Hindi Cinema Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Indian Film Industry and screen narratives on religionThe Indian film industry is the biggest in the world when it comes to number of films produced every year and has for many years been the world's largest film producing country, with an output in different languages. India also figures at the top position for ticket sales as a vast and growing urban filmgoing public in India supports film culture and circulation (Wadia, 2008).This speaks about the fervor around films in this country. Film production in India began almost simultaneously with other filmmaking countries, beginning in 1896 (Mazumdar, 2007). In the years after independence, Indian Cinema circulated outside the country to audiences in Russia, The Middle East, and Latin America.Bombay cinema, popularly known as 'Bollywood' is the largest in India, followed by Tamil and Telugu cinema. Films are typically woven around love and romance, set in the backdrop of social, political, religious or economic crises. Rel...

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- Religion, Sociology, Art, Film Studies

A book that looks at the relationship between melodrama, gender, sexuality and nationalism per se, and with reference to Hindi cinema between 1970-2000.
Table of Contents:
1. Political History, Political Economy
2. Bombay Cinema and Questions of Form
3. Towards a Theory of the Sexual Economy
4. Femininity and the Regulation of Pleasure and Desire
5. The Changing Faces of Masculinity
6. Gender, Sexuality, Nation
7. Communities and Their Others
8. Wounded Identities

- by Karen Gabriel
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- Censorship, Film Studies, Heterosexuality, Sexuality
- by Kedar A Kulkarni
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- Theatre Studies, Theatre History, South Asian Studies, Modern Indian History

Manufacturing dissent in the name of history, its instrumentalisation for political purposes and bloodshed over its competing versions are the hallmarks of the Hindu Muslim schism prevalent in India. A recurring feature in Indian historiography is its rupture in the form of riots leading to human casualty. In this context, through an attempt to read the 1992 Mumbai riots as a quagmire of power politics, I would like to propose that a popular film like Mani Ratnam’s Bombay stabilises the secularist notion of unity in diversity amidst voices of dissent. The top down memory of trauma and hatred which percolates from the records of ‘official’ history is neutralised to a certain extent by the bottom up memory induced by an ‘imagined’ account which loiters in the popular psyche of generations. The film thus becomes a striking example of a neutraliser of memory. But a more nuanced reading shows how the director has skilfully projected the principle of equivalence from among the multiplicity of gazes to the axis of male gaze in order to conceal the play of ideologies.

- by Smithi Mohan
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- Cultural History, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Film Theory

The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine 'attraction' in the popular cinema of the Indian subcontinent, has been extensively and rigorously theorised in the scholarship on this cinema. The preponderance of song-and-dance sequences across the many film cultures of South Asia has been deeply generative in challenging theories of narrative construction and cohesion, and resultant ideological analyses; postulations about cinematic genre and authorship; canons of realist and experimental cinema; and indeed any attempt to propose a singular ontology of film.

- by Usha Iyer
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- Choreography, Hindi Cinema, Bollywood (Anthropology), Film music and film music theory

¿Qué es un film? Sino un documento animado… un guion, un formato de una obra o una película; una forma escrita que luego ejecuta una acción en el presente, para perpetuar imagines en el futuro digitalizado o simplemente el pasado repetido en el futuro cuantas veces queramos. O no somos capaces los profesores y/o maestros de la historiografía o historia descifrar este acertijo antropológico; sin entrar en restricciones y reglas anal-retentivas de lo que debe ser una reseña historiográfica, perdiendo por completo de perspectiva la utilidad educativa de un documental o film que no necesita complementación bibliográfica. Es esta mecanización de la historia la que queremos ofrecer a nuestros estudiantes o alumnos. Que formas recalcitrantes y de educación bancaria promovemos como educadores al reseñar o criticar documentales o películas con formatos pre hechos y/o predeterminados.

