidated with the movement s acquisition of state power in Tamilnadu from the late 1960s, a period where one or the other of the parties arising from the movement have been in power. 19 I highlight a history of disaggregation in the subcontinental territory of the cinema to point to the complexities of projects for a national cinema in a multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic nation-state. As I have suggested, this needs to be put together with certain histories of convergence, social content, and genre production across different production spaces; and also with the way Bombay assumed the position of a trans-regional production centre. Having said this, the question of a 19 For Tamil cinema, see Theodore Baskaran, The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema, East-West Books, 1996; and for the changes effected by the DMK film, Pandian, Parashakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema,

226 210 Cinema and Territorial Imagination disaggregated history remains important, and remains persistent even after the formation of the nation-state in It is against this backdrop that the material in Part II has been put together, with a specific focus on how in the 1990s the image of Tamilnadu, or of Tamilness, moved away from earlier Tamil film traditions, with a view to map itself into the pan-indian nation. These essays also carry on and reframe some of the arguments I pose in this book, considering how the new moment of the 1990s had provided substantially new problems for melodramatic modes of narration. The group of Tamil films I discuss provide an index of the new political and cultural context for the working out of a territorial imagination, as well as new aesthetic issues. The case of Mani Rathnam conjures up something of the contemporary problem posed by the displacement of earlier divisions between art and popular cinema insofar as these are accessible through a discourse of authorship. Arguably, Rathnam has generated a consistent body of work since the beginnings of his career at the end of the 1980s. At one level, his oeuvre is very much of the commercial-popular format, and has, in conjunction with the music directors Ilayaraja and A.R. Rahman made a significant contribution to the song-and-dance sequence. As several critics have argued, he has also mobilized elements of the scaled-down, quotidian characterization associated with a so called middle-class cinema of the 1970s in delineating his narrative universe. 20 In keeping with this middle-class cultural refashioning of the narrative world, Mani Rathnam s films also seek to articulate song-and-dance sequences to the task of building character perspectives, relationships, and social worlds, that is, augmenting our sense of the world of the fiction, and the logic of its unfolding. What is interesting in this new configuration is the continued importance of the melodramatic mode, and how it has been reorganized. There are intimations of change in the relationship between the public and the familial domains in the revised formats of melodramatic strategy. Here, in contrast to earlier melodramatic articulations, the familial sphere is rendered somewhat autonomous of the metaphoric ties to social and political transformation, what I have called the vertical axis of melodrama s narrative articulation. The peculiar power and interest of this shift is that it does not operate a conventional displacement between levels, but makes the familial form in its apparently 20 Prasad, Signs of Ideological Reform, in Ideology of the Hindi Film.

227 Introduction 211 autonomous existence available for public and, more specifically, political engagement. The family unit has undergone transformation in another sense. While extended family ties of an intergenerational sort remain very important, there is a movement towards a new orchestration of the intimate sphere, with the couple rapidly instituting itself, rather than becoming the narrative s primary object. This generates a new focus for spectator engagement, and in turn relates to a particular type of consumer investment, with the couple as the lynchpin for new vistas of lifestyle and household. However, it is the logic of the melodramatic mode, its mechanisms of peripeteia, abrupt plot reversal, that the rapid institution of the couple does not guarantee its sustainability. There is a narrative drive to push the couple into an engagement with the political sphere, an encounter which threatens to destroy that which has been so rapidly instituted. The couple, and in some cases the family it has given rise to, have to generate a solution to a political problem in order to reinstitute itself. Politics here refers to the structure of the nation-state but may, in certain instances, also centre on the politics of class, as for example in Rathnam s Alapalayuthey (Wave; 2002). I seek to address the question of how melodrama and its fictive publicness are used in these films in several ways. Firstly, following the logic of a political articulation of the family plot, strategies emerge to incorporate new narrative locales in a bid to transform territorial imagination and affiliation. Tensions emanate from the bid to resituate the family, the intimate sphere of love and romance, and the regional culture it emerges from into the larger territorial frame of the pan-indian nation. There is a resulting gap in levels of territorial and historical attachment, regional and national. The romantic couple and/or family becomes the mobile, deterritorialized unit which condenses, displaces and bridges these divisions through the use of certain standard conventions, most classically the bid to reunite lovers and dismembered families. Melodramatic publicness rears its head determinedly: characters defined by their professionalized, middle-class modernity and through actorly economies of restraint and silence mutate into vehicles of patriotic fervour pitched in the escalated tones of public self-nomination and address. But this publicness of the form has other implications. The elements of didacticism, along with the tendency to disjointed narrative continue to define the popular format and provide the possibilities of addressing not one public, but to manoeuvre amongst publics differentiated both ideologically and in terms of storytelling orientation.

228 212 Cinema and Territorial Imagination The question of multiple publics is not predicated, necessarily, on individuated viewpoints, as on the Hollywood model. In the formats I am dealing with, the individual is invariably asked to stand for a public discourse, even if this emerges from a sentimental, romantic character motivation. I will try to suggest how this works in the case of Roja, as the form runs the gamut of pitting viewpoints female against male, private against public, but also in terms of the residue of one form of national imagination for the Tamil against a new agenda. In Bombay we may discern this both in the form of the film its mobilization of different, often contradictory accounts of the Bombay upheavals of in ways which are not ultimately reconciled and in the contradictory reception of the film available in journalistic discussions and reviews. In Hey Ram, too, we observe the importance of character articulation of a public viewpoint. This is not only to do with the privileged access of male characters to notions of the larger public good, but also operates through the mobilization of affective investments. Specifically, this connects individuals in a larger public network based on shared senses of injury and loss during the Partition riots. The work of Mani Rathnam offers us a politicized melodrama founded on a new economy of individuated romance and middle-class subjectivity, pushing its romance narrative to engage with various orders of political difference, including the conflict between communities, classes, and different constructions of nationhood. Hey Ram, in contrast, deploys the full melodramatic gestural style to enact a proper externalization and publicization of individual tragedy. The peculiar challenge posed by this film lies in its reconstruction of melodramatic tropes within a project which substantially challenges the truth claims of cinematic indexicality. Drawing on digital technology and video game narrative formats for its reconstruction of history, the film invests history with the attributes of invention and manipulability. It provides new and complicated ground on which to think of the relationship between a dramaturgy of melodramatic affect, the performative and public articulation of characters, and a poetics of loss and uncertainty. As I will suggest, this reassembly of the melodramatic format takes place on a new ground for the imagination of desacralization, where the nation-state has taken the place of the divine order as the space that has come to be voided of meaning.

229 6 Voice, Space, Form: The Symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnam s Roja (1992) Roja (Mani Rathnam, 1992), a Tamil film dubbed into Telugu and subsequently into Hindi, has been a great financial success at the pan-indian level. The existence of the film in a number of language versions and the story s focus on Tamil and Kashmiri identity conjure up various issues relating to regional and national identity. It was perhaps the film s success across a number of regions that has made the Indian government view it as an emblematic, indeed, a programmatic patriotic film for a situation which, since around 1989, has been defined by a series of central coalitions of regional parties. Doordarshan, the national television channel, regularly screened the film on Independence Day from the late 1990s. Arguably, the success of the film lies in its ability to address the fact that regional histories have often been the bugbear of a pan-indian identification. Only by addressing regional specificity and its contests with the larger national form can the film persuasively construct a rhetorics of transcendence. As the film s narrative construction is centred on this reconfiguration of a combative regional history, I will first chart a preliminary history of the regional contexts that Roja refers to. 1. Kashmir and Tamilnadu Very briefly, the Muslim dominated border state of Kashmir has been at the centre of the Indo-Pakistan conflict, both sides laying claim to this strategic territory. In recent times, there has been an escalation of militant and separatist sentiment within the state, leading to the marginalization and emigration of a significant number of Kashmiri Hindus. These developments fed into a majoritarian Hindu chauvinism

230 214 The Melodramatic Public whose protagonists see the separatist movement as Pakistan-instigated, as based on a fanatical Muslim nature, and more generally emblematic of the marginality of Hindus in India because of the alleged appeasement of minorities. It is argued that Hindu tolerance and the weak-kneed secularism of the postcolonial state have encouraged Muslim conservatism and political aggression. Apart from the quite fascistic nature of the argument, it fails to take into account a particular problem, that of the brutality of the Indian army in its dealing with the Kashmiri populace. This in turn has caused a popular resistance to the Indian state in Kashmir which has distinguished the present political phase from previous currents of separatist sentiment. 1 As regards Tamil identity, from the 1920s a movement espousing a rationalist, anti-hierarchical ideology, the Self-Respect movement, had developed a critique of high Hinduism and the caste system. In its subsequent incarnation as the Dravida Kazhagam and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, it assumed a militant stance against the domination of the Hindi-speaking North over the local language and identity. 2 This movement settled into the political establishment by the end of the 1960s, the parties it generated forming state governments ever since. The linguistic tension between Tamilnadu and the Hindispeaking northern states has varied in intensity. At the turn of the 1990s, the importance of a distinct Tamil identity was complicated by the emergence of an extremist and separatist movement from within the Tamil minority of neighbouring Sri Lanka. The ruling party of Tamilnadu at that time, the DMK, was supportive of the movement and averse to undertaking any action against Sri Lankan Tamil separatists working out of Tamilnadu; and the Indian government, led by Rajiv Gandhi, conciliated this sentiment. However, it was subsequently involved in a pact with the Sri Lankan government by which an 1 For an account of recent developments, see Balraj Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, Delhi, Orient Longman, For the early phase of the modern Dravidian movement, cf. Eugene F. Irschik, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement, and Tamil Separatism, , Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1969; for a stimulating theorization of the overall significance of these developments in Tamil politics, see M.S.S. Pandian, Notes on the Transformation of Dravidian Ideology: Tamilnadu, c , Social Scientist 22, 5 6 May June 1994; idem, Denationalizing the Past: Nation in E.V. Ramaswamy s Political Discourse, Economic and Political Weekly, 16 October 1993; and idem, Brahmin and Non- Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2008.

231 Voice, Space, Form 215 Indian Peace Keeping Force was deployed in an unsuccessful bid to curb the violence. This alienated the Sri Lankan Tamil extremists from the Indian state and led to an extremist group assassinating Rajiv Gandhi in Subsequent Tamil regimes have distanced themselves from Tamil extremism in Sri Lanka. These two regional backdrops are central to our understanding of how nationhood is imagined in Roja. In the prologue, Wasim Khan, a militant leader, is captured by Indian forces in Kashmir. The main body of the film opens with the song Chhoti si aasha (Simple desires), sung by the heroine, Roja, against the backdrop of the Tamil countryside. 3 The plot then introduces Rishi Kumar, the urbane, Madrasbased cryptographer (decoder) working for Indian military intelligence. He wishes to marry a simple village girl and arrives to inspect Roja s elder sister, Lakshmi, as a prospective bride. Lakshmi tells him she wishes to marry another, but is prevented by a family feud. Rishi chooses Roja instead, to save her family from embarrassment. Roja s resentment on behalf of the sister dissolves at Rishi s home in Madras, when he explains his behaviour and Lakshmi confirms his version over the telephone. The reconciled couple leaves for Kashmir, where Rishi has to do a job of decoding for the military. In the film Kashmir is composed of locations from resorts in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh and from Tamilnadu. The couple s idyll is interrupted when the militants abduct Rishi to demand an exchange with Wasim Khan. A distraught Roja, incapacitated by her knowing no language except Tamil, takes the help of a palmist and religious guide, Chachchu Maharaj, to plead with police, army, and even Wasim Khan himself, for the return of her husband. The one army officer, Royappa, she can talk with, is strongly against such a deal. The forces of the Indian state will not at first accept the exchange, but seem to finally succumb to Roja s emotional pressures. In the meanwhile, Rishi expresses a staunch nationalist determination in the face of extreme militant brutality, but also a desire to convince the militant leader, Liaquat, of the inhumanity of his enterprise. By coincidence, Liaquat can speak Tamil because he studied in Coimbatore, a dynamic industrial centre of Tamilnadu. Liaquat s sister is a silent, anxious presence, clearly disturbed by Rishi s suffering. She and Liaquat are both grief-stricken when Pakistani 3 It would seem the locations used are not always from Tamilnadu, but I have not been able to establish from where exactly they are drawn.

232 216 The Melodramatic Public soldiers kill their younger brother, sent to Pakistan for training. Subsequently, the sister releases Rishi. Rishi s only obstacle now in his headlong rush to freedom is Liaquat. But the earlier exchanges between the men, and the death of Liaquat s brother are meant to have humanized the militant, and he lets Rishi go. The hero is reunited with Roja who, emotionally overwhelmed, falls at his feet, caressing his wounds, as the military officer, Royappa, and the religious guide, Chachchu, look on with relief. From this plot summary, we notice how the film elaborates a series of differences defined by identities of region, language, gender, community, and nation. The film s narrative seeks to neutralize this range of differences through a unification of identities under the ideological linking of discourses of nationhood, humanism and modernity. Tejaswini Niranjana and Rustam Bharucha have outlined the power-laden implications of this exercise. 4 They argue that Roja demonizes the Kashmiri militant as a Muslim fundamentalist, that it idealizes the modern middle-class Hindu male as the fount of a committed and developmentally dynamic nationalism, and that it neutralizes or at best appropriates the woman into this larger project. I consider this analysis persuasive but will argue that it glosses over the points at which such ideological orientations stumble and falter in the process of storytelling. We can think of the space of the fiction as being composed of four areas: the Indian side of Kashmir, the mobile militant space, the Tamil countryside and the city of Madras. What happens in the film is that Roja s desire to touch the sky, to bind the cosmos within herself (images from the song, Chhoti si aasha ) is refashioned, and a boundary placed around it as she comes to understand that she inhabits the political space called India. Her objective is to recover her husband, to bring him back into this (for her) newly identified space. Earlier spaces are still pictured and coalesce through the narrative function of communication media, telephone, and television, into a new, national simultaneity. 4 Tejaswini Niranjana, Integrating Whose Nation? Tourists and Terrorists in Roja, Economic and Political Weekly 24 (3), 15 January 1994, 79 82; Rustam Bharucha, On the Border of Fascism: Manufacture of Consent in Roja, Economic and Political Weekly 29 (23), 4 June 1994,

233 Voice, Space, Form 217 If nuclear patriarchy and the nation-state provide the coordinates within which Roja functions, the figures of the militant and the woman endanger their stability. In the introductory song sequences Roja is presented as an energetic character unburdened by household or occupational responsibility, a pre-adult figure, but with desires of an excessive, undefined nature. Her investment in Rishi s marrying Lakshmi is akin to a projection of her own undefined desires. Her subsequent marriage to Rishi appears to anchor these desires under the sanction of a romantic, companionate conjugal tie. This closure is not, however, quite complete. The crucial narrative development of Rishi s capture is set up because Roja leaves the conjugal precincts for the innocent enough activity of seeking out a mandir (Hindu temple). Her unannounced departure panics her husband, who rushes out with scant security and is thus made vulnerable to the militants. Roja threatens to exceed the existing boundaries demarcated by nuclear patriarchy and nation-state, and in such a way as to reorganize the narrative parameters of these forms. This appears to redefine and extend the narrative goal of the film, in so far as it rests on an investment in the definition of national boundaries. The discourse embedded in Roja s narratively influential move to the temple, that the god of Kashmir is not different from the god of Tamilnadu, offers the Hindu religion as a framework to transcend not only regional difference, but to extend the space of the national territory. Kumkum Sangari argues that a rhetoric of incitement animates the function of women whose agency is circumscribed by patriarchal authority and must therefore gain their ends through men. 5 There are the traces here of such a narrative drive, with Roja s movement precipitating the hero into a space beyond the limits set for civilian national life. She affords the hero entry into dangerous spaces that set up encounters and a dialogue with the Kashmiri/Muslim extremist, providing the ground for a future emotional and territorial reintegration of a dismembered nation-state. The logic of narrative incitement is not worked out as an aggressive reintegration, in the manner of reconquering lost space, but, perhaps inevitable in the strategy of a consensual hegemony, as a humane resolution achieved through persuasion. Also, it is not my point that these 5 Cf. Kumkum Sangari, Consent Agency and the Rhetorics of Incitement, Economic and Political Weekly 28 (18), 1 May 1993,

234 218 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 36 Fig. 37 Figs 36 and 37: Roja, Mani Rathnam, 1992, Two Women.

235 Voice, Space, Form 219 are the only terms on which identification is activated. Indeed, the woman in the film becomes a kind of tabula rasa traversed by a variety of fragmentary identities, and the stage for a series of incommensurable positions. Roja cannot do anything except plead with the police and the military. At one level, it is symbolically important that she stay on this side, within the national boundary. From now on, whenever she moves in the direction of the militant camp, Indian soldiers accompany her. Once her functions of narrative incitement have been completed, the female character is subordinated to a conventional territoriality, denied the possibilities of independent movement outside the precincts of home and nation-state. This crisis of familial separation engenders an imagining of this nation-space through new coordinates afforded by modern temporal and communication technologies. Roja s immobilization is succeeded by shots of a television news broadcast informing the original village community and Rishi s mother in Madras of the kidnapping. The binding of the images of village and mother into a national simultaneity delegates desire to another agent. 6 Liaquat s sister, on the other side, is introduced immediately after these images. This delegation is reiterated more physically and locally as Roja, now accompanied by Royappa and his men, glimpses the sister, and there is a significant exchange of looks between them. (Fig. 37, p. 218.) It is the sister, of course, who achieves the goals predicated by this narrative move when she releases Rishi, indicating her estrangement from the militant method. The displacement and doubling of Roja s narrative functions in the militant s sister protects the Indian woman from the contamination of transgressed boundaries, but provides the ground for a national and humanist discourse in the crucial function of female nurture. This scenario of female doubling and delegation is not an untypical strategy for the Indian popular cinema. 2. The Politics of Identity I now want to suggest that we can discern a politics of identity in the film grounded in its use of language. Critics have focused on how both the Tamil and Hindi versions of the film use English to solicit audience 6 For a now classic statement on the temporal and communicative framework of the imagined national community, see Anderson, Imagined Communities.

236 220 The Melodramatic Public identification with a Hindu middle-class-led dynamic of modernity. 7 This tallies with the image crystallizing around Mani Rathnam as a film-maker concerned with the modern Westernized components of Indian national imagination. 8 But Roja s success has been substantial, so clearly the use of English has not alienated audiences beyond the restricted domain of the middle-class. While certain phrases rest on a conversational idiom, e.g., What? Come again?, others are the coinage of youth romance in mass culture ( I m sorry s.o.r.r.y. ), hardly indicative of a great familiarity with the language. Finally there are a string of words which conjure up the mystique of state and public order, terms which are part of the vocabulary of public knowledge and anxiety. Security, and curfew, tersely invoked by the technocrat hero do not require a Westernized viewer for their deciphering. 9 The modernizing middle class is foregrounded as the fulcrum of the narrative, and thereby of national resolution, but there is a wider address in the film. The English language as the mark of Rishi Kumar s urbanity is both a focus for style identification, but also has a potential for suggesting cultural alienation. His formal introduction of his wife for security clearance is brushed away by his elderly boss who welcomes Roja through references to a shared village culture. The mode of address suggests that we need to think of a layered field of identification, rather than one centring on the hero. In the politics of the film s use of language, the heroine occupies a crucial position. When Madhoo, the actress who plays Roja, was asked why she had not made many films she reacted quite strongly, emphasizing that she already had a substantial career in South Indian films, 10 7 Bharucha raises the question of the linguistic politics involved in dubbing but does not expand on it. The real politics of language in the film has been determined by its dubbing from Tamil into Hindi... the other political dimension of language in Roja is its uncritical, even positive use of the English language (which, of course, remains the same in both the Hindi and Tamil versions of the film). From the sweet banalities of I love you to the more professional use of the word cryptologist, Roja reveals its openness to westernization which is part of its project of development in India. Bharucha, On the Border of Fascism, In quite a few of his films...mani Rathnam has cultivated an audience primarily composed of the newly articulate, assertive and self-confident middle class... Niranjana, Integrating whose Nation?, For an interesting argument on the phenomenon of bilingualism, see Harish Trivedi and Susan Bassnet, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, I use this umbrella term simply because of the easy circulation of film-makers,

237 Voice, Space, Form 221 though she only started her Bombay career with Phool aur Kante (Flowers and Thorns; Kuku Kohli, 1992). 11 The lack of information about this other space provides us with an important framework to assess Roja. Most of the critics have referred to the original Tamil version as essentially equivalent to the dubbed Hindi one. But in the original version, language functions to highlight differences of identity which are entirely suppressed in the Hindi version: the protagonists come from Uttar Pradesh, the populous North Indian state which has been at the centre of national politics since the 1920s and has produced all but two of India s prime ministers. As I have pointed out, in contrast Tamil political identity after Independence has often been self-consciously marginal, even oppositional to the pan-indian one, and so this dubbing constitutes a very significant elision indeed. The logic of the national market here is one of linguistic and political levelling. This is not to suggest that the original Roja encodes an authentic Tamil culture. Indeed, there is already a process of hegemonization in the social narrative of the marriage, suggesting to some commentators the matching of an urban elite non-brahmin with a woman of socially lower rank. 12 What I want to draw attention to is the act of appropriation invoked both in the dubbing and in the restriction of critical focus to the Hindi version. 3. Tamilness as Intractable Edifice In the original film, language is not expressive of a restricted geography, of a communication predicated on the particularity of place, it can also transcend locality. By having Liaquat graduate from Coimbatore, the narrative makes it possible for the hero to speak with him in Tamil, and, in the process, claims the cultural space of the pan- Indian nation for the language, by facilitating a conversation not about Tamilness, but Indianness. On the other hand, for Roja, placed within the confines of a domestic and instinctual discourse, the Tamil language works to exclude her from the larger nationalist outlook. actors, and technicians amongst the states of Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra, and Karnataka through dubbing. Tamil films are regularly dubbed into Telugu. 11 Interview on Times FM Channel, 21 August Venkatesh Chakravarthy and M.S.S. Pandian, More on Roja, Economic and Political Weekly 29 (11), 12 March 1994, 642 4, and discussion with M.S.S. Pandian.

238 222 The Melodramatic Public There are two ways of looking at this exclusion, both of which relate to the heroine s difficulties in communicating with the representatives of the Indian state. The anxiety attached to this inability brings an imperative of everyday emotions and desires to bear in the narrative. When the colonel, Royappa, speaks with Roja, language is not an impediment, but there is a difference in discourse, that between the nation s interest and the individual s. In contrast, when Roja pleads with a central minister to save her husband, he signals his interpreter to be quiet at a crucial point because the language of emotion has broken through. Narratively, this proves decisive in shifting the axis of the state towards the needs of the affective life, thus humanizing the nation-state form. 13 But if on the one hand the woman deepens the imaginary of the nation-state, there is a point at which linguistic positioning reiterates another quite contrary trajectory. While there are stereotypical invocations of a popular nationalist discourse in Roja s outlook as when she asks Wasim Khan why he doesn t leave India if he doesn t like it the overall subordination of state to the intimate emotion of conjugal loss and recovery in her coincide with the resistance associated with the history of Tamil identity. This is where the film bears the residual traces of a still contentious outlook on the nature of the Indian state, if as an inertial presence, rather than as an active element in the narrative. This film can at one level be seen as a kind of sublimation of the Tamil identity into the Indian one, as an exorcism of the collective guilt felt by Tamilians over Rajiv Gandhi s assassination. 14 But ironically the identity which the narrative seeks to sublimate comes across as incommensurable with the rationality of the nationalist self. This is not to argue that Mani Rathnam has intentionally created this ambivalence, but that in labouring to transform the text of Tamil identity into 13 This is analogous with Helen Foley s comments on the place of the affective in ancient Greece: The emotional, domestic sphere cannot be allowed direct political power and the wife must subordinate herself to her husband in marriage; but the maternal or domestic claims are nevertheless central and inviolable, a crucial check on the bellicose male dominated democracy. Sex and State in Ancient Greece, in Diacritic, quoted by Laura Mulvey, Notes on Sirk and Melodrama, in Gledhill, ed., Home is Where the Heart Is, 76. Of course the Indian state in Roja is not depicted in such excessive terms, and cannot be, for ideological reasons argued below; but the realm of everyday affect is shown to be a necessary element in the constitution of a nation-state which must distinguish itself from the ruthlessness of its opponents. 14 Niranjana, Integrating Whose Nation?, 82.

239 Voice, Space, Form 223 that of an Indian one, the film comes up against a symbolically intractable edifice. 4. The Connotations of Place Roja then demonstrates contradictory features at the level of representation which provide us with an understanding of the difficulties involved in the construction of a (pan-indian) national identity. These difficulties are reflected in the way in which spaces are put together, and the way subjectivities are narrated in the filmic text. As I have noted, certain places referred to in the film as Kashmir or the Tamil countryside are actually composed of other places, making the profilmic a compound of displacements. However, these displacements can also put different types of desire into play. Kashmir was formerly the favoured setting for romantic escapade in the popular Bombay cinema. The political impossibility of shooting there now remaps the romantic imaginary as a fabrication. The gap between the physical and narrative referent exposes the crevasse between a desired emotional fullness of romance, of the nation-state in its ideal form and its realization. For Roja this is the romance of new identity, in so far as she enters new and unthought-of spaces which fill her and redefine her. But, in actual fact, the split of the physical from the fictional referent is significant. In the scene where Rishi introduces Roja to Kashmir, the film invests in vision, Rishi covering Roja s eyes, the camera tilting up the snowscape, in an exultant, revelatory way. But Kashmir here is Kulu-Manali, the untroubled hill resort of Himachal Pradesh. Here the split is perhaps humdrum: evidently there is an equivalence and redundancy of such resorts in the filmgoer/tourist imagination. If this aspect of the representation of contested space is not predicated on knowledge or recognition and the filmgoer can still participate in the fiction of Kashmir, there is another location which is not so easily skirted. Certain key military scenes of Kashmir were staged in Wellington, in the Nilgiri hills of Tamilnadu. The Tamil, and more broadly South Indian, tourist is likely to recognize this place, the Madras Regimental Centre and Staff College, located as it is en route to the major tourist resort of Ootacamund. (Fig. 38, p. 224.) This recognizability serves to relocate the drama of national integration in Tamilnadu, thereby echoing the larger set of drives, of Tamil identification with the pan-indian nation, within which the narrative operates. This recognition underlines that in crucial respects the

240 224 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 38: Roja, Madras Regimental Centre. characters have not moved very far. In contrast to the locational absences and equivalences that elsewhere mark the representation of Kashmir in the film, in the deployment of Tamil locales to represent this absent place, there is a certain over-representation of Tamil identity and place, making it the latent subject of the film. Of course, these features are elided in the dubbed Hindi version, as the non-tamil audience is asked to see Tamilnadu as Uttar Pradesh! 5. The Recalibration of Popular Form Formally, Roja has been identified as reflecting a realist disposition that addresses recent developments in the orientations of middle-class culture. In the 1970s the Indian government s National Film Development Corporation supported social-realist films, as in the work of Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Govind Nihalani, and others. These films explored various topical issues of social exploitation, and political and moral corruption. The realism of Mani Rathnam, in contrast, is privately financed and very much of the mainstream rather than the parallel cinema. Moreover, as Tejaswini Niranjana points out, its realism

241 Voice, Space, Form 225 is oriented to celebrate middle-class modernity rather than develop a stance of social criticism. In its mobilization of certain devices of identification, a linearization of dispersed and disparate information into a character-centred, goal-oriented frame, the film echoes the methods of the classical Hollywood cinema. This form of spectatorial coherence contrasts both with the critical orientations of the state-supported parallel cinema, and with the particular omnibus, attractionbased elements of popular Indian cinema. In the latter instance, the main narrative line tends to be highly circular in its orientation, even if a secular rearrangement of elements is achieved. Further, these lines tend to be interrupted and dispersed by musical and performative instances that provide us with different loci to understand character, based not only on oppositions of the melodramatic kind, but on a series of contrasting capacities and dispositions. 15 In a sense then, we might assess Roja s structural features as emblematic of the drive to orient the spectator to the psychic and perceptual needs of a dynamic, properly modernized national formation. In terms of these formal dimensions, however, there are certain elements which must give pause to the formulation that Roja represents a straightforward departure from earlier currents. The particular way this formal reorganization is used to express nationalism, as well as its distinct aesthetics of spectacular framing, undercuts a straightforward linearization. Mani Rathnam clearly works with certain realist concerns, at the level of restrained acting styles, and a classicism of formal construction and narrative dovetailing of cause effect structures. Nevertheless, the film retains a stress on spectacular and performative dimensions which externalize thematics from their smooth anchoring within the flow of character actions and subjectivities. This is evident at a series of points in Roja: in the representation of certain aspects of the real, especially the narrative positioning of technology; and finally, in the expression and positioning of character within the formally and referentially overdetermined framework of the song sequence. In the representation of the army, the film invests in a mode of display which is not always related to narrative causality. The investment is in the movement and the display of the military institution, of the 15 See Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s, Screen 30 (3), 1989, pp ; and ch. 3 above.

242 226 The Melodramatic Public travelling camera, of the techniques of the stunt. While these features are yoked to the narrative of the hunt in the film s prologue, where the army track down and capture Wasim Khan, subsequent episodes of display have no such narrative pay-off. These scenes recall the type of motivations of spectacle associated with the ritualized staging of state power, as in Independence and Republic Day parades, except that the tableau form characteristic of pageants is here played out in narrative time. The realist citational aspect of the film, in which verisimilitude is sketched in by the background detail, also enables the highlighting of the state as a visual form, composed of the soldiers undergoing regimentation in a scene shot at the Madras Regimental Centre, Wellington. Another narratively unassimilated feature is both the discourse and the narrative sequence relating to the hero s professional activity. A mystique attaches to Rishi Kumar s work, both as impenetrable verbal sign, as the village women stand bewildered when he informs them of his work, but also as activity. Avowedly undertaking decoding for the military, his work is given no narrative context. We are not provided information that would make his activity goal-oriented and subject to deadlines, locking the activity into a hermeneutic unravelling of the narrative. Further, any expectations that his abduction relates to the militants need for information only he can provide are swiftly belied. It would seem that any Indian national would have done, or at least any state functionary. Performing a negligible narrative function then, Rishi s work is primarily presented for our view. Posed before his monitor, and looking at a series of mathematical figures incomprehensible to us, this sequence fits into a larger tendency to figure the scientific as a compendium of mysterious signs, the preserve of a narrative agent whose specialist skills make him into an elite figure remote from common or everyday knowledge and identity. These alienations from narrative flow stand metonymically for a larger framing of the relations between state and subject, and the domain of science and the subject as they are relayed in the wider extracinematic universe of signs rather than within the film text. Inflected in the film by notations of propaganda and of mystique centred on an image of professionalized modernity, these scenes invite us to think of a different architecture of the film text, in which blocks of time hover in the space of the text, secure in their exemplary authority, but requiring other agents to mobilize affect on their behalf.

243 Voice, Space, Form 227 This particular regime of spectacle is much more complicatedly organized around the person and the body of the women. In the song sequence Chhoti si aasha, the montage constructs Roja as body through choreography and interplay with natural textures, especially water. But she is also positioned as person when she is pictured in a number of social situations, especially of family life, as also in her assumption of public roles, driving a tractor, graduating from college, even taking on the garb of the patriarch. As some critics have suggested, the rhythms of body construction tend to fetishize both the woman and the countryside in the manner of the ad film. However, the vivacity of the actress Madhoo s performance combines with the wider features of her social articulation in the montage to generate a highly condensed and dynamic narrative of the woman. This narrative is not so much an interplay between family life and a professional future; rather, it plays out the idyll of a tension-free negotiation of many roles. Structurally speaking, this sequence is as impacted as the foregoing instances which I have discussed, but it is fuller in its work of narrative condensation and it is, if only implicitly, in contradiction with the main narrative line of the film. This subsequent narrative constantly blocks dreams of a future for women that the idyll generated around Roja conjures up. Despite protest by the girl, her education is derailed by the parents decision that she must marry Rishi to save the family honour. Subsequently, the high mobility that the girl exhibits has to be constrained by the dictates of territoriality, as I have shown. Mani Rathnam has then modified the terms of popular cinema, sharpening its somewhat disjointed and disparate form of address into regimes of spectacle, performance, and narrative sequence that have a more articulate relationship, of development, antagonism, and reversal, than is conventional. One of the features which might be said to distinguish its narrative form from the conventions of the popular is the way a certain didactic element, encompassing structures of rhetoric, dialogue, and visual figurations such as the tableau have been displaced from the expression of moral imperatives centred on the logic of family identity into that of political imperatives, representing the interests of the nation-state. As I have suggested, this process of displacement and refiguration seeks out a number of spatial nodes, in the images of state and modernity, alongside the more conventional sites of articulation. The drive for a certain type of integrity has been enabled by the

244 228 The Melodramatic Public honing of form through its articulation with the methods of classical Hollywood cinema, its regimes of subjectivity, linearity, and norms of balance in composition and editing. This interaction derives from a longer engagement, stretching from the 1930s, 16 and is part of the story of the Indian cinema as a key institution in the imaginary negotiation of modernity. I have tried to suggest how that story, rather than being an unravelling of a drive towards a coherent, formally integrated modern subjectivity, bears the imprint of other traditions and different forms of identity. Finally and almost inevitable perhaps for a popular political project of this order, it generates space for a directive, hortatory function, a didactics of address which speaks as much of the need to cohere meaning as the difficulty of doing so. 16 See ch. 2 above for an analysis of the combination of codes from Hollywood and indigenous visual culture in Hindi film around Independence.

245 7 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 1. Plot Synopsis Shekhar Mishra, a journalist working in Bombay, visits his village home in Andhra, where he sees and falls in love with Shaila, daughter of the brick-maker, Bashir Ahmad. Both Shekhar s father, the village notable Narayan Mishra, and Bashir are incensed at the idea of the match, but Shekhar arranges for Shaila to flee the village and join him in Bombay, where they are joined in civil marriage. Twins, Kamal Bashir and Kabir Narayan, are born to the couple, and they are visited by parents anxious at news of communal rioting in the city. The reconciliation is blighted by a renewed spate of rioting, leading to the death of the elders and the loss of the children. As Shekhar and Shaila search the strife-torn city for their sons, Hindus and Muslims are locked in unrelenting slaughter. At the climax we see Shekhar and several others pleading with the rampaging mobs to stop the killing; Shekhar douses himself with kerosene, urging Hindu rioters to kill him. The appeal quietens the crowd, and amidst the dispersal of the riot, the twins emerge and the family is reunited. Within the space of three years, Mani Rathnam took his lead actor, Arvindswamy, the Rishi of Roja, along with the compendium of attributes his character stood for the professionalized modernity of the Hindu middle class, social urbanity, and a pan-indian patriotic vision and repositioned him in a rather different narrative world. Between Roja and his 1995 film Bombay intercedes the epochal catastrophe of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1993, a symbolic attack by majoritarian Hindu chauvinists on the minority Muslim

246 230 The Melodramatic Public community. In its wake there came face-offs between the state and a wounded minority, and thereafter, violence unleashed by the extreme wings of the Hindu right that resulted in something tantamount to a pogrom in the city of Bombay. The event posed fundamental questions for Mani Rathnam s hero; how would he respond to the new configuration while retaining the key features which defined him? Here I look at Mani Rathnam s much-debated film, Bombay, in its movement between cinematic address and public reception. As a film, and as a form of popular narrative, my concern is to understand its structural features, its generic location, and its intertextual animation of key motifs in public life. In terms of reception, my analysis is concerned with the response of the articulate strata of the public, as expressed in the outlook of mainstream politicians, journalists, and reviewers. Writers of liberal outlook, left-wing affiliation, and the votaries of majority and minority identity have been outspoken in their evaluation of Bombay. They have argued about the rules of representation that ought to govern the exploration of national crisis, in particular the place of the real in this enterprise, and the way prohibitions surrounding women are central to definitions of communal identity. I also try to understand a practice which is both a form of production as well as one of reception, that of government censorship. The prohibitions enforced by the censor board add up to a certain image of the state and its understanding of the impact of images on social perception and official authority. I have argued that the narrative construction of this film has a tendency to discontinuity, with segments acquiring a certain autonomy from each other. However, a pattern emerges over the time of the narrative, one of forgetting the past within the text. These features are echoed in the way the narrative is constructed by segments of the audience. The opinions I draw upon makes sense of the text through a selection of material, and by highlighting the logic of certain narrative phases. The last section below presents my own susceptibility to vesting the film with coherent meaning. In seeking to go beyond the existing terms of the debate, I focus on a particular feature which has not attracted much attention, that of the sacrificial male body. Through this figure I try to suggest that the particular way the text seeks coherence generates contradictory elements which offer the spectator an ambivalent viewpoint on the narrative of communal relationships and sectarian violence.

