Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2013

Much recent scholarship on post-liberalization Indian cinema has explored the ways in which its productions have participated in or pushed back against the ideological project of neo-liberal transformation. Significantly, both kinds of critical endeavours have focused on genres depicting the metropolis and its rich cinematic figures (the new creative hero, the psychotic hero, the tapori, the metrosexual) as the locus of the elaboration and exploration of modernity. Recent ‘hatke’ cinema or the growing body of films addressing the domestic cosmopolitan, which are distinctive (or ‘hatke’) in their formal and thematic innovativeness, realism and indie-style; has also been the subject of these critical enquiries. This article examines two films from within the landscape of hatke cinema that depict northern Indian provincial youth: Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil (2003) and Kabeer Kaushik’s Sehar (2005). Popular and critical discussions of these films have located their ‘hatke’ quotient in their ‘deglam’ depictions of university politics, student politicians, hostel cultures and provincial youth’s sense of disaffection. In this article I argue that the provincial youth-film troubles binaristic notions of the metropolitan as the site of India’s global modernity and the provincial hinterland as entrapped by age-old structures of caste and feudalism. Through its exploration of caste-masculinities in the mundane spaces of a provincial small-town (rather than the aspirational horizons of Indian or global metropolises), the genre registers what I call ‘provincial modernities’ as a complex of the intertwined colonial, postcolonial and neo-liberal histories of the developmental project and power. In these films, the figure of the youth political-entrepreneur through his occupation of the discrete spaces of the provincial university campus (corridors, classrooms, hostels), and his subsequent infiltration of economically burgeoning sections of the city (railway contracting, real estate, telecommunications), illuminates a long provincial history of the bourgeois nation-state, crony capitalism and subsequent transformations wrought by economic liberalization and the democratization of caste. In doing so, I argue, the films posit the provincial as another site of impact as well as formulation of contemporary modernity and its inequities.

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

The discourse of exceptional crisis and unparalleled injury has made ‘9/11’ a globally recognized invocation and sanctioning of the security state’s violent imperial and domestic expansion and retaliation. Media representations themselves have come under scrutiny for their role in saturating our imaginaries with spectacles of American suffering with much less attention being paid to other more deadly occurrences (e.g. conflict in Darfur). Both narrative and images attempt to establish 9/11 as the beginning of a new global history that stretches outward from the United States and incorporates other global cities – Bali, Mumbai, London and Madrid – into this history. National and international media located the 11/26 attacks on Mumbai as India’s own 9/11. The bombings, subsequent occupation of the city, and hostage crisis were figured as predicated by 9/11, demarcating a historical teleology of terror that originated in New York and lead to Mumbai. New York, the original site of attack in this narrative, is the centre of civilization, finance and democracy; and the various attacks on Mumbai demonstrate how the threat of Islamic terror is spreading to the free world and other democracies, a narrative that promulgates an Orientalist and imperial discourse of Islamic violence and terror. A recent subgenre in popular Hindi cinema has adapted and adopted a similar narrative of exceptional injury. In a twist, recent Hindi films (2005–present) that deal with 9/11 and the Mumbai bombings have a different exigency, a shifted narrative that locates 9/11 within a larger frame of global Islamic violence, one where New York is not the origin, but where India precedes New York in injury. The affective and political shift we trace here is one where earlier cinematic narrative and images first concentrate on a history inscribed by loss – the 1947 Partition of India into India and Pakistan as a site of mourning, to films that deal with other conflicts and therefore other ways of politically and psychically understanding histories of inflicted and perpetrated violence as well as justification for the perpetration of violence. Most importantly, we suggest that films within the subgenre do not simply call for the expansion of the global security state, but can instead imagine other ethical responses. We identify one such response as postcolonial restoration.

This article explores the trajectory of Indian cinematic melodrama as the site of cinematic exhibition shifts from the single screen theatre to the multiplex through an analysis of the archetype of the self-annihilating protagonist, Devdas. It examines, in particular, the three cinematic retellings of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Devdas (1917) – Devdas (Roy, 1955), Devdas (Bhansali, 2002) and Dev.D (Kashyap, 2009). Arguing that the melodramatic impulse to return to a ‘space of innocence’ makes the modality of melodrama essentially nostalgic, it explores the different kinds of nostalgia at play in the three retellings. The different relationship each instance of nostalgia has to time, it argues, is intrinsically connected to the different valences of loss that inform the different kinds of mourning at work in these films. Finally, the article attempts to answer if melodrama remains a valid lens through which one can continue to view cinema in the age of the multiplex.

This article examines the recent emergence of mind-tricking narratives in popular Hindi cinema, such as Kahaani/Story (2012) by Sujoy Ghosh and Talaash/Search (2012) by Reema Kagti, as an illustration of the increasingly transnational and cosmopolitan outlook of popular film artefacts. This discussion addresses wider concerns regarding the continuing globalization of the Indian film industry, and ramifications for narrative, thematic and generic identity in its films, by posing questions such as: how do the above texts negotiate global storytelling norms within a prevailing and historically dominant melodramatic framework in commercial Hindi cinema? What are the implications of these changes, and most importantly, why now?

Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, William Mazzarella (2013) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 284 pp., ISBN: 9780822353881, p/bk, USD $24.95

The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology, Ajay Gehlawat (ed.) (2013) London and New York: Anthem Press, 218 pp., ISBN: 978-0857280015, h/bk, USD $99.00

Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema, Rajinder Dudrah (2012) Oxon: Routledge, 130 pp., ISBN 9780415447409, h/hk, £81.56

Bollywood: Gods, Glamour and Gossip, Kush Varia (2012) London and New York: Wallflower, 126 pp., ISBN 1906660158, p/bk, $20.00