- by Ricardo J Blanco, Ph D
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- European Cinema, Literature and cinema, Historiography, Digital Cinema

This paper is invested in exploring the sensory affect that is created through censorship. It is invested in unravelling the complex interaction between the films of Anurag Kashyap and the institution of censorship, the sensibilities of which are capitalized and appropriated into the aesthetic effect of the film. It also looks at how such a deployment constructs the cult of a transgressive auteur. I argue that the deafening ‘beep’ that screams of the otherwise silencing practices of censorship is what guides the way to unraveling the subversion of censorship in the filmic text. Taking cue from Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) which looks at cinema as the ultimate pervert art, telling us how to desire, this paper asserts that censorship doesn’t erase the profane, instead it points to its very utterance. I argue how Kashyap’s films’ profilmic text becomes the site of censorship standing out as material evidence to its very censoring. The ‘beeped’ or censored word becomes a provocation focusing attention onto itself by mobilizing its unspeakability through marketing the product as “controversial”. I posit that Anurag Kashyap capitalizes on this recognition. I look at the force of publicity that is created by censorship in Kashyap’s public discourse on censorship, in his negotiations with the CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification) from before the planned commercial release of his first directorial venture Paanch to his ongoing battle with the CBFC over refusing to use the court mandated no smoking warning in ‘Ugly’ (2014).

- by Ishani Dey
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- Subversion, Film Censorship, Hindi Cinema, Bollywood (Anthropology)
- by Terrance H. McDonald
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- Film Genre, Hindi Cinema, Indian Cinema, Bollywood cinema

God make him rich so he can go to India. Mallam Sidi, husband of Hotiho. Sidi's ambition is for God to make him rich so he can go to India. 'Mallam Sidi is the husband of Hotiho' The sight of a 15 ft image of Sridevi, dancing erotically on the screens of the open-air cinemas of northern Nigeria, or the tall, angular figure of Amitabh Bachchan radiating charisma through the snowy, crackly reception of domestic television have become powerful, resonant images in Hausa popular culture. To this day, stickers of Indian films and stars decorate the taxis and buses of the north, posters of Indian films adorn the walls of tailors' shops and mechanics' garages, and love songs from Indian film songs are borrowed by religious singers who change the words to sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed. For over thirty years Indian films, their stars and fashions, music and stories have been a dominant part of everyday popular culture in northern Nigeria. If, as Bakhtin (1981) writes, communication is fundamental to human life, that self and society emerge in dialogue with others surrounding them, then Indian films have entered into the dialogic construction of Hausa popular culture by offering Hausa men and women an alternative world, similar to their own, from which they may imagine other forms of fashion, beauty, love and romance, coloniality and post-coloniality. Before I began my research I read all I could find by Nigerian and Western scholars on media and film in Nigeria. For the most part, this scholarship dealt with the complex and continuing problem of cultural imperialism-the dominance of Western media and most especially Hollywood films. When I first visited Kano, the major city in northern Nigeria, it came as a surprise, then, that Indian films are shown five nights a week at the cinemas (compared with one night for Hollywood films and one night for Chinese films); that the most popular programme on television was the Sunday morning Indian film on City Television Kano (CTV); and that most video shops reserved the bulk of their space for Indian films (followed by Western and Chinese films, Nigerian dramas and religious videos). The question of why Indian films are so popular among Hausa viewers has occupied much of my research since that time.2 What pleasures do Hausa viewers take from films portraying a culture and religion that seem so dissimilar and are watched usually in a language they cannot understand?

- by Brian Larkin
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- Nigerian Literature, African Studies, Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
- by Dr. Harisur Rahman
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- Media Studies, Terrorism, Nationalism, Urban Studies

A study of banning of some Indian films between 2006 and 2010

- by Vishal Langthasa
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- Censorship, Popular Culture, Film Censorship, Hindi Cinema

A discourse in Bombay cinema, that veers from the dominant reflection of Hindutva views in which Muslims are constructed as alien and dangerous Others, depicts a pluralist Indian society characterized by intersectionality between religions. Such portrayals resonate in particular ways with South Asian groups, like the Satpanth tradition of Khoja Ismailis, which have historically emerged from Vedic-Islamic interaction and occupy a liminal in-between space. Those Khojas who have migrated to East Africa and Canada over several generations have lost touch with elements of their South Asian cultural heritage due to pressures of cultural westernization and religious Arabization / Persianization. However, they have maintained their centuries-old ginan literature that articulates Shia concepts in Indic languages, culture and symbolism. They find an intertextuality between these hymns and Hindi film’s themes and music that draw from tropes of Indic scripture. Compared to the kinds of identifications favoured by Islamist and Hindutva forces, the religiously hybrid characteristics of the Khoja Ismaili community coincide with a more pluralist and less essentialist set of portrayals in Hindi cinema. They have responded well to the ways in which their co-religionists in Bollywood have creatively used Indic and Islamic religio-cultural resources in the face of religious nationalism. The examination of this group’s engagement with Bollywood affords insight into one of the several countervailing discourses that continue to flourish in complex national and global settings despite the heavy constraints imposed by nationalist power politics.