247 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative Structure In Bombay we have one narrative logic running through the film: how can a family be constituted across the divisions that define Indian society? These are divisions at once between families and communities; and the divisions, refigured in the larger frame of the riot, dismember the family generationally. Although the children are separated from each other for a while, each generation finally retains its integrity. The film thereby sets out a symbolic temporality, a common enough past, present, future logic. The constitution of the family, its rupture with the past, and its drive to preserve its legacy for the future provides the overarching motivational structure, one which brings the nuclear family into dialogue with the representatives of state and society. This dialogue is avowedly one which the innocents of the film conduct with those who wield power. Innocents is a term regularly employed by the reporter Shekhar in his discussions with Hindu and Muslim leaders, as well as with the police; are they not disturbed by the death of innocents? Ultimately, the innocents are condensed in the image of dead children, and the notion feeds back into the narrative structure which sees the parents struggling to recover their children and the social future, torn from them by the upheavals. The discourse of the family meets with that of state and civil society when the protagonist moves beyond his own concerns into a wider frame of action and restitution. Thus from the logic of recovering his family the hero is thrust into the logic of protecting society. The achievement of the one enables the other, as the children suddenly emerge in the wake of Shekhar s successful bid to diffuse an angry mob, and the nuclear family is reunited. The commutation of spaces is a key device in the unravelling of this narrative logic. Bombay must replace the village in order for the marriage to take place under the sign of modernity, the film s ultimate goal and resource. Shekhar Mishra s home in Bombay now becomes the iconic space in which all the significant kinship relations can regroup on the basis of a twofold fantasy. The first is revealed in the names of the twin grandchildren, Kabir Narayan and Kamal Bashir. The mix in which they reincarnate their grandfathers names is the idyll of reconciliation. In this fantasy Shekhar and Shaila give birth to their parents to reconcile their differences with them, or more pertinently, to exercise authority over them and refashion them in terms of their ideals.

248 232 The Melodramatic Public The second fantasy is the wish expressed by the newly arrived grandparents to recover the family unit from the catastrophe of the riots by reclaiming it for a reconstituted village. With this comes the now comic contest over who will oversee the religious upbringing of the children. That which was a source of tension earlier can now be comic because it is deferred to a future condition of utopian revival. Simply put, these are fantasies generated out of an opposition between modernity and tradition, and the fantasy of modernity ultimately supplants that of tradition. That one fantasy is organized to deal with the other is indicated in a significant instance of narrative amnesia. This is when the hero and heroine, caught in the vortex of the riots and in the trauma of losing their children, forget that they have lost their parents (whom we, the audience, know are dead). This lacuna could be attributed to weak and hurried scripting but it is consistent with an obsessive narrative logic, in that the protagonists have already introjected their parents in their children. Not only are the children two, they are twins, so that Shekhar and Shaila have in effect recreated, in their children, their parents without difference, without conflict. This is therefore an ideal image generated by modernity, one which incorporates the past gesturally. The full logic of this substitution emerges when the iconic family space which has seen the dispersal of the family, the death of the grandparents, the desperate search of parents for children, finally sees the reunion of the twins. In a classical Hollywood shotreverse-shot arrangement, Kamal Bashir looks, and sees Kabir Narayan, who returns the look (or is it the other way around?); there is no difference between their images. Where the grandparents were pitted Hindu against Muslim, here the children are drained not only of the signs of religious difference but of any marks of difference at all. We can say that the film is a reflection on the transformation from one structure of authority (a traditional patriarchy) into another which denies that it is authority. It claims instead that it is an identity and a point of view predicated on mutuality with the beloved and freedom of choice. However, if we penetrate below the structure of sentiments we find that Shekhar generates Shaila through an anticipatory (and therefore markedly fantasy) point of view. 1 As he is walking along the jetty, he comes to a halt, distracted, it would appear, by something 1 A classic instance of such a narrative move is when Guru Dutt s look generates Mala Sinha in Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957).

249 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 233 off-screen. The next shot shows the woman in a burqa, but the burqa only lifts in the wind now, suggesting that Shekhar s look exposes Shaila to his, and our gaze. It is also Shekhar, largely, who generates the momentum for the romance, in terms of meetings, ultimata to parents, the blood bonding with Shaila, denial of parental authority, the mastery over movement by his sending of rail tickets to his beloved, the privileged view of Shaila at Victoria Terminus, the setting up of the registered marriage. Perhaps most significant of all, it is his nonreligiosity which defines the non-identity of the children. Whatever we may imagine of the practical problems posed by the marriage of the communally differentiated couple for the identity of the children, in effect the children follow the father in not practising religion. 3. The Representation of Inter-Community Differences Apparently contrary to the orientation of the narrative to the modern, in its basic understanding of cultural difference the film lies squarely within the dominant representations of communal relations in Indian cinema and popular narrative. While the traditional society of both communities is caught within a conservative outlook, the Muslim is lower in the social hierarchy. More sparse in its dwelling, associated with fishing and brick-making, Bashir Ahmed s family stands in contrast to Narayan Mishra s. In Mishra s upper-caste dwelling, clearly based on landed wealth and community standing, labour is not mentioned or seen at all. That the Muslim is also affected by modernity is reflected in the education of his daughter. However, these attributes make narrative sense only in her being aligned with the beloved. She knows English which, while not the everyday language of the lovers, comes to be symbolically central. For Shekhar uses it to write to Shaila, enabling her move to the city and into modernity. These sociological imaginings are complemented by a familiar iconography of community. When the Muslim father is confronted with perceived slights and open insults, his response is composed of a gestural aggression. Bashir takes immediate recourse to sharp-edged implements knives, swords, cleavers; Narayan, on the other hand, is given to verbal anger and noticeably backs down in certain exchanges, urging moderation. Again, as a parent he much more readily succumbs to sentimental appeals than the Muslim, even accepting the important distinction that

250 234 The Melodramatic Public he is dealing with a son already expressing autonomy and Bashir s authority relates to a dependent daughter. While this stereotypical image reproduces a characteristic othering of the Muslim, it should be noted that the film institutes another logic of difference which seeks to disavow the first, that between the city and the village. The film portrays intercommunal conflict in the village reaching a certain point and no further. Thus the particular frozen iconicity to even the most precipitate of encounters, the Muslim father, brandishing knife, but allowing himself to be held back by his women-folk and community fellows. One is reminded here of Anuradha Kapur s references to conventions of representation in which iconic figures rest in autonomous space, not quite engaging/referring to other iconic figures juxtaposed to them in the frame. 2 It is in the city that we are given a representational mode for intercommunal relationships which is more goal-oriented in its construction. The menacing features held in balance by the codes and emotions of social acquaintance in the village now surface in bloody conflict. The film covers its traces here. For the very structure of representations already has this conclusion built into its premises, the knifewielding Muslim already given within the iconography of village life. Characteristics do not change or emerge within a community or scatter amongst communities; they are already inscribed in the community, awaiting particular circumstances to bring them to the surface. 4. Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The Pattern of Public Events The apparent evenhandedness in the representation of communal violence is then undercut at the outset, in terms of the basic digits of community representation. What happens subsequently allows us both to be aware of that premise, but also to be forgetful, and even to become confused. I suggest how this happens through the way the film represents the communal violence of that period as taking place in three phases. (i) The Hindus assume the aggressive stance. We are shown the rathyatra, the processions centred on the ceremonial chariot that were 2 Anuradha Kapur, Deity to Crusader: The Hindutva Movement in Ayodhya, in Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others.

251 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 235 used to mobilize a Hindu constituency in the Ram temple campaign, often with violent results. Shaila witnesses this, along with intimidating door-to-door collection of funds for the campaign. This segment of the film culminates in the destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December, shown through newspaper headlines and photographs, and the resulting encounters between Muslims and policemen. At the conclusion, unidentifiable assailants threaten the life of the twins. (ii) 5 January: two mathadi workers, load carriers, are killed; newspaper headlines declare that Bombay burns ; Hindus and Muslims are shown mobilizing their communities in localities, the Hindus through the street corner maha arti, Muslims through namaaz; Muslims threaten the Hindu grandfather, Narayan Mishra, but move away on Bashir Ahmed s intervention; a Hindu house is burnt, the grandparents perish in an arson attack, and Shaila and Shekhar are parted from their children in the resulting mêlée. (iii) In the last phase of the film we see intercommunal rioting, interspersed with the parents search for the twins; the twins receive help from a hijra and the child bearing their mother s name, Shaila Bano ; Shekhar upbraids his communalized friends. In the climax, Shekhar, two Muslims, and the hijra, defuse the rioting; the twins are reunited with their parents. One of the features of the public debate on the film has been the degree to which Muslim aggression has been visibly more evident, especially through the film s tendency to fetishize their image in the white filigreed cap. 3 I believe that this is largely correct, and indicates the premise of a mainstream, and therefore necessarily Hindu secularist narrative dealing with cultural difference as its central theme: in its reconstruction of events, and its bid for intercommunal reconciliation, the narrative cannot neutralize constructions of the Muslim as other. What is missed in this observation is the amnesiac propensities of popular narrative, as it states certain premises only to skirt them, a process centred on more than one elision. In this connection we may consider the film s introduction of a specifically Hindu aggression, both in the city and in the countryside, 3 The first show of the riots is a Muslim picking up the sword in aggression. The number of white caps is always foregrounded and framed well, in tasteful colours, while the Hindu mobs are more indistinct, it is difficult to make out faces. Chitra Padmanabhan, Money Ratnam Walks the Razor s Edge to Sell in a Communal Market, Economic Times, 16 April 1995.

252 236 The Melodramatic Public around the agitation at Ayodhya. This fearsome image of the Hindu is a most extraordinary one, a landmark perhaps in the history of popular film narrative in India. The image is shown to us through Shaila s point of view, in a context where her somewhat uneasy position in the Hindu locality has been established. Already vulnerable, she sees the emergence of the rathyatra as a fearful sight, an ominous soundtrack coding the moment in this way for us as well. A ragbag of sadhus conjure up an image of unruly force, followed by the rath bearing a figure aloft who resembles the BJP leader Advani. (Fig. 39.) Our alienation from this vision of a political Hinduism is further solicited when members of the Shakti Samaj, standing in for the Shiv Sena, approach the couple for a donation to build the temple. In a lesser vein, Narayan Mishra directs a calculated insult at Bashir Ahmed when he orders a truckload of bricks for the Ayodhya temple from the Muslilm brick-maker. There is, as I have suggested, an extraordinary unprecedentedness to this accumulation of anxiety-inducing images of a Hindu communal consciousness as far as the popular cinema is concerned. Following again upon the image of the anxious Shaila, this segment concludes with the newspaper headlines announcing the demolition of the Babri Fig. 39: Bombay, Mani Rathnam, 1995, Shaila s View of the Rathyatra.

253 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 237 Masjid. The atmosphere of foreboding generated in the opening stages of communal mobilization would have concluded with documentary footage of the demolition but the censor board had these images deleted. The representation of communal violence in the second phase focuses almost entirely on Muslim activity in the riots of December 1993, though it depicts it as aimed at property and state rather than against civilians. It also allows for the representation of Muslim deaths under police firing. The overall lopsidedness of the narrative continues into the depiction of another turn in the riots. Here the attack on the mathadi workers (loaders), the murderous advance on Narayan Mishra, and the burning of a Hindu household in a slum, relentlessly focus our attention on anti-hindu actions. Indeed, the only point of relief in the representation upto this moment is one which remains ambiguous. When the children are attacked, the identity of their assailants is obscured by the scarves that swathe their faces. However, in the last phase of the film, there is a noticeable shift in the treatment, as the film shows both communities involved in an alternating pattern of blood-letting. It is this impression that liberal and left-wing public opinion has taken away from the film, despite the fact that the earlier episodes contradict such a clear-cut picture. However, the reasons for this impression vary considerably with left wing and civil rights activists on the one side and those expressing a liberal humanist viewpoint on the other. The former argue that the apparent evenhandedness of the film is a terrible misrepresentation of the riots, as these were in reality an anti-muslim pogrom. Did someone say it s a balanced view because the director has shown one maha arti for every namaaz. But what of the sleight of hand by which what was an effective pogrom engineered by state forces against one community became a riot between sections of two communities Padmanabhan, Money Ratnam. Cf. also Namrata Joshi, The Film Represents Reality!, Economic Times, 16 April 1995: Mani Ratnam has virtually re-invented the Bombay riots in a grotesque expression of what it ought to have been universally played and, ultimately, amenable to cessation in the face of sentimental, moralistic rhetoric. A version even Bal Thackeray approves... His reality is a communal riot shot much in the style of a ding-dong kabaddi match... It is a contest between equals, with points being scored by either side with a pendulum-like regularity and fairness... Though the theme of communal conflict engulfs the film for nearly three-fourths of its duration, there is no hint of the possibility of the entire episode in Bombay in 1993, having been an organized and planned pogrom against a minority, the scars of which are yet to heal...

254 238 The Melodramatic Public Liberal opinion on the other hand does not recognize that there is a misrepresentation. One such writer concedes that the film did not draw out the complexities of the riots in terms of police and criminal involvement, but the juxtaposition of street corner artis and congregations at mosques is powerful enough... 5 A particularly strident version of this view berates the Muslim lobby for not appreciating the evenness of the treatment: Offence was taken we are told, because a Hindu family was shown being burned alive. A Muslim family is also shown being similarly murdered, because this also happened in the terrible riots of 1992, but our Muslim objectors are selective in their opinion. 6 Here the equality in the treatment of communities is understood as truthful because this... happened. I think it is part of the liberal argument that instead of being critical, the Muslim lobby should be grateful, for Bombay is one of the first films to portray the Muslim victims of the Bombay riots sympathetically. And yet it is somehow typical of the pathetic leadership of the Muslim community that the objections should have come from Muslims. 7 These liberal views are based on an acceptance of the film s misrepresentation of the riots as finally centring on the equal guilt of the two communities. More remarkable though is the fact that observers who are ideologically opposed are susceptible to a common miscognition, that the film holds Muslims and Hindus as culpable in a similar manner. Can it be because the moment of the figuration of equal culpability is also that of the coherence, reparation, and renewed legitimation of Indian society in the film? This is the moment that engages both critics and apologists, making the film an essentially coherent object to engage with, rather than an inchoate and dissonant one. Or is it a miscognition that the narrative process successfully generates, containing/disavowing earlier figurations of identity and conflict? In an article by S.S.A. Aiyar the liberal apologia abandons its references to the real and demands an investment in the myth of equal culpability. Referring to criticisms that the film had failed to represent the violence for what it was, a pogrom, Aiyar writes: 5 Sunil Sethi, Much Ado About Nothing, Pioneer, 16 April Tavleen Singh, Pampering the Minority Ego, Indian Express, 16 April In Tavleen Singh s writing there is a slippage between official Muslim opinion, or the views of the Muslim leadership, and Muslims as a whole. For example, Emboldened by their success in stopping Bombay, Maharashtra s Muslims notched up another little fundamentalist victory last week. 7 Sunday, 28 April 1995, 84.

255 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 239 This objection cannot stand scrutiny. No film can or should claim to represent the absolute truth (there is probably no such thing). Besides the whole point of the film and indeed of secularism is that violence is wrong in principle, not because one community suffers more casualties than another. Numbers are not irrelevant they add another dimension to the injustice of violence. But the fundamental issue is the inhumanity of all slaughter, and it is unwise to get diverted from this by looking at riot statistics. Had Bombay been a documentary film, a mention of numbers would have been appropriate. But as a film trying to show that there are no winners in the inhumanity of communal strife, it would have lost its message by going into who did how much to whom. 8 This is an active advocacy for the suppression of facts except, rather contradictorily, in the format of the documentary. Is this because the documentary is generically and ethically oriented to representing facts? Or is it because it is a minority medium which does not have the communicative possibilities of the mainstream fiction film? I sense it is the latter. The detail that Bombay knowingly draws upon documentary conventions, and therefore might be expected to observe the ethics of the documentary is beside the point in Aiyar s argument. For what matters is that the film is a vehicle for the mass communication of myths, and these must be rendered in such a way as to mitigate specific responsibility and liability to punishment by generalizing culpability. Everyone is guilty, so let us agree to accept this guilt and move on. In writing about that which should be addressed by the film (and on secularist principles), Aiyar unwittingly raises a genuine problem. While the working premise of social representation in mainstream cinema is the stereotype, we must understand that the Bombay cinema has always tended to reserve a notion of normalcy for the Hindu hero, the apex figure in the composite nationalism of its fictions. Exaggeration in cultural behaviour is attributed to other social groups, especially Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. If this is the conventional mode of representation, should we castigate Bombay for reproducing it? As a mainstream film engaged in purveying myths for the nation, we need to look at the popular film in terms of what it can represent within the limits historically and institutionally set for this form. However, even within these limits, one may ask whether Bombay is not part of a larger regressive move. While the attributes of 8 Times of India, 15 April 1995.

256 240 The Melodramatic Public social backwardness, cultural conservatism, and deep religiosity are common enough to the stereotype of the plebeian Muslim in the popular cinema, the popular cinema does not usually cite aggressiveness as a defining quality. This characteristic may recur in popular cultural stereotypes of the Muslim, 9 but cinema has been much more careful in this context. In the recent past Bombay cinema has redefined these conventions by showing Muslims as villainous characters in films such as Tezaab (N. Chandra, 1988), Gardish (Priyadarshan, 1993), and Angaar (Shashilal Nayar, 1993). 10 But Muslims in these narratives come from Bombay s criminal groups. Mani Rathnam s Bombay participates in this shift (as did his Roja in a sense), but it also makes a distinct intervention by figuring aggression as residing within the community rather than as characterizing its criminal offshoots. In this sense the film may have brought about an alignment between mainstream cinematic fiction and the popular Hindu imagining of the communal other. Along with these politically regressive interventions in popular cinematic modes, Bombay has contributed certain other new elements Fig. 40: Bombay, Intertitle, place and date. 9 Gyanendra Pandey, The Bigoted Julaha, in Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1990, Rashmi Doraiswamy, Commercial Hindi Cinema: Changing Narrative Strategies, Cinemaya 23, 1994, 4 12.

257 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 241 into mainstream cinema: its proximity to the events it depicts, and the invocation of documentary methods, the use of dates, newspaper headlines, and place-names to situate the violence. (Fig. 40, p. 240.) These features place the film in the arc of recent public memory, and make it an intervention in the construction of that memory. Indeed, where reviews actually claim that the film is objective and balanced in its account of what took place in Bombay, it could be said to be a substitute for memory. 11 It is here, in the historical proximity and the truth claims of the fiction, that we need to apply a different register of reception than that accorded to the mainstream consensual form. In Bombay the inbuilt cultural politics of the mainstream, its constituent units of representation, are harnessed via documentary simulation to the politics of the immediate, the justification, condemnation, or disavowal of Hindu actions, depending upon the particular narrative segment one chooses to highlight. Thus, it is remarkable that Thackeray, the Shiv Sena leader, concentrates on the facts which the film draws upon, and how it organizes these facts, not on the myth of equal culpability around which left and liberal critics orient their position: We didn t start the violence. If you look carefully at the film, you will find that it is all there. The murder of the Mathadi workers. The burning of the house in Jogeshwari. We had no choice but to retaliate It is no coincidence that the Muslim lobby also highlighted these references to identifiable incidents as giv[ing] the impression that the Muslims are the aggressors. 13 While the liberal and left-wing critics dwell only upon the narrative s process of equalizing responsibility, it is the communal lobbies on either side which point to how significant documentary strategies construct a tale of Muslim aggression as a central component of the riots. Of course, these constructions also exclude a great deal which goes on in the film in their own particular bid for narrative coherence. The discourse around censorship and the bid to ban the film draw out the political implications of its representation of Bombay s communal violence for the state and a certain image of the Muslim community. It would seem that the censors operated through a mixture of 11 The film maker has taken great pains to structure his objective and impartial documentation of the communal riots in Bombay two years ago. Battle over Bombay, editorial, Screen, 14 April Sunday, 28 April 1995, Muslims Object to Bombay Scenes, Times of India, 9 April 1995.

258 242 The Melodramatic Public considerations regarding the film s portrayal of the state, its impact on diplomatic relations and on the sentiments of the Muslim community. 14 Thus the cutting of references to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Islamic state must be related to diplomatic prohibitions. Sensitivity to reminding Muslims of the campaign against them appears to underlie the censor board s deletion of the following: visuals of the rathyatra along with dialogue Babri Masjid todenge, Ram mandir banayenge ; dialogue relating to a door-to-door collection of funds from Hindu households; visuals of the Babri Masjid and its demolition; and, amongst other dialogue cuts, 5000 years ago there was a temple here. Who destroyed it? The suggestion is that the depiction of certain incendiary anti-muslim rhetoric and actions might inflame passions, presumably of the Muslims rather than of the Hindus. This means that these events are isolated from their treatment within the narrative process. The presumption is that even if a director employs a method which alienates the spectator from such scenes of anti-muslim aggression, this would nevertheless involve the re-experiencing of the affront with possible political repercussions. What the censors particularly feared, I would think, was the rekindling of anti-government sentiment among the Muslims, on the assumption that the demolition of the mosque was a failure of the government to represent their interests. The censor board s cutting of references to the high incidence of Muslim deaths in the December violence, and of visuals showing police firing on Muslim crowds, conforms to this imperative. There is also another anxiety: not only that the government should not be shown to be ineffective or opposed to the community, but that it must not appear vulnerable to popular assault. Thus an episode showing the death of a policeman was also removed. Anxiety about the government image amongst Hindus, on the other hand, is hardly in evidence. Perhaps the excision of the dialogue Go and ask the government which is cheating you in the name of secularism is the solitary instance, suggesting a concern for the impact of Hindu communalist propaganda on public perceptions that the government was guilty of minority appeasement. Despite such anxieties, the censor board still displayed a respect for realist representation for it did not demand a complete excision of any reference to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. But, within this 14 For details of censorship, see Times of India, 12 March 1995; and Frontline, 16 June 1995.

259 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 243 reality orientation it made a distinction: only newspaper clippings could be shown, implying that documentary footage had the capacity to stir passions in a way that the photograph did not. Indeed, we can say that the censors reflected a general concern to contain movement, whether of people s emotions, or of the image, in keeping with the motivations of order. 15 If the censor board allowed for a muted representation of reality, it made excisions which were significantly opposed to the clear articulation of a causal logic. This is especially indicated by two cuts. The first is the response of a policeman to the Muslim actions of December: These people have started the riots against the demolition of the masjid in Ayodhya. The second is the deletion of visuals and dialogues spoken by Tinu Anand while distributing bangles. Apparently the Thackeray stand-in was shown giving his followers bangles in the wake of the killing of the mathadi workers. While these cuts follow the logic of blocking the recreation of injured sentiment and of the rhetoric used to justify violence, they contribute to critical gaps in narrative causality. To a large extent the film s organization of images around the demolition provides an explanation of the Muslim response despite the cut. But the particular location of Tinu Anand s dialogue suggests that the film offers an explanation for Hindu violence in the last phase which now stands obscured. At least one of the discontinuities of the film s present structure derives not from the peculiarities of its organization but from censorship cuts. The official Muslim lobby, on the other had, objected to representations of Hindu mobilization and the images of the demolition even after the censor s excisions. 16 We must assume that the demand derived from the sensitivity of the spokesmen to the re-enactment of a humiliation. But, at another level, their outlook amounts to an ironic 15 Thus, too, the much publicized induction of Bombay police officers to evaluate the impact of the film on public emotions. 16 According to the Muslim League corporator Yusuf Abrahani who has emerged as a spokesman of the protesters, the following scenes are anti-islamic: In a shot showing a procession of Hindus, a placard demands Tala Kholo... This is an obvious reference to the removal of locks on the Babri Masjid... The hero s father who is a Hindu flings money at the heroine s father, who is a brick manufacturer, and asks him to make bricks with Ram inscribed on them... There is a shot of the Babri Masjid. Even though its demolition is not shown, newspaper clippings carrying news about the demolition are shown while the soundtrack makes it clear that the structure is being demolished. Times of India, 9 April 1995.

260 244 The Melodramatic Public intensification of Chidananda Das Gupta s thesis that, in the case of the Indian audience, seeing is believing. 17 Das Gupta of course sought to conjure up a cognitive mind-set here, the gullible spectator for whom the impression of reality achieved by the cinema makes the unreal real. In this case of course the image refers to reality, and the lobby fears that to see it will make it, shall we say, more real or hyper-real. Whereas Eco uses that term to describe a striving for reality effects by cultures lacking history, 18 such as America, here I would suggest that we are presented with a very distinct viewpoint. The images in contention suggest that the sacred is fallible and can be violated. I am not suggesting that the Babri Masjid had an uncomplicated sacred status. Rather, I think what is important here is a process of displacement, where politics causes the sacred to resurface in particular locations which then come to stand not for the sacred but for the socio-political community constructed in its name. The hyper-reality effect then speaks of a particular imaginary public sphere in which images are impacted with affect, a cluster of emotive political intensities which become the object of psychic and public defence. Such an imaginary investment is not necessarily shared by the community as a whole. The trauma suffered by the mass of Muslim people over the destruction of the masjid is not under question here, but their hypostasization as community in the representational claims of both government and Muslim spokesmen is. The government displayed an intention to contain images which conjured a reality in which it was culpable. And the drive of Muslim leaders to erase the trajectory of loss may reveal a need to maintain the imaginary of the socio-political community in which they as a limited interest group have a particular stake. 19 Each of these components in the public response to Bombay are characterized by indifference to particular representations in favour of others. These investigations suggest that amnesia is a procedure more generally observable in the reception of popular narrative forms and goes against the grain of discontinuity which characterize these forms. In the case of Bombay, we have seen how censorship has contributed to certain discontinuities, but this does not explain all of them. The 17 Das Gupta, The Painted Face. 18 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper-Reality, London, Picador, Cf. for example, Rashmee Z. Ahmad s analysis of the protest by Sahabuddin Owaisi s Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen in Hyderabad. Bombay: Competitive Communalism, Times of India, 21 March 1995.

261 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 245 explanations of communal violence implicit in various parts of the film can be considered as comprising both discontinuity, and as organized in such a way that earlier events are systematically contained by later ones. The description of cultural difference through popular stereotype, the gesture to the documentary mode, the fictive reconstruction in its various hues, these modes of representation amount to a certain layering, iconically and temporally, of the narrative s construction of Indian identity. A deep structure of cultural difference provides the bedrock of perceptions, one coloured by Hindu, and more broadly modern modes of othering. While this never actually undergoes any change in the film, the figuration of the dangerous Hindu must cause us to reflect that the film s mode of address is a rather complicated one. These images need to be held onto even as we consider the operations of ideological coherence at work in the film. 5. The Navigation of Sectarian Differences: Community and Sexuality The Hindu right has been relatively quiet in the discussion around censorship. It was given a privileged position over Muslim groups when Amitabh Bachchan organized a meeting between Mani Rathnam and Bal Thackeray, providing the film s initial public image with a slanted sense of political negotiation. Despite liberal disclaimers, the film has not been able to discount this image in terms of the emphases of its own narrative structure. The discussion was a minimal but significant one. Apart from Thackeray s argument that the film should be renamed Mumbai, something he did not persist with, the Shiv Sena leader demanded the deletion of a scene showing his stand-in (Tinu Anand) repenting the riots. This demand reflected Thackeray s reading of the film s narrative of the riots as a Hindu retaliation against Muslim aggression. In other words, there was nothing to repent. 20 The Shiv Sena s relationship to the film has subsequently acquired the aura of a liberal defence of free speech; Thackeray stridently asserted that he would ensure the release of the film against the drive of the Muslim groups to have it banned. 21 This pattern of response indicates that the fiction does not, overall, directly assail the Hindu right or their under- 20 Sunday, 28 April 1995, He said efforts to give a communal tinge to the film s release would not be tolerated. Thackeray Warns Muslims on Bombay, Pioneer, 9 April 1995.

262 246 The Melodramatic Public standing of what happened. In fact, Thackeray called it a damned good film. 22 The Hindu right also had no objection to the film s romantic scenario; the official Muslim position, on the other hand, argued that the implication of Muslim tradition and identity in the heroine s moving out of the community (the association of the Koran with her flight to her lover, the throwing off of the burqa) was anti-islamic. 23 Characteristic of both positions, however, is the significance attributed to women in the definition of wider group identities. That communal spokesmen mirror each other in this premise is clear from the following statements: Love knows no barriers and can blossom even under a rain of fire and brimstone. No one can therefore object to a Muslim man falling in love with a Hindu woman and vice versa. Syed Shahabuddin 24 It was a fact that there were marriages between Hindu boys and Muslim girls, but no one created a fuss. Interview with Bal Thackeray. 25 We may observe that both spokesmen assume the masculine position for their community when they speculate about intercommunal marriages. While Bombay constitutes a departure in referring to such marriages, it does so within the rules of the Hindu nationalist hegemony that the popular cinema has by and large reproduced. The hero must come from the majority community, thereby exercising a symbolic patriarchal communal authority over the constitution of the nation. 26 Once again, Thackeray obviously has no problems on this account. 22 I Have Never Called Muslims Traitors, Says Bal Thackeray, Times of India, 31 March Times of India, 9 April Hindustan Times, 7 May Pioneer, 9 April Thackeray also noted that actors like Meena Kumari, Dilip Kumar, and Madhubala were Muslims and no one had objected when they took Hindu names. This again fits the rules of a Hindu nationalist hegemony, in which it is perfectly acceptable that minorities negate their identity and assume the majority one. 26 Cf. Javed Akhtar s eloquent elaboration of the problem of popular cinema s inability to represent Hindu Muslim romance: This is actually part of a larger taboo area in popular cinema... The real taboo is that a high-caste Hindu girl will never be shown marrying an outcaste boy. Never. If at all the great caste divide has to be bridged, it will be done via a high-caste boy falling in love with an outcaste girl, as

263 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 247 I want to reflect on how this order of symbolic narrative is worked out in the domain of romance, sexuality and of domestic life, and what tensions surface within a narrative of the subordination or assimilation of community identity through marriage. As with the larger narrative of public events, amnesia is important here too, and centres on the codes of deportment of the woman, and the signs through which she is represented. The first half of the film clearly codes Shaila as a Muslim, perhaps most emphatically in her springing free from her burqa to meet her beloved. From the time of her arrival in Bombay onwards, her identity is marked not through clothes and the burqa, but by her name. Though she does not apply sindoor or the bindi, she now wears the sari. The subtle neutralization of her identity is only seriously disturbed in the fleeting but significant glimpse of her going through the namaaz, during a song montage. The persistent signs of her Muslim identity derive from a narrative strategy which cannot afford to forget it entirely. To recall secures a position not only for Shaila the Muslim but also for a secular position which is provided with an assimilable rather than an intractable other (the one who bears the sword). The power-laden terms of the assimilation are indicated in Shaila s vulnerability, not only to larger public forces, but also, in her perception, to the whims of Hindu patriarchy. Thus Shaila anxiously enquires whether Narayan Mishra seeks to take her children away from her. The particular resonances of this scene are one of subtle masquerade, the Muslim woman pleading her case by adopting the demeanour and submissive idiom of the dutiful Hindu bahu. But the fragments of her Muslim identity are not easily dismissed. The instance of her prayer is assimilable because it fits the film s sociological imagination: the jeans and T-shirt-clad ex-hindu male stands discreetly in the background, overseeing his wife s immersion in prayer, the moment iconizing a benevolent (Hindu-derived) modernity indulging a private and unobtrusive Muslim religiosity. 27 However, a in Achoot Kanya, Sujaata, or Parineeta. Similarly, the one who rebels against the Hindu Muslim divide will never be the Hindu woman, it will be the Hindu man. Ratnam s Bombay bears this out. The Great Evasion, Times of India, Sunday Review, 23 April The other side of this indulgence is the hero s offer to give up his religion to compensate for his father s attitude. The offer is a gesture rather than a belief, and so does not compromise the modern transcendence of religious identity.

264 248 The Melodramatic Public more conflictual note is sounded when Shaila first enters Shekhar s landlord s house. In a film which obscures and hypostasizes the Muslim community, or frames it as otherwise assimilable, these circumstances force an assertion of identity from the heroine. Encircled by a shocked and pollution-fearing household, she firmly announces that she is a Muslim. However, beyond the fragment, which I take to be the transient surfacing of a silenced subjectivity, there is a mise-en-abime effect which derives from the observation of a structure of taboo, the repetitive tracing of a ritually coded mark of difference. The burqa as veil, as material which conceals, separates, but also allows a constrained intimacy, resurfaces when Shekhar grapples with Shaila through the saris on a washing line, and when Shaila s pallu covers her face when Shekhar kisses her. The sign of the taboo weaves into the narrative of assimilation, tracking back over it by maintaining a symbolic division even at the moment of consummation. (Fig. 41.) The film s complicity with community prohibition is woven into a larger narrative of the place of romance and sexuality in public and private spaces. Some of Bombay s critics have suggested that, from the Fig. 41: Bombay, Veiled Kiss.

265 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 249 beginning, the romance between Shekhar and Shaila is defined by a Hindu male gaze motivated by a curiosity to penetrate the exoticism of the other. 28 This interpretation fails to note that this gaze is an infringement of a prohibition with a much wider currency. This is the public monitoring and containment of sexuality, and its corollary, the difficulty of carving out a private sphere for the register of the intimate and the erotic. 29 The infringement of public regulation is common to popular film romance. As Khalid Mohammed and Iqbal Masud have pointed out, Bombay draws upon the tradition of the romantic Muslim social whose narrative is generated by a fleeting glimpse of the woman. 30 Bombay inaugurates its romantic scenario around a fantasy of the look roaming in public space, unbounded by public scrutiny. In the song sequence Kehna Hi Kya, Shekhar s free movement through the Muslim wedding yokes this fantasy to the tale of intercommunal love. Shaila is constantly repositioned for our and Shekhar s view within the characteristic discontinuities of the song sequence. The swish pan affords an accelerated pace for recentring the woman in different spaces and bodily dispositions. But its usage in the later riot scenes is anticipated here when Shaila, in a kaleidoscopic sweep, turns her look in search of Shekhar, whose look she has hitherto evaded. Centred on female performance for a male spectator, this turnaround in the last stages may be said to set the scene for Shaila s own desiring look at Shekhar in his family house and the subsequent centring of the man as vulnerable, emotional figure in the Tu hi re song sequence. The larger problems of the representation of romance and sexuality emerge only after the couple is married. Here the film defers the consummation of the marriage by denying privacy to the couple, children 28 Sadanand Menon, Bombay is Political Cinema at Its Best!, Economic Times, 16 April For a suggestive consideration of the problems surrounding the distinction between public and private in the constitution of the Indian cinema, see the work of Madhava Prasad, for example: Cinema and the Desire for Modernity, Journal of Arts and Ideas 25 6, Lenseye, Truth or Dare, Times of India, Sunday Review, 2 April 1995; Iqbal Masud, A Damp Squib, Indian Express, 14 May Masud castigates Mani Rathnam for not being able to understand and represent Muslim culture; one wonders if this is not to mistake the project of the film. Strangely, he advises viewers to see Nana Patekar in Krantiveer (1994) for a better representation of the riots. To my mind this is a film which underwrites Hindu male authority much more brutally than Bombay.

