Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hindi Cinema
Hindi Cinema
This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first,
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between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times
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positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the
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7 Hindi Cinema
Repeating the subject
Nandini Bhattacharya
Hindi Cinema
Repeating the subject
Nandini Bhattacharya
First published 2013
by Routledge
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© 2013 Nandini Bhattacharya
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bhattacharya, Nandini.
Hindi cinema : repeating the subject / Nandini Bhattacharya.
p. cm. -- (Intersections : colonial and postcolonial histories ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures, Hindi--History--20th century. I. Title.
PN1993.5.I8B424 2012 791.430954--dc23
2012016462
ISBN: 978-0-415-69867-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-08417-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire
Contents
Introduction 1
3 The man formerly known as the actor: when Shah Rukh Khan
reappeared as himself 110
Notes 183
Bibliography 194
Index 211
Figures
2.1 Lahore 85
2.2 “Retired Hurt,” FilmIndia 91
2.3 “Hindu Code Debate?” FilmIndia 91
2.4 Print advertisement for New Delhi, FilmIndia 96
2.5 Amina and her mother, a still from Garm Hawa 100
2.6 Gadar film poster 103
4.1 Ram in the 1990s 143
5.1 Kaante, offset lobby card 162
Acknowledgments
This book owes its origin to those reckless youths, my parents, who doughtily
and un-censoriously hauled me off to “see cinema”—as Bengalis say—in the
sweet and sour sixties and seventies of commercial Hindi filmmaking in India.
I went happily, and the cinephile that I am today is most likely due to this child-
hood experience.
This book owes its completion to two very different cinema-lovers, my
Bombay friends Irene Dhar Malik and Ashwini Malik and their daughter and my
godchild Trisha, whose disapprobation of the sort of films I saw in my innocent
youth is boundless, if not downright volatile. Irene and Ashwini not only intro-
duced me to various Hindi cinema personalities and artists, but put up gallantly
with my extended stays in their apartment in Bombay, and my endless stream of
queries about whom to meet next and how to get there. Ashwini sat down with
me patiently and shared with me a treasure trove of knowledge about how the
industry works, how films get made and, of course, scripts, scripts, scripts. Such
are the varied ingredients and tensions—like the classic masala Hindi film—of
which my cinephilia (first) and my scholarship (second) are compounded. As
long as it has taken me to finish this book, I finally dedicate it to this group of
family and friends. They made this happen, whether or not they want to own up.
I owe deep debts of gratitude to my Bombay friends: Onir, maker of exqui-
site and adventurous Hindi films today; Anjum Rajabali, doyen of contempo-
rary Bombay scriptwriters; and Paromita Vohra, feisty and prolific writer and
filmmaker. Onir, aka Tutul, was my ever gracious mediator and one-man social
network, giving me access to his numerous contacts in the industry as well as
sharing with me his insights about making films and making them mean some-
thing, as the world knows from his own films. Anjum was an invaluable resource,
host, and cheerful receiver of free-floating interlocutions and -- in the earlier
stages of my work -- vague and tentative questions and reflections upon what I
was facing and what I saw as my project. To these people, my first and foremost
thanks and admiration. Deepest thanks also to all those who gave me precious
time, insights and opportunities: Saif Ali Khan, Kundan Shah, Rahul Dholakia,
Sanjar Suri, Paresh Rawal, Homi Adajania, Urmi Juvekar, Anjum Rizvi, Vinay
Shukla, Arun Joshi, Rohit Banawlikar and Nadi Palsikar.
At the National Film Archives of India, Pune, likewise, my debts to the
following persons are immeasurable: Dr. Sasidharan, Mrs. Karkhanis, Mrs.
x Acknowledgments
Lakshmi Rao, Mrs. Shanta Joshi, Mr. Diwar, and all of the other staff who made
my visits there pleasant and memorable.
My chief editor at Routledge, Dorothea Schaefter, is a boon to all who, like
myself, want to write about South Asia for a large and varied audience: to her
I extend my warmest thanks. I thank also Jillian Morrison and Leanne Hinves
at Routledge, and Richenda Milton-Daws and Thursa Swindall for their copy-
editing and production efforts. Colleagues and friends to whom I feel deep obli-
gation for their generous and enthusiastic support are too numerous to name
individually for each instance of inidivual kindness, but I would be remiss not
to make special mention of Kamran Ali, Srinivas Aravamudan, Margaret Ezell,
Sangita Gopal, Renu Juneja, Ketu Katrak, Jimmie Killingsworth, Lawrence
Liang, David Morgan, Marietta Morrissey, Claudia Nelson, Mary Ann O’Farrell,
Sue Ott Rowlands, Paul Parrish, Amit Rai, Srividya Ramasubramaniam, Sumathi
Ramaswamy, Vanita Reddy, David Stern, Shankar Subramanian, Jyotsna Vaid
and Neha Vora. Heartfelt thanks to my Spring 2012 English 658: Indian Cinema
graduate seminar folks for a fun semester or conversations and learning, espe-
cially to Catalina Bartlett, Victor Del Hierro, Dhrubaa Mukherjee and Alma
Villanueva. I benefited vastly from the wealth of knowledge of fellow members
of the South Asia Working Group at Texas A&M University, and from the South
Asian Cinema Online folks. This book was made possible by generous research
support and grants from the Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M
University, the Texas A&M College of Liberal Arts, and the Texas A&M English
Department. Finally, this book owes its sustenance to Bob and to Khoka, and all
its flaws to me.