- by Karim H Karim
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- Hinduism, East Africa, Islam, Hindi Cinema

This paper explores the intersection of cinema and architecture to analyse the Filmic House in Hindi film Piya Ka Ghar (Dir. Basu Chatterjee, 1972). It deploys Environment-Behaviour Studies for film interpretation to make readings about the unique habitability and domesticity of chawls, a residential typology evolved in Bombay for communal living in a dense urban situation. The central premise of the film is constructed around the spatial anxieties faced by a young bride having grown up in a spacious village house when she arrives at her new marital home, a single room chawl tenement that is home to five other people besides her husband, and is always overrun by chawl friends. This marital house (or 'The Home of the Beloved', of the title) and its extreme utilisation of space is the source of her anxieties and impacts her behaviour. The lived space rendered in the film and its architectural mise-en-scene is found to communicate about the strategies of adaptation and possible reconciliation to a life in chawl. It also communicates nuanced meanings about the generally understood notions of domesticity such as home as a private and inner domain vis-à-vis the world outside by showing their fluidity in the context of chawl living.

- by Smita Dalvi
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- Hindi Cinema, Environmental Behaviour Studies

Through reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), I will delineate Ray's formal and enunciatory cinematic usages and their applications in Sadgati, along with the critique of Premchand's progressive realism and aesthetics. I address the aporia of the aesthetic to caste issues by exploring and reconfiguring caste in terms of the delineation of Dalit life-worlds in Ray's and Premchand's narratives through modalities of the aesthetic-ethical framework.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2015.11933011

- by Nishat Haider
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- Literature and cinema, Giorgio Agamben, Hindi Cinema, Dalit studies

With a primarily South Asian population, including both middle-class fami- lies and ‘bachelors’, the Gulf states unsettle assumptions about the Middle East and South Asia developed from western area studies. This article examines three documentaries – From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Champ of the Camp and Sounds of the Sea – that layer visual images of the Gulf with songs from India and Zanzibar. They document the inequities and the ways in which vulnerable popula- tions navigate them to find dignity in a world that often dismisses them as victims (e.g., exploited migrants, oppressed women) or uses them to legitimize segregation in allegedly overcrowded cities. They reconfigure documentary practice to allow subjects to speak indirectly, protecting them from possible retaliation or stigma. By document- ing through nonwestern popular songs, these films contribute to a recovery of connec- tions between South Asia, the Gulf and East Africa that were interrupted by British colonialism and US imperialism.

- by Inderpreet Kaur
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- Film Studies, Literature and cinema, Indian studies, Gender and Sexuality

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers forged a career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry, creating a niche market for their cheaply produced horror films. Despite drawing committed audiences in B-and C-centers, these films were dismissed by the urban English press as clumsy counterfeit versions of American and British products, and by the late 1990s a new school of practitioners led by Ram Gopal Varma had begun producing slick and songless horror films that could translate internationally.

- by Kartik Nair
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- Horror Film, Product Design, Hindi Cinema, Cinema

The main objective of the paper is not only to contribute the homage to Hrishikesh Mukherjee, but also it will suppose to critically depict some kind of objective readings of his films, rather than to contain tales of experiences and blood and flesh relations with Hrishikesh Mukherjee, where the image of the artist gets to relive with a renewal of love and affection within the minds of his connoisseurs. The objectivity may demand certain kind of analysis, formulation, diachronic readings which at times may look little remote from the directness of the pleasure of viewing and appreciating his films up front.

- by Deb Kamal Ganguly
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- Film History, Hindi Cinema, Indian Cinema, Cinema Studies

The study of violence in media is not new. A number of theories have been formulated to discuss the violence in media content. Interestingly, most of these theories appear to be quite apprehensive about the effects of media violence. However, very little is discussed about the actual violence. Questions concerning its norms and representation are seldom addressed. Also, irrespective of its effects, the popularity of media violence simply cannot be ignored thus making for an interesting study. The research aims to study the process of aestheticization of violence in Hindi Cinema; and also to identify the tools used for the same and their respective roles. Data collection was done through unstructured interviews and qualitative content analysis of Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. Ten male and ten female respondents were chosen using purposive sampling technique for the unstructured interviews. The study highlights that film-makers aestheticize violence in the cinema using tools like narrative, unreal nature of the narrative, representation of weapons, language, and humour as a camouflage; also, that these tools of aestheticization of violence aid the process of characterization.

