Contested Spaces: Performances of Marginality in Bollywood Cinema
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Contested Spaces: Performances of Marginality in Bollywood Cinema By Lauren Bettridge B.A. (Journalism), Curtin University, 2008 B.A. (Hons), The University of Western Australia, 2009 This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities (Discipline of English and Cultural Studies) Supervised by Dr Shalmalee Palekar 2016 ABSTRACT As the most dominant cultural industry in India and with an increasing audience worldwide, Bollywood is becoming a louder participant in global popular culture. Challenging Eurocentric perceptions of inadequacy, this study seeks out performances of marginality that destabilise, disturb and dislocate the apparent hegemonic modality of modern Bollywood. In considering the representation of the other in popular Bollywood, I uncover marginal genres, themes, locations and gender representations. Contested Spaces: Performances of Marginality in Bollywood Cinema traverses the complex relationship between a nation and its cinema, and contributes and connects to a rapidly growing conversation with Bollywood and its others. This thesis attends to performances of marginality and otherness in popular Bollywood cinema by critically examining the production of contested spaces. In finding spaces where marginalised identities jostle for recognition, I assess the degree to which Bollywood cinema represents the Other. Driven by the urge to uncover alternative performances, I resist Bollywood scholarship that contends Bollywood cinema merely performs a conservative version of national ideology and western scholarship that subordinates Bollywood to Hollywood. I locate this thesis within a setting that contests the idea that globalisation has destroyed the nation, by demonstrating that there are radical and resistant ruptures forming at the margin. My aims in this thesis are twofold: one, to challenge the myth that Bollywood performs a homogenised rendition of the Nation, and two, to illuminate Bolloods ieasigl ilusie epeiets ith the Othe. I closely reading twelve popular films I rewrite, or rather restage the performance of national identity through Bollywood, by finding that even within the most mainstream films there are moments of marginality that contest rigid academic notions of Bollywood and nationalism. This thesis advocates for a thoroughly Indiacentric analysis and in seeking occurrences of otherness, travels to new and contested spaces. ii Cadidates Declaratio: This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication. iii iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr Shalmalee Palekar, for her time and commitment. Without her I would not have undertaken this study. I thank all of my friends, especially Annie, Chris and Rukmini, for their friendship, care and restorative dinners out. I am thankful to the city of Bombay and I thank everyone there for the love and madness. I thank my family for their support. This thesis is for the women who keep me strong: To my mother Sonya, a pillar of strength and encouragement, I am thankful, and for her unwavering belief in me, I am endlessly indebted. This PhD is as much hers as it is mine. To Dallas, whose baking has often seen me through a difficult chapter, and whose own strength and grace has inspired me to strive for the same, I am grateful. Finally to Renuka, whose equal passion for Bollywood and for life has inspired me. Much more than a Hema Malini or a Sharmila Tagore, she is a heroine in the truest sense of the word. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………Page 1 Chapter One – The Tragic Tawaif: Fractured Indo-Muslim Identity i the Musli “oial………………………………………………………………………….….…Page 25 Chapter Two – Anger and the Antihero: Masculinity-in-Crisis in Deewar and Devdas………………………………………………………………………..….Page 53 Chapter Three – Subversive Sisterhoods? Performing Bollywood Feminism after the 1990s……………………………………………………………………….Page 92 Chapter Four – Queering Bollywood: Putting Female Same-Sex Desire in the Frame………………………………………………………………….……………Page 128 Chapter Five – The New Bollywood………………………………………………….…..Page 165 Conclusion: Reflecting Bollywood………………………………………………………….Page 201 Glossary………………………………………………………………………………………………..Page 209 Filmography………………………………………………………………………………………….Page 212 Woks Cited………………………………………………………………………………………....Page 216 vi INTRODUCTION The Contested City: Mumbai/Bombay Bombay was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across as the black water to flow into our veins. Everything North of Bombay was North India, eethig “outh of it as the “outh. To the East la Idias East, ad to the West, the olds West. Boa as etal; all ies floed ito its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once – Salman Rushdie, The Moos Last “igh (350). In beginning its story in the old city of Bombay and ending in the new city of Mumbai, this thesis