266 250 The Melodramatic Public of visiting relatives being quartered in the tenant s dwelling. This amounts to the institution of a public gaze within the fiction, mirroring the prohibitions of the censorship code. Does this articulation of the symbolic then negotiate a second-level prohibition with the imaginary, not only upholding the primacy of patriarchal communal norms but their extended observation in the marking out of a space between communities? We may turn to the position of the Hindu matriarch of the household for an elaboration of this problem of the public and the private. In opposition to the street mother who flirts with Shekhar, this one highlights in her person the repressiveness which Narayan Mishra and her own husband transcend (she also balances an absence: a Hindu matriarchal presence in the absence of Narayan Mishra s wife). This return of a repressive attitude serves to point up the question of boundaries, the playing out of those everyday taboos through the vehicle of women as prime repository of the virtues and rituals of the household. The Muslim woman has to be made acceptable in everyday Hindu life, so the Hindu landlady as the domestic image of a communal ethos has to be humanized. She is shown to relent at the sight of heady, youthful love. When Shekhar mistakenly embraces her in his pursuit of Shaila, she is taken aback and is then made to smile. Put plainly, this is an instance of bad acting. A glitch in the performance of a minor character suggests a problem for representation; how to employ marginal characters in such a way that the transformation of attributes, their main function, does not appear imposed on the material. If such minor systems of representation fail, an interesting gap opens up in the relations between the pro-filmic and the filmic, where the former becomes a kind of unnarrativized dead weight in the texture of the narration. Put into the structure of the film s regime of affect, the failure of performance suggests a difficulty in superseding an earlier representation. The transformation of this character that follows is still inflected with an anxiety: the young couple, walking through the proximate red light area are shooed into the domestic interior by the matriarch, anxious that their flirtation is not the object of public scrutiny. Why is this Hindu domestic space composed in such tight narrative proximity to the red light area? Shekhar and Shaila s walk is cast against the backdrop of his rueful exchange with the prostitutes; perhaps the narrative invites us to speculate about a bachelor s familiarity with

267 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 251 these women. But the point is that the couple, on the threshold of sexual relations now that the children have left their apartment, communicate the taint of sexuality from one space into the other, eliciting the matriarch s anxious plea that they go inside. The red light area then becomes a metaphor for the sexuality of the couple, one which the matriarch must conceal in the household. We can see a slippage here between the general prohibitions operating around the companionate couple, and their particular refraction through the prohibitions of a Hindu Muslim romance. In contrast to the amnesiac propensities of the narrative, whose problems and uncertain features are periodically suppressed, a performative register is drawn upon to invest the surplus arising from the deferment of the couple s sexuality. In the song sequence Hamma Hamma identity is transformed arbitrarily, relayed now in the way the lovers are projected through their bodies and to the rhythms of discosensuality. Instead of a careful development of expressive attributes through narration, these are abruptly rendered through gesture and performance. Indeed, this is a performative coding of the access to sexuality, one displaced onto the Hamma Hamma performance, where the figure in white from the Kahna hi kya song sequence returns as a ramp artist (Sonali Bendre). The problems of identity addressed in the narrative are fleetingly transcended. Skirting the requirements of character development, modernity defines itself here as composed of the pleasures of performative surfaces rather than authentically evolved psychologies. And with disposition of the body now integral to the cultural refashioning of the character, there is a foregrounding of the vivacity of the star personality, Koirala s impishness surfacing from the constraints of the shy and timid Shaila. However, there is still a trace of the problem sexuality poses for the narrative in the strangely ornate and sleazy environs of the performance; here couples are glimpsed in intimate poses as they take pleasure in the dance. While the sexuality of the couple is secured in the domestic interior, a peculiar undertow of the illicit and disreputable suffuses the scene. 6. Self-Alienation in the Constitution of Decommunalized Space Performance contrived out of generic resources such as the romantic Muslim social and the fashion show allows for a release from the

268 252 The Melodramatic Public constraints of social representation. As a result, the film generates a certain spectrum of personality traits rather than a tightly coded pattern of identity. Something of these effects of dispersal characterize the climactic sequence, in which a multi-communal agency as agency of re-paration (now forgotten in the more characteristic narrative of the mainstream cinema) intervenes in the riots to recover the image of an inclusive nationhood. However, this agency too is hierarchically coded, and finally clusters around the offer of sacrifice from the position of a modern Hindu identity. This particular organization of moral authority is clearly highlighted in the film s climax. The actions are systematically developed along a particular axis. Shekhar s defence of a Muslim family from a Hindu mob provides the focal point for other similar actions, and has the phenomenal form of an epicentre, the travelling camera describing an arc around his space. New spaces in which other agents neutralize communal antagonism follow on from this key action and space, our views being calibrated to its rhythms of representation, with segments getting shorter, and a greater frequency to the recurrence of the original scene, on which, of course, the sequence concludes. If this master space generates the narrative rhythm of the sequence, it also provides rules for the construction of decommunalized space. Pacification is undertaken by figures who make appeals to aggressors of their own denomination. There is an important implication to this. As they are amongst their co-religionists, they can draw upon the safety of a common identity; they are not victims pleading for their lives, they are not the other, but an alienated figuration of the self. While these figures perform at the boundary of identity, an active claiming of the other as the self, as in the case of the Muslim woman who claims those she protects as her child and her sister, is not a common strategy. It could be said then that the hero generates a model, an exemplary instance which is echoed in a number of actions of a similar kind. But this model of decommunalization has a certain discreteness of community address built into it. There is a suggestion here that the film s vision of the bringing to an end of antagonism nevertheless entails the reproduction of difference. However, there are two, possibly three instances in which the rule of community self-address does not operate. The first instance is that of the policeman who intervenes between communities, gesturing here to the highly ideological image of a transcendent state. The second is the hijra, whose self-image is beech wala,

269 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 253 one who stands in between. This ironical self-image alludes of course to gender identity as well as community identity, suggesting that there is a relationship between a clearcut communal identity and a clearcut sexual one. The idiom here would conjure up a certain distance from the gendered terms through which hierarchies of authority and submission, oppressor and victim, are played out across the masculinefeminine opposition. But the hijra is shown to be protecting a Muslim from a Hindu mob, rather than mediating in between communities. The placement of this character therefore establishes a homology with others similarly placed, and pre-eminently with the hero. For the hijra, like the hero, invites the mob to kill the dissenter first. This doubling must not obscure an earlier identity that the hermaphrodite conjures up, that of the mother who protects the lost child; after all, the first, fleeting image we have of the hijra is as a figure in a sari...but perhaps we are doing a disservice to this figure by constraining him/her within this grid of parallels; for the main parallel, the hero, proceeds through a process of negating identity to the avowal of an Indian identity, something the hijra never does. 7. Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of Self-Sacrifice Let me go back now to the set of problems which have emerged in the course of this analysis. How does the film s project of a transcendent secular modernity and national identity square with its reproduction of the minority as other? At one level it can do this because it figures modernity as evolving from the trajectory of Hindu subjectivity. To that extent it remains within the conventions of the popular Indian cinema. It is this authoritative structure which generates a number of apparently dissonant elements: from the invocation of popular stereotypes of the Muslim and the film s skewed rendering of their role in the riots, to the position of assimilation (through marriage) and multicommunity integration on the model of the Hindu hero at the climax. We can see that the apex Hindu position identifies the particular position the minority is to occupy in various situations. However, against the drive to coherence in the text and its various public constructions, I suggest that we need to locate the sources of discontinuity, and to capture its timbre. The key issue here is how the narrative places the spectator; how does it seek to persuade us of its

270 254 The Melodramatic Public particular project of modernity? It does this, I suggest, by inviting us to assume a melodramatic subjection, where notations of victimhood and powerlessness bind us to the film s vision. It is clear enough that in the case of the Muslim woman, the terrified children, and ultimately even the grandparents, we are immersed in a melodramatic subjecthood, the situation of the disempowered. But how does the film work out a relationship between the hero s authoritative position and such a melodramatic subjection? Is a position of narrative authority, defined by a culturally confident voicing of a rational-humane viewpoint, automatically a position with which we can identify? Or does some other process, or repositioning, have to take place? For there is no automatic process by which we should empathize with the hero s attributes. Indeed, Shekhar s passion for Shaila is attractive not because it is controlled but because it is out of control, tumultuous, culminating in the remarkable agony of the song Tu hi re, where the hero s face crumbles in a helpless weeping. There are notations here of hysteria, of an outpouring that will not be contained by the confidence of rational outlook and disposition. It is such an aspect of melodramatic excess that the film uses to structure subjectivity, a strategy through which the rational modern both creates affect by a focus on the powerless and then increasingly thematizes itself as ultimate locus of the marginal and the dispossessed (a patriarch without his children). This is an unusual narrative strategy, for it is much more common that innocence and victimization, and in terms of narrative tropes, silence, are favoured to elicit feelings of pathos. 31 Here it is the clearly articulated voice of rationality that is put on the margins, bearing a truth-claiming rhetoric, but a powerless one. This rationality on the margins ironically displaces the feminine figure who would be the conventional locus of such a disempowerment, appropriating to its person those feminine features of emotionality and, most interestingly, a making vulnerable of the body. There is a working out here of a logic stated early in the film where Shekhar cuts his hand to indicate the depth of his passion for Shaila. 32 The culmination of this repositioning of the body as object of a self-inflicted wound occurs when Shekhar douses himself with kerosene and invites the rampaging Hindu mob to burn him alive. 31 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. 32 This is of course followed by the much more ambiguous and for me repulsive act of Shekhar cutting Shailabano s arm for a blood-bonding.

271 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 255 This invitation to harm the body follows upon two premises: the hero s negation of his given identity and his making that negation visible. In negating his given religious identity he embraces sheer negativity: hum koi nahin hain; but then he claims a name: hum sirf Indian hain. In the second move, the hero, safe from aggression, desires, demands that he be like the other, and that the threat of the self he denies be visited upon him. The hero s invitation that the mob immolate him is a direct visual and rhetorical throwback to Rishi Kumar s throwing himself on the burning Indian flag in Roja, except that act was not preceded by a step of negation; there was a repulsive fullness to the protagonist s affirmation of an identity. (Figs , p. 256.) In contrast, it is the negativity of Bombay which puts nationalistic rhetoric into perspective as predicated not on a fullness but on an absence of identity. The rhetoric distinguishes the hero and makes him visible amongst a body of other Hindus, the distinction of marginality proving to be the yardstick of difference. The narrative effects a displacement of authority where the hero s confidence, his control over his destiny at the microcosmic level, at the level of decisions concerning family and career is rendered ineffectual when the wider universe consorts to negate that logic of freedom. Melodramatic subjection here enforces an evacuation of positions of power and authority in a nightmare articulation of the desire to negate oneself publicly, to exonerate oneself of the taint of identity. The hero s offer of sacrifice requires us to reflect on certain practices of male self-immolation. The Tamil instance and after all, this is also a Tamil film 33 has been associated with the cult of MGR and also with Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka. The Tamil experience offers a negation/sublimation of the self into the large image of the leader, an image which is indeed confirmed and constituted by such acts. The second instance is that of the anti-mandal agitation which dramatized the despair of an identity grounded in perceptions of fallen status, but also reflected the sense of closure amongst isolated lower-middle-class youth. 34 The Mandal context did not provide the act with a positive 33 But, unlike Roja, it is not primarily a Tamil film. In its conception from the outset as a multiple version film it is a new type of film which is also an old one, harking back to the 1930s practices. A more considered analysis of this feature is necessary to situate the film market as a critical component in Mani Rathnam s nation. 34 Cf., for example, Dinesh Mohan, Imitative Suicides? and Harsh Sethi, Many Unexplained Issues: The Anti-Mandal Suicides Spate, Manushi 63 4, March June 1991, 31 3 and

272 256 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 42 Fig. 43 Figs 42 and 43, Roja, and Bombay, Bodies for Burning.

273 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 257 or purposive name such as leader or nation. However, the image of the immolation was appropriated to a discourse of merit generated by the privileged and mobile sections of the middle class who linked it to a dynamic of national reconstruction. One could speculate that these acts emerge out of a sense of marginality, an experience obscured by the discourses surrounding them. Rishi Kumar s act in Roja reproduces the discourse of appropriation by sublimating individual, class, and in this case, regional identity, into that of the nation. Bombay, on the other hand, echoes much more strongly the negativity which underlies discourses of sacrifice. While speaking in the name of humanity and nationhood, Shekhar Mishra simultaneously speaks the language of alienation, indeed of revulsion. Although Roja and Bombay solicit quite different sentiments, both arise from a similar subjectivity: that of a modern nationalist view, with the modern hero bearing the characteristic attributes of professional identity, cosmopolitanism, ideological humanism, rationalism, and the marginalization of religion. In Roja, the hero s religion is at best a desire for a life-style which is simple, unadorned, and therefore gesturally fulfils that need of the modern to secure its roots, to specify an identity. Otherwise the significance of Hindu identity derives not from its reference to religiosity, but its capacity to adapt to modern social and cultural processes, and is cast in opposition to the intractable Muslim fanaticism of the Kashmiri separatists. 35 In contrast, in Bombay the hero finds himself stranded on the margins of a social space inundated with genocidal identity conflicts in which he is ultimately pitted against Hindus. Alienation from the Muslim other is here subordinated to self-alienation. The desired identity is always above other identities, and this transcendental situation has a name: Indian. It is against this resolution that Sadanand Menon expresses his unease, indeed abhorrence, urging that a resolution of conflicts cannot be founded on transcendental denial but on an admission of difference and an acceptance of it. 36 Important (and difficult) as this argument is, it perhaps fails to consider that whatever the cultural thinness of the modern-universal, its 35 Significantly, the Muslim is a modern too, one who has denied rationality but can be recovered into it; the hero and the extremist leader can speak the same language, not only Tamil, but intellectually, too. 36 Bombay is Political Cinema at Its Best!

274 258 The Melodramatic Public will to negativity exercises pressure on the notion of a single dominant identity. It is through such a negativity that it is possible to conceive of the aspects of discontinuity which characterize the film. The dangerous Hindu, perhaps the most startling image the film has generated, emerges from the negative reflections of a protagonist whose modernity must at once derive from his Hinduness and deny it of any significance. It is thus a peculiarly inward discourse of the self, an inwardness which allows for the peculiar self-alienation which abides in the film alongside the firm tracing of the communal other. The modern ponders on its national unease, performs versions of itself that abruptly and pleasurably depart from troubled scenarios of antagonistic identity, and generates spaces in which the other may be assimilated only to surface in a less congenial disposition. That discontinuity at the level of form and narrative statement can be integrated within the conflicts of a unique subjectivity must lead to scepticism. I can only suggest, in conclusion, that this is indeed my own surmise, and leaves me to conjure with the disconcertingly calm reflections of a subjectivity which should have no room in this narrative discourse: We know hundreds of people fall in love with persons of another religious community, caste, and marry the person they love. A film cannot be rejected on that ground. And it is for the people themselves to judge whether a film is worth watching or not. In the case of Bombay also, the Muslim masses did not respond to the Muslim leaders initiative We can only wait upon the moment of the popular to disabuse us of the impertinence of analysis. 37 Asghar Ali Engineer, A Controversial Film on Bombay Riots, Mainstream, 6 May 1995, 6.

275 8 Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999) 1. Plot Synopsis In Chennai, on 6 December 1999, an old man, Saket Ram (Kamalahasan), is in a critical condition, and it s from his point of view that the film flashes back to the Partition period. Archaeologists at Mortimer Wheeler s dig at Mohenjo Daro, Ram and his colleague Amjad Khan (Shah Rukh Khan), are abruptly asked to pack up when Hindu Muslim riots erupt. Ram returns to Calcutta to be with his beloved, Aparna (Rani Mukherjee), and finds the streets torn by marauding Muslim crowds answering Jinnah s Direct Action call. A nightmarish account of Direct Action Day follows, with Aparna raped and killed by Muslims. Amongst these is a tailor, Altaf, well known to Ram, and Ram himself is almost sodomized by the tailor s mate. Ram subsequently finds and kills Altaf, and witnesses the systematic execution of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs. Assailed by guilt at his actions, Ram meets a Hindu firebrand, Abhyankar, who urges Ram to join him on his shikar to hunt down Muslims. It is, however, Gandhi whom Abhyankar deems most culpable for the tragic fate of Hindus because of his alleged appeasement of Muslim leaders. A numbed Ram returns to Madras, where he submits to the desires of his Iyengar family and marries Maithili (Vasundhra Das). The two travel to Maharashtra to meet Abhyankar, now the protégé of a fundamentalist Hindu raja. A friend from the past, Lalvani, a Sindhi merchant, fortuitously surfaces at this point, a figure ravaged by the rape

276 260 The Melodramatic Public and murder of his wife, the loss of his daughters, and the destruction of his business in Karachi. The raja responds compassionately to this devastated figure and provides him with a job. Ram s indoctrination continues, and, when Abhyankar is crippled in a riding accident, Ram is chosen to take his place as Gandhi s assassin. Ram prepares for this through elaborate rituals performed at Benares and arrives in Delhi where he stakes out the Birla Mandir for his assassination bid. A plot twist takes him to the Muslim quarters of old Delhi, where he happens upon his old friend Amjad who, despite personal losses incurred during the riots, remains fervent in his Gandhian values. At first implacable in his Hindutva beliefs, Ram s attitude changes when Amjad is threatened by what are clearly RSS incendiaries. He defends Amjad and his family, but Amjad dies. Overwhelmed, Saket Ram, now celebrated as the defender of Muslims, goes to seek atonement for his sins from the Mahatma, only to see him felled by Godse s bullet. A traumatized Ram removes Gandhi s sandals and glasses, and we subsequently find these housed in the room where Ram lives out his later life in darkness and silence. This museum of personal history is hung about with numerous photos, and a huge image of the Mahatma is pasted over the windows. In a peculiarly haunting and ambiguous last shot, as the credits roll Saket Ram s grandson opens these windows, and light begins flooding through and fragmenting the Mahatma s image. Here I examine Kamalahasan s controversial film Hey Ram! along the following axes of reflection. What new perspective does the film offer on the traumatic Partition of the subcontinent? And from what location in contemporary politics and culture does it launch this reflection? In other words, how does the film s historiographical agenda relate to present imperatives for issues of identity formation? The question of perspective here is also one of narrative point of view. It leads to a second series of reflections on the structure of filmic story telling, and whether the film offers the spectator a coherent perspective on its narrative world. I will seek to focus on the contradictory effects of the film, the distinct uncertainty which viewers experience when confronted with the inflammatory images and voices that conjure up a narrative of Muslim bloodlust and Hindu trauma and retaliation. The uncertainty is compounded because these deeply troubling passages

277 Another History Rises to the Surface 261 seem to be only ineptly redressed by less forceful narrative moves to distance the spectator from an extreme Hindutva perspective. I want to place this analysis in terms of larger issues of popular cinematic form: specifically around the question of how a melodramatic mode of narration has been subjected to revision in the contemporary era. In particular, I want to consider how the sweep of melodrama s Manichaean, bipolar universe is refigured against the grid of contemporary political systems. This is an arena far removed from the original contexts of the melodramatic mode which negotiated shifts in social experience away from the certitudes of traditional hierarchies and concepts of the sacred. 1 Of central concern here is the changed location of the sacred itself, now transposed onto the domain of nationhood and its key icons such as the Mahatma. I am also concerned with the way narratives of national origins turn on the public modes of address of melodramatic performance. In this rendering, the individual agent is subsumed as a hyperbolic incarnation of the national drama even when a specifically psychological set of motifs ineradicable feelings of loss and guilt, for example are deployed. Arguably, such characterization complicates any project of empathetic identification. For in this film the narrative seeks to construct the character through a personalized discourse of history, but also by staging identity as spectacle, and therefore in a key which does not quite allow us, as spectators, to internalize the character. 2 This melodramatic staging of history, in which the character is a figure who performs for us rather than is us, directs attention to the particular regime of play associated with the star personality of Kamalahasan. The actor is known for his extensive experiments with cinematic representations of bodily mutation through physical contortions, makeup, and digital manipulation. These performative dimensions may speak to the what-if, fiction-foregrounding premise of the narrative its invitation to reimagine the history of the nation-state as a biography of murder and revenge that speaks to the suppressed desires of Hindus at large. They braid in with the regime of play generated 1 For a more extended discussion of melodrama, see ch. 1 above. 2 See Madhava Prasad s suggestive distinction between empathetic identification and symbolic identification, the latter encouraging a relationship of representation for the viewer rather than similarity. Prasad, The Aesthetic of Mobilization, Ideology of the Hindi Film.

278 262 The Melodramatic Public by the film s deployment of video-game structures and digital modes in key sequences. The cinematic art of the index, in which the photographed object leaves its physical trace on the film stock, is here challenged by a regime of effects that manipulate the image internally, without any relationship to an external referent. I suggest that these devices invite us (at least temporarily) to disengage from a relationship to history as something grounded in materially defined socio-political experience. Instead of this happened or Godse killed Gandhi, the issue becomes any Hindu could have killed Gandhi and I invite you to re-play that possibility through a regime of images. Hey Ram renders cinema and history as manipulable, as open to the play of desire which is in the active process of constitution. Yet, in essaying this, the film nevertheless seems to come up against a blockage, as if it cannot produce a new symbolic structure and national biography that will entirely replace earlier ones. The crisis in national identification signalled by the film and the shifting, unanchored structure of the postcinematic signifier push protagonist and spectator to the brink of an imaginative abyss. As I will suggest, melodramatic history in the age of digital simulation produces uncanny compensations to recover meaning and the lost object of sacralized nationhood. 2. A New History? In interviews, Kamalahasan has said that it took him some time to understand that Pakistan was not just another country, it was a religion. 3 In another context, drawing attention to an iconoclastic disposition in himself, he has spoken, ironically but not without seriousness, of the oedipal contest with the father, referring to the Mahatma, but also, perhaps, to Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker the ideologue of the anti-caste non-brahmin movement of Tamilnadu. The director s rather cryptic references to Periyar suggest that the Dravida Kazhagam movement had fashioned a cultural hegemony within which some Brahmins such as himself had also distanced themselves from their identity. The situation has now changed, though the account does not provide us with a sense of how this happened and of its implications. 4 3 Interview in Screen, 4 February Seminar on Gandhi, Film and History, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), April 2000.

279 Another History Rises to the Surface 263 What is being signalled here is a basic shift in perspective, one that marks the passing of a time in which there was a certain consensus about leading figures such as Gandhi and Periyar in an official or overt public discourse about secularism, democracy, and identity. Running parallel with such discourses was a repressed and therefore potentially seductive domain of beliefs and affiliations that could not be spoken loudly and fulsomely because it was deemed politically incorrect by reigning hegemonies. There are three strands involved here: the history of the Hindu public s relationship with minority communities; that of the Tamil to questions of caste and his/her place within the wider formation of the Indian nation-state; and, finally, the Hindutva critique of secularism functioning as a new common sense which fashions its own repression of Hindu identity and memory. I will come back to the last and most complicated of these formulations later. The secularism developed under the Congress state is now under sustained attack from the Hindu Right which castigates it for appeasing a minority characterized as reactionary and backward. In the Hindutva perspective, this appeasement has not only undermined the Hindu majority but also India s investment in modernizing initiatives. The Hindu Right seeks to attribute responsibility to the Muslim for historical atrocities visited on the majority, and to effect the proper subordination of the Muslim, and other minority communities, to the Hindu in the name of a majoritarian diktat. From an entirely different location the secularism of the nation-state has been critiqued for its politically repressive projects by left-wing, feminist, and Dalit intellectuals. One point of criticism is the covert complicity of the nation-state with high-caste Hindu elite and with reactionary elements in minority community formations. Secularism is blamed for having excluded the articulation of the specific cultural and political dimensions of low-caste and Dalit subordination. It is also said to have excluded other ways of thinking about the relation of community and nation-state than that of a composite yet hierarchized nationalism. 5 At one level, Hey Ram would seem to be aligned with the Hindu Right s unleashing of certain public discourses, its narrative highlighting Muslim atrocities and underwriting high-caste Hindu identity as 5 This current is probably best represented by Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.

280 264 The Melodramatic Public the vehicle of a resurgent nationalism. Here lies the importance of the janeu, the sacred thread worn by the twice-born, the talisman through which Abhyankar recognizes Ram for what he is and what binds them. This talisman seeks to undertake a symbolic transformation, forging a pan-indian elite that will be the vanguard for the reconstruction of the nation-state. Some of the narrative also hints at contemporary Hindu grievances through a displaced reference in the figure of the devastated Sindhi merchant Lalvani. His uprootedness from region, the ruination of his property and family, could clearly refer to the current anguish of the Kashmiri Hindu community. As Pankaj Butalia has remarked, it is significant that while the film has been attacked by a number of groups, and especially the Congress, the RSS has remained quiet about it; perhaps because the film has told the tale from their point of view. 6 On the other hand, in the representation of Tamil identity, Hey Ram! is part of a recent current that challenges the Dravidian movement s influence by highlighting two features in the hero s profile, his Brahmanical identity, and his identification with the broader Indian nation-state. The DMK-influenced cinema of the 1940s and 1950s subjected the brahmanical order to a radical critique. It also distanced itself from the web of imperatives set by a North Indian nationalism, drawing on the anti-hindi movement as a crucial vector of Tamil nationalism. 7 We have observed such transformations in other Tamil films, especially the work of Mani Rathnam, in Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), where elite, if not Brahmin-coded characters, urbane, cosmopolitan professionals, had thrown themselves into situations of patriotic endeavour, in Kashmir and Bombay. 8 This would have been an alien agenda for an earlier generation of Tamil directors. 9 Hey Ram 6 Presentation at the seminar, Gandhi, Film and History, NMML, 4 April However, Butalia went on to suggest that the film controverts this possibility in its conclusion. 7 See, for example, Pandian, Parashakthi: The Life and Times of a DMK Film, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. 8 M.S.S. Pandian has suggested to me that Mani Rathnam in fact consciously uses non-brahmin characters, as if to deflect criticism that tales of modernity and modernization are inevitably associated with brahmanical destinies in popular Tamil perception. Personal conversation. 9 This does not apply only to an earlier generation. Mani Rathnam s Nayakan (1988) tracks the alienated circumstances of the Tamil poor in Bombay, showing its hero violently resisting the dictates of local policemen and politicians to carve out a space for his community. It has been argued that the shift in representation takes place

281 Another History Rises to the Surface 265 follows in the wake of this shift, but is even more strident, exhibiting no anxiety about emphasizing the hero s Brahmin identity. In fact, this becomes a crucially enabling identity. It generates a neo-traditional invocation of an archaic and hierarchical Hindu symbolic order as the ritual form through which the narrative can elaborate a renunciatory relationship for the higher cause of national regeneration. This construction of the neo-traditional is pitted against another version of the traditional, that of the Tamil Iyengar household which underwrites the Mahatma s vision of the nation. Thus Ram s motherin-law strongly affirms the power of Gandhian non-cooperation, and her husband is part of Gandhi s entourage. This Iyengar household is suggestive of the earlier linkage between nationalism, modernity, and high-caste society emblematized by a leader such as C. Rajagopalachari. The hero distances himself from this earlier, unmarked identity formation, turning instead to an aggressively figured pan- Indian Hindu consciousness grounded in Brahmanism as politically symbolic identity. These trends in the Tamil cinema are part of a long-term concern to succeed in the Hindi market, the most substantial domestic market, through dubbed and multiple versions. The new feature is to yoke this drive into the national market to a pan-indian patriotism that thrusts the Tamilian into a wider political agenda. It has been argued that Mani Rathnam s films negotiate a new position for the Tamilian visà-vis the Indian nation-state as an entity now reconfigured onto the global stage. The earlier investment of popular film in a narrative of alienation from the West, defined by caricatures of English-speaking westernized Indians, sexually permissive, and indifferent to family allegiances, is now suppressed. Instead audiences are invited to identify with the urbane, English-knowing, cosmopolitan figure. It is as if a conduit had been set up between Tamilness and a new trans-regional national elite at par with its global counterparts, a new stage for mobility at home and around the globe. 10 There are wider historical transformations therefore being channelled through Kamalahasan s casual references to an oedipal logic challenging the father, be it Gandhi or Periyar. However, to take these after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by the LTTE, from when films started demonstrating the pan-indian nationalist credentials of Tamil protagonists. 10 See, for example, Tejaswini Niranjana, Integrating Whose Nation? Tourists and Terrorists in Roja, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 (3), 15 January 1994.

282 266 The Melodramatic Public remarks at face value, especially in relation to the Mahatma, may be to ignore certain tensions within the project. This is something I will return to later, after tracking some of the key representational strategies used in the film. 3. Publicizing an Unofficial History Central to Hey Ram!, and more generally to the popular Indian cinema, is the concept of an iconic history. The past is rendered through a set of emblematic figures, locations, and events which are deployed to represent that which is already known. It is important here to distinguish between contexts of knowledge. As I noted earlier, the secularist project has been criticized for not accurately representing historical realities for the Hindu Right this includes an account of Muslim atrocities against Hindus. This has long been one of the strands which contend within the popular Hindu understanding of the national past, but it did not force its way into the official discourse of political parties and in arenas such as the cinema until the substantial emergence of the Sangh Parivar. Manohar Shyam Joshi, who wrote the dialogue for Hey Ram!, noted that it had brought widely held popular attitudes into the cinema for the first time. This iconized history is the sort familiar from pilgrimage maps and hagiographies, where the life of the bhakt, heroic figure, or exemplary character is charted through his association with particular events and iconic spaces. The figure who carries the destiny of society in his life story may authenticate certain historical constructions by his status as witness. Even more seductive and insidious is the character on whose body and mind these public histories are imprinted through the direct experience of loss and suffering. This strategy works most transparently through the function of rape narratives. Nothing breaches the boundaries between the public and the private in as devastating a fashion. At issue here is not only a partisan, Hindu communalized reading of history, but the fact that this has been mobilized into the cinema. The flashback devoted to Direct Action Day, events which Kamalahasan described in an interview as an execution by the Muslim community of Jinnah Sahib s orders, 11 has in some fundamental sense broken the rules by which communal conflict was represented in popular Indian 11 Television interview with Kamalahasan on BBC, February 2000.

283 Another History Rises to the Surface 267 cinema: the Muslim crowd banging at the windows of Ram s car, suggestive of a primordial simian mass; the Muslim tailor, welcoming his salivating mates to gang-rape the winsome Aparna (the use of the popular teen star Rani Mukherjee hyperbolizes the horror); Ram tied down and vulnerable to somewhat different pleasures, the threat of sodomization suggestive of Hindu masculine anxieties; and, finally, the blood welling up from the slit throat of the dying wife. In its extended, graphic description of Muslim bloodlust and sexual assault reiterated in other stories told by Hindus in the film Hey Ram goes against the secular discretion exercised by popular film. That Saket Ram subsequently feels guilt-stricken at having let vengeful and murderous instincts towards the Muslims take him over hardly neutralizes the bestiality we have witnessed. The undermining of such popular conventions is not necessarily wrong in itself, and its functions are something we will come back to later. In the sections of the film devoted to Saket Ram s relationship with Abhyankar, the Hindu extremist gives voice to the familiar set of criticisms against the Mahatma. The belief that Hindus and Muslims can or should be allied is lampooned as naïve in the wake of the traumatic suffering Hindus have suffered at Muslim hands. In such exchanges, the film mobilizes a black humour on the side of the Hindutva ideologue, and allows it to gain resonance. Subsequently, Ram is drawn into the logic of Hindutva perception by Abhyankar and the princely ruler. The iconographic rendering of the Hindutva conspiracy retains the disturbing features I have described earlier. The native ruler is a figure of regal equipoise, benevolent and deliberate in his demeanour. The ruined Sindhi merchant s tale of Hindu loss is received with a paternalist concern by the Hindu raja. However, from within this scenario a more sinister image for the raja also emerges. The secret meetings between Ram and the others take place in a room ornamented with portraits of Hitler and Savarkar. In the director s account, this appears to function as a critique, putting the movement into the perspective of a rightist alignment with racist ramifications. 12 However, there has always been considerable ambiguity in India towards the Nazi movement and Japanese fascism, ambivalence suggestive of a fascination in Indian nationalism with military assertion and a strong nation-state. 12 At the seminar, Gandhi, Film and History, NMML, 4 April 2000.

284 268 The Melodramatic Public Abhyankar is crippled in a fall from a horse, and the film then employs a heroic Hindu iconography to figure Ram as he takes over the role of Gandhi s assassin. He is framed in battle with the elements, after which he undergoes a ritual renunciation in Benares. This is an iconography now familiar from the Ayodhya movement to destroy the Babri Masjid, one expressive of the desire to refigure a deity defined by the attributes of a harmonious disposition into one governed by aggressive drives Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation Marks I suggest that these passages are crucial to what I would call a narrative method without quotation marks. Realist narratives commonly attempt to outline a superior narrative authority which stands above the text, quotes various points of view, and arranges these into a hierarchical formation for the reader/viewer, allocating different truth and moral claims to the statements over the time of the narrative. 14 A statement which has a particular rhetorical power at one point may be controverted in the overall architecture of statements. The more simplified structures of melodrama do something similar, by marking out a series of bipolar oppositions that suggest who is good, who is bad. However, in Hey Ram, neither at the time of their occurrence, nor retrospectively, are certain sequences properly situated in terms of the overall architecture of the narrative. This is especially notable of the scenes relating to Abhyankar, the princely ruler, and the fashioning of Ram into an icon of a heroic Hindutva. Clearly, the director intended some of this to be menacing, especially the passages relating to the Hindutva conspiracy in the native state. At such points, the film could be interpreted as a critique of the politics, narratives, and symbols associated with a resurgent political Hinduism, its ties to other right wing movements and, indeed, to contemporary Hindutva. But the film cannot or will not provide a structured distance through which the spectator can view these passages, by putting them into quotation marks, that is, as something being commented upon rather than inviting identification. 13 Anuradha Kapur, Deity to Crusader: The Hindutva Movement in Ayodhya, in Pandey, ed., Hindus and Others. 14 For example, Colin McCabe, The Classical Realist Text, Screen 15 (2), 1974.

285 Another History Rises to the Surface 269 This unauthorized form of storytelling, in which a stance is not outlined for what is said and shown, is quite different from the disjointed but nevertheless morally structured melodramas of the Indian popular cinema. Showing something without being able to explain it or asking the audience to assume a definite stance towards it, allows the director to say he was being critical of the Hindutva perspective in precisely those passages where the textual organization leaves one bemused about the film s point of view. Is the image or narrative account we see meant to be menacing or laudatory? Does it invite reflection, or does it simply court fascination with the charismatic Hindu personality and Hindu masculine assertion, and employ a narrative rhetoric prejudiced against Muslims? Apart from the ambiguous passages, the textual organization does not allow for a refutation of any of the micro-narrations that recount a Hindutva scenario of Muslim bloodlust and the Mahatma s politics of appeasement. The overall architecture lets these elements float, and despite the ambiguities of the film s conclusion, they return as irreducible features of the historical memory relayed by the film. Strangely, the much more offensive passages are those in which the film apparently seeks to take a stronger position against the Hindu Right. The turning point in Ram s development, his conversion after the meeting with Amjad and defence of the embattled Muslim community against Hindu extremists, is particularly offensive. For here, in the name of a reformed, more humane perspective, the film unself-consciously conforms to the prevailing Hindutva ideology that a Hindu nation provided with a renewed sense of its potency will provide protection to the minority from majoritarian extremists. 5. Reading Hindutva Masculinity The complexity of the narrative strategy is augmented by a series of images and sequences that invite an ironic perspective rather than relay a didactic position. There is a subtle way in which the desire for masculine potency is implicitly tied to colonial affiliations. Thus, apart from the expression of male action through the hunt held in the native kingdom, there is also a set piece in which the men, sporting solar topis, engage in a game of polo. The interweaving of a colonial masculine sport with the desires of Hindu political assertion outline linkages which may be quite uncomfortable for anyone looking to authentic indigenous coordinates for the heroic Hindu.

286 270 The Melodramatic Public Clear anti-hindutva positions are also articulated through Maithili, Saket Ram s second wife. She is introduced to us as someone who believes in the Mahatma, and insists on a dialogue on this with her husband. Following on from the sensual play between Ram and Aparna another field of desire opens up, posing an alternative realm of human possibility than the male-bonded assertion of Hindutva. In the scenes in the princely kingdom, this dialogue between Maithili and Ram is displaced into a logic of sensual and spatial oppositions. From the moment of their arrival, Maithili inducts a discordant note into the designs of Abhyankar. Disconcerted to find Ram married, Abhyankar seeks to immerse Ram into a different sensate universe by plying him with an intoxicant. However, the results are quite contradictory, retrieving the strange images which haunt Ram, as when Maithili is transfigured into the orphaned Muslim girl whose plight Ram witnessed during the Partition killings in Calcutta. (See Figs ) In an unusual fashion, the sensual here retrieves an image for the conscience, a sense of the desire to be in the world, to hold onto existence against the vicissitudes of a violent history. In the film s depiction of Ram s relationship with his two wives, there is a clear investment in the playfulness and intimacy of the relationship, and a desire that the women should not take the hero as some kind of domestic deity. But the realm of the sensual also encompasses other drives that have been foreshadowed in a statement made by Ram after he and Aparna have engaged in a gently erotic and playful love-making. Aparna says she fears going out into the riot-torn city, apprehensive that she will be sexually assaulted. In a strangely insensitive remark, Ram says, you have already been sexually assaulted, madam. This conflation between love-making and rape pre-figures Aparna s rape and death. 15 But it arguably also foreshadows the unleashing of sadistic dispositions within the hero, in which the political imperatives of self-assertion are channelled through a refiguring of personality within a new, or at least hitherto suppressed, order of masculinity. Crucial here is Abhyankar who, in Anirudh Kulkarni s performance, emerges as a mesmerizing, indeed homo-erotic emissary of a repressed and shadowy world. Thus the image-work of the film stages conflicting realms of the sensual, in 15 For an exploration of the way censorship codes proscribing the representation of sex has led to an ambiguous use of rape scenes in Indian cinema, see Lalitha Gopalan, Avenging Women in Indian Cinema, Screen, 38 (1), 1997, rpnt in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema.

