The Melodramatic Public
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The Melodramatic Public The Melodramatic Public Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema RAVI VASUDEVAN THE MELODRAMATIC PUBLIC Copyright © Ravi Vasudevan, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-24764-2 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by Permanent Black, Ranikhet, India. First published in the United States in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-59042-1 ISBN 978-0-230-11812-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-11812-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vasudevan, Ravi. The melodramatic public : film form and spectatorship in Indian cinema / Ravi Vasudevan. p. cm. 1. Motion pictures—India. 2. Melodrama in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures—Social aspects—India. I. Title. PN1993.5.I4V375 2011 791.430954—dc22 2010039768 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075. First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN edition: March 2011 for Amma and in memory of Achan Contents Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 1 Indian Cinema Today. 1 . and Yesterday 4 2 The Thematics of Melodrama 8 3 The Shifting Agenda of Film Studies in India 10 1 The Melodramatic Public 16 II: DEBATES IN MELODRAMA STUDIES 17 1 The Archaeology of Melodrama in Euro-American Theatre and Cinema 17 2 Melodrama as Generalized Mode of Cinematic Narration 20 3 Melodrama vs Classical Narrative Cinema 26 4 The Post-Colonial Question: Melodrama vs Realism 28 5 Deconstructing the Universal and the National 31 II: THINKING ABOUT MELODRAMA IN INDIAN CINEMA 34 6 Pre-Cinema Histories 34 7 Film Form: The Heterogeneous Popular Format 38 8 Melodramatic Interventions 42 9 ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ Articulations 46 10 Revisiting Melodrama in Hollywood 56 PART I MELODRAMATIC AND OTHER PUBLICS 65 Introduction 67 Narrative Forms and Modes of Address in Indian Cinema 67 viii Contents 2 Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: Realist Art Cinema Criticism and Popular Film Form 74 1 Critical Discourses in the 1950s 75 2 Popular Narrative Form 81 · Visual Figures 82 · Appropriations and Transformations of · ‘Modern’ Codes 86 · The Street and the Dissolution of Social · Identity 88 · Iconic Transactions 89 3 Redefining the Popular: Melodrama and Realism 94 4 The Popular Cultural Politics of the Social Film 95 3 The Cultural Politics of Address in a ‘Transitional’ Cinema 98 1 Indian Popular Cinema Genres and Discourses of Transformation 102 2 Dominant Currents in Contemporary Criticism 105 3 The Politics of Indian Melodrama 108 4 Iconicity, Frontality, and the Tableau Frame 110 · The Reconstruction of the Icon 112 · Darshan 114 · Tableau, Time, and Subjectivity 118 5 The Political Terms of Spectatorial Subjectivity 125 4 Neither State Nor Faith: Mediating Sectarian Conflict in Popular Cinema 130 1 Community Typology and Public Form in Popular Cinema 131 2 Phalke and the Typological Discourse of Early Cinema 137 3 The Social Film: Community Typage/Modernity/ Psychology 141 4 The Historical Film: Differentiating Historical and Contemporary Publics 145 5 The Transcendental Location of Stellar Bodies 150 · Raj Kapoor 151 · Nana Patekar 157 Contents ix 5 A Modernist Public: The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Satyajit Ray 163 1 Ray’s Films: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and a History of the Present 166 · The Modernism of the Trilogy 168 2 The Unfinished Agenda of History 181 · Charulata (1964) 183 3 The Contemporary 191 · Aranyer Din Ratri (1969) 192 · Jana Aranya (1975) 192 PART II CINEMA AND TERRITORIAL IMAGINATION IN THE SUBCONTINENT: TAMILNADU AND INDIA 199 Introduction 201 1 The Formation of a Pan-Indian Market: Inter-Regional Translatability in the Cinema of Social Reform 202 2 Differentiated Territories of a Subcontinental Cinema Before and After Nation-State Formation 205 6 Voice, Space, Form: The Symbolic and Territorial Itinerary of Mani Rathnam’s Roja (1992) 213 1 Kashmir and Tamilnadu 213 2 The Politics of Identity 219 3 Tamilness as Intractable Edifice 221 4 The Connotations of Place 223 5 The Recalibration of Popular Form 224 7 Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995) and Its Publics 229 1 Plot Synopsis 229 2 Towards a Modern Identity: The Basic Narrative Structure 231 3 The Representation of Inter-Community Differences 233 x Contents 4 Journalistic Effects and Truth Claims: The Pattern of Public Events 234 5 The Navigation of Sectarian Difference: Community and Sexuality 245 6 Self-Alienation in the Constitution of Decommunalized Space 251 7 Melodramatic Identification: The Claims of Self-Sacrifice 253 8 Another History Rises to the Surface: Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation: Hey Ram! (Kamalahasan, 1999) 259 1 Plot Synopsis 259 2 A New History? 