Akshaya Kumar

Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural economy of north-Indian small-town nostalgia in the Indian multiplex

This paper looks at the journey of new small-town films and analyses the cultural economy of this small-town nostalgia. Looking at the reconfiguration of Indian cities as a key phase, the paper attempts to argue that small-town nostalgia is produced by these reconfigurations as the small-town seeps into the big cities and produces its cinematic variant from within the urban imaginary. The paper conceptualises the small-town as a space marked by performative excess and state of exception in the realm of law and order. It is produced as an imaginary ‘other’ of the big city, a counter-utopia which threatens even as it entertains the residual cultural-self trapped in the confident but ill-conceived Indian urbanism. The multiplex, as a prominent socio-economic site of exhibition, now hosts this new small-town simulacra that disengages itself gradually from its referent and gets a life of its own. This paper, therefore, situates small-town nostalgia within the multiplex-mall probing the boundary conditions of this new genre now working in solidarity with various vernacular cinemas in its site-specific idioms, yet thriving in a space beyond. Thus, the paper raises arguments about a new cinema culture that has at its heart, complex migration patterns across India, a performative belonging, and a cinema culture of mourning.

Bhojpuri Cinema and the “Rearguard”: Gendered Leisure, Gendered Promises

Film exhibition, for the most part, has been the most powerful segment of the film economy. Yet, most of the film history traces cinema at the production end. Bhojpuri cinema, however, burst into visibility via a specific moment within the history of film exhibition in India. Films have been made in Bhojpuri language—widely considered to be a mere “dialect” of Hindi—since 1963, but the third phase starting in 2004 furthered the “music mania” that began with the “cassette culture” in the late 1980s. The dramatic growth of the film industry, the emergence of its own star system, and widespread popularity among the working class migrants who work across the country as construction laborers, porters, rickshaw-wallahs, and taxi drivers consolidated the territory of Bhojpuri cinema. The availability of the single-screen exhibition spaces soon after the arrival of the multiplexes, multiplied by the struggling contemporary Hindi film economy, rendered it economically viable. An analysis of Bhojpuri cinema, therefore, makes imperative upon us to shift our focus towards the exhibition end. This discussion, in doing so, situates Bhojpuri cinema in relation to the legacy of many “fringe” genres that thrived within rundown theatres. What brought the two together, however, is not only the site of the decrepit theatre, but also the missing female audience. Gender and space therefore could be highlighted as key to the historical trajectory with which Bhojpuri cinema sought alignment. Gender and space have been the most significant axes shaping circuits of film exhibition across India. In other words, how urban and semi-urban space is orchestrated for leisure, and distributed in gendered terms, informs us about the segmented promises of cinema. In order to grapple with this segmentation, we must recognize the differentially arranged production, distribution and exhibition practices, and the key role of gender in shaping this arrangement. The gendering of the space of Indian public life has been strategically navigated by the pre-eminent framework of the family. This focus means that for a woman, the right to her gender is regulated by her current family—often controlled either by the patriarchal figure of the father, or the husband. Valentina Vitali writes,

Item Number/Item Girl

‘Item’ is another one of the many English words that have acquired a life of their own as they are rendered in Indian languages. By itself, the item, as an object, puts a mere playful spin over the...

Bhojpuri Consolidations in the Hindi Territory: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and Competing Masculinities in North India:

The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distribution in most of north India. The success of the film industry had followed from a vibrant music industry; in a few subsequent years, however, the success of the Bhojpuri film industry turned against itself, on account of the shifting balance between production and exhibition sectors. This paper explores how the Bhojpuri industry negotiated this challenge, particularly with the reconsolidation of the Hindi film industry. I argue that the Bhojpuri stars benefitted most from the enforced reconfigurations as the film-texts became further subservient to stardom and the new aesthetic grammar was organized around the figure of the action-star. Through Jaan Tere Naam (Prasad, 2013)—one among a series of successful films featuring Khesari Lal Yadav—I assess Yadav’s popularity, earned via his performances as a launda (female impersonator). Bhojpuri cinema survives by projecting the male star as its primary text and arranging a plethora of pleasures around his figure, including the bawdy registers that proudly claim the insignia of nativity. The rebellious and native masculinity thus not only anchors the switch between bawdy irreverence and moral exactitude, it also vanquishes the “othered” urban values often resident in the female body.

Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure

This paper attempts to make sense of Satyamev Jayate, a popular Indian television show hosted by film star Aamir Khan, in terms of its politics, Khans stardom and the attempt to reframe the social on television. Grappling with the broad contours of the cultural economy of justice on national television in India, I suggest that the star descends upon television as an avatar promising empathy to a variety of victims of social injustice. In so doing, Khan converts crime news into emotional truths. The show has not only generated public debate, it also invites the public to return to a performative innocence. As television becomes the site of articulating moral authority, ritual participation and demanding social change, the political is re-assembled through Khans stardom. The paper also enquires how and why the show compels narrative ingenuity towards what Aditya Nigam calls the ‘implosion of the political’—the erasure of the public from the street and its re-inscription in the studio. Equally notable here is the role film-stardom plays in rendering moral authority through the trope of the sacrificial.

The Unbearable Liveness of News Television in India

The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in others’ stories. This article engages with the implications of “liveness”—as material and as affect—toward convergence of news narratives. Discussing two of the most widely covered recent stories—Aarushi Talwar’s murder and Baby Falak—the article foregrounds the class antagonism and scandalous anxieties of Indian televisual publics, and argues that news television invites us to trade liveness for news. Thus, news media not only liberates itself of the rigor of news production but also entertains us by reaffirming our deepest anxieties and competing with other modes of intertextual entertainment available on rival channels.