287 Another History Rises to the Surface 271 which sadism, death drives, and an erotics of being glance off each other. In terms of the force of images there is however a definite shift in the balance of elements, as sadism and masculine vainglory acquire centre stage. 6. Lifting the Mogul Pardha You see, Hindu ideologies represented by Konarak or Meera-like bhajans in Tamil were all created by Hindus. Their ideology pertaining to sex, love and life seems to be at odds with what came to India after the advent of the Moguls and Christians. Today, they ostensibly fight over the Hindu ideology. But when it comes to my film and I m not even addressing myself as a Hindu but as an Indian who would like to compete with the rest of the world intellectually, no one seems to be bothered. Kamalahasan, interviewed by Screen I would suggest we need to place these layered and contrary modes of erotic address within a particular discourse set in train by Kamalahasan. His self-image appears to be that of the artist who fights to liberate representations of sex, bigotry, hatred, from the edict of the censor, in order to provide an outlet for taboos, to get things out in the open. What is disturbing about his remarks is that a certain understanding of political freedom from the repressive lineage enforced on Hindus by Muslims and Christians is the condition for the recovery of suppressed sensual instincts. Despite the disclaimer that he is talking as an Indian rather than as a Hindu, the othering of Muslims and Christians suggests that this is hardly the case. Another instance of this is Kamalahasan s statement that Pakistan is not a country but a religion, implying fanatical dimensions that will not accept the boundary of countries and nation-states. This formulation also illustrates the way in which contemporary discourses of the Hindu nation-state have generated a temporal conflation in the rendering of the historical past. Thus, the past is rendered in terms of Mughal and Christian domination, rather than say Mughal and British colonial, or Muslim and Christian. Within political discourse, the reference to Mughal rule appears to suggest a past-ness to this repressive formation, while Christian repression, perhaps alluding to Victorian morality, relocates the other in the domain of contemporary politics, suggestive of the current Hindutva attack on the Christian communities of India. This is important. The

288 272 The Melodramatic Public reference to Mughal repression brushes aside a complex understanding of regimes which were always alert to the fact that they ruled over a complex weave of ethnic groups and cultures. And, in the second slippage, Kamalahasan is imprisoned within a highly contemporary discourse, deriving from another deferred revenge scenario, that of subordinating Indian Christians as representatives of the Western other. At the same time, one has to attend to the fact that the director does not seem quite satisfied with the representatives of a resurgent political Hinduism: they ostensibly fight over the Hindu ideology but do nothing about the attempts to censor his film. In other words, they are not adequately true to what it means to recover Indianness from the repressions it has been subject to. Perhaps there is a domain here which exceeds what Hindutva is concerned to represent as Hindu. This is what I meant when I remarked that the Hindutva critique of an earlier secular political construction of intercommunity amity is embraced by the film but Hindutva also seems to enact another order of repression, that of certain crucial attributes of Hindu identity. That the repressed self within Hindutva is still a Hindu one, still the main point of identification, is of course heavily problematic. But my suggestion is that the film reveals that there may be insurmountable problems in the institution of this Hindu personality. 7. Melodrama: Peformativity and Expressivity These tensions in the representation of a desirable Hindu personality lead to a significant splitting of character into different forms of representation. In an earlier film of patriotic provenance, Hindustani, Kamalahasan had played two roles, splitting his performance between a superior entity driven by the higher calling of patriotism, and his more everyday counterpart, a son who has rebelled against his father s impractically upright attitudes. The son immerses himself in the dense circuits of a corrupt and sensual everyday world. The old patriot, adorned either in chaste veshti or INA uniform, determines to undertake a secret crusade against the corruption he sees around him. The film invites the audience to indulge a vicarious pleasure in the vengeance he unleashes against corrupt officials on behalf of the people. However, this is not a figure that invites empathetic identification. Kamalahasan s fascination with filmic mutations of appearance, through make-up, morphing, and physically demanding distortions, works to

289 Another History Rises to the Surface 273 render the older protagonist into an implacable and indeed sadistic mask. And there is something quite disturbing about the patriot s single-minded pursuit of the just path, as he even sacrifices his daughter s life, rather than pay bribes to a bevy of corrupt policemen, hospital administrators, and doctors. The dilemma is meant to provide the element of tragedy, but the position he takes is not one easy to identify with. In contrast, the mundane world of the son, a tout who facilitates applications and wants a regular job as a transport official, is cynically but amusingly depicted. This is a world at once more realistic and, punctuated by standard comedy and dance sequences, easier for the audience to find a place in. The narrative manages the tensions generated by this bifurcation by having one of the son s casual acts of corruption result in horrendous consequences: he takes a bribe to issue a licence for a bus which is not roadworthy, there is an accident and many schoolchildren die. The relentlessly principled Hindustani takes his own son s life, a sacrificial punishment that his wife and the boy s girlfriend accept. These different drives are composed of different modes of representation. One is edifying and iconizing, it freezes the patriotic figure into a kind of death mask/mould. The other, deploying realist and performative tropes, elevates the domain of comedy to a significant status within the organization of film narrative. The narrative generates a set of conflicts that ultimately results in a moral resolution the film s conclusion shows Hindustani in another country, informing a corrupt state that he is still at large and its functionaries cannot rest easy. Even so this does not ensure that one mode of representation supplants the other. The presence of two modes of representation, and the persistence of an alienating and punitive dimension to the patriotic superego suggests a sado-masochistic double bind for the spectator. S/he is invited to approve the actions of a just state, and destined to remain alienated from it, and to fear that the imaginary state s punitive drives will ultimately be visited on the mass spectator him/herself, caught as s/he is in a circuit of adjustments with the corrupt everyday world We may also consider the way the hero has been split in key film narratives of the 1990s, such as Darr (Yash Chopra, 1992), where identification is split between a powerful hero, a naval commando who successfully carries out anti-terrorist actions; and a weaker entity, a psychotic harbouring romantic desires for the commando s wife. Ultimately, the hero bests his rival, but goes beyond the justification of survival to execute his other. The splitting of spectatorial identification again suggests a soliciting of sado-masochistic drives.

290 274 The Melodramatic Public If this were a coherent strategy, seeking to integrate the different levels properly rather than bifurcate them, then it would move characters through registers of guilt at what they have done. Thus in classic Indian melodramas such as Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) the mother s moral imprimatur is routed through the characteristic melodramatic plot structures of suffering. A strongly conceived pathos results when the mother has to punish her bandit son for transgressing moral communal norms and taboos. In Hindustani, something remains strangely disjointed. The moral-political domain is situated in a vacuum, and ultimately in another country/space, and finally fails to become part of the register of the everyday. Morality springs free from all sense of suffering and mortality, and achieves a transcendent iconicity. I will suggest that the problem posed by Hindustani for the mode of performance, figuration, and representation, has implications for Hey Ram as well. To show how, I will take a slightly convoluted route, looking to the overall narrative strategies of the melodramatic mode to understand the way in which the spectator is invited to relate to character in Hey Ram. It has been argued that melodrama is a mode of representation that addresses the shift in sacred and socially hierarchical meaning systems in the transition to modernity. Melodrama strives to retrieve the security afforded by earlier systems. However oppressive these were, they nevertheless provided people with a sense of where they were located, and how to rationalize their circumstances. But this recovery is not possible, and, in however unconfident and faltering a fashion, melodrama generates new sources of meaning in the secularized world of family and a non-hierarchically situated individual personality. In this sense, the logic of representation exceeds known systems of meaning, and this lack of fit is registered in the tropes of pathos associated with characters who suffer the trauma inflicted by the old and the uncertainties of the new. This melodramatic modernity relates the individual to larger formations, of the civil domain, in which s/he can vent a repressed set of truths and moral claims. The articulation of personality as locus of meaning is predicated then on a particular frame, that of the modern state supplanting the intermediate term of the family, an organism associated with issues of status and extended power within traditional societies. Melodramatic narration places its subject in transit displacing attachments to the father and the connotations of power he carries from earlier social hierarchies, revolving emotionally around the mother, and apparently locating the

291 Another History Rises to the Surface 275 ultimate outlet for its protagonist in the transcendent, equalizing imprimatur of the modern state form and the identity of the citizensubject. Its distinctive feature is uncertainty and messiness, a striving to reinscribe the security of older forms while feeling its way towards an uncharted territory of the new. Some of the particular power and interest of melodramatic undedicedness is the way its hesitations may ask us to look back at older forms in different ways, rather than simply urge us to look forward into entirely new ways of figuring past and future. The melodrama of Hey Ram! addresses a new territory of transformation. Instead of traditional hierarchies and older, religious connotations of the sacred, it opens onto a symbolic domain that has already been transformed by modernity, repositioning the sacred in the nation-state and its sacred icons. The oppressiveness of the sacred lies in the subordination of a certain construction of the self, that of the Hindu who believes s/he has been and continues to be wronged by the state, in a sense that s/he has been denied the full rights and political determinacy of citizenship. As I will suggest, this deployment of melodramatic form hinges on the drive to articulate a notion of citizenship which is founded not on the sovereignty of the individual but that of the community that the individual represents. This new articulation of the melodramatic form cuts across earlier formulations about the relationship between tradition and modernity. Instead of rendering these as binary opposites, the film pits two different constructions of the modernizing of tradition against each other: one deploys Gandhi and a certain image of the high-caste Tamilian follower, smoothly carrying the marks of ritual identity and being into a new territory of social and political flexibility and openness; the other poses the first form as colluding with the repression of historical wrongs, and embraces a tradition of the ascetic warrior. The ritual identity of this figure speaks not of a sociology of identity and its adaptability, but of a symbolic of identity, something which allows a highcaste Hindu identity to transcend its localness, and its particularity. In the process, it reinvents a Hindu community, in an imaginary in which it can stand up, speak out unashamed and act against a tide of a history which seems to deny it a sense of right, of pride and the will to exact retribution. There is no space in either of these trajectories to speak of other identities, they remain resolutely Hindu in their provenance. In this sense the oppositions are played out within the Hinduness of the protagonist. It is perhaps suggestive that the second form, the symbolic

292 276 The Melodramatic Public of Hindu political identity, arises in a figure who has already distinguished himself from the sociologically defined elite who are the Mahatma s followers. Though Ram follows family diktat in terms of marital arrangements, it is a form of accommodation that is undertaken in order to renounce it and to assume a transcendent identity. The character is uprooted from the determinants of a local sociology and space, and refigured as an entity fashioned by the historical itinerary of a wounded and then resurgent Hindu nationhood. What is distinctive to this melodramatic form is the recourse it takes to the large gesture, the scaling upwards of expressive functions, in terms of emotional pitch, bodily disposition, musicality and mise-enscène. Central here is the publicness of melodrama, where the mode of excess, an inflated mode of speech, demeanour and iconic figuration, displaces the realist, intimate communication between characters. It is as if such expressive functions are meant to be seen and heard publicly, beyond the delimited narrative world we see on screen. This publicness relates to a staging of the personality, not simply to a process of making it plausible. On being questioned about the nature of characterization in the film, Kamalahasan said that it would be wrong to see the character as realistic in the way we have been used to when viewing Hollywood cinema. Instead, he stated that he was drawing upon indigenous conventions which presented character as character, as a figure being enacted rather than inhabited, in the mode of a sutradhar function. And, indeed, the histrionic excess of his performance, and the outright invocation of iconic dimensions when Saket Ram is invested with the imagery of the Hindu ascetic warrior, could be read in exactly these ways. This again problematizes identification with the character. The tortuous dimensions of melodramatic transitions is expressively heightened, refusing the calibration of a lower pitched, naturalist performance, and gesturing instead to the ineffable, to a zone of meaning that has not been settled or normalized. The complications involved are suggested in the way the performance also hyperbolizes interiority. There are key moments where the character is defined by the ravages of loss and guilt, when he witnesses Aparna s death, and subsequently when he is haunted by her loss and the death of other Muslim victims. In the first instance, the actor renders the loss of his wife through a highly gestural range of effects, groping for support, turning away from the horrific sight, and finally giving vent to anguish by a scream from the balcony, framed for architectural affect by the low-angle camera.

293 Another History Rises to the Surface 277 I have spent some time on these expressive functions to suggest where Hey Ram s strategy of characterization departs in some respects from that of Hindustani, with different effects for the mechanisms of spectator identification. Hindustani splits its iconic character from the logic of everyday life, mobilizing the embalmed figure of nation-state history as a punitive superego. Hey Ram seeks to bring this figure into an intimate register to recover a sense of historical wrongs as experienced by an ordinary or typical character; but it does this in such a way as to retain large-scale personality tropes. The performative excess of intimate expression presents the audience with a staging of an ordinary life caught in extraordinary times, as a form of public identity rather than a personal one. Internality, interiorization, identification, are not domains and processes that emerge out of the subliminal compact between screen images, characters, worlds, and the individuated spectator. Instead, they are governed by the articulation of collectively invested narratives, myths, historical constructions, in which the spectator is mobilized into a wider orbit of subjectivity. I think this is an important distinction, for in recovering the ordinary or typical experience as supra-individual, the narration makes an insidious move. It invites us into a narrative community united by a melodramatic urge to give voice to a suppressed sense of historical wrong and victimhood. But, as I have said, there is only a partial departure from Hindustani s structures of representation. For the film also invokes the extraordinary rather than the typical, investing the character with the attributes of the mythical Ram. This iconic figure is brought into being by a highly ambiguous set of story-telling mechanisms that induct the spectator into a regime of play rather than straightforward identification. 8. Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation In terms of symbolic transactions around concepts of the sacred, the hero seems to be the vehicle of a melodrama that seeks to displace the earlier icons and cultural strategies used to create identification with the nation-state. It sets him up in opposition to the earlier Congressinspired tradition of high-caste nationalism and, in terms of filmic narrative traditions, against the DMK-inspired anti-caste Tamil nationalism. The countervailing pull here is that of the sensual and the domestic, the this-worldliness of women and of everyday life, and it is augmented by that characteristic melodramatic striving to retrieve

294 278 The Melodramatic Public the securities of an older sense of self. Thus the film traces a tortuous route back to the sacredness of older notions of imagining the nation, in the persona of Gandhi. This particular tracking back is made problematic because of a sign-referent problem emerging from the deployment of particular modes and technologies of representation. For the sacred now returns in the somewhat caricatural performance by Naseerudin Shah as the Mahatma. The climactic moment of the assassination has the Mahatma flung backwards off the ground in a manner normally employed for stunt and action scenes. The sobriety of the sacred is further compromised when Mahatma, charkha, and crescent become objects within a video-game format, where the spectator/player is invited to blow away this constellation and generate a swirling set of computer images, the swastik metamorphosing into a swastika and a hard-edged lotus. (Figs 48 51, pp ) The mechanics of the video-game and computer-generated images relate to a particular moment in the Hindutva conspiracy to assassinate the Mahatma. The almost cartoonish treatment of the figure of Gandhi indicates a general problem in representing him with a sense of gravity and dignity. This is a highly unusual compendium of effects with which to represent a revered, iconic entity. Indeed, the armature is suggestive of a post-modern aesthetic, generating a certain pastiche-driven, depthless quality in the relationship between viewer and screen. 17 More specifically, the use of digital means to represent the Mahatma displaces an indexical relationship of sign to referent, in which film physically captures a trace of the human body, by a digital mode that can alter the nature of the image internally, without reference to a real image. 18 It would be productive to see the video-game format influencing the structure of other scenes as well, not only those where its form is specifically used. 19 This is when a scene may be read as providing a 17 For example, Jameson, Postmodernism. 18 For example, Lev Manovich, Cinema and Digital Media, in Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwarz, eds, Perspectives of Media Art, Germany, Cantz Verlag Ostfildern, 1996; also see Manovich s site at 19 This is also the name of a film by David Fincher, an important contemporary Hollywood filmmaker who started as a music video filmmaker. The Game (1998) replicates many of the drives of video games, thrusting the protagonist into a series of possible gambits which are given a frisson by their being perceived to be real dangers when, in fact, they are highly controlled and staged manoeuvres.

295 Another History Rises to the Surface 279 Fig. 44 Fig. 45 Figs 44 and 45: Hey Ram!, Kamalahasan, 1999, The Return of the Dead 1.

296 280 The Melodramatic Public sequence of effects governed by player choices. In the key sequence at the raja s palace, the spectator-player is provided a path into the game by the movements and awareness of Ram, who has been induced into intoxication by Abhyankar. He wanders as if in a maze, the coordinates of which are Abhyankar, his wife Maithili, the destitute Lalvani, and the raja. The first phase of the game does not picture the latter figure, and inducts the player into an intoxicated, sensualized experience, with Ram approaching Maithili as an erotically charged object. Unexpectedly, this phase relays this erotic charge as opening the protagonist to a heightened awareness of the tragic loss of human existence, as the erotic object morphs into the eerie figure of the bereft Muslim child. (Figs 44 45, p. 279.) The springing of memory and conscience through the sensualization of the character conjures an appropriate mise-en-scène, weaving the tragic, drunken figure of Lalvani through its field. However, a new phase is inaugurated, where the player s acceptance, or rather submission, to particular game-paths, constrains options. The raja emerges to conduct Ram into his sanctum sanctorum, but Maithili and Lalvani are denied entry. It is as if Ram s acceptance of the raja s domain jettisons certain options, a more open erotics and an alertness to human loss. This configuration will not allow for the weaknesses of compassion. The metaphor of the game for registering the dissolution of earlier forms and the inauguration of the new phase is captured through Ram s giddy fall into the checkerboard black and white floor. The raja s rhetoric now constrains the terms of verbal and perceptual discourse. He decries the Mahatma as the enemy of Hinduism, and selects Abhyankar and Ram to carry out the assassination. The decor includes pictures of Hitler and Savarkar, and produces three appropriate computergenerated images. As the raja exhorts the men to action in defence of Hinduism, he is morphed into Ram s dead Bengali wife Aparna, who, her head swathed in saffron cloth, seems to invoke both Vivekananda and more contemporary images of the militant sadhvi. (Fig , p. 281.) This iconography, associating Hindu consciousness with notations of honour and revenge in the image of the murdered wife, is in sharp contrast to the possibilities which opened up around the figure of Maithili in the previous phase of the game. The second vision conjures images of Abhyankar s refrain that the Mahatma s policies have nurtured the Muslim threat from a sapling into an overwhelming

297 Another History Rises to the Surface 281 Fig. 46 Fig. 47 Figs 46 and 47: Hey Ram!, The Return of the Dead 2.

298 282 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 48 Fig. 49

299 Another History Rises to the Surface 283 Fig. 50 Fig. 51 Figs 48, 49, 50, 51: Hey Ram!, Video Game Format.

300 284 The Melodramatic Public tree. And, finally, there is the computer-generated annihilation of the Mahatma and the hated symbols of the Muslim other. 20 The overarching filmic domain of this mediating point in the game presents a composite structure of filmic and post-filmic effects, linking narrative to older photographic and newer computer-generated modes of representation and address. The particular pathways accepted by the player structures subsequent choices. There is a machismo quality to Ram s love-making, and the game s aggressive channelling of libidinal drives metamorphoses the woman s body into the kitsch image of a gun. It has been argued that game culture, and new regimes of special effects, have articulated the possibility of multiple narrative drives, rather than a linear, cause effect driven one. 21 At one level, this would mean giving the spectator multiple plot structures which would allow a variety of choices in fashioning the way narratives could develop. Science fiction s manipulation of temporality its foundational premise that technology has remade human existence in terms of space-time constraints, thereby making alternative pasts and futures possible makes it the favoured genre for a simulation of spectator interactivity with screen narratives. This is the case, even if closure ultimately reasserts itself within standard narrative formats. (It is through video game culture, and CD-Rom and net-based interactive packages for experimentation with familiar serials and films that a more structured variety of endings have emerged.) But the issue is not only that of multiple plots but also of the multiple forms made possible by the transcendence of cinematic indexicality through special effects. Here the simulation of film characters into history provides an important background. Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) mobilized the eponymous simpleton hero into newsreels associating him with great public leaders at decisive moments in American history; Zelig (Woody Allen, 1990) did the same for its man without personality, a figure who assumes an identity through the environments he is placed in. Hindustani follows on from this, but to make the hero 20 The image is inflected with an irreverent wit, as, almost subliminally, we also see the image of the three monkeys who would hear, see, and speak no evil. It is as if the director lampoons the Mahatma s message of tolerance as debilitatingly suppressive of the truth. 21 Alison McMahan, The Effect of Multiform Narrative on Subjectivity, Screen 40 (2), Summer 1999, special issue on FX, CGI, and the question of spectacle.

301 Another History Rises to the Surface 285 monumental rather than mundane, placing the INA hero in the same frame as Subhas Bose. These films clearly provide a technological inspiration for Kamalahasan, as he seeks to simulate the subject s presence in history: in Zelig, in ways that enact a comedy of the totalitarian subject, or in Forrest Gump, to assert the way in which its simpleton incarnates basic human values that enable him to bear empathetic witness and bring balm to the victims of the history through which he has lived. But films such as Zelig and Forrest Gump do not bring simulated history into tension with official history, or symbolically rewrite history. In Hey Ram, digital technologies articulate the domain of possible histories, histories other than those which a society has stabilized for itself over time. There are distinct strategies involved here. Hindustani morphed character into actuality footage, a procedure which renders history as physically alterable at the level of its mechanically determined representation. Hey Ram, on the other hand, by and large maintains its indexical relationship to what takes place in front of the camera, accepting the historicity of its own fictional representations, distinct from earlier live action representations of historical personae. Instead of simulating presence, its use of computer graphics and 3D artwork disrupts the seamless induction of fiction into history. This alerts the spectator to the different ways in which forms of remembrance refigure the drives which compose the shifting terrain of the present. The configuration of these drives in the crucial sequence is relayed through the game structures I have described, as artifice, projection, and play. They markedly exceed the requirements of defining character motivation and character perception. The 3D art and video-game rendering of the Mahatma as a target is relayed through Ram s point of view in the raja s inner sanctum. But these frontally composed frames are phenomenologically marked off from the rest of the scene. This disjointment breaks the textural coherence of the scene and opens it out for a different view. Fabricated to render the drugged perspective of the protagonist, these images are not however sealed off through his point of view. They appear to be borne by an agentless gaze, one which inducts the spectator into a direct regime of play with perspective and history. It is here that the film makes a crucial move, inviting the spectator to directly assume a point of view on the possibilities of symbolically re-writing history. It

302 286 The Melodramatic Public is no longer the case that someone else, a fictional character in a film, has such visions, but that we are invited to assume this vision, to view history as a game with alternative outcomes. This symbolic rewriting is crucially to do with something which exceeds prosaic fact, and mobilizes a realm of desire. It is an acknowledgement of what people imagined and wanted to happen, and an acknowledgement that these desires still animate present consciousness. To kill the Mahatma here signifies not merely a larger complicity and desire which exceeds a specific character and organization, but amounts to a will to visit a symbolic death on him and the politics of appeasement of which he is characterized as an exemplar. The game metaphor then opens history to a collective rewriting. But in posing this as game, in disrupting the flow of character driven narration, the film may open up the possibility of the question: Do we want to play the game? It is here that the narrative without quotation marks, where the spectator is not clearly signposted on what standpoint to assume, takes on a particular distancing dimension. For, from this point on, the film also shifts registers of representation. If earlier the character Ram relayed a large-scale rendering of the intimate effects of catastrophic events, from now on he assumes an iconic set of poses. Refashioned by the particular channelling of libido with aggression, he acquires the transcendent figuration familiar from Kamalahasan s Hindustani incarnation. The tableaux which displays his mythical empowerment, as a brahmanical figure who can withstand the elements and undertakes a symbolic cleansing and renunciation at Benares, draws upon the imagery of the Ayodhya campaign, and provides the spectator with a distanced stance, for these are no longer the registers of the ordinary or typical character. None of this carries the charge of melodramatic investment, urging us to identify and imaginatively participate in character transformation. Instead they are presented as a sublimation of individual subjectivity into iconic character. Nevertheless, this sequence of transformations poses definite problems. Marked as artifice and game, their depthless quality denies history to our look, leading, apparently, to a waning of affect, a diminishing of investment in earlier figurations of the sacred. In this particular deployment, the digitally composed animation complicates the conventions of sobriety and emotional sanctity with which significant historical entities are represented. In melodramatic terms, this has a serious implication. The

303 Another History Rises to the Surface 287 bid to recover lost meaning, always fraught in narratives of transition, is rendered thinner by the loss of the cinematic signifier s referential integrity. The waning of affect lies not only in the difficulty of reinvesting the nation-state and its icons with value and meaning, but in the transformation of the cinematic signifier away from its own claims to capturing the real. However, this is to put things rather too simply, for the waning of affect on these terms may in turn induce a pathos, a sense of lack, on the part of the spectator for earlier certitudes in symbolic meaning and cinematic referentiality. And the transformation of the signifier highlights, in some fundamental sense, a pathos around the lost body of reality of the human body, of a stable and verifiable history, of earlier codings of history which revered the Mahatma. This doubling of lack of the nation-state in its earlier incarnation, of the signifier heralds the need, in terms of symbolic exchange, for a new order of compensation. This, I would suggest, is what is caught in the film s framing narrative about Saket Ram. When we first see the figure, in old age and on his deathbed, he is organized to conjure up the image of the Mahatma: Kamalahasan s face, heavily adorned with make-up, is fixed on top of the emaciated, dhoti-clad body of the Mahatma in the present of 6 December (Fig. 52, p. 288.) The eeriness of the fabrication arises from the narrative it implies: that by some strange osmosis Saket Ram was transformed into the lost body of the Mahatma, and that thereafter time froze over. The realm of the simulacrum displaces the Mahatma from the orbit of sanctity, but the film generates a compensatory simulacrum, one that takes over and neutralizes the subjectivity of the disaffected Hindu in the body of the Mahatma. Significantly, this offering of another position for spectatorial affect rests within a space that rigorously refuses to sublimate the rest of the past. The traces of the old, traumatized Saket Ram are maintained, including the prominent placement of Abhyankar s photograph. The peculiar duality of the last scenes, of Gandhi s huge image both fractured and illuminated by the opening out of discourses by the present generation suggests the issues involved. The icon and the history that it embodies have been dissected to reveal other layers of subjectivity, but in ways which still require a reinvestment in the Mahatma.

304 288 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 52: Hey Ram!, The Merging of Bodies. Does the film invoke a project of necessary catharsis? One could paraphrase the argument for such a project along the following lines: repressed beliefs lead to festering psyches, and sustain a political unconscious that can be manipulated for the politics of hate. Instead of keeping quiet about these beliefs it would be better to let them erupt, come to the surface in their most virulent form, and then see if cultural resources can be generated to return from the brink. From this perspective the film-maker s ambition would be that of making the cinematic public privy to an exhibition of wounds whose display has hitherto been proscribed. Thereafter the narrative could assume the functions of the confessional, where the Hindu protagonist admits to succumbing to a retaliatory bloodlust and the spectator in turn is invited to acknowledge a collective desire to rewrite history. However, for this second account to work there must be a conviction that the confessional form does not become an exercise in vindication, but actually stages a debate which opens out discussion. This the film clearly does not do. But I would suggest that it is important not to see the film in isolation, but as part of an emergent and, crucially public, reevaluation of history animated by different viewpoints. Jabbar Patel s

305 Another History Rises to the Surface 289 Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000), for example, stages a series of debates between Ambedkar and Gandhi which has the iconized Dalit leader upstaging a notably diminished Mahatma. Generated within the coordinates of a post-hindutva identity, Hey Ram constructs the Muslim other in a variety of ways: as bestial other, as a reasonable, self-effacing entity amenable to political assimilation, and as object of the conscience. Much of this is congruent with Hindutva perception. Yet in associating images of conscience and sensuality, the narration gestures to a domain of feeling that I think is ill at ease with the obsessive, puritanical discourses of Hindutva. Highly charged encounters are succeeded by much more ambiguously defined and open structures of narration that appear to solicit interpretation from the spectator rather than offer a coherent position. The draining of investment in earlier forms of the national-sacred is strangely mirrored by the invocation of the emotionally remote entity of the all-powerful Hindu. Unable to chart a clear path through an erupting unconscious, the film acknowledges a public will to rewrite history and kill the father, but can compensate for the resulting sense of shame and loss only by a simulated imbrication in the iconicity of the great other, and a silence thereafter. Ridding oneself of the father isn t all that easy, after all; recovering him is even harder.

306 III Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated: Narrative Form, Urban Vistas, and New Publics in a History of the Present

307 Introduction 1. The Urban Imagination In the way I have ordered these essays, we move from an emphasis on the mode of address and fictive publicness of melodramatic cinema through to a situating of these issues of textuality in a shifting register of methodological engagements. From the analysis of film form and its intersection with a political theory of citizenship, we move into the question of posing the cinematic imagination in relation to broader historical canvases. Through the triptych of Tamil/ Hindi films, this canvas comes into view as part of a history of the territorial imagination of film and of nation-state. In the last section of the book I want to move from the register of history qua history to the idea of the contemporary, and of the present. This does not mean to imply that the contemporary and the present lack history. But in the proximity of these formations to our experience, the historical as a discipline of context has to be unpacked across a series of axes. To initiate this engagement with contemporary film experience, I want to highlight a specific context for cinematic reflection and practice, that of the city, a material and imaginative form that has become significant in a number of different ways. Indian cities have obviously been crucial in cinematic representation over a long period, and before addressing that particular junction I want to briefly plot the ways cities have been engaged with in the post-colonial imagination. As spaces of migration, they have been a laboratory of cosmopolitan coexistence as well as heightened ethnic violence, of social deracination and reinvention. Their morphologies speak to the dramatic, concentrated engagement with the technology and culture of modernity, offering heightened sense perception through mechanical transportation, new modes of simultaneous communication across space, from broadsheets and newspapers to telephones and the internet, and an unprecedented sense of anonymous living, of being part of the crowd.

308 294 Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated On the other hand, Indian and most postcolonial urban experience has also marked out a distinctiveness simply in terms of the way cities also keep some of these transformative indices at bay, or slow down their effect. For a long time Indian cities were defined both by the presence of new technologies, and their restricted availability. The telephone, for example, has only become commonly or easily available in the period of liberalization, in which context it has leapfrogged into the heightened communicative mobility offered by the cellular phone, now a commonplace of modern business, informal bazaar, and mobile labour practices. Transportation too presents a vivid example of the way human physical cartage and animal labour can be deployed to maintain cost-reducing economies alongside high-speed vehicular transportation. And, in terms of social and cultural congregation, the generation of neighbourhoods and slum settlements on the basis of ethnic-regional migratory patterns, labour, and employment networks sits cheek by jowl with the idea of the stranger city which requires the fashioning of new modes of public exchange. It is only in the last ten years that we have seen the emergence of what Gyan Prakash has called the urban turn in the thematic engagements of history and the social sciences, with publications on Bombay, 1 Calcutta, 2 and Delhi, 3 collating academic, activist, and public intellectual writings, and important monographs on Chandigarh and Bangalore. 4 Prakash suggests that earlier modernist assumptions that the city would be crucial to Indian society s achievement of a full modernity has been given pause for thought by the emergence in the urban 1 Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner, eds, Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, Bombay and Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1995; idem, Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, Bombay and Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996; Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos, eds, Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2003; Thomas Blom Hansen, The Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton, Princeton University Press, Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta, the Living City. Volume 1, The Past; Volume II, The Present and the Future, Calcutta, Oxford University Press, Veronique Dupont, Emma Tarlo, and Denis Vidal, Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, Delhi, Manohar, 2000; Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India s Emergency, Delhi, Permanent Black, Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987; also see idem, Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to Capital City, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994; Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore s Twentieth Century, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2005.

309 Introduction 295 sphere of powerful currents which provide us with a layered sense of the modern city. Prakash highlights the emergence of ethnic plebeian movements such as the sons of the soil Shiv Sena in Bombay, the assertion of Dalit politics, and the practices of pavement dwellers seeking to secure rights of home and livelihood on the streets of Bombay. All of this substantially altered earlier consensuses based on an elite liberal modernity of the cities, one which aimed for a rational, planned city which could resolve issues of inequality and its manifestations in slum formations and land appropriation. 5 The break in the planning imaginary urges us to cast an eye back in time to address the disarticulated nature of urban formations, and the different logics and histories which composed them, and, in turn, postcolonial modernity. To this we may add a series of specific conjunctures. Most powerful, perhaps, was the impact of the Emergency of While the Emergency was a complicated assertion of central authority over democratic movements that sought to topple what were perceived to be corrupt regional governments, its ambitions were clearly in the service of a vision of authoritarian modernization. Crucial features of this regime included population control through forcible sterilization, greater efficiency in governmental functioning, state control over finances through bank nationalization, the symbolic undercutting of feudal remnants by ending privy purses to the former princes of British India. 6 While this move to an authoritarian modernization impacted both urban and rural society, there was a notable way in which the city became the symbolic centre for what would become a leitmotif in the emergence of the contemporary epoch: the forcible eviction and displacement of squatter settlements, many with a very long history, in order to facilitate an image of an urban vista cleansed of its subaltern social groups. In the long run this had a sustained impact on cities such as Delhi, as areas were cleared and new settlements initiated on the outskirts of the city. Inaugurated in the 1970s to project a strong state initiative in nationalist modernization, we will see the motif reappear in the last decade or so, but for rather different objectives. This is in the wake of liberalization, where the Indian state has sought to develop an urban vista, infrastructure, and consumer economy that would 5 Gyan Prakash, The Urban Turn, in Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, Delhi, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2002, For the Emergency, see David Selbourne, An Eye to India: The Unmasking of a Tyranny, Harmonsdworth, Penguin, 1977; and Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.

310 296 Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated cultivate India as a viable field for foreign direct investment. The question of the squatter was to remain a persistent motif of cities such as Bombay in the 1980s, but has become the objective of sustained state intervention primarily in the era of liberalization. As we weave our way into the contemporary period, the decisive issue remains the division between the formal and the informal city, the latter composed of bazaars, squatter settlements, and neighbourhood workshops which are integral to the sustenance of the formal city. We have seen these spheres of activity and sustenance come under scrutiny, juridical regulation, and eviction as the momentum of what has been called the new urbanism has gathered pace. In turn, a new imperative has surfaced, as globalized regimes for the regulation of intellectual property impact on India. Here, the bazaar economy is under target for its retailing of goods which emerge from the pirated end of duplicate goods in clothes, household appliances, and electronic merchandise. 2. Differentiated Film Publics This is where we come back to the culture of film and the film public, how it is distributed, exhibited, and, in the contemporary period, delivered through new digital formats to its audiences and consumers. From the work of Stephen Hughes and Kaushik Bhaumik in the period of early cinema history, through to the work of Rosie Thomas, S.V. Srinivas, Bhrigupati Singh, and Anand Taneja, film history has explored how film exhibition was disaggregated into different circuits, according to the quality of film halls and their location in the city (Madras, Madurai, Bombay, and Delhi). 7 Divisions related to the colonial and native towns, between halls screening Western (British and US) and Indian films, as well as internal hierarchies and cross-overs between cinema circuits exhibiting locally made films. 7 Hughes, The Pre-Phalke Era ; idem, House Full: Silent Film Genre, Exhibition and Audiences in South India, Indian Economic and Social History Review 43 (1) 2006, 32 6; Rosie Thomas, Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts, in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, eds, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, Delhi, Sage, 2005, 35 69; S.V. Srinivas, Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies 4 (1), April 2003, 40 62; Bhrigupati Singh, Aadhamkor Hasina (Man Eating Beauty) and the Anthropology of a Moment, paper presented to the panel Cinema and the City, City One Conference, Sarai CSDS, January 2001, for a discussion of the B and C circuits of film exhibition in Delhi: also Sarai Broadsheet 01: Film in the City, 2000, compiled and written by Bhrigupati Singh; for the differentiation of

311 Introduction 297 Several different issues come up for consideration in this research. The question of how the industry used genre to target audiences is a recurrent theme. Here, Hughes has highlighted the action serial as a format targeting working class audiences in the native town of Georgetown in Madras. This was the European and US-produced action serial, and the importance of this international genre carried over into the development of local versions presented to plebeian audiences. Scholars have underlined the importance of this format and its characteristic audiences to complicate formulations about too indigenist a construction of what would attract local audiences. Thus, this new scholarship has complicated the highlighting of the mythological film, and later, the cinema of social reform made in the 1930s by a number of prestige studios as the privileged objects of film history. As I have noted, both these genres appeared to speak to the development of a subcontinental enterprise in film, sometimes a specifically nationalist one, as in the formulations relating to D.G. Phalke s pioneering work in the mythological film. But the importance of other genres and circuits suggests different purchases on the cinema by plebeian audiences. Thus Thomas counterpoints the functions of Fearless Nadia, the Australian Greek action star a figure who conjured up a hybrid racial persona while playing Indian women adventurers to those of socially respectable heroines such as Devika Rani. Here she argues for the greater openness of plebeian audiences to hybridity over authenticity and female action over melodramatic suffering. Bhaumik also points to the importance of hybridity at the level of language, art direction, and costume, in the composition of the musical performance cinema. He suggests that this derived from a wide-ranging bazaar culture where ethnic groups commingled and cultures of visuality and music traversed a wide arc of north Indian towns and cities. Differences in genre and public respectability did not necessarily set up different circuits of film exhibition. Thus, Bhaumik points out how exhibitors in the higher circuits started showing Wadia s Fearless Nadia films after their success in the lower circuits. 8 film exhibition in Delhi, see also Ravi Vasudevan, Cinema in Urban Space, Seminar 525: Unsettling Cinema, May 2003, Anand Vivek Taneja, Begum Samru and the Security Guard, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Delhi, CSDS, 2005, , on old and new cinema circuits in Delhi. 8 Bhaumik, The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, , 192.

312 298 Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated Of crucial importance here was the whole status of the cinema theatre and the public which went to see films. Film trade and newspaper press recurrently featured complaints about how poorly equipped theatres for Indian films were in contrast to venues for American films. In an important body of research, S.V. Srinivas argues for the peculiar subaltern conditions of the film public. 9 Using material from the Telugu film periodical Roopvani of the 1950s, he notes that both middle class and plebeian spectators were subject to rough and arbitrary treatment by theatre staff. Amongst the litany of complaints were double sale of tickets, selling after the show had begun, manhandling of customers, and so on. In these accounts, the cinema assumed the status of a subaltern institution where, irrespective of the customer s social background and ticket class, they were likely to find the experience demeaning. Cinemas catering for Indian films were replete with such complaints, indicating that the lowly social and cultural space occupied by the cinema in the policies of the national elite was manifest in everyday filmgoing experience. In Srinivas s logic, the cinema did not fit the design of an institution of the public sphere, where a bourgeois logic of taste, conduct, and opinion formation could take place. This arose not only from the vulnerability of its public, but, in the second step of his argument, because this public lacked the cultural attributes required of a bourgeois public. He outlines a middle-class discourse about the cinema which goes beyond the question of the failed civility of its administrative habitat. This lies in the desire of middle-class opinion to cultivate the more plebeian sectors of the audience both in their rights to civil treatment, a right that audiences needed to invoke irrespective of class distinction, but also because the plebeian sector had to be cultivated in the virtues and skills of concentrated, silent viewing. Here we have a bourgeois civilizing process in operation, a prescription for how the cinema public should behave. Thus, within the not-yetlegitimate institution lay a potential public sphere governed by the attributes of reasoned behaviour, silence, and focused attention. Within the subordinated institutional positioning of the cinema under and after colonialism, we may observe then the emergence of a discourse of social and cultural uplift and institutional reform for the creation of a unified cinema public. Srinivas s work on the fan clubs 9 S.V. Srinivas, Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall, 2000, www. frameworkonline. com.