- by Prateek Singh
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- Aesthetics, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies

BOOK: Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2018. The monsoon is the season of pouring rain and intense emotions: love and longing, hope and fear, pleasure and pain, devotion and joyous excess. Through a series of evocative essays exploring rain-drenched worlds of poetry, songs, paintings, architecture, films, gardens, festivals, music, and medicine, this lavishly illustrated collection examines the history of monsoon feelings in South Asia from the twelfth century to the present. Each essay is written by a specialist in the field of South Asian arts and culture, and investigates emotions as reflections and agents of social, cultural, and political change across borders of language and religion and between different arts and cultural practices. The history of emotions in the rain is as rich, surprising, beautiful, and devastating as the thundering monsoon clouds, and will delight general and scholarly audiences alike.

- by Katherine Butler Schofield
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- Hindi Literature, Art History, Persian Literature, Indian Music

Delhi, Oxford University Press 1998, 258 pp + ix.

- by Ravi Vasudevan
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- Film Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Film Analysis, South Asian Studies
- by Emma Gobbato
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- Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Silent Film, Feminism
- by Aishwarya Javalgekar
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- Gender Studies, Media Studies, Film Studies, Indian studies

साल 1947 में जब भारत आजाद हुआ तो हमारे समक्ष भाषा को लेकर सबसे बड़ा सवाल था, क्योंकि भारत में सैकड़ों भाषाएं और बोलियां बोली जाती है। हालाँकि, संविधान सभा ने अपना "26 नवंबर 1949" को संविधान के अंतिम प्रारूप को मंजूरी दे दी। और 14 सितंबर... more

- by Trilok Singh
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- Hindi Literature, Literature, Hindi Cinema, Hindi

During his decade-long (1952–62) tenure as minister of Information and Broadcasting, B. V. Keskar spearheaded ambitious reforms to the national radio network, All India Radio. Keskar filled broadcasting hours with classical music programming, inviting musicians trained at renowned academies to perform and record. This essay argues that in the wake of independence, Keskar and his supporters sought to orchestrate a soundscape for the Indian nation through the medium of radio. In their attempts to train the ears of radio audiences and forge citizen-listeners, they also refined the meaning of citizenship in auditory terms. Administrators and broadcasters at AIR, however, assumed that citizen-listeners would be docile. Radio listeners proved the opposite. They protested against AIR’s music broadcasts by writing to magazine and newspaper editorials and by tuning their dials to foreign radio stations, whose broadcasts better suited their musical tastes.

- by Isabel Huacuja Alonso
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- Radio, Hindi/Urdu, Hindi Cinema, Hindustani classical music
- by Sai Diwan
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- Gender Studies, Hindi Cinema, Kali, Hindu Goddesses in the West, Cinema
- by Abhishek Avtans
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- Religion, Hindi Literature, South Asia, Linguistics

Sections of chapters 3 and 5 were published as "Testimonies of Loss and Memory:

- by Priya Kumar
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- Partition literature, Jacques Derrida, Hindi Cinema, Indian Muslims
- by Soumya Suvra Das
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- Hindi Cinema, Bollywood
- by Vamsee Juluri
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Hindi Cinema, Film and Media Studies, India

This thesis looks at contemporary Hindi-language documentary film in South Asia and its relationship to marginalized populations. In South Asia, three of the most visible marginalized groups are Dalits, women, and the homeless and impoverished, and many contemporary South Asian documentaries deal with subjects in these categories. Documentary film, especially ethnographic and advocacy film, has a long history of representing groups which are less visible in mainstream media. This thesis analyzes the conflicting perspectives of the filmmaker, audience, and subject, and determines the voices that are represented in the final products. Are the marginalized subjects of Hindi-language documentaries truly heard through this medium? Does documentary film achieve some form of justice and representation for the unheard? How is this reconciled with the voice and perspective of the filmmaker?

