Christiane Brosius

‘Is there no place like home?’ Contesting cinematographic constructions of Indian diasporic experiences

This article explores the different qualities of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ as they are visualised in various films produced by Indian filmmakers between 1970 and 2001; on the one hand, by commercial Mumbai cinema, and on the other hand, overseas, non-commercial film directors. The key question is how notions such as longing and belonging to a country and cultural heritage are articulated and contested by Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). The article proposes that in terms of values and identification, there is a shift from national responsibility to familial loyalty to individually chosen habitats. The first section of the article examines three films that address the question of how Indians can uphold and rejuvenate patriotic values and loyalties towards their motherland and family traditions. This idea of a ‘portable identity’ is counterposed in the second section of the article, which examines two films about second-generation Indians living in North America who feel estranged by their parents’ traditions and the idea of return and seek to root themselves permanently abroad.

Love in the Age of Valentine and Pink Underwear: Media and Politics of Intimacy in South Asia

The flow of transcultural images and media in times of contemporary globalisation does not mean that we must anticipate symmetrical and identical diffusion and reception. The case study I have chosen to present here underlines this in two ways: it examines how a globalised – and seemingly universal – notion, that of romantic love, circulates, with the help of images and media, and how it changes speed, quality, and routes over time. Moreover, it enables us to take a close look at moments and sites at which certain entanglements take place so that we gain a better understanding of the fabric of public spheres. By and large, romantic love is associated in Western contexts with modernisation, the rise of individualism and gender equality, as well as compatibility. As and when it does appear in non-Western states, so the widely shared view among scholars, it could only be cultivated by local elites equipped with the competence to appreciate this subjective emotion of intimacy between two people both aesthetically and rationally (Jankowiak and Fischer 1992: 1; Giddens 1992). In other sources, romantic love is largely associated with a leisure-oriented consumer society, the commodification of emotions, and irreversible changes from socio-centred communities to ego-centred nuclear alliances (Illouz 1997).

Hindutva intervisuality: Videos and the politics of representation

This article analyses the ways in which new audiovisual technologies may organise and challenge patterns of seeing for purposes of political mobilisation and ideological indoctrination. The context is that of the Hindu Right, with particular reference to the Ayodhya controversy. Focusing on God manifests Himself, a video produced by Jain Studios in New Delhi (1989/1990), the complex question of representation is discussed with reference to two key principles that inform the audiovisual rhetoric of Hindu nationalism. First, the video demonstrates that the Hindutva politics of representation is based on the technique of ‘intervisuality’, whereby meaning emerges from the dynamic interplay of aesthetic and symbolic spaces and social practices. Second, Hindutva rhetoric relies on the use of ‘wish-images’, through which imaginary ‘think-spaces’ are opened that enable its ideologues to generate ideas of a crisis-ridden imagined community of Hindu nationals against the backdrop of a Golden Age and a utopian future. This includes the stereotypical fixation of the ‘Muslim Other’. The article investigates the role of popular culture and religio-political practices as well as stylistic aspects of docu-drama, montage and special effects.

Introduction – Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-sited Reading of Image Flows

“(T)ransculture – the violent collision of an extant culture with a new or different culture that reshapes both into a hybrid transculture that is itself then subject to transculturation – highlights those places where the carefully defined borders of identity become confused and overlapping, a task that requires new histories, new ideas and new means of representation” (Nicholas Mirzoeff 2002 (1998): 477)

Regulating Access and Mobility of Single Women in a “World Class”-city: Gender and Inequality in Delhi, India

This chapter reflects on the ways in which the concept of the “world class” city, here Delhi, Indias national capital, mirrors and generates gendered spaces and discourses (e.g., on independence and safety). These facilitate structural inequalities and concern politics of visualisation and materialisation of single middle-class women. First, restrictions for the access to independent residential living for single upper middle-class women in Delhi are analysed. A focus on public space then draws in the spatial dimension of singleness, linking it to contemporary models of urban development. Second, the interconnections between women’s aspirations of claiming a right to the city are discussed. The chapter highlights the coexistence of urban models, equipped with different and essentially transcultural histories and imaginaries, producing ruptures and tensions in a neoliberal context.

