Ulka Anjaria

Text, genre, society: Hindi youth films and postcolonial desire

This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that ‘text’, ‘genre’, and ‘society’ are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three reading strategies, which we feel are crucial to understanding popular film as a genre. The second half proceeds to demonstrate the use of these strategies by enacting a dialectic and intertextual reading of three popular youth films of the early 2000s: Dil Chahta Hai, Kyon?, and Yuva, for what they reveal about change and postcolonial desire in contemporary urban India.

A History of the Indian Novel in English

A History of the Indian Novel in English traces the development of the Indian novel from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present day. Starting with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the fi eld, this History includes twenty-fi ve chapters that shed light on the legacy of Indian writing in English. Organized thematically, these chapters examine how English was “made Indian” by writers who used the language to address specifi cally Indian concerns. Th ese included the question of what it means to be modern as well as how the novel could be used for anticolonial activism. By the 1980s, the Indian novel in English was a global phenomenon, and India is now the third-largest publisher of English-language books. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History invites readers to question conventional accounts of India’s literary history.

Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel

In what many consider to be a postrealist age, what are the new modes emerging that reflect a continued investment in representing contemporary life? This essay outlines the contours of a new social realism through the works of contemporary novelist Aravind Adiga. Against the grain of recent Indian writing, Adiga constructs a virulent critique of contemporary social issues. Adiga’s realism is not transparent, but instead raises a set of open-ended questions about the nature of interpretation, elaborating a “realist hieroglyphics”—the presentation of realism as a mode founded on indecipherability—as an aesthetics central to the political novel.

The “Slumdog” Phenomenon: Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City

What the hell can a slumdog possibly know? —Police Constable, Slumdog millionaire The swirl of excitement, commentary and controversy surrounding the film Slumdog millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) in India and elsewhere calls for a careful analysis of the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational cultural production. alternatively seen as a celebration of urban Indias global coming-of-age, an affront to cultural sensibilities, a sign of neoliberal hegemony or superficial cinematic diversion, Slumdog has become one of the most controversial films to sweep the academy awards, winning eight out of its ten nominations. The film has spawned hundreds of news articles, reviews and blog entries, along with vigorous academic debate — of which this current volume is just one example. Out of this discourse, a majority of the voices have been somewhat cynical about the films success. Many critiques come from a well-founded mistrust of the politics of popular culture and an awareness of the largely racist and imperialist history of cross-cultural representations of India and the east in Western film, media and literature. These critiques rely on a generalized skepticism of the political potential of melodramatic film. however, what most critics have overlooked is how Boyles film offers a possibility for rethinking the relationship between popular cinema and the contemporary Indian urban experience precisely through its fantasy plot.

‘Relationships which have no name’: Family and sexuality in 1970s popular film

This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships specifically by means of its use of melodramatic formulas. Against a dominant periodization of the decade which emphasizes rupture, I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see a process of repetition and resignification whereby formulas such as the ‘lost-and-found’ plot and the love triangle were re-presented and their constitutive elements rearranged in order to generate alternatives to conventional kinship and romantic paradigms. Discussing several films from this decade, including Sangam, Yaadon ki Baaraat, Deewaar, Sholay, Amar Akbar Anthony and Silsila, I show how Hindi cinema in the 1970s was engaged in considering how to represent human relationships outside of social sanction or conventionally accepted kinship terms, thus offering a new paradigm from which to read popular film at large.