Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 7, Issue 1-2, 2015

In this article I propose to critically engage with the figure of the fan in Tamil Nadu’s cinematic landscape. The ways in which fans contribute to a visual and political landscape are rather exceptional in South Asia and therefore require particular attention. I use the notion of the figure, following Barker and Lindquist, as ‘subject positions that embody, manifest, and, to some degree, comment upon a particular historical moment’ to elucidate the blurring lines of the figure as notion and as lived experience. By examining the figure I will show how fandom is a constant dialogue between intense affinity, affection and excess versus justification, control and denunciation. This brings fans from being part of the grand narratives of cine-politics in Tamil Nadu and the often taken for granted positions that they take in this to a subject position that shows the practice of being a fan.

Language articulates cultural distinction and difference in a variety of ways in India’s diverse cinematic traditions. In mainstream Bombay cinema, language has been deployed to assert the hegemony of Hindi and to cast Hindi-speaking North Indian subjects as quintessential national subjects. This assertion of linguistic and cultural privilege runs counter to the fact that film-making in India has always entailed a host of multilingual and cross-regional exchanges, from producing remakes and double versions to dubbing film dialogues. This article uses G. N. Devy’s concept of ‘translation consciousness’ to demonstrate how Ek Duuje Ke Liye/For Each Other, a Hindi film produced by South Indian film-makers, challenges the hegemony of both Hindi and Bombay cinema as an industry. In moving deftly across multiple tongues and cultural forms – from various iterations of Hindi to Bharatanatyam to classic film titles – EDKL urges us to embrace a more playful attitude towards linguistic and regional identity. Attending to the politics of language and sound in this particular film, and in Indian film history more broadly, also allows us to rethink the relationship between the ‘national’ and the ‘regional’ in film studies as a discipline.

This short, reflective article explores the settings of Qissa (Singh, 2013), written by the director and the author. By framing the plot in a fable-like spiral narrative mode, the aim of Qissa was to look back at (and beyond) post-partition narratives. By referring to the original screenplay and shooting-stills, this article draws attention to the ways in which ambivalent spaces are produced, and illustrates the ‘to-ing and fro-ing between specific geographical locales and human imagination’. Indeed, if Laura Marks writing about the haptic (and multi-sensory experience) has argued about ‘intercultural’ cinema with reference to diaspora encounters, I revisit Qissa in relation to Gurvinder Singh’s Anhey Ghorey Da Daan (2011) to (re)consider in what way Anup Singh’s film fashions new cinematic terrains, and re-presents Punjab through extensive location shooting.

The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of Marathi cinema, and narratives focused on childhood have been one of its dominant strands. In films like Tingya (2008), Shala (2012), Balak Palak (2013), 72 mile ek Pravas (2013), and Fandry (2013), the vulnerabilities of childhood become the matrix of historic transformations in material experience, lifestyle and perception. Interestingly, these films responding to local and regional concerns register the transformation of the region because of neo-liberalism. The films’ investment in childhood seems to be along two distinct but sometimes intertwining axes of desire. One is the site of the sexual in the child and the other invests in the child’s spatial and affective relation with the land of the region, the rural village/small town on the cusp of a social-economic transformation. With a focus on Fandry, this article examines some of the textual strategies and tropes of this cinematic moment.

This article is a case study of the People’s Archive of Rural India, a multimedia digital archive founded by journalist P. Sainath, which debuted online in December 2014. PARI features photographs, videos, interviews, audio files and articles that seek to illuminate the lives of the over 833 million people who live in rural India. Focusing on the narrative form of the ‘story’ and the universalizing temporality of the ‘everyday’, the article asks, ‘What is the relationship between PARI’s rural India and the “New” India to which it ostensibly belongs? How do PARI’s textual and visual mediations work together to produce the rural as a region?’. The article explores the relevance of postcolonial theory for the study of cultural production in the time of ‘New’ India, while arguing that PARI offers a Janus-faced depiction of the rural as urban India’s historically entrenched Other, on the one hand, and as a critical outside to the neo-liberal imagination, on the other.

This article engages with the Tamil film Pisaasu/‘The Ghost’ (Mysskin, 2014) to analyse the horror genre as providing the space for the binary of a beautiful maiden and her ghost and the gradual collapsing of the binary between the body and the spirit to make a statement on the predicament of women, particularly in Tamil society, thereby enabling the unravelling of the layers of the unconscious of a patriarchal society. The singularity of Mysskin’s Pisaasu, however, lies in its inversion of the ghost as yearning for love instead of revenge and thereby offering a rich space to interrogate Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine by juxtaposing it with the specificity of Tamil culture and psyche, as well as engage with the possibilities afforded by digital technology to converse with the cultural subconscious in its own language – one made up of complex images.

This article attempts to revisit the popular as well as tribal myths of Mahabali, the former of which informs Onam – Kerala’s national festival. The popular myth while mourning the loss of Mavelinadu – a utopian welfare state – also attempts to recreate the same by way of thoroughly modern political praxis. The mostly unknown tribal myths of Mahabali, from the Wayanad district, however, propose an alternative concept Mavelimantam that, while being an antithesis to the former, imagines a radical, pro-Adivasi and anti-majoritarian space. Onam symbolizes the ‘return’ of Mahabali who, in the popular myth, was pushed to the netherworld by an invading Deva disguised as a dwarf Brahmin. His return from ‘exile’ also represents a politico-economic reality of his ‘former subjects’ returning from their exiles abroad, especially from the Persian Gulf. While Mahabali can stage an annual return to Kerala, Maveli, the tribal chieftain whose land was usurped by the feudal lords in the tribal myths, cannot. This article also investigates notions such as body, alienation of tribal land in contemporary Kerala, politics of myths and their ramifications on modern economic, political, philosophical and cultural affairs of the state and its deeply multicultural spaces.

Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism, Prarthana Purkayastha (2014) Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 216 pp., h/bk, $69.99, ISBN 978-1-137-37517-9

Figurations in Indian Film, Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu (eds) (2013) London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 292 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-29179-9, Hardcover-79,99

Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance, Pramod K. Nayar (2015) Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 216 pp., h/bk, ISBN: 9781107080584, $90.00

Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, Purnima Mankekar (2015) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 320 pp., ISBN: 9780822358367, p/bk, $26.95

Dream Machine: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema, Samir Dayal (2015) Philadephia: Temple University Press, 304 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1064-1 P/back $31.30

Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work, Aparna Sharma (2015) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 276 ISBN: 9781137395436, $90. H/back

Bollywood and Postmodernism: Popular Indian Cinema in the 21st Century, Neelam Sidhar Wright (2015) Edinburgh University Press, 227 pp. ISBN: 9780748696345, h/back, $120