Heritage Dynamics in Times of Crisis

Recent debates on heritage-making have approached heritage as an ongoing process involving diverse stakeholders, contestations and debates in the production and revitalization of communities experiencing and reflecting change. Moments of crisis and disaster (e.g. migration, earthquake, war or poverty) play an important role in this formation, bringing to the surface globalized practices and reified notions of maintaining the fabric of a social group or society. Heritage formation is thus a positioning of social agents in time and place, a means of orientation and self-reflection, not a linear outcome. Oftentimes, such processes go unnoticed, under the radar of “official” cultural heritage. The ensemble of perspectives that constitute this “conversation” pays attention to the initiatives of both “stakeholders” and researchers to shift attention from a position that presents a conclusion (“this is heritage”) to that of a more rhizomic, open field of multiple qualities of what Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer call “politics of authentication” (van de Port and Meyer forthcoming). This issue of “In Conversation” evolved from a panel entitled “Heritage in Times of Crisis. Transcultural Approaches to Reconstruction and Revaluation in Post-Earthquake Nepal.” The panel took place at the annual conference “Making, Sustaining, Breaking—The Politics of Heritage and Culture” at the Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Context, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at Heidelberg University in October 2016. Its focus was on the diverse dimensions of the Nepal earthquakes of 25 April and 12 May 2015, and how people responded to them through the ensuing and altering ideas of cultural heritage in relation to reconstruction and regeneration. One of our aims was to contribute to a reorienting of seemingly given binary oppositions such as “local” and “global,” “tangible” and “intangible,” “high” or “five star” heritage and “ordinary” heritage. Instead of seeing them as poles between which interlocutors navigate, we consider them as mobile forms of relationality and as emergent, that is, entangled by a vivid traffic of ideas and notions, institutions and people. The different voices in this conversation reveal grades of dominant and demotic discourses that can best be recognized and further explored through “close looking” and being there. The contributors have had first-hand experience of being both observer and participant in the cases they present. The earthquake of 2015 affected us both personally and professionally. The experience of destruction and loss has led the interlocutors of each case study to develop different strategies of positioning themselves in the shaping of heritage. They look at social and aesthetic responses to the earthquake from different disciplinary and auto-biographical positions, again placing heritage as a means and not a final repository. They stress how cultural and religious heritage came to play a substantial if not existential role in the recovery and regeneration of people affected by the earthquake, as means of coping with trauma and loss, as sources for resilience and strengthening of social relations. Each contribution pays attention to the intrinsic relationship of materiality and practices, to translocal relations and coeval temporalities. This is not without tensions arising from controversial understandings of heritage’s “meaning.” For example, we can read of the auto-orientalist desire for material authenticity of official stakeholders that collides with pragmatic visions of reconstruction efforts, using “foreign” materials, but also with local traditions that have always been transformed, and “modernized,” but are not considered suitable to be seen as innovative and contemporary. On the other hand, some of the stakeholders do not even use the terms “heritage” and “culture” and yet are discussed as producing or caring for it by the authors; aspects often referred to as intangible heritage, such as ritual function and use, play a more prominent part, while destruction may not necessarily be considered as harming the value and meaning or function of a building or object. For us, the intimate relationship and interstices between tangible and intangible heritage ought to be considered by stressing social agents’ perspectives, such as those of craftsmen, artists, or devotees. In this light it seems worth mentioning that there is no term for “heritage” in Nepali, something telling and underlining that our use of such concepts must be handled with care because it might push our research towards a specific narrative. We have nevertheless chosen to stick to heritage dynamics Christiane Brosius is professor of visual and media anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Her current research focuses on Delhi and Kathmandu, in particular on urban spaces and change, cultural heritage and artistic production in the twenty-first century. brosius@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de