Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-Televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema by Anustup Basu B.A. in English, Jadavpur University, 1994 M.A. in English, Jadavpur University, 1996 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Anustup Basu It was defended on 04.13.2005 and approved by Paul A. Bove Colin MacCabe Eric O. Clarke M. Madhava Prasad Marcia Landy Dissertation Director ii Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema Anustup Basu, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like ‘modern’ selves and ‘traditional’ moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the ‘free market’, individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of ‘cinema effects’ across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age ‘cinematic’ in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary ‘informatics.’ The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Sovereign Power and Informed Heroism of the Epic Kind: Shankar’s Nayak and the Allegory in Contemporary Indian Cinema ................................................................................. 1 2. Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema ...................................................... 45 3. Myth and Reality: The Manifold Tropes of the Cinematic ............................................. 79 4. Lyrical Resolutions and Postulated Desires: Assemblages in Popular Indian Cinema ……………………………………………………………………………………………..144 5. The Music of Intolerable Love: Indian Film Music and the Sound of Partitioned Selves ……………………………………………………………………………………………..188 6. Mantras of the Metropole: Digital Inscriptions and Mythic Curvatures of Profane Time ……………………………………………………………………………………………..211 7. Repetitions with Difference: The Long and Arduous Journey of Mother India and her Sons toward the Metropolis...................................................................................................... 245 APPENDIX............................................................................................................................... 290 A Critique of Cinematic Reason: Indian Cinema and Classical Theories of Film.......... 290 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 326 iv PREFACE This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. There is of course an obvious homogenizing trap in using an umbrella term like ‘Indian’ to talk about a very rich and diverse cinematic tradition divided along the lines of ideology, production, language, and region. However, the signpost Indian can be understood in a non reflective or non-representative sense, as one that merely designates a sampling of films that in myriad ways discursively pose the concept itself as a problem. Hence, the films included here are Indian not because they reflect truths about an Indian essence, but because they, in largely popular formats, attempt to speak about, draw, or trace an ‘India’ in the world. Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema attempts to argue that contemporary films in such a terrain should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like ‘modern’ selves and ‘traditional’ moorings. Instead, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the ‘free market’, individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of ‘cinema effects’ across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. These strange, ‘outlandish’ departures, which often take place without any obligation to narrative continuity or the unified milieu, are developed in the dissertation as a theory of ‘geo-televisuality’. This concept is grounded in a global arena of concern, involving questions of mediatization, informatics, power, and sovereignty. Apart from Indian cinema proper, it is elaborated in relation to a critique of three lynchpins of western film theory: a subjective phenomenology of realism, structuralist linguistics, and psychoanalysis. These critical postulates are evaluated not just through discursive engagements with scholarly works on Indian cinema, but also in the light of v alternate ways of seeing, philosophical world views and aesthetic forms in the Indian traditions, like the cosmologies of schools like the early Samkhya, or Madhyamika Buddhism; the Rasa aesthetics of Sanskrit drama; the expressive forms of Parsee Theater, the Nathawara School of Painting, the Rasalila plays, or the grand nationalist themes of the turn of the century novelistic traditions. The dissertation aspires to make two important contributions to the field: it tries to open out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India. One can begin this discussion by assembling a little more detailed picture of the post-globalization situation in the subcontinent. Here is a brief account, sectioned under three headings pertaining to liberalization, Hindutva, and media expansion. From Nehruvian Socialism to Free Markets According to experts, it was in 1991 that the Indian economy, under the stewardship of Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, began to decidedly discard its core feature of Nehruvian socialism and open itself out to global processes of liberalization. This is a process frequently seen in terms of curative measures and neo-liberal ‘reform’ that is, of course, still in a process of continuation. The project set its goals in terms of making the rupee fully convertible, lowering tariff walls, and in time, opening up Indian markets completely to international investment capital and consumer goods. Nehruvian socialism can be described as an ensemble of ‘mixed’ governmental ideologies and tasks: democratization and parliamentary representation, industrialization of the feudal- agrarian countryside, state monopoly of macro-economic formations, regulated development of a licensed private sector that is protected from international competition vi and supported by public monetary institutions, and a quasi-socialist distributive justice1. Launched with the first five year plan of the republic in 1951, this system, with its heady combination of tempered capitalism and state paternalism, posed itself as an ideal model for post-colonial economies of the third world2. This original Indian experiment constituted a governmental apparatus that has been described by Rajni Kothari as an ‘intermediate aggregation’ in which “the centre-periphery dimension of nation-building in an old and plural society was crystallized through intermediate subsystems that provided linkages between a relatively homogeneous, modern centre and a widely dispersed,