While the monstrous feminine of Hollywood is available transhistorically over much of cinema across the world, the female monster of Hindi horror cinema remains ignored and merits serious academic exploration. Much of the widely accepted modern art-horror theory as applied to the horror genre is predicated upon Julia Kristeva’s notion of the
‘abject’ and the Freudian notion of the ‘return of the repressed’. While Creed (1993, 2002) exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the ‘Monstrous “Other” Feminine’ narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual
desire and gaze as the abject ‘other’. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. Exorcism becomes the means
not only of expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining the female body for unrestrained desire and look.

Violence and atrocities against people from lower castes have brought the discourse of subalterns to the forefront. Cinema is one of the mass media through which the issues of social justice have been projected. The portrayal of subaltern voices in Hindi cinema has been a topic of study. The popular cinema is seen by many as a way of entertainment which provides relief to the people from the harsh realities of life. Even if such an issue is taken up it is over- simplified to avoid the problems in the discourse. The portrayal of Dalits in cinema goes back to as early as 1934 with the release of Chandidas. Afterwards, films like Dharmatma (1935) and Achhut Kannya (1936) brought the issues of caste to the forefront. In the post independence era films like Sujata, Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Damul, Bawandar, Sadgati, Bandit Queen, Lagaan, Aarakshan, Court, Shudra: The Rising, Chauranga, ManjhiThe Mountain Man, etc have discussed the issues of caste, and the oppression based on it. In our society women are discriminated not only on the basis of their gender but also on the basis of their caste and class. The discrimination and prejudices become harsh if a woman comes from lower caste. The scriptures denied education even to upper caste women. The position of Dalit women was worse. In the nineteenth century, the social reformers like Jyoti Rao Phule opened the first ever school for Dalit girls’ education in 1848 inviting the ire of Brahmins, and along with his wife Shavitri Bai Phule who taught in that school, he had to face expulsion from his home by his father. It culminated in Dr. Ambedkar taking up the cause of women for which he introduced the Hindu Code Bill in parliament which the Hindu orthodoxy prevented from being passed and he resigned from the cabinet in protest. He took up women’s cause in this bill, giving them the right to property and other matrimonial rights, including the right to divorce. The bill was later passed in bits and pieces. Dalit women face
triple suffering, first as Dalits, second as women, and third as class. They face violence, rape, discrimination, denial of education, etc. They are forced to do manual scavenging and become migrant labourers. Some of the films addressed these issues but the focus on their plight as a whole is missing. These films grapple with the problem as the solution to the problem is hard to achieve. The endings of these films are either idealistic or left open ended. Whereas others have simply failed to show the gravity of the issues related to Dalits. This paper tries to analyse the portrayal of Dalit women and the issues related to them in Hindi
cinema.

- by Ms Mamta
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Hindi Cinema

The film industry in Kerala (popularly known as ‘Mollywood’ in the mediasphere) is an
obvious example of the changing face of the regional film industries in India in
accordance with the varying socio-cultural values and demands of the audience. These
films claim a multifaceted ‘newness’ in their narration, ranging from the themes
explored to their techniques of production and narration. This article seeks to analyze
whether this ‘newness’ is contemplated in the conceptualization of female characters
within films. We conclude that although women are conceptualized as part of a
globalized culture in which ‘she’ has an identity, they are nevertheless subject to the
familiar gender hierarchy and marginalized identity.

- by Dr. Sony Jalarajan Raj
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- Malayalam, Hindi Cinema, Indian Cinema, Malayalam Literature
- by Gaurav Sharma
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- Film Studies, Theater and film, Hindi Cinema, Bollywood (Anthropology)

This exploratory study uses theme based group discussion, brain storming and focus group techniques on 27non-disabled multi-lingual college students to evoke their reminiscences on depiction of disability in Indian cinema. The corpus of audio/video recordings were subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis by three independent mutually blinded observers for latency, duration or time lag of respondent recall, dominant content or themes, attitudinal valence, perceived cliché and stereotypes about disability in cinema. Response analysis of attributed features for the film characters with disability was undertaken on major themes. The typical 'pitysympathy' dimension of viewing the 'hero' as protagonist afflicted with mental illness is the most remembered depiction by female respondents. The most frequently evoked images, themes, language and terminology continue to reflect dismal, negative, struggling, anguished or aggrieved stereotype of contemporary cinema representation on persons with disabilities. These findings on commercial Indian movies are discussed with implications and justification for greater in-depth systematic research in this area.

- by Srinivasan Venkatesan and +2
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- Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology, Media Studies