313 Introduction 299 of the Telugu film star Chiranjeevi indicates how fraught such a project was, as a fractious subaltern society entered violent contests for the (temporary) control of cinema theatres showcasing their star icons. 10 More generally, the ongoing studies of the B and C circuits (the latter specifically presenting films made or marketed as soft porn) suggest the more general problem of disciplining the institution into a civilized form. 11 The history of the cinema, its different circuits, and differentiated if sometimes overlapping publics suggests that this objective was never to be gained. This has been so more generally in world cinema, with the differentiation of cinema circuits and publics being a commonplace dimension of the institution Discourses and Practices of the Cinematic Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre Diversification As I have implied, in crucial ways, the discourses and contests about the cinema s cultural status and functions have been most visible in the landscape of the city, even if the rural circuits have been historically important, as well as the phenomenon of the touring cinema which entered areas without permanent theatres. 13 In the contemporary epoch, after the inauguration of economic liberalization, there has been a greater push to this focus around the city. Here, under the impulse to refabricate the city into a more desirable venue for investment and consumption, we have seen the emergence of the new mall-multiplex format, where the cinema becomes one amongst a series of attractions to cultivate a new regime of branded, globalized consumption. Municipal regulations are altered to accommodate changes in cinema formats, real-estate companies and consultants take the mall-multiplex as a key engagement and the new consumer economy becomes the cornerstone for the reconstruction of the city vista S.V. Srinivas, Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, See especially the work of Bhrigupati Singh and Anand Taneja cited above. 12 See, for example, Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Exhibition in the United States, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, There has been very little work on this phenomenon. See the postings by Sougata Bhattacharya on the Aurora Film Company of Bengal in the Sarai Reader List, 14 Sarai Broadsheet 02: The Contemporary Fabric of the Media City,

314 300 Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated Contests now emerge along the urban grid between the mall-multiplex and a new technological context for the bazaar economy. Where the cinema of the older, pre-multiplex model had already come under threat from the early 1980s with the advent of videocassette piracy, the new digital context provides an even greater challenge. Cheap copying technologies make for a highly dynamic, portable culture difficult to police, the low costs of CDs allows for easily affordable consumption, and a sophisticated network of piracy in the region from South Asia through East Asia ensures the availability of the latest film in the local market almost simultaneously with its release at cinema halls. An elaborate apparatus of lawyers, investigators, and special police departments have been put together to try and protect the film industry s intellectual property rights, often without discernible impact on the functioning of this parallel economy of film consumption through video. 15 I have tried to capture the diversity of this history of the city and the cinema at two levels. One is a more freewheeling, imaginative exercise that seeks to plot the cinema s intervention in perceptions of the urban experience. I engage key contexts the Emergency, mid-1980s Bombay and the emergence of a post-industrial landscape and new ethnic nationalisms to focus on cinematic representation and its embodiment of social and political conflicts on the stage of the city. In this essay, the politics of the institution of the cinema is considered primarily by looking at the way differentiated film practices engage with urban experience, from the mainstream format, through to art and auteur cinema, and into the field of documentary practices. Issues of narrative discourse, melodrama, and realism are refracted through a particular concern with the way figures are aesthetically organized and indexed as vehicles of urban performance. Motivated by an enquiry into the sources and modes of presentation of violence, the essay spills out of the city into other story worlds marked by political violence, and also fleetingly considers how a global framing of identity conflicts, here taken from the logic of British Indian film and television production, offers us a different purchase on identity performance. This global context, and the place of cinema and urban experience in the contemporary situation is carried forward in chapter 10, which 15 See the research notes by the media city research team at Sarai, Complicating the City: Media Itineraries, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Delhi, Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2005, , and

315 Introduction 301 deals with the politics, economics, and cultural formats of contemporary cinema. Here I consider the category of Bollywood in relation to the global market targeted by segments of the Indian film industry, and the new commodity constellation of which the cinema has become a crucial part. Analyses of the new perspectives of the Indian government, encoded in the 1998 recognition of cinema as an industry, goes alongside a discussion of the new corporate strategies involved in mining the new entertainment commodity. I then go on to consider the different ways in which the category of Bollywood has been used in film-critical discourse, with special attention on the work being done on the way Hindi cinema circulates globally, and the terms on which it is received, with a view to develop the possibilities of a multisited history of Indian film. In the final chapter I come back to the larger thematic of melodrama and public form, but also address the ways in which the emergence of new genres has altered the connotations of Indian popular film. Melodrama remains crucial, especially in the high-end film product with global aspirations. The use of the family-film genre suggests an archaism and throwback quality but, along with the conventions of reconciling family differences, the genre now navigates shifts in global location and culture. It also functions as a clearly ornamental form, staging the extended family, its ritual dimensions and marriage ceremonies as fashionable and desirable. While acknowledging these features, my larger concern is to suggest the complexity of the narrative strategies involved in key works of the genre, and also to note and analyse how the national imaginings offered by the genre may alter. Thus these films reiterate the tradition/modernity paradigm familiar from the older family film, but do so in a way that suggests the cinema s own transcendence of these parameters. This is achieved through a new star iconicity, with the star as sutradhar or storyteller, the vehicle of melodramatic affect. As I will suggest, the specific appeal of Shah Rukh Khan in this format is emblematic. To focus on the family movie would be misleading, for the contemporary period has generated a remarkable amount of genre diversification. As I will argue, this form of production was also grounded in economic processes of corporatization not dissimilar from the highend, global-oriented family movie. Nevertheless, it moves in a different direction. Genres such as the horror film, urban thriller, erotic thriller, and road movie move an engagement with lifestyle and commodity world very specifically into the space of the couple. These films

316 302 Melodrama Mutated and Differentiated also exhibit a greater investment in Hollywood economies of narration, even in some cases doing away with song, dance, and comic sequences from the entertainment format. While the consideration of such genres requires us to think afresh the relationship between genre practices and melodramatic modes, my initial formulation is that this development does not follow the pattern of a bourgeois segmentation of the social realm into the public/private division. Instead these genres often display a significant narrative momentum which requires the articulation of new (or newly acknowledged) subjectivities in relationship, if not to the state, then to the impossibility of forging a bourgeois autonomy. Thus, in films such as Ek Hasina Thi (There Was a Pretty Woman; Sriram Raghavan, 2004), Road (Rajat Mukherjee, 2002), Ab Tak Chhappan (56 and Counting; Shimit Amin, 2004) or Bhoot (Ghost; Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) traversing urban thriller, road movie, policier, and horror genres, the genre momentum refuses the possibilities of domestic autonomy from the dangers which course through contemporary society.

317 9 Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 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 which is layered into other image tracks, just as music too loops back into earlier melodies and voices. At one level, this is to do with the constitution of selves: inevitably, different generations will regard the contemporary with different time scales. But, stepping outside these subjective ties, there is the historical institution of the cinema. Composed of the layered experience of its practitioners, its codes of representation and performance, its narrative tropes, the cinema opens such temporal loops even as claims are made for the contemporary moment as distinctive and unique to itself. The built environments of cities in the cinema of today conjure up earlier moments in a history of cinematic representation. Public spaces such as the Bombay Victoria Terminus, high-rises, the interior 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 personae, their social typage, generic placement, and performative repertoire set up dialogues with earlier formations of personality. Here I look at these parameters, the city and the body, as they are woven in the narrative space of the cinema. My exploration of these ways of looking will primarily focus on the experience associated with Bombay in the cinema. But the exploration will periodically flow beyond this focus, to see how

318 304 The Melodramatic Public 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 the body as a vehicle of performance. By this I mean a form which renders the body as artifice, as subject to play and transmutation. Rather than a self locked into a body, there is a disjunction, affording us with the possibility of seeing the body as interpretative vehicle. The contemporary situation has witnessed substantial changes in state and civil society discourses about the cinema. A key term here is Bollywood. This is a term widely used to describe the institution of contemporary Bombay cinema. By and large, it seems to have emerged with the development of a substantial external market for the Bombay cinema, one which exports the elaborate staging of Indianness through the rituals of the so-called traditional family. Such a cultural form, it has been argued, panders to the needs of cultural affiliation and 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, state cultural policies, new linkages between cinema, fashion, advertising, and music, and a new constellation of commodity culture. 1 I will pursue these issues over the next two chapters. But for now I want to set this important phenomenon aside, in order to provide another sense of the contemporary, and provide a route for a different engagement with our time. I will turn to the 1970s as my point of origin, developing a narrative that moves between the cinema and social and political transformations. Indian state, social, and civil institutions, organizational frameworks and cultural forms underwent a crisis whose ramifications were not immediately clear. A huge railway strike paralysed the country in The government s breaking of this strike, along with the later failure of strikes in the textile industry in the early 1980s, perhaps signalled the long-term decline of trade unions in the country. The early 1 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena, in Kaarsholm, ed. Cityflicks; and Madhava Prasad, This Thing Called Bollywood, Seminar 525, May Rajadhyaksha s argument is discussed at length in ch. 10 below.

319 Selves Made Strange s also witnessed movements against the corruption of local governments, sweeping through the federal states of Bihar and Gujarat, and indicating a groundswell against the ruling Congress Party, but also against the forms of social alliance and consensus the party had represented since the time of Independence. In the face of escalating opposition, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency, arrested opposition leaders, suspended civil liberties, instituted extensive censorship and an executive authority unchecked by rule of law. This dictatorship prefigured, in its governmental policies, some of the imperatives which have come up over the last ten years or so. These include a governmental address to the increasing complexity of Indian cities, which had, in these years, witnessed a large influx of population. 2 The Emergency deployed a rhetoric about efficiency of government, and a drive to discipline society, including the notorious government-led drives for sterilization and the clearance and relocation of slums. 3 Reaction to the Emergency saw the turning back of some of these drives. In the last ten years, much of the earlier agenda has re-emerged. Now, urban spaces in particular, and the disorderly and polluting publics of the city, have become the main targets for cleansing and reform by governments. Of course, where the 1970s regimes operated within the parameters of protectionist policies, current regimes have opened up the economy, so that many state interventions for the reorganization of cities relate to the cultivation of foreign investment. 4 This historical background suggests a complicated field against which to situate the domain of culture. One of the independent state s agendas was the development of modernizing cultural protocols. The state had set itself the agenda of supporting a good cinema which could vary from the experimentalist to the social realist form. Madhava Prasad has analysed how this developed in the differentiated cinematic field of the 1970s. He identifies a state-supported cinema that espoused a developmental realism, a middle-class cinema devoted to the 2 See Chatterjee, Is the Indian City Finally Becoming Bourgeois, for a discussion of the new forms of governmentality which emerged in the 1970s. 3 David Selbourne An Eye to India: The Unmasking of a Tyranny, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1977; Tarlo, Unsettling Memories. 4 Aditya Nigam, Dislocating Delhi: A City in the 1990s, Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, Delhi, CSDS, 2001; A. Sharan, Claims on Cleanliness: Environment and Justice in Contemporary Delhi, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life.

320 306 The Melodramatic Public ordinary and the everyday, and what he refers to as an aesthetics of mobilization launched by the industry. 5 The latter refers both to the narrative content but also to the imperative of mobilizing a mass audience into cinema halls against the perceived threat to the industry posed by state intervention and support. 1. In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas Here I want to keep aside the more ideologically normative role outlined in Prasad s description of cinematic differentiation. Instead, I will look at a range of cinematic practices which constitute what I will call a breaching of vistas. These are forms of inquiry into received paradigms for social transformation, which include texts of social realism along with popular forms of deconstruction, and the orchestration of the cinema as a type of energy field. These practices undertake the work of unsettling a horizon of desire for national reconstruction by targeting the iconographies through which this imagination has been instituted. They range in generic form from the author cinema, through popular action, domestic melodrama, and slapstick comedy. This outlines, then, a body of perspectives that cast a critical eye on the history I have charted. At the outset, let me gesture to a body of work which, in a sense, never settled into an iconography or established a horizon for national reconstruction. This is the work of the left-wing Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak which emerged from the historical catastrophe of India s Partition, a phenomenon which involved large-scale bloodshed and displacement. The event marked his work deeply, generating a highly innovative inquiry into the ramifications of this violent rupture. Using mythic and epic resonances in his delineation of characters and settings, his work documented how displacement had blighted attempts to put a world together again, whether on the basis of the household, the radical collective, or the ground of a realist and rationalist ontology. In 1974 Ghatak made something like a last will and testament. His Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, Story) in many ways carries on the earlier forms, composing materials as varied as the traditions of folk-dance (Chau), the symbolic itinerary of a Bangladeshi 5 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film.

321 Selves Made Strange 307 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 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 carry her family through starvation and indignity. Its narrative is framed by Radha, now a respected village matriarch, overseeing the construction of a dam. Mother and earth mingle as nature is converted through a nationalist dream of technologically driven plenitude. Nehru s by now well-worn statement claimed that the dams would be the temples of modern India; the popular film narrative suggests that an image of the suffering, sacrificial mother is the ultimate source of meaning and value. A quarter of a century later, in Coolie (Manmohan Desai, 1983), a villainous entity, motivated by sheer lust and the drive to dominate, opens the dam walls to inundate a village. An image of technology not as benign vehicle of plenitude, but instrument of destruction and mayhem, surfaces into view. This is testimony, perhaps, to the epochal rending of the developmentalist dream beloved of Nehru. Images such as these accumulate from this period. A number of icons of modernization, of Nehru s new faith, are rendered with a dark, even popular modernist sensibility. Railways, seen as magical vehicles to carry one into an extending universe of new experience, most famously perhaps in Pather Panchali (Song of the Road; Satyajit Ray, 1955) are composed within a rather different mise-en-scène of the city in films such as Zanjeer (The Chain; Prakash Mehra, 1973). 7 Here the narrative s existential sense of the contingency of life, ruled over by the imminent possibilities of accident, sends a man tumbling to his death from a mass commuter train. 6 Geeta Kapur, Articulating the Self into History: Ghatak s Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, in Pines and Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema, , rpntd in Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism, Delhi, Tulika, 2000; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic, Mumbai, Screen Unit, For a more complicated account of the train sequence in Ray, see ch. 5 above.

322 308 The Melodramatic Public Elsewhere in this film, the rail bridge and rail tracks are presented as symbolic backdrops for the hero s merciless beating. 8 While the 1950s rarely displayed an engagement with the representation of work, whether in the popular or art cinemas, in this period work is evoked through a realist description of the space of dockyards, warehouses, railway platforms, mines, construction sites. But the evocation is not noble; the personality is bound up with involuntary, industrialized rhythms. In Deewar (The Wall; Yash Chopra, 1974), the anger of the migrant child-worker Vijay at the insult to his mother is displaced onto the reverberations of an earth-breaking drill. Elsewhere, the city provides the setting for violent, traumatic outcomes, as when, in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Emperor of Destiny; Prakash Mehra, 1978), Bachchan and another subaltern figure mistakenly attack each other due to the cunning manipulation of forces behind the scenes. Locked in battle at a construction site, they use weapons Fig. 53: Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Prakash Mehra, 1978, Fight at the Construction Site. 8 See Ravi Vasudevan, The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in Contemporary Urban Action Films, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life.

323 Selves Made Strange 309 picked from the debris of the site, the deadly armature of the city-inthe-making claiming its sacrificial victims. (Fig. 53, p. 308.) Realist typage and melodramatic fantasy cohabit in the formal structures of this cinematic universe. The city often becomes a crucial space for staging the particular relay between the evocation of the real and its fantastical mutation. Bachchan s body appears almost architecturally of a piece with the vertical lines of the Bombay cityscape. In Yash Chopra s Trishul (The Trident,1978), set in Delhi, the ravaging of selves is engineered by a narrative of relentless business logic. A 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 recurrently gestures in his screen personae to the built environment of cities as alienated forms. These must be repossessed in the name of the alienated labourer, the mother who is also the producer of the conditions of life and of labour. City as the narrative space for the undermining of ethical certitudes is observable across the board. Ray s last film in his city series, Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975), indicates the emergence of a cynical imagination within a humanist oeuvre. His protagonist, normally defined in clear moral terms is here rendered as a shadowy entity. A diligent student who falls foul of the vagaries of the exam system, he gets caught up, with a sense of fascination, in the world of middlemen who get contracts on the basis of bribes and pimping. There is a clear delight in etching a gallery of inventively corrupt characters, glitteringly 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 which allows for the play of intermittent attraction rather than causal and moral coherence. 9 A delightful version of this new form of engagement comes from a film by Film Institute graduate Kundan Shah, 9 Ravi Vasudevan, The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray, Journal of the Moving Image 2, Calcutta, Jadavpur University, 2002, rpntd as A

324 310 The Melodramatic Public part of the elite New Indian Cinema movement supported by state finance. In Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Let Sleeping Dogs Lie; 1983), the urban energies are channelled not through melodrama and action but through slapstick and a cynical, black humour. The post-emergency scenario had generated a new journalistic form, that of the 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. This is an amiable self-reflexivity that leavens the film s cynical outlook on the hoopla of investigation so lauded in those years. The city as comic, absurdist frame displaces nationalist narratives of truth and justice, offering the spectator a rather different form of visceral engagement. Let me return, however, to the issue of melodrama. The nested spaces of the household within the city afford a powerful location from which to launch an inquiry into received terms of value and meaning. The popular domestic melodrama of these years offers a significant lexicon. A database of images and narrative syntagma brings Bachchan into view again, this time as a force straddling the revenge scenario and domestic melodrama. Both Trishul and the domestic melodrama Kabhi Kabhi (Sometimes; Yash Chopra, 1976), frame him against a backdrop of explosions. Destruction and construction, destruction for construction, these are well established motifs in a modernist reinscription of the world. 10 But here the modernist motif is interrupted, destruction is torn from the chain of signification, the object of construction drained of value. In Kabhi Kabhi, the motif is channelled into domestic space. Amit (Bachchan) had given up his love for Pooja (Raakhee), asserting that their happiness should not be at the cost of her parents misery. But he carries and nurtures this loss into adult life, marriage, and fatherhood. Construction provides a metaphorical imagery here. Amit is a builder, and Vijay, Pooja s husband by arranged marriage, is an architect and interior designer. As builder, Amit is associated with explosions used Modernist Public: The Double Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray, ch. 4 above. 10 A brilliant analysis of this process features in Harun Farocki s documentary film, Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988).

325 Selves Made Strange 311 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 structure and public placement, but a design for habitation and intimate living. Shifted to the domestic field, Bachchan is singularly ill equipped to fulfil such a design, unlike Vijay. Here the name Bachchan uses to incarnate the victorious persona of public revenge fantasy is transposed onto another, for he cannot animate the interior, defined as he is by a sense of lack. A 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 forcefield for unravelling expressive energies, is multiplied into the next generation. Vijay s son, Vikki (Rishi Kapoor), a bundle of disco-rhythms, romantic and sexual kinesis must find an outlet or attachment for otherwise his uninvested drives will destabilize the possibilities of generational renewal. 11 If Bachchan captures the fissure in the nationalist imaginary through a powerful melancholia, doomed to revisit scenarios of revenge which can never compensate for the losses he has sustained, there are other, quite contrary modes. The procedures of an anti-melodrama achieve eerie force in passages from Tarang (Wave; Kumar Shahani, 1984). Coming from the experimental side of the New Indian cinema, Shahani s film analyses the social transitions of its time, capturing the decline of the trade union movement, and the internecine fighting between nationalist and dependent visions of capitalism. Shahani s treatment is that of the distanced eye which frames, positions, and mobilizes 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 servant in the house of the industrialist Sethji. Caught in the conflict between her father and her husband, Rahul (Amol Palekar), Rahul s wraith-like wife Hansa (Kawal Gandhiok) exhibits a strange lassitude. Rather than pathos, here is the body depleted by spiritual enervation, drained by her capture in a generational conflict within the capitalist class. Shahani renders Janaki s transcendence of this world through an intricate iconography drawn from the epics. More memorable is his work with Hansa, who assumes the position of an Ophelia, but one who gives up 11 For further information about this film and the work of Yash Chopra, see Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra, London, British Film Institute, 2002.

326 312 The Melodramatic Public her life out of estrangement rather than melodramatic subjection. The figure glides across Shahani s widescreen composition, fleetingly glimpses the inner machinations, sexual logics, and business manoeuvres, and moves on, in a perambulation which echoes and creatively reinvests a Bressonian choreography 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 state is no longer an impartial arbiter of social justice is the subject of one of the independent documentary movement s major films, Anand Patwardhan s Bombay, Hamara Shahar (Bombay, Our City, 1985). This movement, working outside the domain of the state-run Films Division, started up substantially after the Emergency with films such as Patwardhan s Prisoners of Conscience (1978). 13 His work displays great discretion in rendering the situation of the pavement dwellers, deploying their own voices for offscreen narration. The voice floats, and the film takes time to locate it in a specific person. The director plays his own presence down, except to highlight it as the object of working-class scepticism about the 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, and self-absorbed citizen 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 appears suggestive to me that certain dimensions of this scenario appear to be off the agenda. While investigative journalism takes state and corporate corruption as its main object, in general, 12 For the work of Kumar Shahani, see Framework 30 1, 1986, Dossier on Kumar Shahani. 13 Vinod Pavarala, Other Voices: Exploring the Cinema of Resistance, Indian Darpan, Hyderabad, 2000.

327 Selves Made Strange 313 neither the film documentary nor the print journalistic genres investigate 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 [Half-Truth], 1983; and Aaghat [The Shock], 1985). From the 1950s onwards, Bombay popular cinema has taken crime as a key thematic, generic form, and mode of urban representation and experience. While these earlier forays used criminality to dramatize social injustice, and as metaphoric narrative for situations of illegitimacy and social exclusion, the contemporary cinema from the mid-1970s develops a different symbolic narrative of crime. It is perhaps instructive to look at Bombay, Hamara Shahar alongside the popular fictions of the period, for example Ankush (The Goad; N. Chandra), made in the same year. Surely a life at the margins, on the streets, of the sort depicted in Patwardhan s film, is also one open to the seductions of petty crime? But this the documentary format does not take up; apart from the fact that it would deplete the activist focussing of issues of injustice, it is also perhaps a more difficult world to enter. Let us track back to the Bachchan persona. His characters derive from realist typage and display a representational capacity, as the 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, in a world which was increasingly to see the demise of trade union forms (Deewar captures this in the destiny of Bachchan s father), the film appears to anticipate this and to take its hero into a world of crime and the illicit accumulation of wealth, although, of course, in the name of the mother. This body of work is thus entangled in a particular vision of the delegitimization not only of the state as 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 offers 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 (Acid; 1987). The off-mainstream Ankush generates its own sense of documentary reality. Its evocation of street corner, neighbourhood, and bazaar is distinctive, bringing a new semantics of the

328 314 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 54: Ankush, N. Chandra, 1986, One Day, Everyday. cinematic city into being. Later, these spaces would often be more ornately represented in studio sets, but here, a realistic mise-en-scène, relying on location shooting, is observable. The realism extends into the characterization of the male group which clusters at the street corner. The film gives us a sense of distended time, as if this could be one day, everyday. (Fig. 54.) It also captures the condition of unemployment, but also of embitterment which provides the film with its political slant. Made in the wake of the decimation of the huge Bombay textile labour strike, and, in turn, the substantial dispersal of the city s textile industry itself, the four main characters both gesture to this, and posit a more general condition. This is of the educated unemployed who have been unable to adjust to the demands of a corrupt society. The social configuration speaks of the constituency widely noted to be a critical base of the Shiv Sena, Maharashtra s chauvinist regional party which later became an important part of the countrywide Hindu majoritarian polity. 14 This group s sense of status is under attack, they 14 On the Shiv Sena, see for example Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence.

329 Selves Made Strange 315 are fallen, and this sense of unjust social demotion embitters them. Public assertion is critical, and takes the form of contests with gangs who seek to control right of way in the film s opening spectacle of the Ganesh Chaturti processions, a key feature of city public life and political mobilization in a chauvinist Hindu politics from the time of the nationalist leader Tilak. 15 All of this corroborates the thesis that the film is like a Shiv Sena propaganda vehicle. 16 In its social configuration it also anticipated the national conflicts that were to erupt a few years later. In 1989, V.P. Singh, the prime minister of a minority government, decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission on reservation of jobs for historically backward classes. That move sparked a spate of public protests. An elite public believed such policies would cut at meritocracy and put a brake on India s developmental dynamic. More complicatedly, a high-caste, lower-middle-class population expressed a frustration and despair which saw a number of young people taking their lives. 17 Of course, it is not in the imagination of an Ankush to capture this last scenario. Male bravado is its chosen route, as the protagonists undertake the annihilation of a corrupt bevy of businessmen and accept their guilt and public execution in the manner of martyrs to a social cause. However, the importance of the film as a generator of a new language for the capture of Bombay in the cinema should not be underestimated. From the Ganesh Chaturthi, through neighbourhood, street-corner, and bazaar, Chandra would go on to capture the railway tracks, and the shanty town at the borders of the city in Tezaab, his major commercial success of The film defines an inside/outside logic to the city of Bombay. The sometime starry-eyed navel cadet and patriot, the middle-class Munna, has fallen on evil times because of the machinations of various forces and the failures of the court and the police. Like the mythic Ram, Munna is unjustly exiled from his city, and undergoes a proper criminalization. The ultimate logic of the 15 However, the Ganesh festival was also much more complicated, as shown by Raminder Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism. 16 This is the argument put forward by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen in Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, For a discussion of this spate of suicides, see ch. 7 above on the image of the burning male body in Roja (Mani Rathnam, 1992) and Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995).

330 316 The Melodramatic Public narrative is to return him to his city on his fulfilment of the Ramayanastyle rescue of his beloved, this time 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. Such trajectories were not the only ones possible, and this is indicated by two other films of the period, Nayakan (Hero; Mani Rathnam, 1987), 18 and Parinda (The Flight of Pigeons; Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1988). 19 Deewar was meant to gesture to the career of Haji Mastaan, a gangster who was also seen as something of a godfather figure in the Bombay of that time. While Deewar hardly touches on such issues, Nayakan alludes to the paternalist legitimacy of the criminal in its evocation of the important Tamil gangster, Varadarajan Mudaliar, for its protagonist Velu Naicker. The narrative could be read as pitted against the emergent Shiv Sena, sons of the soil, vision for the city, which took as its first target the immigrant from Tamilnadu and Kerala. The film adapted Coppola s The Godfather (1972) for its story set in the Tamil slums of the megalopolis, doubly marginalized by poverty and ethnic subordination. Here Ankush s iconography of the violent slum neighbourhood is carried on with a different inflection. Kamalahasan essays a bravura condensation of Brando and Pacino s performances, and, perhaps, the iconic Tamil star Sivaji Ganesan. 20 The iconography of the chaste, dhoti-wearing leader is familiar from Tamil politics, and political resonances are echoed, too, in the way art director Thotta Tharani and cameraman P.C. Sriram stage Naicker s home. Rather than the sepulchral inner world of Don Vito Corleone, this is a brightly lit space blocked to emphasize frontal registers for those who supplicate the Tamil mobster. There are suggestions here of the architecture of the court and the political realm. The film subtly traverses the field from crime to politics in such a mise-en-scène, suggesting not only the links but also the rhetorical structures through which constituencies converge around the image of the leader. There are the workings here of a complicated relay between spaces of politics and criminality via the axis of the cinema. And this is done 18 For Nayakan, see Lalitha Gopalan, A Cinema of Interruptions, London, British Film Institute, Ranjani Mazumdar, Ruin and the Uncanny City: Memory, Despair and Death in Parinda, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life. 20 I thank Indira Chandrashekhar for this observation.

331 Selves Made Strange 317 in ways which take the new lexicon of slum/crime/politics into a different direction than that which N. Chandra s films of this period configure. But there is also, powerfully, an intra-cinematic relay in the re-imagining of the contemporary. If Nayakan offers a riposte to N. Chandra s work, then Vinod Chopra s Parinda takes the figure of the Tamil gangster, strips him of political functions or references, and makes him the ambiguous psychotic villain, Anna (Nana Patekar) This is not so much a depoliticization of the ethnic narrative of Bombay subaltern life as a generic, and indeed, realistic description of the crossethnic dimensions of the criminal world. As Ira Bhaskar has pointed out, gothic elements now emerge strongly in the genre. 21 Bombay is the night city alternately composed of anonymous crowds, or an empty canvas for the staging of irrupting violence. And it is a city where the subject is never quite remote from the enquiring eyes of a malevolent network which may penetrate law courts, sacred religious spaces, and the household itself. The specifically gothic rendering emerges in the revelations about Anna s factory system, the city s underbelly. Apparently organized to produce drugs under the guise of an oil press, perceptually it is only available to us as a dis-assembly line for the 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 becomes a focus for a specifically generic inquiry in this film. As Ranjani Mazumdar has shown, the putative formation of a couple that bids to escape from the criminal nexus is constantly interrupted, as the domestic idyll is threatened by anonymous telephone calls and sudden blackouts. 22 Film noir and gothic elements function to 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 21 Ira Bhaskar, Melodrama and the Urban Action Film, paper presented at the workshop, The Exhilaration of Dread: Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in the Urban Action Film, Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, November Mazumdar, Ruin and the Uncanny City.

332 318 The Melodramatic Public work in the art cinema. While Nihalani s work addressed the complex relations between law and criminality, there was a strong pedagogic insistence in the make-up of the parallel cinema. This is perhaps represented most strongly by the work of Saeed Akhta Mirza, who, with Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Makes Alberto Pinto Angry?; 1980) Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho (Mohan Joshi, Present Yourself; 1983), and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Don t Shed Tears for Lame Salim; 1989) essayed a series of films on ethnic subalternity, and other forms of marginality. Arguably, these exercises, inspired by a Brechtian form of engagement, speak a language of conscientization that fits the 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 is exactly in outflanking such a discursive terrain and setting up scenarios of the city, its violent landscapes and subaltern experience not easily admissible within such a discourse. This breaching of the vistas of the developmental dream of nationalism is effected by outlining new senses of frustration and violence. There is a generative grammar of urban criminality which can speak about a range of experiences, from twisted forms of subalternity, new locales for urban meaning in the neighbourhood, down to the cinema as mode of urban experience. As we have seen, the politics of such an outflanking can go in different directions, providing both the possibilities of reassembling the national on a more chauvinist ground, and side-stepping its discursive frames in order to look at the social as the social, without clear ideological and political trappings. 3. Diagnosing the Sources of Violence One of the most startling of popular films steps outside the sphere of the urban, and looks to the countryside for its diagnosis of the sources of contemporary violence. In Maachis (Spark; Gulzar, 1994), the state is arraigned for the terror it unleashed to quell the Sikh militant movement from the mid-1980s, resulting in an arbitrary targeting and torture of many youths. Maachis director, Gulzar, functions at the intersection of the popular, middle class and parallel cinemas, and this is suggested in his deployment of realist narrative causation, quotations from newspaper reports to highlight civil libertarian issues, and song sequences that carefully dovetail with narrative requirements. The latter evokes the nostalgic bonding of young men who, in the face

333 Selves Made Strange 319 of an arbitrary state terror, have exiled themselves into a vengeful identification with militancy. Violence, hitherto associated with the genre of urban action, is now accessed through a social realism that captures an eerily silent Punjab countryside. Gulzar s scenario 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 a Savitri who would bring her husband back from the dead, with startling consequences. If the violent resonances of the contemporary have a series of 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 provided an epochal transformation in the violent contours of the contemporary. Increasingly influential from the mid 1980s, with the movement s parliamentary wing acquiring powerful political presence in the elections of 1988, its leader L.K. Advani unleashed violent encounters through a series of public processions evoking a mythic symbolism, the rathyatra. Parliamentary and extra-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 Riots followed, including something akin to a pogrom of the Muslim population of Bombay in January The independent documentary movement provided a powerful engagement with these developments. Patwardhan s Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God, 1992) undertook a kind of field research of the Hindutva movement, testing its historical claims against versions which contested these, and uncovering its high-caste mobilization to counter the democratizing impulses of the 1989 implementation of the Mandal Commission. Madhushree Dutta s I Live in Behrampada (1993) rendered the attacks on a locality in Bombay during the 1993 riots through a dynamic, whiplash capturing of different testimonies. The art cinema too produced one of its best works of recent times in Saeed Mirza s Naseem (1995). Mirza retains elements of his pedagogical form, this time to extol the ideal of female education against the 23 For the Hindutva movement, Tapan Basu, et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags; Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.

334 320 The Melodramatic Public characterization of the Muslim community as oppressive of female agency, something quite important to Hindutva ideology. But the film also provided a rich evocation of an earlier, secular nationalist 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 on the destruction of the mosque. Powerful, sensitive testimony 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 on the shape of the contemporary offered by the cinema. As always, the popular format provides intimations of such drives in much more ambiguous terms. Films such as Baazigar (Gambler; Abbas Mustan, 1993), Darr (Fear; Yash Chopra, 1994), and Gardish (Vicious Circle; Priyadarshan, 1992) access political changes via 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 a mysterious, even terrifying place. But there is also the terror arising from the attempt to use identity claims to include and exclude from the sphere of social and political 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 (The Wound, 1999) takes the security, indeed arrogance, of a domineering, politicized Hindu identity and submits its transparency of identity claims to historical dissection. Bhatt inaugurates his favoured exploration into the ramifications of illegitimacy with the killing of a woman during the Bombay riots. The killer is a Muslim youth, angered by the assault on his community let loose by the Hindu Right in January In fact, he has killed a Muslim, and Bhatt goes into the history of this suppressed identity, and its impact on the children of the dead woman. As in another landmark film, Yash Chopra s Dharamputra (Righteous Son, 1961), one of the children has grown up believing he is Hindu, and has become a rabid anti-muslim fanatic. The revelation of his parentage brings a devastating halt to his fanatical activity. As in his 1983

335 Selves Made Strange 321 Saaransh (The Essence), 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 Hindu- Muslim romance. This is done inventively, especially in a scene where children burst into the studio of the filmmaker father. They come upon a mythological film shoot, with Hanuman bearing down 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 such as Maachis and Zakhm, the popular cinema steps back and offers the possibilities of a quieter, less fevered perspective on a violent history and the identity conflicts which undergird it. In turn, new departures in the independent documentary format move from the logic of the public, activist form seeking to open the parameters of civil society, into a more exploratory dimension. Here, the register of the intimate rather than the public surface, along with essays in selfinterrogation, and richly textured explorations of the documentary form and its characteristic subject matter. What constitutes our relationship to the history of violence; how to explore this as a relationship, between spectator and audio-visual material, between filmmaker and subject, between the individual subject, present experience and historical memory? How to capture a vista, a space, a perspective, that can talk about violence, but in ways which do not exclude the viewer from the spectacle? In A Season Outside (1998) filmmaker Amar Kanwar s voice-over is not an expository one, leading us from one shot to the next, but one which insistently regards a space and reflects on its meanings. He looks at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan, a camp for the display of Sikh military prowess, a Tibetan refugee camp, and chooses to look at a distance, from a window above Chandni Chowk, at the Republic Day parade. Distance, and a brooding, enquiring disposition composes a new relationship of viewer to image, breaks up the documentary transparency of the image s relationship to event, everyday routine, ritual forms, marginal spaces. In contrast to the campaign or activist documentary, with its own, very important field of pertinence, the reflective form opens the possibilities of inquiry rather than making definitive truth claims and establishing clear-cut critical paradigms. (Fig. 55, p. 322.)

336 322 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 55: A Season Outside, Amar Kanwar, 1998, At the Border. 4. Intimations of Dispersal: The Poetry and Anxiety of a Decentred World Ruchir Joshi s remarkable Eleven Miles (1991) is an ambitious 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 re-contextualize the fixed ethnographic object, the folk form deprived of a relationship to an ongoing history. This sense of historical transformation is conveyed through the itineraries of Baul history presented by the film. Thus it tracks back to singing conventions that characterized Baul performance in the pre-partition period, moves to a contemporary situation where Baul performers are mobilized by the West Bengal Left Front government to commemorate the French Revolution, and refers to their cultural interaction with international currents, for example the work of Grotowski in Poland, or the rather different, exoticizing dynamics of their cultural export to France. The itinerary is composed not only of a new geography, but

337 Selves Made Strange 323 also encompasses a sense of how Baul philosophy, idioms, and narrative forms respond to modern experiences in technology, say of electricity, of musical form, and the new rhythms of life associated with the city. In tracking this expanding experience the film defamiliarizes spaces, as when a performer wanders through the night city, its shopping arcades, its pavements festooned with the different argot of popular entertainment forms. The night city becomes a city of reverie, which in turn recalls how earlier cities of the cinema looked (Motilal, like a wraith, drunkenly wandering down the street in another Calcutta film, Jagte Raho! [Stay Awake!], Shambhu Mitra, 1956). This 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 again. Such dispersal, a dispersal of narrative procedure in Eleven Miles, is evident in other work at a level of the thematics of urban experience. Dahan (Smouldering; Rituparno Ghosh, 1997) is based on a wellknown 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, in the film a schoolteacher; the victim, a woman who has married into a conservative, lower-middleclass 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 woman confronts the constraints of her own positioning. Ghosh interweaves testimony from passersby, and delineates micro-social pressures at home and in the work-place with a fine sense of composition, detail, and duration. At times, the form suggests the complex, serialized television film, indicating the emergence of new dynamics in the intersection between art cinema and the new televisual space it how inhabits. In our traversal of the movement from the crisis of the 1970s, we have witnessed the emergence of a landscape from which icons of

338 324 The Melodramatic Public earlier vistas have been deracinated, and new senses of space and organizations of subjectivity have emerged in a post-industrial city. Such intimations of dispersal are captured with a sense of density and intricacy in Surabhi Sharma s Jari Mari Of Cloth and Other Stories (2001). The household, and female labour, become the sources of stable reference in the shifting labour situations of the contemporary. Men move from place to place, seeking employment, while a new putting-out system provides women with work at home. The preservation of this space becomes crucial to familial stability and reproduction. Surabhi meets several women in these domestic workplaces, small, hemmed-in dwellings which build over the time of the film into an intricate, miniaturized aesthetic of work. (Fig. 56.) Along with the vendor, and images of movement and transience, the miniature form provides a tapestry of dispersal that shapes a new sense of the contemporary. The former cloth district lies adjacent to the airport, where flights constantly take off, connecting this space to a world economy for commodities and labour. In all this, the filmmaker displays a residual investment in the older forms of trade union organization, as she captures a failed union mobilization of workers. In these dispersed Fig. 56: Jari Mari, Surabhi Sharma, 2001, Miniaturized Aesthetic.