stands on contested ground. It is therefore, important at the outset, to contetxualise the location that is home to both the Bollywood film industry and this study. As the term(s) Bollywood and Bombay Cinema suggest, the city is as integral to cinema as cinema is to the city. While India is a country composed of varying ethnic, linguistic and religious traditions, Bombay has always been Idias ost diese it (Jacobson). With a long and fabled history of migration, the city is home to religious minority groups such as the Parsi, Jewish, Catholic and Muslim communities. Drawing from that same well of sentimentality that Rushdie does, poet Jeet Thayil laments the loss of the Bombay of old, saying in an interview, Bombay and Mumbai are two very different cities, which will never meet (qtd in Oikonomakou). Thomas Blom Hansen echoes these sentiments in Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Post-Colonial Bombay, suggesting, ost people i the it…ill agee that Mumbai is not Bombay (4). As a result of the loss of old Bombay, it is often remembered in popular culture and in personal memory as an almost-mythical, secular, inclusive and harmonious utopia. But Bombay is, if anything, is a city of contradictions; one that opened her arms to the floods of economic migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa and other countries across India that spilled onto her shores desperate to succeed; and also one where the devastating riots of Deee ad Jaua shatteed the its mythical cosmopolitanism (Hansen 4). Soon after the riots city underwent major 1 traumatic spatial and social alterations that culminated in one final, swift change. In November of 1995, Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai. The State Government, headed by regional party Shiv Sena and the Hindu nationalist Bharaitya Janata Party, declared it was doing away with the residual colonial lega of Boa aig the renewed city after the Hindu Goddess MumbaDevi, the patron of the agri (salt collectors) and koli (fisher-folk), the original inhabitants of the seven islands that once constituted Bombay. Aiming to undo the perversion (Hansen 1) of the naming act committed by the Portuguese ad Bitish, the “hi “eas push to eae the it as seeigl straightforward – naturalising the anglicised word Bombay by converting it into the indigenous Marathi language as Mumbai. But the name-change had political and social ramifications far beyond the semantic. By tying its new name to the pre-Colonial past, the aims of the political act were admirable, but in practice they culturally fragmented the city, shattering the teeming hinterland of the city with its layered communities (xxiv) that Homi Bhabha so fondly remembers. In an article in the Express Tribune, writer Vivek H. Dehejia recalls the city that was: That lost Bombay, a romantic city of the imagination that struggles to articulate its dying existence in the quotidian commerce of Mumbai, was always premised on the coexistence of its many founding communities, ethnicities and faiths. In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes: Bombay is a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land; I, who had been away so long that I almost qualified for the title, was gripped by the conviction that I, too, had a city and a history to reclaim (10). The Bombay that sits upon land reclaimed from the sea forms the contested location that this thesis is so devoted to. As a city, Bombay is imperative to Bollywood on and off the screen. My use of the old name (which many people still choose to do) is partly to evoke the open-mindedness the city once stood for (however mythic such an imagining may be), but given that half the films 2 studied here hail from a time when the city was in fact Bombay, for ease of reading I continue to refer to the city as Bombay, even when referring to films and events after 1995. Hansen gestures to the hybridity of the city, writing on (parts of) the its opposition to the official name-change: In this name, it was argued, was contained a unique experience of colonial and postcolonial modernity--dynamic, intensely commercial, heterogeneous, chaotic, and yet spontaneously tolerant and open- minded. This was the Bombay of ethnic and religious mixing, of opportunities, of rags-to-riches success stories, of class solidarity, of artistic modernism and hybridized energies that so many writers have celebrated in novels and poetry. Obviously there were many different ideas of Bombay (4). In the end, there are competing stories of the city, and the terms Bombay, Mumbai and Bollywood are perhaps as conflicted as the city they hail from. As Rosie Thomas contends, referring to the use of the words Mumbai and Bollywood,both terms are today crucially marked by who speaks them and from where (4). In this sense, Bombay and Mumbai mean different things to different people; and like all great stories, the version depends on who is telling the tale.