Figurations in Indian Film This page intentionally left blank Figurations in Indian Film
Edited by Meheli Sen Rutgers University, USA and Anustup Basu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Palgrave macmillan Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu 2013 Individual chapters © Contributors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-29179-9
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Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents
List of Figures vii Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction 1 Meheli Sen Part I Political and Typological Figures 1 Sensate Outlaws: The Recursive Social Bandit in Indian Popular Cultures 21 Bishnupriya Ghosh 2 What Happened to Khadi? Dress and Costume in Bombay Cinema 44 Anupama Kapse 3 Configuring the Other: The Detective and the Real in Satyajit Ray’s Chiriakhana 67 Gautam Basu Thakur Part II Generic Mutations 4 Diverting Diseases 91 M. Madhava Prasad 5 Nevla as Dracula: Figurations of the Tantric as Monster in the Hindi Horror Film 101 Usha Iyer 6 Haunted Havelis and Hapless Heroes: Gender, Genre, and the Hindi Gothic Film 116 Meheli Sen Part III Star Figures 7 “The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships”: Helen and Public Femininity in Hindi Film 139 Anustup Basu 8 From Superman to Shahenshah: Stardom and the Transnational Corporeality of Hrithik Roshan 158 Nandana Bose 9 Con-figurations: The Body as World in Bollywood Stardom 179 Sumita S. Chakravarty
v vi Contents
Part IV Figuring (out) New Bollywood 10 Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Om Shanti Om 205 Bhaskar Sarkar 11 Bodies in Syncopation 236 Moinak Biswas 12 Between Violetta and Vasantasena Is Toulouse-Lautrec: Cinematic Avatars and Bollywood in Moulin Rouge! 253 Kirsten Strayer Afterword 268
Index 279 List of Figures
1.1 “Gabbar ki asli pasand” television ad for Britannia biscuits 21 1.2 Veerappan’s photograph on TV9 Filmy 27 1.3 Shot from Wounded shown on the BigBoss TV show 34 2.1 Shanta Apte and Shakuntala Paranjpye in Duniya Na Mane (1937). Note the subdued hues and elegant draping of the handloom saris of both actresses. The umbrella and purse are prominent signs of the woman’s newfound public life as a social activist 54 2.2 Asha Parekh (right) and Bindu (left) in Kati Patang (1970) 55 2.3 Nirupa Roy in Deewar (1975) 56 2.4 Zeenat Aman in Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram (1978) 58 2.5 Guru (Abhishek Bachchan, corner right in khaki shirt) is dwarfed by the sooti (cotton) merchants in Bombay in Guru (2007) 59 2.6 Abhishek Bachchan plays the role of an unscrupulous polyester magnate who launches the economically bloated, gargantuan Shakti group of industries in Guru 60 8.1 The physical training sequence in Fiza (2000) 162 8.2 The shadow sword fighting sequence in Jodhaa Akbar (2008) 163 8.3 Extreme close-up shots of Roshan’s body 167 8.4 Extreme close-up shots of Roshan’s body 167 8.5 This appearance of Roshan’s in Dhoom 2: Back in Action was chosen as the model for Roshan’s waxwork at Madame Tussauds 170 9.1 The Networked Body: Shah Rukh Khan in Om Shanti Om (Red Chillies Entertainment, 2007) 194 9.2 Mimicking Superman in Om Shanti Om (Red Chillies Entertainment, 2007) 197 9.3 Shah Rukh Khan with Rekha in Om Shanti Om (Red Chillies Entertainment, 2007) 198 10.1 A chiseled SRK emerges out of the water in Om Shanti Om 213
vii viii List of Figures
10.2 OK talks to Pappu in front of the Tag Heuer billboard featuring himself 216 10.3 Deepika as Shantipriya “dances” with Rajesh Khanna in a sequence from Sachcha Jhutha (1970) 218 10.4 The callous OK discovers his inner Om at the Filmfare awards 223 11.1 Daera: Sheetal tends to her husband 247 11.2 Daera: Sharan looks at Sheetal as she lies in her bed 247 11.3 Daera: Sheetal’s last gaze as she dies – The inside of the clock 248 11.4 Daera: The song message approaches Sheetal 249 11.5 Daera: The message floats about 249 11.6 Daera: Sheetal reads the page 250 11.7 Daera : Sheetal turns around; the message caught in the splitting log 250 12.1 At the Moulin Rouge (Moulin Rouge! Twentieth Century Fox, 2001) 260 12.2 Satine as cultural pastiche (Moulin Rouge! Twentieth Century Fox, 2001) 265 Notes on Contributors
Anustup Basu is Associate Professor at the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic (2010). Basu’s recent work has appeared in boundary 2, Postscript, PostModern Culture, and in Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (2008). He is working on a monograph titled The Phenomenology of Information. Gautam Basu Thakur is an assistant professor of English at Boise State University. His teaching and research interests include postcolonial studies, critical theory, and British literature of the Empire. His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, New Cinemas, Slavic Review, RaVon, and in the anthologies The Literary Lacan and Bollywood and Globalization. Moinak Biswas teaches at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University and is the director of the Media Lab. He edits the Journal of the Moving Image and co-edits BioScope, South Asian Screen Studies. He writes on Indian film and culture. Among his English publications is the volume Apu and After, Revisiting Ray’s Cinema (2006). He has recently written and co-directed the award winning feature film Sthaniya Sambaad (2009). Nandana Bose is an assistant professor of Film Studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has been published in Cinema Journal, Velvet Light Trap, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, Journal of the Moving Image and Feminist Media Studies, and has coedited Using Moving Image Archives (2010) with Dr. Lee Grieveson. Her most recent publication is a chapter on post-colonial censorship in Indian cinema in Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (2012), and she is currently working on a monograph commissioned by the British Film Institute (BFI). Sumita Chakravarty teaches media and cultural studies at the New School. She is currently working on a book on media and migration. Her research areas include media and globalization, film and national identity, the his- tory and philosophy of media technologies, digital media and affect, and comparative structures of the visual. Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies at UC Santa Barbara. After publishing on elite and popular cultures of global- ization (When Borne Across (2004) and Global Icons (2011)), Ghosh is working on two monographs on speculative knowledge (The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization and The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics).
ix x Notes on Contributors
Usha Iyer is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her disserta- tion focuses on dance and female stardom in popular Hindi cinema. She has a forthcoming publication on intertextual song-and-dance sequences in recent Bollywood films in the volume Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films. Anupama Kapse is an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She is currently completing a book manuscript on melodrama and Indian silent cinema. She is also coedit- ing a collection of essays entitled Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (with Jennifer Bean and Laura Horak; forthcoming, Indiana University Press). M. Madhava Prasad is a professor at the Department of Cultural Studies in English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He is the author of Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (2001) and numerous essays in film and cultural studies. His recent and forthcoming publications include “Indian Cinema: The Age of Imitation,” “Genre Mixing as Creative Fabrication” and other essays in film and cultural history and theory. A book-length study on “Cine-Politics: The Political Significance of Cinema in South India” is under preparation. Bhaskar Sarkar is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (2009). He is also the coeditor of Documentary Testimonies (2009) and a special issue of the journal Bioscope on Indian Documentary Studies. Meheli Sen is Assistant Professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University. Sen’s work has been pub- lished in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of the Moving Image and South Asian Review, as well as in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (2010). She is currently working on a monograph on commercial Hindi cinema. Kirsten Strayer is a lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has recently published articles in several anthologies and Literature/Film Quarterly on digital television, augmented reality, and global cinema. Her edited anthology, Fragmented Bodies: Transnational Horror across Visual Media, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2013.