339 Selves Made Strange 325 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? Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended Seductions of Performance: The Work of Aamir Khan Rarely does one get the opportunity to see this invisible tapestry. As we have noticed, it is men, and usually violent men, who have dominated the cinematic field outside the documentary and art cinema practice. But men have increasingly come into focus not simply as figures to identify with but as objects of enquiry. Rahul Roy s When Four Friends Meet (2000), his documentary on young men in a northwest Delhi neighbourhood, provides pause for thought. Not only does it enable us to reflect on the sources and problems posed to masculinity in the contemporary epoch, it may also provide us with a bridge to open out the status of fiction and performance in the rendering of experience. In his film, a significant reference point for male identity is the affective unit of the family, and the space of the household. However, this is not necessarily a productive setting for his subjects to express themselves, their memories and desires. Rather, it is the male group that proves particularly potent for the expression of interpersonal 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 filmmaker found the best setting to be a place outside the domain of the family, on the balcony of the family dwelling, a terrace, or in the personalized space of one of the men. The group both represents individual male views and exceeds them, generating an inter-subjective field. I would suggest that male group subjectivity is governed by performativity, the practice of assuming a role, character attributes, nuances of style and speech which are lived 24 For an analysis of such dispersed work situations, Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India s Informal Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

340 326 The Melodramatic Public 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 instance, the group recount and comment uproariously on how a group of men had sex with a mentally unbalanced woman. This is humour of the nudge-and-wink sort, performing a worldly knowledge of what men get up to and what women really want. The filmmaker s voice then intervenes, disturbing the rhythms of group performance, and inducing a more reflective and moral discourse on an event that clearly verges on gang rape. It is tempting to deploy Roy s sensitive film as a deconstruction of the new subjectivities which we have observed emerging from the ground of the dis-assembled nation. Surely it bounces off films such as Ankush or Tezaab, uncovering what lies beneath male braggadocio? Similarly, perhaps Jari Mari can also be intercalated as a text of 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-judgemental method of documentation (which is not the same thing as failing to develop a point of view). Rather, it lies in attending to the performativity of the male group, the inventiveness which they conjure up when they come together, and to give that performativity an affective force, to discern that it is a mode of self-realization. The popular in fact, does not necessarily contest truths by laying reality bare. As we have observed, reality may in fact provide a mise-enscène and launching pad for a peformativity displaying fantasies of action and potency. 25 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 which is simultaneously hollow and dramatizes the impossibility of self-realization. This is a species of melodramatic tragedy, but one that 25 Richard Dyer looks suggestively at the relationship between representations of the humdrum everyday, performative excess and utopian transcendence in Entertainment and Utopia, Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods, vol. II, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987.

341 Selves Made Strange 327 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), Lawaris (Orphan; 1981: the illegitimate offspring involved in high melodrama but also the comedy of female transvestism) Sharaabi (Drunkard, 1984: the drunkard again), Don (1978: where his small town yokel in the city is the double of a powerful mafioso), not to mention domestic comedies such as Chupke Chupke (Hush Hush; 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. And he has developed a signature style composed of nonsensical repartee and frantic jock dance moves, mimicking and sending up a genre of phallic performance. This performer requires an extended inquiry, but for this essay, in keeping with the dualities and overlaps in my twin focus around violence and performativity, I refer the reader back to my analysis of the Nana Patekar persona, and will briefly look at another key star, Aamir Khan. 26 Aamir Khan started his career with Raakh (Ashes; Aditya Bhattacharya, 1988), in many ways a deconstruction of the male revenge sagas so long a staple of the Bombay industry. However, he swiftly moved into standard industrial groove, featuring as a strutting, confident, macho teen hero in films such as Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (Road to Disaster; Mansoor Khan, 1988), and Dil (The Heart; Indra Kumar, 1990), both major box office successes. Other films suggested a slightly more complicated screen persona. Dil Hai ke Manta Nahin (The Heart Won t Listen; Mahesh Bhatt), Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (Winner Takes All; Mansoor Khan) and Andaz Apna Apna (A Style of One s Own; Raj Kumar Santoshi), all suggested a playfulness verging on a perverse, manipulative disposition. A slump in the mid 1990s signalled a time for reinvention of persona. Aamir essayed the yokel in the city (Raja Hindustani), with great success, and then went on to try 26 For Nana Patekar, see ch. 3 above.

342 328 The Melodramatic Public on a tapori (street conman) mask in Varma s Rangeela (Colour My World; 1995), and Vikram Bhatt s Ghulam (Slave; 1998). Just when the urban street mask seemed to have settled in rather well, Aamir assumed the role of the educated, middle class patriot, a policeman pitted against terrorists from both within and beyond India s borders in John Mathew Mathen s Sarfarosh (Martyr; 1999). Both here and in the tapori films, the Aamir persona appeared to grapple with the reassertion of a secularist legacy under threat from the Hindu Right, if in rather ambivalent ways in the case of Sarfarosh. Aamir s urbane screen persona contributes a certain darkness to the innovations of Farhan Akhtar s Dil Chahta Hai (Desires of the Heart; 2001), which the director says was consciously aimed at a sophisticated, yuppie audience, evoking an attitude to love, work and friendship different from those constructed by mainstream cinema convention. Finally, of course, Lagaan (Land Tax; 2001), the much-touted foreign Oscar nominee, and Aamir Khan s own production. This rural saga, 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 nation. It is the image of the nation which is arresting here, composed as it is of a highly inclusive representation of social groups and types, if in sometimes patronizing ways (as in the case of an untouchable character). Aamir rendered this play with typage, in a series of Coke ads featuring a Muslim street stall vendor, urban tough, Punjabi peasant, Bihari contractor. While these constitute an entertaining play with the idea of the unanchored persona, with Lagaan and other mainstream features, there is a distinctive way in which this star persona continues to deploy his cinema to revive older, more generous forms of national self-perception. Let me turn away from domestic production to look to the instance of British Indian culture. Until recently, fictional forms dwelling on the problems of an Indian experience brought up at the intersection of migrant ethnic culture and local mores tended to be restricted in its appeal; on the other hand, Bollywood was and continues to be largely consumed by an ethnic Indian and Pakistani audience. However, recently there have been signs of the development of a crossover culture in a clutch of new films that went beyond the ethnic and art cinema audience to achieve broader local and international success, as in the

343 Selves Made Strange 329 case of East is East (Damien O Donnell, 1999), My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997), and Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002). The first two films have made Om Puri, primarily an actor of India s parallel cinema, into an internationally recognized star. 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 (Meera Syal) is, perhaps, of the same cultural derivation, though its strategies are rather different. Here, once again, performativity appears to have provided a force that unpacks cultural differences. Deploying elements of stand-up comedy, musical skit/cabaret and the comedy routine, this TV comedy 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 the social realist fiction. At the same time, the series is very much apiece with a scatological British body humour, with its profuse recourse to bathroom jokes and gross out-representations. 6. Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac Performativity Let me conclude by looking at a specific type of performativity. This is the performativity of the cinema itself, as vehicle of an aesthetics of astonishment, where technology announces itself as a primary 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 will take as my example a film that works at the intersection of violent and performative imaginations about the city, and essays a significant intervention in our understanding of contemporary experience and politics. In Ram Gopal Varma s gangster film Satya (1998), a gang fight is orchestrated via a highly self-conscious camera. A massive crane 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 rooftops as we look down on the chase in the streets below. In a particularly resonant segment, the chase climaxes on an overhead suburban railway bridge, quoting from

344 330 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 57 Fig. 58

345 Selves Made Strange 331 Figs 57 59: Satya, Ram Gopal Varma, 1999, The Killing of Bhau Thakre. Friedkin s The French Connection (1971), and then crescendoing via Scorsese s De Niro/Pesci double gunburst in Goodfellas (1990) as the protagonists Bhiku and Satya dispatch their opponent Guru Narayan. The scene is cast against the backdrop of the train hurtling below. Apparatuses of cinema and everyday urban speed double each other, referencing the moment through a kind of world cinema parallax. Characters and actions shadow each other in phantom relay, the baton of form being carried into another territory of social experience. We have here an act of transposition of form where the experience of 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 on a bar terrace above a crowded Bombay street allows us to see goons mercilessly beat down on Satya as an unaware everyday concourse streams by on the street below. As Bhiku, Satya, and their gang torture an opponent in a basement, we see Satya s beloved, Vidya,

346 332 The Melodramatic Public through a skylight which opens out onto the street above, as she walks along, unaware of what we are privileged to see. The systematic deployment of the steadicam, of seamless bodily movement and character focalization, essayed by Varma earlier as an abstract formal exercise notionally yoked to the horror genre in Raat (Night; 1991) is in Satya recurrently deployed to problematize the inside/outside world in the city. Here the camera s bodily pursuit of a character highlights how privatized spaces may be rapidly infiltrated, often with violent results. Such a hyper-location, braiding the spectator into spaces that are differentiated, draws upon the omniscient conventions of classical narration, but, above all, foregrounds the technology through which our perception is organized. Separated spaces can be figured as adjacent, as collapsing into each other, and as rapidly 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 we 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, which, as we have already noted, is a crucial cultural form in contemporary Shiv Sena and Hindutva politics. Bhiku s assassin, Bhau Thakre, the gangster successfully turned politician, presents himself and his followers before the deity. As Satya moves in, the camera focuses on the red cloth which he has swathed around a knife. The red sheath bobs along in the crowd, reminding us of a similar scene in Coppola s The Godfather, Part II (1974) in which Vito Corleone moves through a street overwhelmed by festivities celebrating a Roman Catholic holy day to target the local gang leader. Satya

347 Selves Made Strange 333 stabs Bhau Thakre to death, and as the scene dissipates into chaos, we are left with a haunting image. The camera is positioned at the lofty elevation of the deity, looking down on the solitary figure of the dead villain as the ebb and flow of the tide tugs at his body. His followers dispersed, his command over spectacle voided, his rag-doll body is offered up for a view that at once assumes the cosmic perspective of the deity, and the cultural momentum of a cinephiliac camera that enframes it. We do not need to recognize the cinematic reference to be caught in the allure of the moment. (Figs 57 59, pp ) 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.

348 10 The Contemporary Film Industry I: The Meanings of Bollywood One of the dominant senses of our contemporary times is a massive sense of change in Indian urban life. Several nodes of transformation have been identified as the source of these changes, especially those of economic liberalization and globalization. In the wake of the massive debt to the World Bank incurred by the Indian economy at the end of the 1980s, the Indian government undertook to start dismantling a protectionist regime initiated after Independence to shore up local industrial growth, in order to invite foreign direct investment, including non-resident Indian investment, and to open the Indian market to foreign goods and competition. 1 One of the noticeable changes of this period has been the rapid transformation of urban landscapes in line with this new set of compulsions. The clearing of key urban spaces of slum settlements, pavement dwellings, and street vending has been inaugurated to set up new markets, malls, and entertainment spaces with a view to build a powerful consumer economy. This efflorescence of a new commodity culture and urbanism has gone hand in hand with contests of various types, specifically on issues of property right, the deployment of municipal government to take over lands, and the displacement of working populations. The new urbanism has also had a complicated intersection with urban environmentalism, as the presence of polluting small factories and workshops in residential areas has given rise to campaigns 1 Payer, The Debt Trap; Kavaljit Singh, Taming Global Financial Flows: A Citizen s Guide, Delhi, Madhyam Books, 2000 and London, Zed Books, 2000; Payer, Lent and Lost; Peet, Unholy Trinity.

349 The Contemporary Film Industry I 335 for industrial relocation, again with considerable impact on a mass of the urban working class. 2 Along with this new urbanism and consumer economy, the contemporary period has showcased new types of production centred on information and communication technology, and the high profile given by government and corporate sectors to this area on the basis of the impact made by Indian Information Technology knowhow in the global market. In terms of the consumer economy, this context has been marked by an accelerated availability of communication and media forms, from telephony through to satellite broadcasting and cable television, and new systems of distribution and delivery based on digitized formats. Much of this has taken the form of corporate initiatives, with considerable state backing. However, such transformation has not been controllable, and has given rise to different and contested circuits of production, circulation, and consumption. Rather than an image of corporate enterprise and leadership, the second focus looks to the phenomenon of more informal, dispersed types of initiative, challenging attempts to control new economic forms through a burgeoning regime of intellectual property rights. 3 Where do we place the cinema in this firmament? What does an exploration of the cinema offer us in terms of understanding the new relations between the state, corporate enterprise, media, and public life? We have a new context for Indian cinema in the 1990s, one which contrasts sharply with its official status during the decades after Independence. If from the 1950s the cinema in its dominant, commercial 2 For the possibilities of manoeuvring around the law in issues such as land allocation, access to urban amenities, and intellectual property contests, Lawrence Liang, Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 6 17; Solomon Benjamin, Touts, Pirates and Ghosts, ibid., ; for changes in land allocation to facilitate the construction of malls and multiplexes in Delhi, Anand Vivek Taneja, Begum Samru and the Security Guard, ibid., ; and, more generally, Media Researchers@Sarai, Complicating the City: Media Itineraries, ibid., ; for the impact of urban environmental lobbies and experts in urban transformation, Awadhendra Sharan, Claims on Cleanliness: Environment and Justice in Contemporary Delhi, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, 3 17; and New Delhi: Fashioning an Urban Environment through Science and Law, in Sarai Reader 04: Bare Acts, For an overview, Ravi Sundaram, Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalization, Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), 3 January 2004, 64 71; Rakesh Kumar, ed., Medianagar, 1 and 2, Delhi, Sarai-CSDS,

350 336 The Melodramatic Public format was understood by the state to be a form that did not warrant sympathetic policies, and was to be taxed and regulated in order to control its dubious attractions for a mass audience, then the situation has changed substantially. One of the major issues here has been the emergence of a significant market, getting high returns, in Indian cinema s export-oriented sector. The phenomenon went hand in hand with the reframing of the nation-state, and, indeed of the national imaginary. Rather than the territorial nation, whose economy, boundaries, and cultural protocols needed protection, we witness the emergence of the global nation where non-resident Indians come to have an increasingly high profile, symbolically expressed in the annual prime ministerial meetings with the success stories of what are now referred to as PIOs, People of Indian Origin. 4 Of course, one must emphasize that such a global nation is skewed in its deployment of boundaries, retaining new forms of openness for the successful diaspora, and otherwise constantly emphasizing territoriality when monitoring the movement of undesirable populations across South Asian borders. The increased importance of the high-end migrant culture, along with the spectacular movement of software engineers into different sites of the world economy, now project the idea of India as a world power with greater confidence. Significantly, rather than yoke such a newly found pride and expansionist logic to a national art cinema, it has been the commercial mainstream film which has invited most attention. And the export market has been a crucial component in the profile of returns on Indian films by the turn of the century. $250,000 was considered a dream figure for overseas rights 10 years ago. Today worldwide rights for a major Indian film range from $2m $3m. The rights for Hindi films in South Africa sell for $50,000, in Aus for $60,000. Equally good for non-hindi. Muthu grossed $1.7m in 23 weeks at a cinema in Japan, and his next film, Padayappa was sold in Japan for $50, The success of Bombay (and Tamil) cinema is composed of a series of intersecting investments, in multi-media forms of distribution and exhibition (cinema, DVD, VCD, satellite broadcast, video on demand, as well as music rights), and in relation to fashion, advertising, 4 See the website of the organization of PIOs, 5 Bhuvan Lall, Indian Summer, Screen International, 24 November 2000.

351 The Contemporary Film Industry I 337 the music industry, internet websites, and live performances. The success of this enterprise suggests how important new corporate cultures have become to the fashioning of the global nation. Earlier arguments that Indian film consumption abroad was important in negotiating identity dilemmas amidst a metropolitan modernity that suborned ethnic cultures no longer carries the same conviction. 6 Thus Indian capital abroad has had occasion to bestride public culture triumphantly, displaying its wares in mainline shops, restaurants, cinemas, and theatres. A case in point was the month-long focus by the well-known British departmental store, Selfridges, in May 2002, highlighting Indian décor and clothes, and deploying a Bollywood theme in its London and Manchester shops. During this period a broad-based promotion of South Asian film, dance, theatre, and music was undertaken as well, called Imaginasia. 7 I do not mean to sound judgemental about this cinema simply because of its association with a new, assertive dimension of capital. Especially in the United Kingdom, it has generated a new space for multicultural engagements, circumstances which have allowed for innovative outputs which lampoon some of the canonical differences and hierarchies of an earlier metropolitan culture, as witnessed in the brilliance of creations such as the British Indian skitcom Goodness Gracious Me (Meera Syal et al., ). If this would indicate the creative end of the spectrum, it is significant how a formerly middle or realist cinema of the diaspora, for example by Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, has actively partaken of export-oriented Bombay cinema s investment in the world of the family as commodity form. In contemporary Bombay, the traditional identity presented by family films provides a sheen, a glossy texture where ritual forms such as the marriage, its modes of ornamentation and performance provide a lustrous drape to clothe the self in and offer others transient distraction. This has been the mode for films from Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who Am I to You; Sooraj Barjatya, 1994) through to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Brave of Heart Wins the Bride; Aditya Chopra, 1995, hereafter DDLJ) Pardes (Foreign Land; Subhash Ghai, 1997), Kal Ho Na Ho (Whether or Not 6 Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, New York, Routledge, See Screen, 3 May 2002, consulted 28 December 2007.

352 338 The Melodramatic Public There s a Tomorrow; Nikhil Advani, 2004), and even down to films such as Gurinder Chadha s Bride and Prejudice (2004). Arguably, Mira Nair s Monsoon Wedding too can be bracketed in this cycle of production, despite uncovering a narrative of incest trauma and unhappy alliances within the armature of a so-called traditional family culture. This is because it uses the format of the brand including its ornamentation, energy and performative excesses in order to place itself in the world market of art cinema, where differentiation from mainstream products provides a distinctive selling point. Crossing the familiarities of an ornamental commodity universe with social concern, Nair s work here appears to spring from a confluence similar to that of the mass cultural genre it seeks to critique and establish a distance from. But in the process it achieved a crossover success that almost brought it on par with the mainstream Bollywood film. 8 This question of the extended commodity functions of this cinema also potentially destabilizes the inside/outside dichotomies of the nation. By this logic, a burgeoning world of newly available commodities mobilizes a desire for narratives that both express and draw upon this fascination, while seeking to generate an identity equilibrium within which these desires can be cohered, made happy. The drama of the extended family provides the generic format to explore these drives not only across territorial boundaries, but also across the emergent boundaries initiated by the unleashing of new forms of desire at home. I say only potentially as, while these films are often as successful in India s metropolises as they are abroad, audience profiles and cultural contexts are not the same, and an analysis of different reception contexts could provide for a suggestive mapping of the cultures of Indian filmgoing. I will suggest how such tensions of audience address and composition may be interpreted in the locus classicus of a cinema with globalizing intent, DDLJ, and by an examination of reception studies emerging in the USA and UK. Further, I will suggest how too constrained a reading of the Bollywood diaspora family movie does not capture possible dynamics in the genre; and also that to focus on 8 Monsoon Wedding was the most successful of the cross-over films, and made returns of 3.2 million pounds in the UK and $13.9 in the USA. Screen Digest, July By 2002 it was reported that the standard return on a superhit Bollywood film would be 3.8 million pounds, but importers were aiming to cross the 9 million barrier. Bhuvan Lall, Indian Pins Box Office Hopes on Devdas, Screen International, 5 July 2002.

353 The Contemporary Film Industry I 339 this strand of film production as emblematic of the moment of globalization is to underestimate the deep transformation wrought by the present moment in the film economy as a whole. Whatever the complex and differentiated qualities of contemporary film culture, one trend seems clear: the state is not much concerned, any more, with providing an authentic rendering of cultural identity through a national aesthetic, as was the case in the years after Independence. As I have noted, at that time there was constant anxiety to avoid the trap of derivative culture, especially the influence of American culture, and a depletion of traditional art and craft values. In a sense, what we are observing now, at least at the crucial level of the high-profile, export-oriented Bombay film is the displacement of nation as art form by nation as brand, adding and deriving distinction and value from products which circulate widely, servicing the global nation in its identity triumphs and struggles, and earning substantial profits. Interestingly, brand India is embraced enthusiastically in the wider bid to convert nations into brand equity, as for example with the recent cultivation of Indian cinema and its apparatus of location shooting and tourism by brand Switzerland, a term knowingly used by the president of one of the most popular resorts of the global India s cinematic vista Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the Bombay Film Economy One of the remarkable features of this transformation is the emergence of the category Bollywood. Nowadays, this term is used as if it had always existed. It is used profusely in trade magazines, television shows, and popular periodicals, and it is used retrospectively. While looking at trade papers of the 1990s, I only started noticing its regular usage in the latter part of the decade. Clearly, it may have been used at various times, but not so systematically as now. Common sense would suggest that earlier usages would be idiomatic and casual, perhaps 9 Screen, May See also the moves of the Greater Zurich Area to encourage Indian film, tourism, and other branded products, including ayurveda and yoga, in the bid to brand Switzerland as a base for European business. Switzerland Keen to Market Bollywood Merchandise, Times of India Online, 28 September 2006, consulted 31 December 2007: cms.

354 340 The Melodramatic Public sending up the pretensions of a third world imitator of the real American thing. However, there is no such sense of this now, and it would be reasonable to go with the logic that it emerged in the wake of the success of the diaspora-themed films from DDLJ onwards. More specifically, the term might then be associated with the reinvention of the family-film genre to address not only diaspora audiences but to provide a mise-en-scène for the new types of commoditization that have developed around cinema in India. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has drawn on this set of associations and gone on to designate Bollywood in more expansive terms, as referring to the ensemble of interests that govern the contemporary entertainment industry. 10 In this definition, film is only one element, even if one from which other entertainment and consumer sectors, in television, music, advertising, fashion, and websites derive cultural capital. Rajadhyaksha makes a strong political-cultural argument here. He believes that such an ensemble has fundamentally redefined the lack of fit we have observed between cinema and nation-state. Whereas earlier the state denied the dominant cinematic form legitimacy, and sought to cultivate an alternative logic of cultural production in keeping with the criteria of art and cultural authenticity, the cinema nevertheless carried the investment of a national culture with it. This was an unofficial culture, but also the prevailing culture of cinema, and the disjunction afforded the working out of a variety of critical conflicts with the design of the nation-state, and its ambition to institute a civil social form with adequate cultural constituents, for example those more oriented to realism and classical and folk art practices. Rajadhyaksha situates the cinema s historical and political significance in its extension of the field of rights, where the purchase of a ticket afforded the filmgoer a right to a view. 11 Here, the cinema provided a space for public access and congregation that was symbolically significant in a society which had prevented those low in the social hierarchy from participating in spaces of public spectacle and 10 The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena, in Inter-Asian Cultural Studies 4 (1), April 2003, special issue on Cinema, Culture Industry and Political Societies, rpntd in Kaarsholm, Cityflicks. References to this article are from Cityflicks. 11 Also see his Who s Looking? Viewership and Democracy in Indian Cinema, in Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema,

355 The Contemporary Film Industry I 341 performance. Specifically, this was a ritual public, composed of spaces ranging from the temple to various types of classical and ritual performance. 12 This type of right exceeded the ensemble of rights disbursed by the modern enumerative state in relation to citizens who were entitled to vote and thereby receive welfare. Rather, the state had to regulate the rights of the filmgoer, for the cinema generated an illegitimate content which exposed its viewers to cultural denigration. Thus the government imposed taxes, and subjected films to moral regulation through censorship. As with subaltern and post-colonial societies more generally, the cinema echoed the messier dimensions of democracy s bid for inclusiveness, exhibiting and channelling mass energies that exceeded the normative and procedural prescriptions of an elite modernity. 13 In Rajadhyaksha s view, contemporary changes in state policy and industrial initiative have threatened these democratic features of the cinema. The threat arises from the new forms of corporatization that have secured the industrial recognition, financial investment, and cultural legitimacy historically denied to the cinema. This reorganization has taken place at the cost of the cinema itself, insofar as it was a field of resistance to the imposition of an elite modernity, and provided an arena of contests around social and cultural transformation. The Bollywood sector of Indian film production is anti-cinema, not only because the cinema occupies only a small, if significant, space in its commodity complex, but also because it has secured legitimacy and instituted a reformist imaginary long in the making. For Rajadhyaksha, in terms of narrative form, this question of legitimacy is an identitarian project to do with successfully laying claim to an indigenous authenticity. And it appears to simultaneously regulate and discipline audience responses in that it successfully addresses its audience as a family audience and on the basis of family values. This is one of several areas where this otherwise insightful mapping of contemporary film economy appears problematic. Firstly, the argument does not appear to accept that criteria of what constitutes indigenous authenticity have changed between the 1950s and the present. 12 Rajadhyaksha draws on the work of Karthigesu Sivathamby, Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication, Madras, New Century Book House, For the argument about the contradictions between modernity and democracy, see Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.

356 342 The Melodramatic Public... in the barely concealed claims to some sort of reformism that Bollywood so often presents these days in its biggest successes the claim of commitment to family values, to the feel-good-happyending romance that carries the tag of our culture one can see the ghosts of past trends going quite far back into time. The problem of the cinema s legitimacy has, since the pre-war years, consistently produced ver- sion after version of what was claimed as culturally authentic cinema authentic because authenticated by the national culture. One distant ancestor to, say, HAHK [Hum Aapke Hain Kaun?] would be the pre-war Swadeshi movie the devotionals and socials emphasizing indigenism of story and production. Post-War and in the early years of Independence, there was the first descendant of this indigenism the cinema that the State repeatedly anointed as authentically national. The process of authentication in this time was more palpable than the films that benefited by various declarations of recommended view-ing and continues to be so, if we see, for example, the extraordinary premium that the film industry continues to place upon the government s national film awards and its tax exemption criteria. One could safely say, however, that among the candidates vying for this kind of accreditation were included Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar socials from the Bombay Talkies studios, reformist musicals such as some of Raj Kapoor s work or some from Dev Anand s Navketan production house (both of which often hired ex-practitioners from the IPTA movement of the 1940s) and realist-internationalist films by directors from Satyajit Ray to Bimal Roy to the early Merchant-Ivory It is not clear what defines this peculiar ancestry, as the claims of indigenism of story and production was something that much of Indian cinema laid claim to from the time of D.G. Phalke onwards. But Rajadhyaksha s argument appears to be that devotional (sometimes seen as a kind of medieval social reform movie by pro-realist critics such as K.A. Abbas 15 ), social, reformist musical, realist-internationalist films shared certain rationalist drives that fitted a civil-social agenda to educate and reform cinema audiences. If indigenist legitimacy 14 Rajadhyaksha, Bollywoodization, K.A. Abbas, Sant Dnyaneshwar His Miracles and Manushya Dharma, Bombay Chronicle, 25 May 1940, rpntd in Bapu Watve, V. Damle and S. Fattelal, Pune, National Film Archive of India, 1985, 33 5.

357 The Contemporary Film Industry I 343 was the claim of this assemblage of films (an unusual one, to put it very mildly), then it could only be insofar as realism claims the capacity to be true to the life patterns (and conflicts) of peoples. Rather than a very loosely defined realist reformism being the ancestor to Bollywood, the family social film would appear to be its more obvious predecessor. Madhava Prasad, of course argued that such a feudal family romance, vehicle for the reproduction of tradionally regulated social relationships, was in fact the dominant narrative mode of popular Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. 16 By this logic, rather than Bollywood bringing the family into a position of symbolic and disciplinary ascendancy, it was already in place as the central structuring feature of popular cinema. Further, it was this form, and its system of assemblage through song, dance, and comedy, that was looked down upon in state cultural policy and its funding practices, and in the realist protocols instituted by an art cinema intelligentsia. From their perspective, narrative reform required a fundamental reworking of a popular format that had failed to develop industrial coherence, realist methods, and psychological portraiture. Chidananda Das Gupta, a key figure of the art cinema/film society movement, would in fact specify popular narrative structures which cultivated individual subordination to the family as one of the central problems of the popular format. 17 There is a huge gap then between earlier state and art cinema discourses of narrative reform and Rajadhyaksha s invocation of the family as the lynchpin of a long-term reformist discourse. I have argued that the family film does not, in fact, provide the dominant architecture of the popular. The cinema was generically differentiated, and familial thematics too had a shifting function in the articulation of narrative structures. 18 However, let me backtrack slightly, and offer a different argument to support the centrality of the family in terms of institutional imagination. The critical issue here is not the complexity and variety of what we see on the screen, but what we are not allowed to see, and how this structures the terms of narration. In a crucial sense, Prasad s argument about the feudal family romance centres on how an absolutist gaze constrains the privacy of the 16 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, Das Gupta, The Oedipal Hero, in The Painted Face, See above, ch. 1, II.9.

358 344 The Melodramatic Public couple by textual procedures secured by the institution of censorship. 19 This is echoed in a key document of industrial reform advocacy, the Film Enquiry Committee Report of While asserting the need for more varied stories and the cultivation of a liberal outlook in terms of social change, for example in the position of women, the committee nevertheless asserted that in India, people preferred to seek entertainment as families....owing to the family life and habits of Indians in general, we cannot imagine a state of affairs where the parents would generally be ready to go to pictures leaving their children behind.... We therefore consider that any plan for the future of the film industry must take account of the fact that these would be seen in an overwhelming majority of cases by adults along with other members of their families. It is necessary therefore, not merely to exercise the greater care in the selection of the material for making pictures but also in their scrutiny when the films are being certified. 20 The committee s recommendation of state support for industrial reform by sympathetic tariff, taxation, and funding policies needs to be counterpointed with a lack of any reform perspective on censorship. 21 This emphasis was to change with the G.D. Khosla report of 1969, which argued for a greater flexibility in the depiction of sexuality. 22 But even after this, we do not observe a substantial change in what Prasad underlines as a key feature of the regime, the prohibition on the kiss as mark of the privatized space of the couple. In this sense the family as a symbolic limit and disciplinary frame already existed under the aegis of state censorship; it did not have to be brought into being by the new life provided the family film in the contemporary epoch. Current changes have addressed, explicitly or implicitly, the key constraints which have dogged the institution of cinema since Independence. The government gave cinema industrial recognition in 1998 and by 2000 banks were formally instructed that the central 19 Guardians of the View: The Prohibition of the Private, Ideology of the Hindi Film, ch Film Enquiry Committee Report, 59; for the importance of more progressive representation of women in the cinema, ibid., For censorship, Film Enquiry Committee, Report of the Film Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship, New Delhi, Government of India Publications, 1969.

359 The Contemporary Film Industry I 345 government had listed the entertainment industry including films as an approved activity under industrial concern. 23 Further, while not reducing the onerous burden of entertainment tax, a number of state governments nevertheless waived it for the periods when multiplex cinemas were being introduced, normally for a three-year period. 24 Many states have also pursued flexible municipal policies, allowing land allocated for single-screen cinema to be redeployed for multiplex and mall construction, revising statutory cheap ticket classes to target upper-class cinemagoers, and more generally making the cinema into a crucial dimension in the fashioning of a new urban vista and consumer economy to attract corporate investment. 25 And, while the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) continues to fund an art cinema, it is notable that many directors associated with the arts cinema wing, such as Shyam Benegal and Sudhir Mishra, have turned to new corporate investors, such as Sahara Manoranjan and Pritish Nandy Communications, for their finance. 26 These corporations in turn fund a varied spectrum of commercial filmmaking. Finally, censorship remains a crucial regulatory drive, but its application appears to focus political issues, rather than the representation of sexuality. Thus the key films to suffer censorship have been Zakhm (1999) for its anti-hindutva stance, Black Sunday (Anurag Kashyap, 2005, released 2007), dealing with the bomb blasts that shook Mumbai in 1993, and the documentaries War and Peace (Anand Patwardhan, 1998) on India s nuclear bomb, and The Final Solution (Rakesh Sharma, 2003) documenting the Hindutva attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in Notably, films sold on the depiction of sexuality, especially a spate of films produced by Mahesh Bhatt, have not run into any trouble. Interestingly, this is in contrast to the trouble faced 23 Bhuvan Lall, The Talk of Mumbai...Industry Gains Its Wings, Screen International, 1 December New multiplexes are granted a five-year tax subsidy by state governments: entertainment tax is waived for the first three years, and there s a 50 per cent and 25 per cent waiver for the fourth and fifth years respectively (by which time capital costs are more than recovered). Single-screen theatres, on the other hand, pay 45% entertainment tax : Multiplex Mafia Rules Tinsel Town, Times of India, 29 May 2006, consulted 18 January See Taneja, Begum Samru and the Security Guard, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts. 26 See below, ch. 11, pt 2: Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch II.

360 346 The Melodramatic Public by films depicting lesbian relationships, such as Deepa Mehta s Fire (1996), but here again the main source of opposition has been streetlevel violence launched by extremist wings of the Hindu Right to intimidate cinema managements. This suggests that the family drama, as vehicle of moral order and social regulation, is no longer the lynchpin of the contemporary cinematic institution. The transformation of the cinema, and its location within an entertainment and image business spectrum, so well described by Rajadhyaksha, is not clearly yoked to one narrative or institutional architecture. As I will indicate, the cinema emerging from this new configuration of the business is varied in its genre structures, much more so than ever before, and this is intimately related to corporatization and its bid to create differentiated product. Whether such product requires significant returns from foreign markets has still to be evaluated, especially, one would anticipate, in spheres such as DVD sales, satellite broadcasting, and video on demand. Even modest returns in these sectors would be useful to films of lower budgets. In turn, our sense of consumption patterns for Indian cinema in a global sense might undergo substantial change. However, we should finally remember that, if we consider only theatrical exhibition, the diaspora family movie appears to have been the most spectacular player at the foreign box office in the USA and UK. It therefore has a significant financial and symbolic presence in the narrative of globalization, an issue I will consider at some length in the next chapter. 2. Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian Cinema It s a term only foreigners who don t know our films use. Shah Rukh Khan in conversation with Derek Malcolm, Do not call it Bollywood. This is a very wrong thing to call it. We are not trying to copy Hollywood. We are making films for an audience of a billion people. Over 80 per cent of these people don t have enough food in their bellies. Our country does not provide its people with pool halls, basketball courts and video parlours, so we make films for them that will let them forget their lives for 3 hours. We 27 Vanity Fair, Supplement, 2002, 4.

361 The Contemporary Film Industry I 347 create total fantasy, not the polished reality that Hollywood portrays. Never forget that, never forget that we are making films that allow people to believe for 3 hours that they are not poor and hungry. Subhash Ghai, We have the remarkable phenomenon that representative filmmakers and actors such as Subhash Ghai and Shah Rukh Khan should react against the very brand name which has garnered them such high, easily recognizable global profile. As I will suggest now, this is particularly ironic for the term has been embraced not only by journalists and publicists but by academics as well, at least in the UK and the USA. The disavowal by key representatives of the Bombay film industry underlines the impression that the term and the brand actually emerged outside India, in places like Birmingham, Leicester, and Bradford, where Hindi films are marketed and advertised as Bollywood, and in the bid to capitalize on the brand in film-location economies outside India. However, to denigrate this misdescription as emerging from culturally deracinated contexts has its pitfalls; for it may lead to the affirmation of what are essentially nationalist terms of criticism that assert the distinctiveness and originality of Bombay Hindi cinema, and the rights of those in India to name it. In fact there seem to be two types of cultural nationalism at stake in contemporary film discourse about Bollywood. The first we could call a Bollywoodian discourse of cultural nationalism. By this I mean a discourse about cinema which has emerged in the wake of global strategies for Bombay film and for the integration of the film economy with other image/sound/music industries such as fashion, interior design, advertising, and music. The nationalism of this discourse would lay claim to a distinct cultural constituency that has retained its identity wherever it is located, an identity which can be brought into being and nourished by a particular type of cinematic address; at the same time, the particular ambition of this strategy is exactly to supplement or exceed that national audience by composing a product whose balance of spectacle, choreography, costumes, and music should create an allure for a cross-over audience. If this is one s working definition of Bollywood, one can be Bollywoodian without subscribing to the brand name. The second, on the other hand, avowedly contests the 28 Ibid., 12.

