Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2018

With a primarily South Asian population, including both middle-class families and 'bachelors', the Gulf states unsettle assumptions about the Middle East and South Asia developed from western area studies. This article examines three documentaries – From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Champ of the Camp and Sounds of the Sea – that layer visual images of the Gulf with songs from India and Zanzibar. They document the inequities and the ways in which vulnerable populations navigate them to find dignity in a world that often dismisses them as victims (e.g., exploited migrants, oppressed women) or uses them to legitimize segregation in allegedly overcrowded cities. They reconfigure documentary practice to allow subjects to speak indirectly, protecting them from possible retaliation or stigma. By documenting through nonwestern popular songs, these films contribute to a recovery of connections between South Asia, the Gulf and East Africa that were interrupted by British colonialism and US imperialism.

This article attempts to delineate the cartography of alternative cinematic productions in the region of Kolkata, which, being a nodal juncture that shapes the cultural milieu of Bengal, offers the technological and cultural infrastructures and the scope for cinephilic engagement crucial to the production of non-mainstream cinemas. To explore the gradual development of independent and amateur films in Kolkata, this article emphasizes the cinephilic tradition of the city that not only triggered cinematic movements (such as the film society movement and the Super-8 movement) but also ushered in the institution of film festivals in the region. Despite the mutations due to technological shifts, both film societies (in altered forms) and film festivals occupy central positions in the contemporary city's cinephilic culture. This article analyses the cinephilic legacies of the film society and the Super-8 movements that have historically fostered the contemporary cinephilic ecology of Kolkata, spurring peripheral media products.

In this article, I explore the dramatic substance of Hindi film songs through an approach based in performance studies, which presents performance as the very stuff of social life, social identities and social power. Given this, the enactment of song sequences in the Hindi film narrative cannot be dramatically benign, or just excess, or just pleasure (however intense). I describe how song sequences perform and thereby manifest and reify love and romance in the film narrative. Using work on public spectacle and power by Foucault and the public sphere by Vasudevan, I further analyse how they connect the public, emotions of love, and social or familial struggle in various ways, embodying key nodes of melodrama. I then reflect, in these terms, on the recent curtailment of performed songs in Hindi films. I thereby present a new method for analysing the dramatic agency of screened or background songs in films.

This article contrasts two seminal Malayalam films from the 1980s to understand the fraught relations between the Left politics and cinema in Kerala. The first part of the article argues that Mukhamukham ('Face to face', 1984) is a film in which its auteur director Adoor Gopalakrishnan identifies the Left political discourse and the medium of cinema as two powerful-popular epistemic tools at disposal in the region, but ultimately elevating cinema's resources as superior in taking us closer to truth. In the second part, I look at John Abraham's iconic Amma Ariyan ('Report to mother', 1986), to argue that the film came to be accepted widely and undisputedly as a political film mainly due to its (symbolic) privileging of the energies of collective affect – inalienable to both the Left politics and cinema – over contemplation and endevours of distanced intellectual knowledge production.

This article presents criticism on Tamil-language films starring the iconic Indian actor Rajinikanth, focusing on the development of female characters as battlegrounds between tradition and modernity. Within the framework of Rajinikanth films as nationalistic projects in which the gendered portrayals of characters are tied up with notions of patriotism and duty, female characters in Rajinikanth films almost always conform to four stereotypes: the goddess mother, the traditional good woman, the modern virgin, and the angry modern feminist. Using close reading and a broad chronological survey of Rajinikanth's filmography, this article highlights the modern virgin stereotype as a mediating force between tradition and modernity, and argues that the predictable reconstitution of modern virgins into traditional good wives betrays growing fears of modernity and globalization within Tamil culture.

This article unpacks a particular gendered vision of nation that we term muscular nationalism. Briefly put, muscular nationalism is an intersection of a specific vision of masculinity with the political doctrine of nationalism. This idea of nation is animated by an idea of manhood associated with martial prowess, muscular strength and toughness. A particular interpretation of muscular nationalism has unfolded in India within a cultural milieu shaped by an assertive self-confidence fuelled by 'liberalization', a process by which India has been integrated into the global political economy, coupled with the prominence of Hindu nationalist politics. India's prolific commercial film industry centred in Mumbai has used images of manhood to express and valorize these cultural changes. We use the popular and critically acclaimed film Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), directed by Rakesh Omprakash Mehra, to illustrate how athleticism and India's desire for regional dominance in South Asia shape muscular nationalism.