Book review: Elora Halim Chowdhury & Esha Niyogi De, eds, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (original) (raw)
Related papers
Communication Arts 613: MEDIATED SOUTH ASIA: FILM, MEDIA AND PUBLIC CULTURES
This course offers an introduction to South Asian film and media. Approaching “South Asia” as a postcolonial category, we will examine how the use of geopolitical labels can essentialize, but also sometimes lend cohesion to culturally, politically, and linguistically distinct entities in their own ways. Even though South Asia comprises countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, there is a predominance of the Indian sub-continent in imaginations of the history of the region. This can sometimes condition expectations of cultural uniformity across the region. Moreover, the tendency to center Bollywood as South Asian cinema points towards the hegemony of the Indian nation-state in the region. Often, this leads to the erasure of diverse experiences, cultures and dissent that marks the landscape of South Asia. In this course, we will cover both regional films produced in India (not necessarily Bollywood), as well as films from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan, among others. We will locate how ethnic conflicts, gender non-conformity, caste, settler colonialism, alternative cinematic practices and migrant films manifest themselves in South Asian cinematic and media forms. Rather than locate the films through the lens of the nation-state and the national cinema framework, this course pushes us to think about the role of media in forging cultural formations that actively contest state formations and national identities that are premised on sovereignty. The cultural artifacts that we will encounter in this course sometimes bypass formal regimes of media production and can steer our attention towards the peripheral, creative and alternative ways of making and distributing media. Thematically, the course covers varied iterations of creative expression and dissent as they cross paths with censorship, separatism, linguistic nationalism and identity politics. We will be using the lens of “public cultures” to tease out the different ways public spheres mediate, contest and complicate the representational matrices used to understand nationalism, cultural debates and gender. Exploring media content including feature and experimental films, art works, art performances, advertisements, digital content (political campaign material), short films and documentaries, this course will unpack how nationalist strains and postcolonial formations can take on new forms in resurgent populist mobilizations. In effect, we will be reading film and media content both for their status as cultural objects, as well as active agents that can capture, reflect and sometimes shape these tense relations. In that sense, this syllabus is an evolving archive of our contemporary moment in which we are faced with ethno-nationalist resurgences around the world, and will ask us to interrogate how ethnicity, identity markers and political mobilization generate an array of factors that brush against, contest and complicate heteronormative renderings of identity. In doing so, this course will offer the students an opportunity to understand global media cultures by locating the infrastructures, modes of production and historical mapping of the media produced in South Asia.
Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema
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. 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 vi 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 feudalagrarian countryside, state monopoly of macroeconomic formations, regulated
Book Review, 2022
Politically, art cinema is often seen as a failed project. For its fierce opposition to escapist entertainment, for its sophisticated formal experimentation, and for the cerebral quality of its content, art cinema has been long regarded as a domain reserved to a small elite, quixotic in its aspirations to educate the masses but inconsequential in its political outreach. Majumdar's book offers a long-overdue reevaluation of this view by undertaking a radical shift in the method of inquiry itself: instead of probing art cinema for a political agenda, Majumdar asks whether art cinema can help us redefine the very notion of what is political in the first place. Her book is the first English-language booklength study of the art film in India, but its innovation lies not just in its subject matter but most importantly in its approach. Majumdar approaches art cinema as a mode of doing history, that is of advancing historical reflection by discursive means specific to the medium of film. She demonstrates how the medium's iconographic potential of condensing multiple temporal planes within an image, its multi-sensory audiovisual address, and its capacity of capturing and preserving the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience allowed the filmmakers to document the contradictions of India's postcolonial condition-anticipating by decades the work of postcolonial historians. The book draws a distinction between statist and populist forms of democracy as they have historically informed a debate on the purpose of film in India. From its very inception, Indian art cinema was through and through democratic. But which democracy did it reflect? Standing in the tradition of the British democratic humanism of the Labor government of the 1940s, the postcolonial Indian government formed a Film Enquiry Committee, which in 1951 produced a report calling to promote "good," realist cinema as an educational project and instrument of state-building. Many cinematographers embraced this mission of the newly founded independent state committed to democracy and modernization program launched by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. But their relation to the Indian state soon became complicated. The focus of the book, 1960s art cinema, emerges at a time when the initial postcolonial consensus was already in disarray, and the "pedagogical commitment" to democracy changed for many into a project of "seeking truth." Focusing on the work of the three Indian masters Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal
Film, Media, and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia
Routledge India; 1st edition (July 29, 2021), 2021
This volume brings together new studies and interdisciplinary research on the changing mediascapes in South Asia. Focusing on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it explores the transformations in the sphere of cinema, television, performance arts, visual cultures, cyber space, and digital media, beyond the traumas of the partitions of 1947 and 1971. Through wide-ranging essays on soft power, performance, film, and television; art and visual culture; and cyber space, social media, and digital texts, the book bridges the gap in the study of the postcolonial and post-Partition developments to reimagine South Asia through a critical understanding of popular culture and media. The volume includes scholars and practitioners from the subcontinent to foster dialogue across the borders, and presents diverse and in-depth studies on film, media and representation in the region. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media and film studies, postcolonial studies, visual cultures, political studies, partition history, cultural studies, mass media, popular culture, history, sociology and South Asian studies, as well as to media practitioners, journalists, writers, and activists.