362 348 The Melodramatic Public Bollywood label, apparently insisting on the location of national culture and its cinema at home, and as something which specifically addresses not the westernized sectors but the mass of people outside the circuits of modernized leisure and commodity experience. In practice, the very people who espouse this second position, such as Ghai and Khan, are also robust icons of Bombay cinema s global spread, its integration with other image/music enterprises, in a word its Bollywoodization. Claims to being the authentic voice of India does not prevent the industry, at one and the same time, of relaying this Indianness both at home and abroad, for the global nation and for foreign, cross-over audiences. Arguably, the usage of the Bollywood category is complicated when we shift our location to a diaspora context. I undertake a preliminary exploration of this territory by considering the academic discourse which has emerged around Bollywood in these locations, and primarily the British context. It is perhaps not surprising that the incidence of academic usage replicates the privileged diasporic reference point for the category s emergence and usage in trade and popular discourse. Three features appear notable about this output. The more pedestrian of these is that Bollywood has provided a brand name for publishers to position their product, a phenomenon which probably also pressurizes authors to adopt this category. As a result, the titles of a number of books, which might earlier have simply used Hindi cinema, or popular Indian cinema, now use the term Bollywood; however, after indicating the currency of the term in global discourse, they then jettison any use of it when they talk about Indian popular film history. 29 What in such instances could be seen to be a compulsion deriving from academic-institutional brand equity may, in a second logic of naming, indicate a more substantial investment, the relative emphasis placed by certain authors on film experience not in India but in the key diasporic locations of the UK and USA. Such a motivation, driven by the impulses of geographical location are often supplemented by a third logic, that of contemporary engagement, often resulting in a cavalier relationship to the past of Indian film. Thus, the term Bollywood has been read back in time, with one account telling us blithely that the history of Bollywood film viewing in Britain dates as far back 29 This would be the case with Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, London, Routledge, 2004; and Vijay Mishra: Bollywood: Temples of Desire, London, Routledge, 2002.

363 The Contemporary Film Industry I 349 as 1926, when King George V and Queen Mary held a command performance of Prem Sanyas (Light of Asia) at Windsor Castle. This film was made in 1925 and co-directed [sic] by the Indo-German team of Himansu Rai and Franz Osten. 30 The anachronistic usage of the term is startling in its unselfconsciousness. A mise-en- scène of the royal personage overseeing orientalist spectacle appears brazenly penetrated by Shah Rukh Khan and an assembly of bhangra dancers. The casual relationship to history appears only corroborated by the wrong attribution to Himanshu Rai of the direction of Light of Asia. What is intriguing is that Bollywoodian criticism does not fail to notice the question mark hanging over the status of the category. After noting the argument that the word may have been generated by some cocky white journalist to describe the Indian film industry in a somewhat idiosyncratic and derogatory manner, Rajinder Dudrah goes on to note: Uncertainties aside...bollywood is more popularly described in relation to, and against, the hegemony of Hollywood... The naming and popular usage of the Mumbai film industry as Bollywood not only reveals on a literal level an obvious reworking of the appellation of the cinema of Hollywood, but, on a more significant level, that Bollywood is able to serve alternative cultural and social representations away from dominant white ethnocentric audio-visual possibilities. 31 As we will see, it is the argument that Bollywood offers a positive, even counter-hegemonic dynamic to Hollywood and American capitalism, that appears to motivate some of this Bollywoodian academic work. The argument is notable too in the Introduction to Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. 32 In this case, also, we notice the fleeting acknowledgement that the category Bollywood is debatable, an admission swiftly recouped as a sign of productive hybridity. In its very (sometimes) contentious name, Bollywood cinema indicates the crossing of borders. The hybrid term refers to India s commercial Hindi film industry, based primarily, but not exclusively, in the city of Bombay, now officially designated as Mumbai since It has a 30 Rajinder Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, London, Sage, 2006, Dudrah, Bollywood, Edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, New Delhi, Sage, 2005.

364 350 The Melodramatic Public complex history, but much like Hollywood, this commercial industry has hegemony over the diverse, regional cinema in India, and circulates globally, from Japan to the US, through a transnational distribution network as well as video piracy. 33 The swift glossing over of the contentious term moves us to a complex history whose invocation includes the mis-description that Bombay s Hindi film industry exercises hegemony over the region. Such a statement is either ignorant of or indifferent to the power of India s Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam cinemas which often produce more films than Bombay. This strangely casual attitude leads to the hazy claim that Bollywood s reach extends to Japan, which probably refers to the avowed craze of Japanese film audiences not for Hindi but for Tamil cinema, and, in particular, the cinema of Rajnikant. However, while I certainly believe this gestural relationship to history and, indeed, to cinema, needs to be challenged, to focus on this alone would be to fail to register the issues posed by this writing. The fact that the authors actually acknowledge the uncertain status of the term, but nevertheless embrace it, suggests a will to assert some kind of insistent presence through it. As such they provide a window into a particular form of experience that seeks to complicate the idea that Indian popular cinema is primarily understood as centred in India. Such a change of focus implicitly urges a multisited tracking of Hindi cinema rather than privileging one space, the point of apparent origins, over others. This is an important agenda, if one that needs to be thought through more carefully than it has been in the introduction to the Bollyworld volume. Secondly, Bollywoodian academic discourse tends often to be contemporary in its focus. In the primarily sociological and ethnographic engagements of Dudrah, for example, there appears to be a strong investment in a contemporary culture composed of Hindi cinema, satellite broadcasting, music, especially hybrid forms such as bhangra rap, and practices such as club nights and live entertainment. Collectively, these appear quite critical to the author s account of group practices and cultural identification that is potentially counter-hegemonic in its implications. The stated aim of the Bollyworld volume is to expand the terms of historical thinking, by collating a loose cluster of research that roams in space and time, going as far back as the 1930s, and moving from 33 Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 16.

365 The Contemporary Film Industry I 351 North to South Africa, and on to Germany, England, New York, and into the cultural experience of a host of different migrant communities, their second- and third-generation descendants. The ambition proposed by the editors is to question a national framework for Bollywood, and to argue that both as product and as experience, transnational aesthetic impulses, and multiple sites of reception constituted popular Indian film. 34 There are several problems with what at first glance has the virtue of a more open and exploratory approach in researching film history. Firstly, I do not believe it is sufficient to suggest that transnational film circulation and multiple aesthetic currents determine the output of a specific industry. There are obviously context-driven ways of selecting and configuring influences, and, further, to understand the impact of such currents, we need to mobilize some form of style analysis that will move us beyond the impressionistic (and widely made) statement that Hong Kong Kung-fu cinema impacted Bombay in the 1970s. Also, rather than dismissing the national as an oppressive and restrictive 34 The question it explores is: how and in what ways did global dynamics take on such a regionalist or nationalistic veneer in the history of Indian cinema; and, how do movies from the subcontinent continue to interact with their global counterparts in their multifarious forms? Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, 14. The first question, about how the national constrains our understanding of the wider network of which it is a part, is not really pursued. The editors themselves offer a rather unhelpful understanding of the national in their estimation of Phalke, for example. Phalke s Hindu mythologicals did not have an even effect on all parts and people of India, particularly if one considers the reluctance of Muslims to view movies about Hindu deities (apparently taken from Stephen Hughes s dissertation on early film exhibition in South India, Is There an Audience Out There, University of Chicago, 1996, 179, 185). In fact Hughes points out that while Raja Harishchandra, 1913, was not substantially exhibited in the South, Shree Krishna Janma, 1918, was, and was successful at large. Stephen Hughes, Mythologicals and Modernity: Contesting Silent Cinema in South India, in Stephen P. Hughes and Birgit Meyer, eds, Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds, 1.2/1.3, 2006, To assume that Muslims would not venture out to see Hindu mythologicals suggests a fetishistic understanding of identity and its attributes. The Introduction is also littered with strange remarks about the nature of Indian nationhood, for example that in the post- Independence years... Hindi language commercial cinema quickly came to be seen as the national cinema of India. By whom? When the Indian government started its system of national awards, it was Ray s Pather Panchali which won the first award. While the volume does not pursue the question of the national coherently, some of the articles productively address the second question, about interaction especially those by Rosie Thomas and Brian Larkin.

366 352 The Melodramatic Public conceptual frame, we need clearer investigation of how the national frame functions: as in the films and genres national industries produce, the way the state regulates the industry through censorship, licensing and other controls, what films are imported, and how film content is distributed through the various film circuits which define the market. One does not need to be nationalist to pursue these questions. Further, the transnational needs greater precision in its usage, as Fredrick Cooper has argued about the more general category of the global. 35 Regional distribution offices in the Middle East, North, East and South Africa date back to the 1940s and were feeding into a particular market for Arabian night stories, and Laila-Majnu, Shireen-Farhad style love legends. There were definite narrative and performative cultures involved here that included North India in their field. These cultures were pre-national, and continued to have an existence after the formation of nation-states, but were thus trans-national in a very specific arc of shared culture. 36 The particular composite nature of popular film form in India certainly distinguished it from the traditions of Hollywood film-making, while still generating, in the long run, definite narrative conventions and musical forms which underwent changes in interaction with new constellations of film, musical, and literary cultures. However, Kaur and Sinha require this composite form to do something more: If Hollywood represents the homogenizing effect of American capitalism in global cultures, a study of Bollywood allows a unique opportunity to map the contrasting move of globalization in popular culture. Bollywood s integration with film studies has brought it closer to the conceptual frameworks developed for Hollywood narratives (audience voyeurism, narrative techniques and so on), and consequently Hollywood s cultural capitalism is mapped, consciously or unconsciously, onto that of India s commercial cinema. One fundamental difference between Hollywood and Bollywood is that the former pushes world cultures towards homogenization, whereas the latter introduces in those cultures a fragmentary process. Hybrid in its production since its beginnings, the circulation of India s commercial cinema through the globe has led to the proliferation and fragmentation of its fantasy 35 Fredrick Cooper, What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian s Perspective, African Affairs 100, See above, Introduction to Part II.

367 The Contemporary Film Industry I 353 space, as its narrative and spectacle beget diverse fantasies for diasporic communities and others. 37 As we have seen, the study of American cinema has been the subject of considerable debate, with writers such as Hansen arguing for the importance of the diverse and reinventable terms of Hollywood cinema, especially in the way its body genres circulated and were reformatted in different territories, and how films were altered, for example in terms of endings, to suit different markets. 38 The issue then is not simply that of one form and industrial culture inviting a singular, homogenizing textual effect and corresponding theoretical apparatus, and the other resisting it. 39 Hollywood cinema too has been subject to fragmentation and its meanings recalibrated. Such an unsettling of textual unity and coherence relates not only to a changed evaluation of how films circulate, the forms they assume, and the meanings they acquire in different contexts. It is also a definite methodological intervention that points to linkages between film and other sound/image/ design elements within a wider economy of perception. Thus aspects of Hollywood films, their specific genres and ancillary features such as publicity, have been explored, for example, to generate linkages with window shopping, 40 sensationalist photojournalism, urban mapping, and spatial practices, 41 discourses of domesticity, 42 and of mobility, for example in gauging the status and imagination surrounding 37 Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, See above, ch. 1, pt I.5: Deconstructing the Universal and the National. 39 This despite Hollywood s extension of ideological hegemony through the apparatus of a film studies fashioned for it being imposed on the study of Bollywood cinema! 40 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley, University of California Press, See especially Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, This is especially notable in studies of melodrama and the women s film, and how such discourses reflect on constructions of the domestic sphere. See, for example, Kathleeen Mchugh, American Domesticity: From How To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999; Nancy Abelman deploys melodrama s poetics of loss and pathos to explore the subjectivity of women riven from home through political upheavals and economic compulsions in the Korean context: Melodramatic Texts and Contexts: Women s Lives, Movies, and Men, in Kathleen Mchugh and Nancy Abelman, eds, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2005.

368 354 The Melodramatic Public different technologies of transportation. 43 And, in the context of Indian film studies, we have observed similar currents recently, for example in Ranjani Mazumdar s research into the linkages between contemporary film culture, and practices ranging from urban planning and spatial mapping to fashion photography and interior design. 44 These approaches do not necessarily supplant an engagement with storytelling codes and practices; rather they engage filmic material in a metanarrative relating to another story, for example that of the transformations in economies of desire wrought by the market, the recalibration of sense perception in the wake of modern technological changes, and the story of the city, its built and imaginary environment, its relay of speed and danger, of crowds and anonymity. This engagement with such an interpenetrative design, where elements in one discipline/field/business of perceptual organization are made to speak to others, expands the terms on which the interpretation of film narrative is undertaken, rather than to sideline narrative itself. Further, this offers new opportunities to think about the effect of cinematic images, sequence, and generic elements as films circulate in different territories and offer modular forms with which to engage audiences in new regimes of sensational experience, as Hansen suggests. 45 Bollyworld s tendentious story of Hollywood hegemony versus Bollywood diversity thus begs the question whether Hollywood is, indeed, as unified a phenomenon as the formulation requires it to be. Further, the argument that Indian cinema has a fragmentary dimension which allows for it to appeal and recombine with diverse local cultures may also beg the question whether such attraction is so unbounded. As I have argued, the longer history of Indian film circulation indicates its participation in a cultural arc where there are overlaps 43 Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, Durham, Duke University Press, 1996; Paul Virillio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London, Verso, 1989; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001; Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Bodies, Cambridge, MIT Press, Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema. 45 Miriam Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses, in Gledhill and Williams, eds, Reinventing Film Studies, ; Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism, Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn 2000,

369 The Contemporary Film Industry I 355 in certain narrative, musical and performance cultures. Such cultural networks were subject to revision and augmentation, especially after the formation of nation-states, when cultural exchange between states, for example India and the Soviet Union, opened up new markets and cultural territories, in the Soviet bloc, China, and, probably as some kind of knock-on effect, in the privatized distribution territories of Greece and Turkey as well; 46 and again, when under the impact of globalization the Bombay film industry entered the US and UK markets on new terms. Keeping this in mind, we will note that the articles on Bombay film reception in this volume make very different entry points into understanding the attraction of Indian films. The first and most straightforward of these relates not to diversity but to a certain sameness of experience: how diasporic Indian communities view films as families, and to negotiate generational differences and cultural challenges posed by the new cultural context. From Marie Gillespie s work on video consumption in South Asian families, to Bollyworld articles by Christiane Brosius on Germany and Narmala Halstead on West Indian migrants, 47 it is not fragmentation and recombination which such accounts retail, but a fairly systematic cultural function internal to the diaspora community. Such an allure, centred on ideas of kin obligation and filial duty have also more generally been understood to be the attraction Indian popular films offer audiences defined by traditional social mores. We may be sceptical that Hindi films elicit such consistent reception across the world, and on the grounds of an affiliation to traditional social norms. I have earlier suggested that the idea of a transitional social and cultural context might provide us with a sense of the attractions involved, 48 but this needs to be fleshed out if such a formulation is not to collapse into that of a sociological explanation. Here Brian Larkin s article on bandiri music provides for a significant 46 Dimitris Elefthioritis, A Cultural Colony of India, South Asian Popular Culture 4 (2), October 2006, ; Ahmet Gurata, Translation and Reception of Indian Cinema in Turkey: The Life of Awara, forthcoming in Kaushik Bhaumik, The Indian Cinema Book, London, British Film Institute. 47 Christiane Brosius, The Scattered Homelands of the Migrant: Bollyworld through the Diasporic Lens, in Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, ; Narmala Halstead, Belonging and Respect Notions vis-à-vis Modern East Indians: Hindi Movies in the Guyanese East Indian Diaspora, in ibid., See above, ch. 2.

370 356 The Melodramatic Public point of departure. Where his earlier writing gave us a vivid sense of the place of the cinema within the coordinates of urban transformation in an Islamic society, 49 the article on bandiri engages with the content and form of cultural experience and, more specifically, the handling of the erotic rather than familial dimensions of Bollywood films. 50 This is not fragmentation, and its recombinations are deeply ambivalent, as Hindi film melodies are used with words that apparently abide by cultural injunctions against the expression of erotic desire. The issue here seems to go beyond the countering of Hollywood by affiliation with its more diversified other. For this is an appropriation of Indian film melody, at once gesturing to the original and its erotic content for the knowledgeable spectator/listener, and apparently neutralizing it through the observation of local religious injunction. Thus, for this operation, Bollywood too is problematic, and the task is to manoeuvre the problematic allure of Bollywood into local forms. Here film-related elements such as music are made over into a new cultural composition and practice. If Larkin suggests how this happens with Bandiri music, then Dudrah s ethnography of clubs where Hindi film images provide a background into which images and sequences are inserted is an index of the assemblage. 51 Elements are separated out and reconfigured, and the space/image/sound relation becomes the very site of subjectivity. Dudrah s ethnographic work with Amit Rai in New York extends the idea of the assemblage as the intersection between cinema hall and auditory, visual, and tactile bodily pleasures available in the surrounding space, and through the sound and image technologies whose regime of simultaneity connects the subject to a wider universe Brian Larkin, Materializing Culture: Cinema and the Creation of Social Space, in Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, Berkeley, University of California Press, Bandiri Music, Globalisation and Urban Experience in Nigeria, in Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, ; for how local film production simulates Bollywood dance, but through an economy of bodily presentation that attempts to curb sexual excess, see also Mathias Krings, Muslim Martyrs and Pagan Vampires: The Popular Video Film and the Propagation of Islam in Northern Nigeria, in Hughes and Meyer, eds, Postscripts, Queer as Desis: Secret Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes, in Dudrah, Bollywood, ch Bollywood Cinema-going in New York City, ibid., ch. 4.

371 The Contemporary Film Industry I 357 There is an imaginary here which refuses the limits of the cinema hall, or of a unified filmic address in defining the scope of film experience. For, in these accounts, filmic experience is now substantially hybridized as it is entangled, mixed, remodelled, by its mobilization into the highly fluid forms of contemporary media experience. However, even if we were to take the space and address of the cinema as primary vehicle of experience, we could still contest the idea that audience reception of the cinema event is only of one type. Thus Raminder Kaur displays justifiable unease at the idea that the meanings of Hindi films can be accepted at face value, that is in terms of legitimizing fixed identities and family value, at least for younger, professional Indian filmgoers in Britain. 53 On the basis of conversations with filmgoers who are second- or third-generation Indians and Pakistanis, and presumably her own response, Kaur points out that her interviewees regard the film story, its characters and its message with scepticism, irony, and pleasure, and, she estimates, a displaced identification. Identification is with the situation of viewing, and with the others who view, rather than with the screen fiction, and this provides the ground of cultural identification. This is in counterpoint to the involvement of an earlier generation who saw the cinema as vehicle of belonging (to earlier times and places). Bollywoodian criticism or, to put it less polemically now, criticism which takes the parameters of the contemporary diaspora as its primary object, like Dudrah or Kaur, seem to consciously divest the cinema of the identity longings associated with it by an earlier generation. In the process, the family is also supplanted as privileged context in which the Hindi cinema was experienced and afforded the possibilities of a shared culture and generational negotiation of identities. 54 Such a critical disposition certainly appears to offer a more complex sense of diasporic film cultures than a strictly identity-bounded one yoked to the axis of the past would. The alternative to a framework based on identity-derived and reinforcing film 53 Raminder Kaur, Cruising on the Vilayeti Bandwagon: Diasporic Representations and Reception of Popular Indian Movies, in Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, Thus Rajinder Dudrah criticizes Gillespie for making the flawed claim that a generational split can be detected in the ways in which first and second generation diasporic South Asians read popular Hindi cinema the former as purveyors of cultural tradition and the latter as struggling to come to terms with cultural negotiation between the two generations. See Dudrah, Bollywood, 40.

372 358 The Melodramatic Public culture is not that clear, however. Dudrah, for example, seems to fall back on just such a function in his interviews with filmgoers. In his case, the more productive agenda appears to arise from an engagement with the ethnographies centred on mediatized spaces such as the dance clubs with their refabricated Hindi film mise-en-scène and the possibilities of mixed audiences. 55 There is another factor, exceeding that of consumption internal to the diasporic community. This is the particular self-image Hindi cinema conveyed to its audiences and to a wider public culture. Thus Thomas Blom Hansen notes that younger audiences had been falling off from viewing Hindi films in Durban, and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is Happening; Karan Johar, 1998) changed all of that because it provided a modernized self-image to Indian youth, and in their perception, held up a more satisfactory mirror or window for non-indian culture to look into. Here, as in England, there was a substantial shift in urban connotation when, after apartheid, hitherto white-controlled residential and upmarket commercial areas now changed hands. The cinema for Indian films now came to be located in more fashionable malls and shopping areas, and, while dominantly being consumed by Indians, nevertheless offered the possibility of a crossover audience. Here, in contrast to North Africa for instance, a history of segregation ensured that African viewership was minimal, and Indian film viewing thereby remained an activity restricted to the diasporic community. 56 There is a final, specifically oppositional cultural agenda to a certain strand of British-based Bollywoodian criticism, and this relates to the carving out of a space within Black British Cultural Studies. In a more substantial engagement with local cinema history, Dudrah has sketched the history of cinema exhibition for Indian films in Birmingham, a major residential concentration for the diasporic population after the Second World War. 57 Three sequences emerge. The first immediately followed the war, capturing the moment of diasporic settlement. This has resonances with work by Nirmal Puwar on the Ritz cinema 55 Reading Popular Hindi Films in the Diaspora and the Performance of Urban Indian and Diasporic Identity, in Dudrah, Bollywood, ch Thomas Blom Hansen, In Search of the Diasporic Self: Bollywood in South Africa, Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld, Rajinder Dudrah, Vilayati Bollywood: Popular Hindi Cinema-Going and Diasporic South Asian Identity in Birmingham, The Public 9 (1), 2002,

373 The Contemporary Film Industry I 359 in Coventry, a specifically working class settlement associated with car manufacturing. In Puwar s account, the cinema hall was part of a longer history of public gathering, which involved live performances, wrestling matches, and political meetings, along with cinema screenings. 58 This is reminiscent of ways in which the cinema provided an opportunity or intersection with other types of popular performance and public interaction, as for example the way the Girni Kamgar working class union of Bombay used halls in the 1920s. 59 Other sequences follow in the wake of changes in urban geography and settlement, for example the settlement of inner cities by Asians and Black populations in the wake of white populations moving out. This occurred in the 1970s, and was substantially checked with the emergence of videocassette retail in the 1980s, in which the Asian video shop became a prominent market. Dudrah makes the important point here that the political engagement of black British cultural studies reanimates places that were considered run down or depleted in terms of urban infrastructures by showing how regular cultural activity made these over into live public cultures. The final phase is that of the contemporary, where white-owned and frequented halls came under Asian management, and Indian film started being shown on a regular basis. The last phase relates to the current epoch, and the renewal of the Bombay film industry in its bid to create new linkages and generate new types of production. This suggestive outline of different periods of Indian film exhibition in Birmingham emphasizes the role of Indian filmgoing in terms of community formation and public culture. However, the symptomatic naming both of present and past film cultures as Bollywood points to a crucial problem with the present state of play in this field. Crucial here is a substantial absence of the cinema, whether as textual form involving narrative and performance, or as industrial product, from the accounts generated in this body of work. The focus tends instead to be on audiences separated out from the practice of film viewing. Thus, even Dudrah s suggestive entry into the mapping of the different phases of post-second World War cinema lacks any reference to the 58 Nirmal Puwar, Kabhi Ritz, Kabhie Palladium: South Asian Cinema in Coventry , Wasafiri, Special Issue on Global Cinema. See also Nirmal Puwar s film Coventry Ritz Cinema, produced by AV Frontline, site/2007/03/12/coventry-ritz-cinema. 59 Bhaumik, The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry.

374 360 The Melodramatic Public agencies of film circulation, what films were shown or were popular in which circuits, a project which would render Indian film history in a more site-specific way. As I have pointed out, the productive dimensions of this analysis derive from sociological and ethnographic moves, especially in terms of cultural practices that emerge in the wake of the cinema. The crucial problem with this contemporary launching point for analysis is the danger of accepting or involuntarily reproducing the parameters set by the business form. Thus Dudrah, Sinha, Kaur, and others urge that Bollywood be taken as an alternative to Hollywood, as a bid to assert cultural choices against racially marked hierarchies determined by the value placed on Hollywood as the norm. However, Bollywood as business is equally intent on being an alternative by breaking into markets dominated by American film, aiming for crossover appeal, and building complex commodity networks. So to valorize it indiscriminately appears merely to echo its objectives. These include Bollywood motivating university degree courses, universities liaising with local business initiatives, metropolitan councils building on Bollywood s drive to set up venues equipped for location shooting, universities and councils throwing themselves into the commercial networks of Bollywood film shows and awards, and museums staging Bollywood retrospectives. While the generation of employment is hardly something to be indifferent to, and we may understand the rationale of local government and even local universities getting on the Bollywood bandwagon, a scholarly agenda needs to develop autonomously of this logic. 60 A marked absence in these attempts to diagnose Bollywood, whether by Rajadhyaksha or the British and US-based criticism, is any substantial reference to film form, storytelling practices, actorly and star economies, and even on-screen performance cultures. The filmic dimension of film studies seems to have been lost in the process of trying to understand the political economy and sociology of the cinema 60 Yorkshire is central to the Bollywood project, with the district business associations and the Leeds Metropolitan University building ties centred on film location shooting, award shows, and tourism. For information about this, see the online business magazine to promote Indian and European film ties, www_iefilmi_com India EU Film Initiative Bollywood in 2006.htm. Yorkshire Forward and the website of the Leeds Metropolitan University highlights local economic interests in Bollywood.

375 The Contemporary Film Industry I 361 institution. In the next chapter, I want to pay attention to on-screen practice, firstly in terms of the Bollywood family film, and then by examining the broader coordinates of contemporary film culture, especially in relation to its genre dynamics. I believe there are substantial changes in the symbolic economy of the stories retailed by the contemporary institution of the cinema, ones more complex than any formulaic rendering of the cinema could capture. In the analysis of the family film which follows, I will try to suggest that it is a more dynamic and complex form than has been allowed for, and also that it undertakes a substantial alteration of the symbolic economy within which relations between the familial, the social, and the national have been configured. Central here is the image and function of the father. I will also try and complicate our understanding of the contemporary film industry, suggesting that the attempt to think of the contrast between family film and genre cinema as springing from the division between Bollywood and non- Bollywood sectors and markets (foreign versus local) is perhaps inadequate.

376 11 The Contemporary Film Industry II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies I focus now on the question of textual form, firstly seeking to capture the complexity of the family film, its strategies and its mutations. Here I will draw attention to two features: the symbolic importance of father figures in articulating a vision of the national, in contrast to earlier emphases in melodramas of the national saga to emphasize the mother; and, secondly, the development of a marked performativity and play in contemporary melodramatic strategies. In the preceding chapter I had pointed to British-based reception studies indicating that to take film stories and emotional appeals at face value might be problematic. Here I suggest that such a surmise appears not only when we look through the prism of reception studies, but may be signalled in the rhetorical form and actorly economies of the films as well. I then go on to consider the lines of transformation emerging from genre diversification, considering in particular the changes in form observable in the productions of Ram Gopal Varma, an emblematic figure of industrial change. In the process, I will suggest that corporate forms, new markets and product tie-ins, often seen to be the preserve of the high-end family movie, in fact have a wider purchase in the contemporary industry. 1. Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch I: Father India and the Emergence of the Global Nation Can we think of the father as carrying in his persona a societal form, channelling through his body, bearing, and imagination, a structure

377 The Contemporary Film Industry II 363 of genealogy, of blood ties and neighbourly networks that jell into an elaborate mise-en-scène? This mode of figuring the father is part of a longer paradigm of Indian popular cinema, going back to the 1930s and 1940s, contested substantially in the 1950s, and once again in the 1970s. It is as if at each point of significant social, political, and industrial transition there emerged a significant pressure on the stability, certitude, and virtue of traditional familial and social structures embodied in and by the father. I have highlighted the emergence of the mother in demarcating a different regime of narrative significance, and one that is often pitted against the rule of the father. 1 This was especially notable in the 1950s. As Moinak Biswas has argued, in the wake of the decline of the studio system, and its more settled stylistic and narrative parameters, we observe a release of visual energy, with significant innovations in the capture of urban space, in senses of speed, in the use of light, and in the patterns of framing. 2 This was often centred on a rebellious or irreverent hero, from Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, and Guru Dutt in 1950s thrillers, through to Amitabh Bachchan and a host of others including the early Shah Rukh Khan in the period from the 1970s through to the 1990s. What we observed on-screen was a new dynamic in the use of vehicular movement for shooting and a drive to capture the porous terrain of street, bazaar, and shantytown in the life of the protagonist. The irreverent social outsider aligns with the mother, real or symbolic, a source of spatial and ethical stability in a shifting universe, and a resource in his contest with the patriarchal social order. Mothers, Communities, Nations While functioning as a figure of ethical motivation and primal contest, the mother very rarely acquired the authority to oversee the very structure of social relationships. The legendary status of Mehboob Khan s Mother India (1957) which appeared to assign the mother such a role, obscures this fact. Arguably, the power of Radha (Nargis) derived not from social authority but a residual community authority. The peasant mother s bid was to preserve her family against exploitation and natural disaster, and her struggles came to symbolize those of the community and the nation. Her triumph over the ravages of a flood and 1 See above, ch Moinak Biswas, Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2002.

378 364 The Melodramatic Public a rapacious moneylender was converted into a call to her migrating fellow villagers to return, a moment captured by their imaging in the shape of the map of India. When her rebellious son s challenge to moneylender exploitation tips over the moral circumference of retributional logic by not only killing the usurer but abducting his daughter, Radha assumes a punitive stance on behalf of village women and kills her son. This form of punishment is at once righteous, a matter of dharma, as it is traumatic; there is a sense that the mother lies outside the symbolic resolutions of the narrative trajectory, as her struggles for the village culminate in the construction of dams in the wake of Independence. For the still grieving mother, it is not water she sees being released on the opening of the dam, but her son s blood. The state, as an abstract entity and vehicle of development, seems pictured at a remove from the emotional world of the folk it oversees. In Deewar, Salim-Javed s updated urban version of the Mother India story, the mother, Shanti (Nirupa Roy), was a much more vulnerable figure, dependent on a son who, like Birjoo in Mother India, took to a heroic but illegal path. Here we witness a steep fall in the social status accorded the mother. She is properly subalternized in a passage that rhymed in clearly dystopian counterpoint to the opening of Mother India. In contrast to the image of Radha s mingling with the earth in a layered, mythicizing depiction of the emergence of the dam, Shanti was involved in carrying earth from the construction site of a highrise building, clearing the space to install the city s monuments of alienated labour. (Figs 60 61, p. 365.) Further, she appeared much more clearly an instrument of the legal and moral order when she sanctions action against her son. The community has been dispersed in Deewar s city, and, almost by default, the moral discourse became a statist underwriting of law and order. In both films, we could argue that the form of the final result was not willed by the mother: for it was the state, and, in Mother India, specifically the nation-state, represented by its characteristic developmental imagery of large-scale irrigation projects and dams, that was erected on the soil of the mother s sacrifices. 3 The framing narrative and flashback structures of both films alerted us to the gap between past struggles and 3 See ch. 9 above; and Vasudevan, Disreputable and Illegal Publics: Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis, Sarai Reader 04, for attempts to frame the Bachchan and Khan protagonists.

379 The Contemporary Film Industry II 365 Fig. 60 Fig. 61 Fig : Mother India, Mehboob Khan 1957, and Deewar, Yash Chopra, 1974, Two Mothers.

380 366 The Melodramatic Public sacrifices, and the present, suggesting ambivalence towards the narrative s denouement. The unresolved pathos of the past brought into focus a characteristic melodramatic undecidedness, where a beckoning past enshrined the loss of community forms, in Mother India s villages and Deewar s labouring communities. 4 Father, Social Order, State Form I have undertaken this flashback to provide a backdrop to the work undertaken by contemporary Bollywood family films around the parameters of family, social order, and nationhood. Taking the community as a unit of affective investment, in contrast to a rule-bound social order or society, we could argue that there was a recurrent bid, from the heyday of the feudal family romance of the 1930s and 1940s, to build equivalence between the social realm and the (hierarchical) community under the authority of the extended patriarchal family. Here the father, most commonly the landed magnate or zamindar, exercised a control over the social domain, with most characters owing him obeisance. For example, in the village social of the Bombay Talkies type, this would include estate managers, servants, tenants, peasant cultivators through to the emblematic figures of religious, social, and professional life such as priests and even postmasters. Oedipal conflicts flowed into socially transgressive romance and, on occasion, the city provided an outlet or escape route for a rebellious son, as in the case of Kangan (Bracelet; Franz Osten, 1939) or Jhoola (Swing; Gyan Mukerji, 1941). The city was ambiguously coded, snaring heroes with its hedonistic appeal and permissiveness, and it was almost inevitable that the story had to return to the village to resolve the conflicts that led to the original flight. This was a face-to-face community in which an initially repressive father could turn into a benevolent entity attentive to the very desires he had denied. It was also a loosely clustered social realm, defined by hierarchy, but allowing within its space 4 Amongst a growing literature on these iconic films, see Ranjani Mazumdar, From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The Angry Man and the Psychotic Hero, in Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning; and Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema, ch. 1, for the Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan figures; and, for Mother India, Rosie Thomas, From Sanctity to Scandal: The Mythologisation of Mother India, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 3, 1989; and Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India, BFI World Cinema Classics, London, BFI, 2001.

381 The Contemporary Film Industry II 367 a variety of comic and performative registers characteristic of the popular compendium. Symbolically, this cinema represented society as a horizontal form, rarely featuring a symbolic space superior to that of the family, whether that of the state or the nation. In contrast, the films highlighting the mother assumed the form of vertical melodrama, ultimately supplanting the family order with an order consecrating the state form, however ambiguously. In the contemporary epoch, the horizontal form with the father as the authoritative figure of power embeds the political within it. The symbolism of political economy and cultural form come together, with the state s withdrawal from the determination of cultural hierarchies and investments now mirrored in its absence within the fiction of the globalizing nation. 5 The global frame is crucial: for the contemporary family film is distinguished from its earlier avatars in its bid to reconcile the division between West and East such that a Western upbringing does not make a protagonist ineligible for the national project in a globalizing era. In all of this it is the father rather than the mother who is arbiter of national belonging. In the process, the affective ties of community are decisively supplanted by social rules of inclusion and exclusion overseen by the baleful and punitive presence of father figures, most famously incarnated in the performance of Amrish Puri. The Symbolic Functions of the Father: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) The first of the Bollywood family movies pointed to this reconfiguration in their initial passages. In both, Amrish Puri plays characters settled abroad, and caught up in the romance of the homeland. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (hereafter DDLJ) projects this desire more powerfully, perhaps because it was presented as part of the biography of a lower-middle class character who feels a transient in England, a country he had come to out of financial need. The father Baldev Singh s current habitat dissolves into the mustard fields and folk forms of his native Punjab, an imaginary investment which appears to 5 For arguments about the contemporary institution of the cinema, see Rajadhyaksha, The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema, Inter Asian Cultural Studies 4 (1), April 2003, reprinted in Kaarsholm, Cityflicks.

382 368 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 62: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Aditya Chopra, 1995, Father India. lend him a confidence as he strides forth through the scenic spaces of London on his way to his shop. The opening is suggestive in terms of figure/ground relations: the father does not submit to his environs; rather, dressed in the traditional kurta and coat, his stride suggests an irreducible iconicity, something which will not change despite the new environments into which he moves. (Fig. 62.) Here is an iconic entity who conjures up a cultural and spatial imagination in his character, creating a vortex so that he commands the spaces he inhabits, even while we know he is actually a very modest inhabitant of the modern metropolis. 6 Pardes counterpoints the small shopkeeper of DDLJ to the brash and confident businessmen hailing from New York, whose evocation of India is firstly channelled through a touristic display of spaces such as the Taj Mahal, preceding the mandatory return to the space of the countryside. Baldev Singh is increasingly shown to be a repressive entity, insisting on the maintenance of traditional arrangements and ideals, including those of marital pledges deriving from ties of friendship and the desire to reaffiliate to the motherland. The hero, Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), contends with this not by opposition or elopement but by seeking to persuade the father of his love for Simran (Kajol). In terms of 6 For discussions of iconicity in film, see Geeta Kapur, Revelation and Doubt in Sant Tukaram and Devi, in Kapur, When Was Modernism; and Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era, rpntd in Niranjana et al., eds, Interrogating Modernity; and chs 2 and 3 above.