262 3 Publicizing an Unofficial History 266 4 Narrative Form: Dropping the Quotation Marks 268 5 Reading Hindutva Masculinity 269 6 ‘Lifting the Mogul Pardha’ 271 7 Melodrama: Performativity and Expressivity 272 8 Melodrama in the Age of Digital Simulation 277 PART III MELODRAMA MUTATED AND DIFFERENTIATED: NARRATIVE FORM, URBAN VISTAS, AND NEW PUBLICS IN A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT 291 Introduction 293 1 The Urban Imagination 293 2 Differentiated Film Publics 296 3 Discourses and Practices of the Cinematic Public: Bollywood, Globalization, and Genre Diversification 299 9 Selves Made Strange: Violent and Performative Bodies in the Cities of Indian Cinema 1974–2003 303 1 In Retrospect: The Breaching of Vistas 306 Zanjeer, Deewar, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Kabhi Kabhie; Tarang, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Alberto Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai Contents xi 2 Our Violent Times: the Morphology of Bodies in Space 312 Ankur, Tezaab, Parinda, Nayakan 3 Diagnosing the Sources of Violence 318 Naseem, Zakhm, Maachis, Baazigar, Darr; Bombay Hamara Shehar, Ram Ke Naam, War and Peace, I Live in Behrampada 4 Intimations of Dispersal: The Poetry and Anxiety of a Decentred World 322 Dahan, Egyarah Mile, A Season Outside, When Four Friends Meet, Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories 5 Social Transvestism and the Open-Ended Seductions of Performance: The Work of Aamir Khan 325 6 Satya: The Politics of Cinematic and Cinephiliac Performativity 329 10 The Contemporary Film Industry—I: The Meanings of ‘Bollywood’ 334 1 Bollywood, Mark 1: The Transformation of the Bombay Film Economy 339 2 Bollywood, Mark 2: Multi-Sited Histories of Indian Cinema 346 11 The Contemporary Film Industry—II: Textual Form, Genre Diversity, and Industrial Strategies 362 1 Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch—I: Father India and the Emergence of the Global Nation 362 · Mothers, Communities, Nations 363 · Fathers, Social Order, State Form 366 · The Symbolic Functions of the Father: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) 367 · The Multicultural Father Deceased and Reincarnated: Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani, 2004) 375 xii Contents 2 Narrative Form in the Contemporary Epoch—II: The Emergence of Genre Cinema 383 · Rangeela (Ram Gopal Varma, 1995) 384 · Bhoot (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) 387 · Ek Hasina Thi (Sriram Raghavan, 2003) 389 · Beyond or Within Bollywood? 392 Conclusion and Afterword 398 1 The Cinematic Public—I: Melodrama 398 2 The Cinematic Public—II: Cinema and Film After the Proliferation of Copy Culture 406 Bibliography 415 Index 437 Acknowledgements his book has been long in the making, and has accumulated a very long list of debts. At the outset, I need to specially ack- T nowledge certain key institutions and people. In the 1970s Celluloid—Delhi University’s film society—gave me a home and an intellectual world not readily available in college. Jawaharlal Nehru University and its Centre for Historical Studies gave me some excel- lent teachers, fellow students, and an extraordinary sense of social con- nection. Thomas Elsaesser has been a wonderful inspiration, a great teacher, supportive supervisor, and a continuing influence through his writings and discipline-shifting initiatives. A number of universities, trusts, and academic institutions have supported my work over the years: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the University of East Anglia funded my PhD; the British Council and the Charles Wallace Trust awarded travel grants to the UK so I could use the British Film Institute and the Cambridge South Asia archives. I thank the Leverhulme Trust for a fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies; and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton for a fellowship which enlivened the final phase of writing. Rachel Dwyer at SOAS and Gyan Prakash at Princeton have been of great support. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, granted me a sabbatical in 2005–6, without which this book would not have been written. I would also like to remember the late Ravinder Kumar who had the institutional imagination to open the doors of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to new types of research. I thank the following libraries, archives, and institutions, and the people who run them: in Pune, the National Film Archives of India, K. Sasidharan, then director, and Mrs Joshi, its most helpful librar- ian; the Film and Television Institute of India, Tripurari Sharan, then Director, and Professor Suresh Chabria. Sujit Deb ‘Dada’ and Avinash Kumar have admirably extended the library resources of the CSDS, xiv Acknowledgements and Moslem Quraishy and Chandan those of Sarai-CSDS. CSDS staff, especially Jayasree Jayanthan, Himanshu Bhattacharya, Ghan- shyam Dutt Gautam, Kunwar Singh Butola, Ramesh Singh Rawat and many others have always been of great help.