Deswa, the film and the movement: taste, industry and representation in Bhojpuri cinema

In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi film. Arguing that the vibrant debate that took place on the fundamental distinctions of Deswa is animated by Chandra’s persistent desire to narrate Bihar’s lost glory and utmost disrepair, I assess in this paper the industrial constraints that shaped the journey of Deswa. Drawing contrasts and parallels with the Hindi film industry, and drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical modeling of the field of cultural production, I locate the Deswa debate as a key moment in the contestations over subject positions, industry infrastructure, and linguistic affinities.

Retro-modern India: forging the low-caste self

prepared to negotiate when he sensed it prudent and he was open to forging alliances with the Axis powers to fight against the British. Bose was ideologically closer to Mahatma Gandhi (to whom Bose gave the title Father of the Nation) than to Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel. Even so, he had his share of differences with Gandhi who referred him as ‘the rebellious son’ (1) and ‘a patriot of patriots albeit misguided’ (3). The book contains a nuanced understanding of these differences between Mahatma Gandhi and Bose. In terms of ultimate objectives both leaders shared the goal of ending British rule. They differed on the vision of a post-British India. While Bose preferred a modern industrial nation, Gandhi was more inclined towards utopian ideas of self governance and self sufficiency (136). The author argues these differences were resolvable but elements in the higher echelons of the Congress movement did not wish to allow this reconciliation of ideas. Bose’s political ideas bore no religious orientation which makes one believe that if he were alive, he would have strictly opposed the partition of the country on religious lines. Bose represented an apt combination of conventionalism and modernity. The book narrates the life and times of a great Indian nationalist beginning with his birth into a well to do family in Cuttack in 1897. Proceeding further the book deals with the rather complex challenges that faced Bose during the Second World War (which coincided with the culminating phase of the Indian national movement). Keeping in view Bose’s centrality in the Indian freedom movement and the potentiality of a future role, the timing of his end was highly significant. Bose has inspired numerous literary works and films both within India and abroad, but His Majesty’s opponent is unprecedented and unique. The proximity of the author’s father to Subhash Chandra is the source of much detail and rich illustration. Also, the thought process gone into writing this book has been fed by the author’s upbringing in a particular setting. At the same time, Sugata Bose shows academic diligence drawing as he does on comprehensive research, assisted by close links with the Netaji Research Bureau based in Calcutta. During the 1990s, the author, jointly with his ailing father, edited the last seven of a twelve volume set of collected works of Subhash Chandra Bose (xi). The book caters to a wide readership, and cuts across the disciplines of history and politics, especially when discussing the dynamics of India’s national movement. For those intrigued by the enigmas of Bose’s political career and his personal choices, this book will be a rewarding read.

The multiplex in India: a cultural economy of urban leisure

This is a pioneering attempt to situate the multiplex not merely as a space of film exhibition, but a space that becomes the arbiter of cultural economy and aesthetic evaluations. Locating it within the larger debates on changing Indian cities, the authors establish how the closed dialectical relationship between the space and those who inhabit it becomes a key negotiation between self and the legitimate other. It is to establish the criterion of the other’s legitimacy that the authors have done extensive ethnographic research with those frequenting the multiplexes as well as those regulating its economic logic. As framed by cleanliness, convenience and security, the leisure experience of the multiplex is haunted by the ghosts of the older publics, but is also threatened by what lies outside the frame – body contact with the crowd and the figure of the indecent masses. It is a powerful achievement of the book to have captured the hollowness of the notion of a ‘decent crowd’, which remains the precipitate of an aesthetic mode of governing Indian cities. By taking up the various architectural and spatial rearrangements in three cities – Delhi and National Capital Region, Bangalore and Kolkata – the book shows in elaborate detail how the spatial segregation of the world-class aesthetic and its undersides continues to widen the real gaps. Also, the finest chapter of the book titled ‘India poised’ maps ‘the uneven geography of opportunity’ (89) by assessing expansion plans suggested for secondtier cities, which already register many environmental catastrophes in their residential, retail and transport economies. The book engages with a wide range of scholarship on the Indian cities and the difficulties of grappling with the urban experience. But it is through belligerent interviewing of the owners of mall-multiplex chains that the book exposes underlying beliefs as they are pursued within business strategies thus playing with the various possibilities hidden within the hybrid and curious urbanity of Indian towns. The book identifies a range of bold attempts by global capital to rearrange the shape, size and even material of amoeba-like cultural chaos caused by heavy migrations, proliferation of consumer industries, and the mobility of a digital imagination. Yet, what must not be overlooked is the certainty and flourish of language used by the new designers of Indian cities. Revealing comments include: ‘when these things complement each other then what you can do is do cross-offerings: watch a movie and get some food, buy something in the food court, come to the movies’ (76). It is instructive to note how their language engages with people and places, how time and space both get neatly radicalized between then and now, how they imagine their own cities and its architectural and aesthetic distribution. So for example, ‘(t)he whole of NOIDA was just a barren land’ (108), but now ‘(e)verything we are getting it world class (sic)’ (110). The popular culture of Delhi is summed up with the claim ‘if you have the money, then it is for enjoyment’ (110). It is thought Bangalore ‘doesn’t offer Contemporary South Asia Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2012, 415–428