Figurations in Indian Film Meheli Sen; Anustup Basu ISBN: 9781137349781 DOI: 10.1057/9781137349781 Palgrave Macmillan Please respect intellectual property rights This material is copyright and its use is restricted by our standard site license terms and conditions (see http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/connect/info/terms_conditions.html). If you plan to copy, distribute or share in any format including, for the avoidance of doubt, posting on websites, you need the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. To request permission please contact
[email protected]. 10 Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Om Shanti Om Bhaskar Sarkar How do we make sense of a situation in which a film industry turns its own workings into one of its primary narrative ingredients and begins to repre- sent itself obsessively? Is this simply a matter of modernist self-realization, now cast in a mythic frame that springs from commercial cinema’s penchant for the grandiose, the spectacular, and the hyperbolic? Or is something more at stake in a particular industry’s on-screen and off-screen self-projections at this conjuncture, in its mediatized articulation of the mythic and the reflexive, and in its willful blurring of the so-called “presentational” and “representational” modes1 in the service of metafiguration? “Without reflexivity, we are nothing” The formation of the modern subject entails the reflexive production of self- knowledge: this, by now, is something of an axiom. Perhaps less acknowledged is an equally habitual flight to the realm of myth. A Hegelian imperative of self-actualization, in accordance with this or that transcen- dental principle, translates the conscious management of one’s becoming into a reflexive performance of some pre-ordained, idealized Self; even when more speculative approaches threaten to scuttle teleology, it is difficult to rein in romantic-utopian impulses.