383 The Contemporary Film Industry II 369 agency the daughter is ineffectual, while the mother (Farida Jalal) occupies a recessed position, locus of care and enunciator of the pathos generated by the patriarch s repression of his daughter s desire. Shah Rukh Khan, the key icon of the diaspora family social film warrants a separate and extended treatment in terms of the changing story, indeed, storytelling functions, of his star personality. Here I will outline what I think are pertinent parameters as they play out in a specific group of diaspora movies, and, in particular DDLJ and Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004). In both of these films, Khan s performance style markedly lacks any of the conventional signs of interiority, and plays on a hyperbolic surface histrionics that, along with the attributes of the tease who is forever taking people for a ride, suggests an indeterminacy of character viewpoint. The audience is denied clear signs of plausible emotional drive, so that declarations of romantic intent, and also declarations of identity what he believes, what values he holds dear in terms of a definition of who he is come across as gestural and performative. My description here is not meant to be judgemental, but semiotic, trying to understand performance within the requirements of the narrative form it serves. In DDLJ, Khan is initially presented as a callow youth, intent only on a good time, and he and his wealthy NRI father, Dharamveer Malhotra (Anupam Kher), are comically indifferent to matters of serious educational pursuit or worldly struggle. In sharp contrast to Baldev Singh, they also appear to easily inhabit a certain image of the metropolitan world, if not a realist one. And yet Khan becomes the film s primary vehicle for the demonstration of Hindustani identity in matters of morality and in the observation of parental desires. There appear to be two key passages in which this shift takes place. Both of them derive from the logic of a game which requires characters to assume a role. The first is when Simran gets drunk, imagines making love to Raj, and finds herself in a state of undress in bed the next morning. Raj at first plays with Simran s trauma, suggesting that they did indeed make love. However, after teasing her in this way, and suspending her in a state of anxiety, he clarifies matters predictably, by asserting that Hindustani folk couldn t behave in such a way. The sequence, based on a narrative gap which withholds the spectator s full knowledge of what transpired, has a routine enigmatic structure rapidly dispensed with by the appropriate moral resolution. The goal of the sequence is to assert that, given the identity of the dramatis personae, this was all that could have happened. Identity and its moral attributes do not have to be

384 370 The Melodramatic Public proved by reference to a character s history, behaviour, and through a process of narrative persuasion. Uttering it proves it, as Judith Butler might say, except that in this context the utterance derives not from the repetitive register of everyday life, but as hyperbolic utterance, befitting the symbolic move to reconcile large-scale differences or at least apprehensions of difference between the identity produced at home and in foreign lands. This is identity as a (serious) game, one which the narrative goes onto make more elaborate. Thus, when Simran is betrothed in the traditional way, Raj takes this as a challenge and insists that he will persuade Baldev to change his views and give Simran to the one she loves. This strategy is undertaken despite Simran s sense of helplessness and her mother s urging that they elope. Raj s strategy is to project a respectful relationship to the beloved s lower middle class NRI father and his world, that of the rituals, iconic landscape and cultural practices of his native Punjab. This is a peculiarly darshanic strategy, in that Raj assumes the position of a devout subject constituting himself within the presence of the respected community elder. 7 However, there is a genuine puzzle, rather than a routine enigma, built into this strategy. How can the bid for authentication of the self by a sheerly darshanic activity be converted into parentally sanctioned romance and marriage? For there is a countervailing social structure and habitus built into Baldev Singh s choice of marriage partner: this is the commitment to his childhood friend, Ajit Singh (Satish Shah), that their children will marry. It is the very differently organized scene of violence which facilitates the conversion. When Baldev discovers Raj s designs on his daughter, he casts the suitor out. As the hero and his father gather at the local railway station, they are set upon by the bridegroom s party, who, riding horses and carrying shotguns, are the very image of a rampant feudal code bent on avenging slighted honour. Here is a very different image of the Punjab from the one nurtured by Baldev Singh. Raj appears helpless before the relentless assault, until the assailants attack his father. It is this attack which causes the emergence of Shah Rukh 7 For the deployment of darshanic images, in which the viewer/devotee seeks to gain benefits by presenting himself to the authoritative iconic entity where the image, in a sense, has power over the viewer see Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, esp. ch. 3; and ch. 3 above.

385 The Contemporary Film Industry II 371 Khan s earlier avatar, deriving from a well-known cycle of psychotic movies from his early film career; 8 it also mobilizes a different register of cinematic appeal, suggesting a more complex audience address. Raj is converted into a figure of uncontrollable, indeed psychotic rage, and launches an attack on his opponents. The performative nature of this violence is significant. It evokes the psychotic in Shah Rukh Khan s visage, and yet uses the parameters of the choreographed stunt sequence, replete with somersaults, feints, and tumbling manoeuvres. In short, the scene has the aspect of an item, a separable unit of pleasure within the traditional format. However, if we so wish, we could provide narrative integrity to this tonal shift and textual disruption by arguing that it dramatizes, quite literally, that ties of blood and kinship have to be given body and graphic force in order to persuade of the possibilities of reaffiliation to the nation in an epoch of global dispersal. This is not a one-off feature, for DDLJ s action sequences are mirrored at the climax of Pardes as well, and with a similar symbolic design. In both cases, the scene (temporarily) supplants a drama of reconciliation founded on a strategy of demonstrating respect and obedience to patriarchal traditions, and deploying elements of the family social film and romantic comedy. What comes into view at this point is the challenge not of demonstrating respect, but of displaying primordial, visceral affiliation by defending family honour. The scene in DDLJ is set up to demonstrate Raj s willingness to fight for his father s honour, and ends when Baldev thunderously closes the proceedings, and outcasts the frivolous suitor yet again. There seems a fatal lag, where the rationale of the son s violence on behalf of his father is not properly witnessed by the other father, the symbolic father, the one who has the power to define who is an Indian. If this father is not there at the correct moment, the scene nevertheless appears to have an afterlife that now recovers the motif of obedience. Raj submits to Baldev s order of expulsion, and he looks out from the departing train as Baldev holds a struggling Simran, who pleads that he let her go. This is a rather fascinatingly rendered passage. Father and son are fixed in a shot-reverse shot exchange of looks across the increasing distance 8 See Mazumdar, From Subjectification to Schizophrenia, and Vasudevan, Disreputable and Illegal Publics, for analysis of Baazigar (Abbas Mustan, 1992) and Darr (Yash Chopra, 1994).

386 372 The Melodramatic Public set up by the motion of the train, and the father seems blind to the girl struggling in his grip, although the two-shot highlights her in the father s frame, screaming to be allowed to go to her beloved. It is as if the sound/image registers are split in the father s perceptual economy: he has eyes only for the interloper, whose bloodied face retains the traces of a symbolic violence; if he registers his daughter s will, it can only be by hearing her and feeling her at his side. In a startling reversal, the father suddenly releases the daughter, and announces that no-one can love his daughter as Raj does. The apparently fatal gap in time which prevented the father s witnessing the earlier scene of filially motivated violence appears to be recovered in the bloody proof offered in the visage of the pretender, and the screams of the desperate young woman. The release of the girl, and the formation of the couple reorders the perceptual economy, making the father into a willing spectator of a scene both sanctioned by him, but now disappearing from his view and into the vast beyond. We should note that the sanction is supplemented by a symbolic exchange: the father recognizes the virtue of the son, and accordingly releases the daughter into the expanded space of the nation; in exchange, he receives a sign, a thumbs up from Raj, which he enthusiastically responds to. (Figs 63 64, p. 373.) The abrupt reversal of demeanour, from the dark, punitive father, to the beaming elder fully converted not only by the virtue but, indeed, the virtuosity of the son, signals an excess. The Indian viewer, in particular, cannot fail to spot the liberalization narrative nested in the exchange. The protectionist economics and import substitution logic of the 1970s had denied multinational soft drinks giants such as Coke and Pepsi a market since 1977, when a series of local products such as Campa Cola and Thums Up were promoted, the latter with great success. With the return of the big multinational firms, Pepsi in 1988, and Coke in 1993, there was a bid to buy up the brand equity of local products, so that Coke took over Thums Up in 1994, the year before the release of DDLJ. According to brand strategy analysis, the bid to use local bottling plant to distribute Coke did not win over a clientele, and Coke reintroduced Thums Up shortly after. 9 The concluding gesture of the film, the exchange of a thumbs up sign between father and son, then suggests that the acknowledging of the next, globalized 9 Sicco Van Gelder, Global Brand Strategy, London, Kogan Page, 2003, 197.

387 The Contemporary Film Industry II 373 Fig. 63 Figs 63 64: DDLJ, Thumbs Up! Fig. 64 generation as legitimate successors comes under the sign not only of patriarchal sanction, but of the integration and, indeed, assertion, of local product in the global commodity constellation. We should not allow this concluding semiotics to obscure the complexity of the new assemblage of the cinema in the contemporary epoch. Apart from the fact that the diaspora-themed cinema addresses transformations in India as much as generating strategies to include

388 374 The Melodramatic Public Indians settled abroad, we have a layered sense of audience dispositions addressed by the film. As a number of critics have noted, the very idea of the arranged love marriage, securing parental sanction for individual romantic choices in marriage partners, is part of a longer pattern of conventions in the cinema that seeks cross-class inclusivity for its audiences. Further, and this perhaps indicates the transitional nature of DDLJ and, indeed, of Pardes, the necessity of the action/stunt sequences suggests an expanded audience address, with a formulaic combination of traditional morality along with the disaggregated visceral attraction. I say this is transitional because the cinema has not yet arrived in the time of urban globalized vistas centred on the mallmultiplex as its high-end exhibition/consumer point. Here is a description of the audiences that have become characteristic for DDLJ in its record-breaking run at Bombay s Maratha Mandir theatre: Twenty-four-year old Nathu Ghorpade, a porter at Mumbai Central station, does not subscribe to the view that his city is one of the costliest in the world. Over the past few years, he, along with his friends, has, at least once a week, been spending four hours in air-conditioned comfort, munching popcorn and watching a hit movie for just Rs 14 (till recently it was Rs 9)... Arriving an hour early, this writer watched the audience lining up at the booking counter, comprising mostly typical, working-class males. The stalls and dress circle did not have a single woman viewer, the balcony, though, had five. The men sat with their legs up on the seats, dozed for some time but went on repeating the Shahrukh Khan dialogues and wolf whistling at the romantic scenes. It s a good time pass for us, they say. Many of us live close by in the slums and lost count how many times we have seen the film. This is unbelievable comfort for us, they add. Porters at Mumbai Central, during the lean morning hours, often drop in at the theatre. Manoj Desai [owner, Maratha Mandir] knew of cases of people visiting the theatre more than times. Yet, it is not an all-male, working-class audience. There are courting couples, co-eds, travelling salesmen and a whole lot of other movie-watchers. Almost 40 per cent of the audience comprises casual visitors from outside Mumbai. Since Maratha Mandir lies close to Mumbai Central and the State Transport Bus Stand, the visitors watch the movie either before or after their work is over. The packed weekend audience is different. Families drive in, watch the film and then lunch in one of the many restaurants in the area. It is a day well spent for them.

389 The Contemporary Film Industry II 375 Obviously, the theatre and the film are made for each other. Says Desai, We have one of the best sound systems in town, installed at a cost of Rs 70 lakh. The film itself is well made, as the theme appeals to the Indian mind and the songs are still popular. The theatre s location helps a lot. But most of all, it is the low ticket rates of Rs 20, Rs 17 and Rs 14, which pull the people in, he points out. V. Gangadhar, Love at Maratha Mandir, The Hindu 10 The description provides us with a sense of the layered audiences that compose the city, from workers, itinerant businessmen, travellers who factor in film-viewing as punctuation in their work day and peripatetic lives, through to more clearly demarcated leisure practices. It is this particular intersection between the city and the cinema that distinguishes it from the multiplex form with its bid to virtualize its space, even if this is not always quite possible because of municipal government practices which often position the multiplex in a differentiated ensemble of consumer economies. The Multicultural Father Deceased and Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004) Shah Rukh Khan functioned in DDLJ as an enunciator, a figure who is central to the organization of the narrative, negotiates amongst its various drives to reconcile differences and demonstrates great dexterity in accommodating himself to changing narrative locales and mise-ènscene. Thus he inhabits different territories of cultural reference and enacts heterogeneous modes of representation, ranging from the callow NRI through to the obedient son who can be both docile and psychotic in his filial devotion. Central to a storytelling design within which the star personality became prime narrative mover is a play with identity which includes the possibilities that the enunciator is entirely removed from the emotions of the situation his character goes through. In crucial ways, the other characters provide the main focus for audience identification, specifically those caught within a scenario of pathos. This is perhaps an excessive claim for the workings of the Shah Rukh Khan personality in DDLJ, but we can see similar features at work in Kal Ho Na Ho (KHNH). 10 Hindu Business Line Internet Edition, 28 April 2004, consulted 18 February 2008.

390 376 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 65: Kal Ho Na Ho, Nikhil Advani, 2004, Figure of Destiny. The performance style and narrative function of Khan in DDLJ indicates the way in which the transformation of the symbolic father was achieved through darshanic gambits, visceral action and, finally, a turn to the symbolism of the game as globalizing semiotic. We will notice both continuity and mutation of these features in KHNH, a film which undertook a complicated revision of the certitudes of identity parameters, in particular by complicating the definition of Indian identity in topical ways. This film, written and produced by Karan Johar, and directed by Nikhil Advani, represented many points of divergence from the original codification of the diaspora film. The plot centres on Naina Catherine Kapoor (Preity Zinta), a young aspiring professional (she and her friend Rohit are enrolled in management classes) who has grown up in New York, and is weighed down by the various problems that assail her family. She lives with her widowed mother, Jennifer (Jaya Bachchan), a sister, Gia (Jhanak Shukla) a spastic brother, Shiv (Ashit Naik), and their grandmother, Lajjo (Sushma Seth). Naina s father is dead, and the film emphasizes the importance of this loss in the opening sequence, when Naina, on her morning run, comes to the point on the Hudson River where she recalls her father playing with her as a child. The father was a Punjabi

391 The Contemporary Film Industry II 377 Hindu, and his marriage to Jennifer, an Indian Christian, was something his mother Lajjo was never reconciled to. The circumstances surrounding the father s death, and, indeed, the status of Gia, are left unspecified until much later in the film. The unceasing tension between Jennifer and Lajjo take their toll on the household and suspend Naina in a state of unhappiness. The fragile economic status of the restaurant Jennifer owns also adds to the tension. Naina s friend, Rohit (Saif Ali Khan), is a likeable character, not unlike Saif s role in Dil Chahta Hai (Farhan Akhtar, 2003), that of the hopeful but ineffectual womanizer. Into this scenario arrives Aman Mathur, who has come to the USA with his mother (Reema Lagoo) and lives with his uncle, Chadha (Dara Singh) in Naina s neighbourhood. Aman takes it as his mission to lighten Naina s load, to make her enjoy life and, finally, to find love for her by bringing her together with Rohit. The catch is that Naina falls for Aman. When she decides to declare her love for him, Aman, forewarned by Rohit, preempts her by indicating that he is already married by leaving the photograph of a mysterious other woman lying around. After a crestfallen Naina leaves, an exchange between Aman and his mother reveals that Aman is not married, that he loves Naina, but that he is afflicted with a heart disease which will shorten his life. After this revelation, and the interval, a comedy of the male adolescent know-all type ensues, with Aman guiding Rohit through the steps that will win him Naina, involving cellphone prompting, the staging of chance meetings, and even a timeline for securing Naina s love. While the ploy seems to be working, at a crucial moment Naina comes to know of the game, and is angrily going to terminate her relationship to Rohit, when Aman intercedes, and reads a passionate letter of love avowedly penned by Rohit from a blank sheet of paper. This mends the impending breach, but also discloses to Rohit the depth of Aman s feelings for Naina. The engagement goes ahead, but a final twist emerges: Aman s claims to being married are exposed when Naina comes upon the woman whose photograph Aman had passed off as his wife s. In fact, she is his doctor, and now both Naina and Rohit situate earlier events differently. Aman s fabrication of a wife, his eloquent and passionate assertion of love in Rohit s name, but using his own words, all of these elements are now seen as proofs of Aman s love. Naina runs off in disarray, and Rohit feels cast into the role of a secondary figure, supporting cast and prop for the real love story. An infuriated Aman assails Rohit for thinking of giving up that which, if Aman were to live, he would never relinquish. The climax of this movement is reached

392 378 The Melodramatic Public when Aman finds Naina at the riverside, returning to the inaugural space of the film. A broken-hearted Naina asks Aman why he loves her so much, the sequence ending in Aman s paroxysmic denial that he loves anyone. A deathbed scene has Naina leave quickly, unable to endure the grief, and Aman declaring to Rohit that he has given Naina to Rohit in this life, but she will be his in the next. The coda takes place many years later, the film concluding with Naina s voice-over just as it had started. The greying couple have a teenage daughter, and Naina notes that this is the end of the story, and that she will never forget her first love. KHNH signals a symbolic shift in the structure of the diaspora family movie. For, unlike DDLJ, Pardes, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad; Karan Johar, 2003), KHNH unsettles the apex position in the structure. The paternal entity who had such power in these other films is rendered a dark, suicidal figure in this one. The back story of KHNH is a startling one, it is only revealed gradually, and its punchline comes as a genuine surprise. Indeed it exceeds the normal range of narrative denouement in popular Hindi cinema, its story of paternal suicide perhaps more reminiscent of the confessional middle cinema of a Mahesh Bhatt. 11 The father had an extra-marital relationship, and Gia was born out of wedlock. The relationship did not work, the father returns, and Jennifer takes him back and accepts Gia as her daughter. Lajjo s anger against her Christian daughter-in-law and her child is exposed as a way of suppressing the fact that it was her son who was primarily responsible for the breakdown of all conventions. It should be noted that the narrative acquires a topical edge here. By addressing the contamination of community and family identity in terms of Hindu Christian relationships, and asserting the validity of Indian Christians as part of the national fabric, the film parallels and implicitly challenges the violent attacks taking place at the time against Christians in India by the ideologues of right-wing Hinduism Films by Mahesh Bhatt such as Janam (Birth; 1985), Naam (Name; 1986), and Zakhm (Wound; 1998) recurrently address the ramifications of illegitimate birth and the challenges it poses not only to ideas about family norms, but also to destabilize the certitudes and prejudices associated with clear-cut sectarian identity. See above, ch. 9, for an analysis of Zakhm. 12 There were regular attacks on Christian missionaries, schools, and tribal groups, especially in Gujarat and Orissa in 2002 and 2003, and the more recent resurgence

393 The Contemporary Film Industry II 379 It is Aman who offers something akin to a psychotherapeutic release of this suppressed narrative, speaking out the truth in front of the assembled family group, apportioning guilt and innocence, extolling Jennifer s virtue and her husband s weakness. Ironically, this weakness is what has set up an entirely different content to family structures, the father s marrying of a Christian augmented by his subsequent relationship outside the Indian community as a whole. Thus the weakness of the father has opened up possibilities of permeability to the normally rigid contours of the Hindu family in the diaspora movie. In a peculiar sense, even with the father apparently absent from the scene, he leaves his imprint on the symbolic structure by scattering a trail of identitarian problems behind. And ironically Aman denounces the very figure into whose space he arrives and whose unfulfilled functions he assumes. For the primary object of his attention is Naina, the one who feels the absence of the father most. Her question at the climax of the film, Why do you love me so much? refers to a love of a very specific type, which loves beyond death, by setting up the conditions for the beloved s future happiness. The fact that this utterance takes place in the very place, and through the image of the father lifting the daughter in a warm embrace, suggests the transactions and compensatory functions layered into Aman s character. From the outset spectatorial expectations are built around him, as our view of him, his back turned to the camera, is interspersed amidst the narrative of everyday strife that governs the heroine s world. Fathersubstitute, impossible, unattainable lover, deus ex machina who solves family problems (he even gets the restaurant going by getting Jennifer to switch to Indian cuisine), exposes festering secrets and heals lingering wounds, Aman is also visually scaled up to assume the proportions of a figure of destiny. There is an epic, operatic quality to the way Nikhil Advani positions him in the approach to New York, in his first appearance at the railway station overseeing Naina s expression of frustration with her life, and as he bestrides the city from a lofty elevation above the Brooklyn Bridge. The approach shot should be placed in a historical database documenting the moment of arrival of migrant of Hindutva parties after the 2007 Gujarat elections again saw the resurfacing of organized attacks in Orissa. See consulted 18 September 2008.

394 380 The Melodramatic Public populations in America, dating back to Chaplin s Immigrant (1917). Something of the exhilaration of America as an experience of spectacle had earlier been captured in Pardes, in the imaging of New York, and particularly in the subsequent trip to Las Vegas. 13 But KHNH s sense of the city is more engaged, at a street level, in terms of participation in crowded pedestrian movement and shooting inside buses, railway stations, and inducting iconic features of street life such as food vendors into the mise-en-scène of the song sequence, Kuch To Hua Hai. The film makes the new space for the migrant over into a space of easy habitation, so that s/he is no longer migrant but part of the multicultural design of the city. This is perhaps best indicated in the film s presentation of the neighbourhood the Indian characters live in. Here Aman s performance of the song Pretty Woman Dekho Dekho Na articulates the space through multi-cultural musical performance, mobilizing pop, rap, gospel, and bhangra. Aman and bhangra enunciate the other elements, and build a rhythm of song and dance that culminates in SRK being imprinted on the US flag as a new ethnic insignia. Aman s body is inserted on the flag and at its edge, drawing on Richard Gere s placement in Pretty Woman (Garry Marshal, 1990) and evoking the position of an MC or disc jockey. 14 (Fig. 65, p. 376.) Arguably, all this would suggest that the film projects a newly confident situation for the diaspora audience. As I have noted KHNH also unsettles the more restrictive identitarian logic presented by the genre, at least allowing for the possibility of the family structure relating fluidly to the ethnic environment it inhabits. The film therefore offers a more liberal position to the spectator in its presentation of problems arising from identity conflicts. However, it is also suggestive that the story-telling outlines a certain crucially liminal position for its star 13 This is in the song sequence Deewana, and its ride across the desert, excitement arising from the thrill of untrammelled movement and anticipation of the cityscape, rather than the actual view of the city itself. 14 In contrast to a long history in which Bombay films have drawn freely on American and other cinemas for plot elements and music, the new globalizing drives of the industry today seek legitimate avenues for the protection and exploitation of intellectual property. So the filmmakers of KHNH paid for the rights to use Oh Pretty Woman, a song originally sung by Roy Orbison. The music directors of the film, Shankar, Ehsaan, and Loy, said they insisted on this, and also that they added their own original lines and musical elements to this version. See Rajiv Vijaykar interviews Shankar Ehsaan Loy, Screen, 27 January 2006, archive/archive_fullstory.php?content_id=11871, visited on 7 May For further discussion of intellectual property conflicts, see the Conclusion and Afterword, below.

395 The Contemporary Film Industry II 381 performer in its construction of the film s emotional world. Aman s position here echoes the performative iterations and role playing of Raj in DDLJ while assuming a superior narrative function. Along with the imagery of destiny associated with Aman in his elevation in the cityscape, this liminality, this undecidability of character perspective underneath an excess of histrionic expressions suggests a figure who comes from a space outside the narrative world. I find this particularly suggestive for unravelling the mode of address of films designed for diversely located audiences. It is as if the mobility of the film into different markets requires a superordinate figure who is not rooted in one place, and can accommodate himself to new places, or can indeed refashion these spaces in terms of his objectives. However, the issue here is not only one of mobility and narrative dexterity, but also one which makes character subjectivity itself displaced as a coherent or desirable goal. This offers the viewer a distinctive perch from which to view the unfolding and indeed the manipulation of story events happening to someone like Rohit or Naina who may be like us. This dual position made available to spectators provides for a situation at once internal and diegetically liminal, and outlines a distinctive strategy of narrative engagement. It is possible to carry this reflection further, to consider other filmic levels which are marked as performative. Thus scenes in which Rohit s housekeeper, Shantaben (Sulbha Arya), thinks she is witnessing a gay liaison between Rohit and Aman punctuate the film and act as a running gag. Shantaben s unsophisticated response is encoded as comic misunderstanding of innocent male bonding. However, the intimacy of the men, their willingness to discuss the beloved as a potentially manipulable object suggests the traces of an older convention of dosti, of male bonding that sidelined the beloved. I say trace because this does not carry the weight of films such as Namak Haraam (Traitor; Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1973) or Qurbani (Sacrifice; Feroz Khan, 1980). Rather, it remains light and yet thereby adds to the image of Khan as adaptable, his flexibility now extending into the realm of androgynous attraction. It is significant that the sequence acquired considerable off-screen play, with Shah Rukh and Saif Ali Khan extending it in the Filmfare Awards ceremony, 15 and gay lesbian groups referencing it as part of an ongoing exploration of homo-erotic 15 See Shah Rukh Khan@ Filmfare on for this scene, consulted on 17 January 2008.

396 382 The Melodramatic Public subtexts in Hindi cinema. 16 But what I find particularly suggestive is how such a malleable, performative personality charts a new context which actively unsettles identity issues of various types, including those of coherent fictional character, ethnic type, and sexual disposition. In a sense, the element of play and distance observed by ethnographers of audience reception may not be as contrary to on-screen narration as we might at first glance believe. Perhaps the screen itself captures the mutability and multiplicity of identities and dispositions to identity that is observable in the audiences that it addresses. 17 Whether such formal elements of manoeuvrability and play tip over into knowingly ironic modes of self-presentation in the films is another matter. Rather, we return here to those particular tropes of the melodramatic mode that are at once archaic and strangely contemporary in their articulation. The histrionics of the Shah Rukh Khan persona is both reminiscent of an older melodramatic emphasis on a spectrum of coded gestures and facial expressions, and wilfully excessive of these. As a result, a question mark is placed over how we are being asked to respond to the performance, especially when the persona alternates his act between the registers of heightened emotion and those of the playful tease. What is particularly intriguing here is that the ambivalences of this performance do not go against an overall emotional engagement, at least when the narration successfully engages us through the pathos arising from misunderstandings and misperceptions. Here, despite the fluidity of performative and expressive drives in this cinema, it is suggestive that the old diptych between melodrama and realism continues to exercise a hold in contemporary global cultures. The pathos of realistically evoked situations continues to engage audience empathy, especially for the women characters of DDLJ and KHNH. 16 See the website, Queering Bollywood, consulted 20 January 2008; and the work of Gayatri Gopinath, Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema, in Andrew Grossman, ed., Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, Binghamton, The Haworth Press, 2000, Raminder Kaur observes that young professional filmgoers in the United Kingdom do not take the over-the-top melodrama of Bollywood movies straight, and perhaps Shah Rukh Khan s characteristic performances mirror exactly this playful disposition and response. Raminder Kaur, Cruising on the Vilayati Bandwagon: Diasporic Representations and Reception of Popular Indian Movies, in Kaur and Sinha, eds, Bollyworld.

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

398 384 The Melodramatic Public Pretty Woman; Sriram Raghavan, 2004), and the horror movie Bhoot (Ghost; Ram Gopal Varma, 2003). In fact, the particular transformation of film form is well indexed by juxtaposing Rangeela on the one hand, and Bhoot and Ek Hasina Thi on the other. Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) Rangeela could be considered part of the older popular format. The film is defined by a number of song-and-dance sequences, tends to be loud in its characterization, and is digressive, highlighting performative and dialogue-driven encounters. Its story revolves around two characters, Mili (Urmila Matondkar), a hard-working film extra, and Munna (Aamir Khan), a streetwise conman or tapori involved in black market activity, including the sale of cinema tickets. Mili and Munna grew up together, and it is only when Nimmi comes to the attention of a major male star, Kamal (Jackie Shroff), and makes it in the movies, that Munna comes to realize he is in danger of losing her and that he loves her. Aamir Khan communicates energy and playfulness in this and other tapori roles such as Ghulam (Slave; Vikram Bhatt), elaborating his repertoire from the sophisticated urbanite to the city s lumpen denizens. The point of the performance is the broad caricatural strokes and a certain vulgar jouissance in the use of costumes, crotch-clutching dance moves and a cock-of-the-walk confidence. Mili, on the other hand, works with a more plausible range of realistic effects to evoke a struggling lower-middle-class character, and conjures up a sense of ordinary, hard-working life, as in a scene showing her involved in sweaty physical exercise on an isolated stretch of Bombay beach. She could obviously try various ways of improving her situation and achieving acknowledgement, but the film introduces the possibilities of self-reflexivity by making her a film extra with ambitions to succeed as an actor. This self-reflexive ambition is announced at the outset of the film. The ordinary and everyday rhythm of the city is both gestured to and worked over in the inventive opening credit and first sequence of the film. City sounds cars, motorbikes, film music amplified by public speakers provide the soundscape for the titles, which also capture the history of the Bombay cinema through snaps of iconic stars. At the conclusion of the credits, what we have seen and heard is retrospectively situated as emerging from the street of the film s narrative world:

399 The Contemporary Film Industry II 385 a young woman steps away from a bioscope, a peep show mechanism of archaic vintage, which in turn accounts for the slide show of star images we have just witnessed. (This also initiates the narrative thematic of actor/extra, which, unusually, is quite carefully carried on in the body of the song sequence.) The young woman is Mili, and we move with her through the syncopated, stop-start, abrupt tonal shifts of the song Rangeela Re. Different types compose the scene, some quite recognizable as part of everyday urban life, such as the uniformed office worker in pants, white shirt and tie, workers at a construction site, and young men and women in casuals. But as the song builds we have a series of interesting cut-aways and new types of body formation. These include militarized units, women in tartan carousing in a scene meant to evoke a Scottish countryside perhaps, and an assembly of taekwondo or judo practitioners. All of these constitute shifting components of the massified ornament. There is no irony in any of this, and if there is a consistent theme, it is the premium being placed on physical fitness, crucial to Nimmi s job as extra but also her sense of self. She is the lead dancer in all these formations, and is arraigned in a series of large-scale, but thinly populated spaces, for example a large warehouse, somewhat denuded streets, and perhaps most striking of all, an empty railway platform. Here Mili is placed at the forefront of a group of girls positioned on railway tracks, their hand movement suggesting an assembly line. The Let s dance! refrain of the song is here punctuated by a reprise/reply to the original star/spectator-fan relationship signposted by the slide show, with Mili imploring that her name acquire fame, that she not be consigned to anonymity. 19 Here and elsewhere the lyrics function in counterpoint to the lightness of Urmila Matondkar s presence. The female protagonist engages a cityscape which seems open and available to her, though the incursion of a scarred street tough into the gallery of types causes the free-flowing girl to momentarily flinch. Urmila s pixie-like looks suggests a gamine who presents herself unselfconsciously in a wardrobe of tight fitting clothes. The childlike star appears natural representative, didi or fond elder sister, to a gaggle of kids and playfully orchestrates them to take on a pile of commandos who accommodatingly back down and slither away. Characteristic 19 Itne chehron mein apne chehre ke pehchaan oh ho pehchaan oh ho, Bade bade naamon mein apna bhi naamonishan oh ho pehchaan oh ho.

400 386 The Melodramatic Public fantasy inversions of entertainment formats pace Dyer facilitate the upstaging of military logistics and state form by a regime of play. Spectators attuned to the South Asian regional tussles of the 1990s, to culminate in 1998 with India s explosion of a nuclear device and followed swiftly thereafter by Pakistan s riposte, might be quite relieved to see the dispersal of military force within the popular assemblage. Topical and prescient too is another articulation of childhood, presented as a condition targeted not by parents or teachers or other disciplinary entities but by the market. A child performs in rap style, complaining of his being assailed by multiple advertisers and competing brand names, mentioning Horlicks, Complan, Cadbury, and Amul by name. Varma has distanced himself now from the film, despite the fact that it was a great success at the time. Presumably this is due to the fact that the film looks a little dated because it is so much part of the older song dance format, less streamlined in its rhythm, a little choppy in its pacing and cutting of shots. However, it is an index of the rapid changes of the contemporary period that the film can at once feel dated and, at the same time, quite novel, in that its collage of images addresses so many of the impulses that define the present. These include female professional mobility; intimations of the city as a space of flows and transformative energies; playful invocations of militarized cultures and their contest; and, through the segments involving child performers, a sense of the looming presence of the market, commodity elaboration and, as the child says, the tension arising from choice. It is even transitional from the point of view of the city of Bombay. Thus it was shot in the Central Business District of Belapur, part of the Navi or New Mumbai, which was designed to take off some of the weight of business and government transactions in the main city. The particular empty look to the city scenes that I have remarked upon is indicative of this transitional moment in the life of the city, as a not yet occupied city space provides the stage for the figuration of new energies and vistas in the cinematic imagination of the city. I have spent some time going over this opening to indicate the contrast it offers to Varma s later, technically accomplished and narratively streamlined work. This too is extremely recent, and arises from work undertaken under the rubric of the Factory, the company Varma set up to generate new genres and deploy new talent. Perhaps for the first time in the Bombay film industry this new genre production appears strongly oriented to reproducing a Hollywood standard in terms

401 The Contemporary Film Industry II 387 of narrative integration, character-driven, point of view story-telling, and even, occasionally, the elimination of the distractive features of song, dance and comedy sequences. However, one should also note that its reference point is not only the Hollywood film. David Desser, for example, has emphasized that South East and East Asian horror films have been an important resource for contemporary Bombay genres. 20 What is suggestive here is not merely the impacting of novel global configurations on the local cinema, but the ways in which such models are crucially related to a reflection on the very conditions of their emergence. High-end genre production is critically related to the development of the new urban vistas, the mall, the multiplex, and new lifestyle cultures that are burgeoning forth in sectors of Indian cities. They are niche-oriented, especially seeking to capture teenagers and young professionals as audience. Rather than being domestically oriented in a conventional sense, as in repeating the earlier format of the cinema as an omnibus attraction, they often consciously steer clear of such a model. Ironically, one could argue that the Bollywood family movie hones closer to the traditional format, not only in terms of its emphasis on morality and family values, but also in continuing to offer attractions such as comedy sequences along with their continued investment in elaborate song-and-dance scenes. As I have suggested, though it keeps to the overall parameters of the melodramatic mode, even the Bollywood family movie has exhibited a certain dynamic. Bhoot (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) Two films from the Factory indicate the shift in form. Both Bhoot (2003) and Ek Hasina Thi (2004) feature Urmila Matondkar, the heroine of Rangeela. Both, however, work with a very definite sense of the modernized, mediatized, and consumer-driven city. In Bhoot Vishal (Ajay Devgan) takes a condo in a high rise Bombay apartment block. Our first view on his wife, Swati (Urmila Matondkar), takes place at the very moment that she is looking upwards, at the extending vertical vista provided by the high-rise. (Fig. 66, p. 388.) Clear orientation of vision, and of the narrative field, becomes crucial here, quite in contrast to the dispersed, multi-sited engagements 20 Globalization Across Asia, paper presented at Globalism and Film History: A Conference, Insitute of Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2006.

402 388 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 66: Bhoot, Ram Gopal Varma, 2003, Vertical Engagement. the heroine of Rangeela has towards her city. As the film proceeds we will observe that the spatial frame introduced by the high rise constitutes a form of separation from the city and even a mode of entrapment. The couple s entry into the high-rise requires the negotiation of a surly guard, akin to some kind of lumpenized boundary entity. The modernist abstraction of the flat, defined by clean lines, split-level flooring, and an expansive view, meets with Swati s approval, but the idyll of the yuppie couple is swiftly infiltrated. An eerie, off-balance maid, Kamla Bai (Seema Biswas), arrives, seeking employment. None of this seems to unsettle the couple, and later, as they make love in the stairwell, we experience a rhythm of discontinuous perception. As the light from the TV screen reflects off the lovers bodies, shifts in time are relayed to us by a montage of abrupt sound transitions in the television news programme. Having separated themselves from the world in the apparent security of the highrise, the world is now available in televised format. The initial sense of foreboding is augmented by unmotivated camera placements characteristic of horror films. Finally, we are given narrative pay-off when the camera turns from Swati, making her way up the stairs after a drink of water, to catch the image of an apparently malevolent female spirit who looks at her receding figure.

403 The Contemporary Film Industry II 389 The abstraction of the couple from the city sets the terms for a narrative involution. If the mid 1990s Rangeela presented a city and a woman character on the cusp of new forms of experience and modes of engagement, these new films capture a substantially altered vista and subjectivity. The narrative carries us away from the city into an apparently desirable isolation. But this freestanding vector of experience has already developed a history, one of previous occupants, their violent deaths and traumatic spirit activity. The return of the repressed scenario is suggestive, as if addressing the perils of the urban form so rapidly re-fashioned in the last decade, and subjecting it to a narrative probing and a disinterring of buried histories. Varma s film seems to participate in a particular circuit of horror films here, originating in Japan, as in films such as Dark Water (Hideo Nakata 2001) and resonating with them rather than their Hollywood versions (whatever the source of his inspiration). The resonance lies specifically in this itinerary of dying cities or new cities that are already shrouded in death and a history of violence. Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003) This was not just a one-off effort, and was carried in a different direction in Ek Hasina Thi (EHT), directed by Sriram Raghavan for Varma productions and the Factory. If Bhoot was centred on the high-rise condominium, then Ek Hasina Thi takes us in the direction of the bhk, the bedroom-hall-kitchen dwelling associated with young single professionals. Contra the collage effects of Rangeela, EHT s city has a realist veneer, if one cleaned up and shot through with a certain idealized rendering of modernized office, market, and residential dwellings. Its protagonist, Sarika Vartak (Matondkar), is a modest employee in a travel agency, whose everyday life is composed of travelling to work by an autorickshaw, shopping in grocery stores retailing the modernized end of consumer choices, and returning in the evening to her tiny but well managed bhk. (Figs 67 69, pp ) Sarika s parents are a lower middle class couple who live in a smaller town, and she navigates the normal irritants of single living for a woman, especially intrusive male neighbours. The film operates a fairly rigorous narrative economy, with no performance sequences distracting our attention from the story of how the girl s innocent desire for the attractions of a dashing Karan Rathore (Saif Ali Khan) leads to her manipulation, framing, and incarceration. This dark story converts into one of a character discovering unknown resources to

404 390 The Melodramatic Public Fig. 67 Fig. 68

405 The Contemporary Film Industry II 391 Fig. 69 Figs 67, 68, 69: Ek Hasina Thi, Sriram Raghavan, 2004, Sarika s Life. turn the tables on her oppressor. However, the new lifestyle is realistically evoked and suggests a more adventurous, sexually curious engagement with the city by the film s woman protagonist. Romance, noir and female revenge stories converge in a narrative amalgam which, novel as it is for Indian film circumstances, may appear somewhat predictable to Euro-American audiences used to melodramas of plot reversal of the Sydney Sheldon type and elements of the erotic thriller. 21 For this reason, this new genre cinema may be generating a very specific and contextual engagement with new urban conditions in Indian metropolises. Ironically enough, in films such as Bhoot and EHT, this cinema reflects in its diegetic space the very conditions that have produced it: the cleaning up of residential areas and the gene ration of new consumer experiences, of which the mall-multiplex is a prime example. But the reflection hardly comforts the newly 21 Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005, for a diagnosis of a current in present-day cinema which is strongly related to direct-to-home broadcasting and the DVD market.