Calcutta Chronicles: Shifting Borders and the Post-Partition Film Culture
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, 2022
This paper focuses on the post-Partition film culture of Calcutta (now, Kolkata), exploring the varied associations between the political, socio- cultural and economic regimes of the city that structured the film industry’s functionality and mode of operations. The critical focus is on delineating how the film industry struggled and devised discursive strategies to exist as a viable cultural and commercial entity while the city was paralyzed by the effects of Partition. The study on Partition and Cinema has mostly emphasized the cinematic representation of the traumatic event (Sarkar 2009) or the major effects that the event had on the Bengali film industry (Gooptu 2010). This paper thinks through Bengal’s shifting border (Salazkina 2020) to render prominence to the different events, processes, practices and discourses that were triggered by the changing urban spatial registers. How do we understand the politics of film production and consumption during a period that had to negotiate with the idea of Bengal as a dynamic geospatial entity that was being remapped? How can film history be narrated when the topography of the city of Calcutta, the nodal centre of Bengali film production, underwent rapid alterations? An enquiry into the same reveals the network of linkages between the urban ecologies of labour, finance and infrastructure and the diverse discourses and networks of operation that characterized film industry of the era. This paper thus traces the effects of the discursive ripples generated by Partition on the film culture of the period by mining anecdotes (Gossman 2003) and contextualizing them with archival materials (cultural magazines, film posters and letters to the editors of major newspapers). In engaging with this period, my approach consists of writing an “entangled/ transnational history” to understand the “interaction, interdependence and complexity” between different force-fields that constituted the film culture (Hagener 2014, 4). Mapping the layers of anxieties and aspirations that the state, cultural critics and industry players navigated through, this paper interprets the discursive terrain that congealed around an industry in crisis. References: Gooptu, Sharmistha. 2010. Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation. New Delhi: Roli Books. Gossman, Lionel. 2003. "Anecdote and History." History and Theory 42: 143-168 Hagener, Malte. 2014. The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant- Garde in Europe, 1919-1945. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Salazkina, Masha. 2020. "World Cinema as Method." Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29 (2): 10-24. doi:https://doi.org/10.3138/CJFS-2020-0008\. Sarkar, Bhaskar. 2009. Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Journal of the Moving Image, 2010
This article seeks to identify coordinates for Indian cinema beyond the territorial nation, from so-called `empire films' of the 1920s and regional film circuits which went beyond the territorial nation, and also considers how the formation of nation-states constrained the terms of film culture in the subcontinet. It is pitted against nationalist assumptions and the framework of national cinema studies.
When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema
Global Media Journal
Bollywood, the most commercially successful form of Indian cinema, presents an interesting contradiction in terms. It consciously mimics some American norms but mines Indian culture for the success it enjoys among diasporic networks of South Asians. In its avowal of nationalism and cultural tradition, it presents a significant challenge to American domination of international film and culture. However, it is too simple to say that Bollywood represents an assertion of cultural independence in the face of an imperialist challenge, as Bollywood films themselves replicate patterns of cultural domination, primarily marketing Hindi-language films to an enormous community characterized by a high level of linguistic diversity. In order to move beyond the complex question of whether or not Bollywood can be seen as a symbol of resistance, this paper investigates how hybridity may explain Bollywood films' widespread and enduring popularity, allowing viewers to accommodate the reality of exposure to different cultures. India is home to a varied and thriving film industry, spread across various regions, catering to different tastes and languages. In commercial terms, however, the most successful segment of the Indian film industry is the one referred to as Bollywood. While the name itself implies a self-conscious attempt to mimic American norms, the reality of Bollywood cinema is that its continued success within India and among diasporic networks of South Asians presents a significant challenge to American domination of international film, and more broadly, international culture. Rather than representing cultural independence in the face of an imperialist challenge, however, Bollywood demonstrates that hegemony can operate at more than one level. Bollywood films not only ape selected Hollywood tendencies in terms of production, writing and marketing, they also reproduce patterns of cultural domination, primarily marketing Hindilanguage films to a diverse community whose languages include Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, among others. It becomes difficult to reconcile this image of a monolithic entertainment industry with the notion of an indigenous culture that successfully demonstrates resistance in the face of hegemonic oppression. This paper examines whether the idea of hybridity may explain the ongoing popularity of mainstream Indian cinema with people of South Asian origin, allowing them to maintain a commitment to traditional values while acknowledging the importance of an Americanized global culture in their lives. Preserving or Destroying? Approaching the Theoretical Debates on Global Culture Rather than attempting to evaluate the artistic merit of Bollywood cinema, this paper focusses on the question of cultural needs and identity politics that may be shaped by the themes apparent in mainstream Indian cinema at a time when globalization can be seen as presenting a threat to local, marginalized and diasporic cultures. In order to discuss this issue, it is useful to examine questions of cultural imperialism, hybridity, globalization and glocalization, with the word glocalization used to address the cultural debates surrounding globalization, rather than economic or political issues. One debate over Bollywood itself is whether its films have any discernible meaning or influence beyond escapism.