Introduction
This book concerns 60 years of Hindi cinema, from 1948 to 2009. I invite its reader
to consider the idea that Hindi cinema has a “repetitive subject,” that is, that one
very important thematic and formal code, at least during those 60 years, has been
repetition. An instance of the development of this tendency would be the main-
stream Hindi cinema in India of the early 1990s, which began to depict an unusual
number of unstable characters and generically mixed plots. Heroes became indis-
tinguishable from villains or comedians, and classic, formulaic narratives gave way
to hybrid genres. Unpredictable storylines and unreadable, psychotic, or schizo-
phrenic characters emerged, primarily on the back of rising star Shah Rukh Khan’s
vehicles. By the later nineties, it was clear that these ambiguous styles of character
and plot development had come to stay. This book shows why this phenomenon
within Hindi films matters, and why it is not new. While the apparently stable
formulas and anodyne look of Hindi cinema were visibly disturbed in the nineties,
it was not the first time that such ambiguities failed to represent cinema’s particular
revisionist apotheosis of subjectivation, whether anti-foundational or hegemonic;
rather, they echoed diverse prior formal and thematic stutters in subjectivating
cinematic and national protagonists. This matters because, as I will show, the nine-
ties and earlier decades of Hindi film-making broadly represented (and repeated)
the co-implicated formation of a particular model of history as a structure of repeti-
tions and repeatability on the one hand, and a cinematic model of conjunctural, as
well as disjunctural, repeat performances of significant political and social trauma
unsettling crucial salvific discourses of national subjecthood on the other.
“The new is not found in what is said, but in the event of its return,” writes
Foucault (1981: 28). What repetition or return does is come back to the constitutive
lag, gap, or caesura that marks the moment of the event returning. The moment
or event’s re-articulations thereby continue to wash up at the point at which the
2 Introduction
future broke away from the present and its past in the original articulation, so as
to make nothing more concrete—certainly not that moment—than the break or
the disarticulation itself. The future potentials become more prominent than the
oneness and plenitude of the event with and within itself (Foucault 1977: 133–5).
Tracing the formal and thematic codes of repetition in India’s Hindi cinema bears
out this thesis in relation to enactment or performance: every performance is an
unsecured and uncontrollable re-enactment or re-activation, and this dynamic
mechanism of reactivation (rather than inert duplication) defers the possibility
of realized and secured subjectivation in Hindi cinema. Performance, as a term,
exceeds theatricality, spectacle, action, and representation; it is a thicker term
that grounds itself beyond object and practice, but rather in a theory of both. In
this sense, performance is in itself a kind of “exaggeration” (Taylor 2003: 13–5)
that meshes well with practices of repetition and indeed requires them for its
utmost plenipotentiary outcome. The performance aesthetic of Hindi cinema,
with its heavy reliance on sometimes unmotivated “excess”1 is thereby also a
more intensely presentational mode of ontologically unsecured “exaggeration,”
whose effect is multiplied with each repetition.
I trace the co-formation of the cinematic mechanism of repetition with a histor-
ical discourse of repetition of structures and events as Indian nation-building,
and demonstrate that, in cinema, both diegetic history and plot use tropes of
repetition to effect the de-centering of subjectivation. I argue that the notion of
repetition underlying the theory of performativity generates multiple versions of
the subject, and stokes the un-extinguished debate over whether subjectivity is a
public or a private ontology and genealogy—two constitutive characteristics of
Hindi cinema’s agonistic production. While cinema in general has been theorized
vis-à-vis performance (Metz et al.), and Indian cinema in particular has been
theorized in terms of Indian performance genres (Lutgendorf; Dissanayake and
Gokulsing; Ganti), the temporality of performance as repetition in the cinema
itself has been very rarely explored by scholars.
Deleuze, of course, concerned himself with difference, repetition, time, and
the cinema, and separately analyzed cinema as a temporal allegory and repeti-
tion as generative of difference (2001, 1994). In his reflections on repetition and
difference, Deleuze wrote incisively about the power of repetition in different
contexts, including the theatre, to overcome the trauma of representation. While
performance as representation succeeds in merely reinstating the regime of
being as “the same,” repetition is that which institutes the dynamic movement
of becoming, because difference is at the heart, and is indeed constitutive, of
such repetition. Repetition is, for Deleuze, that which conveys the real and the
material in the “eternal return,” which is not the return of identity, equivalence,
or commensurability, but rather that of difference, singularity, and becoming:
“identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition.’ Repetition in the
[Nietzschean] eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the
basis of the different” (Deleuze 1994: 41).
However, beyond placing repetition and difference squarely in the realm of
theatre or performance (1994: 23), Deleuze did not extensively explore temporality
as repetition in his discussions of cinema as time-image (2001), as I believe is
Introduction 3
crucial to do in the case of Hindi cinema. I consider the apparently novel emergence
of “uncharactertistic” characters and plots in the cinema of the nineties, looking
back across approximately 50 years of cinematic history and showing that this sort
of instability is by no means new. It is instead a long-standing constitutive charac-
teristic of an anti-essentialist Hindi cinema that relies primarily on thematic treat-
ment of the polymorphous relationship between historic event and social structure,
which actively and necessarily generates subjunctive or liminal being.
I see such subjunctivity or liminality less as incompleteness, more as a certain
metaphysics and art of “becoming” through the repetition and eternal return of
the excessive and incommensurable, as Deleuze writes: “Only the extreme, the
excessive, returns” (1994: 41). Further on, I will demonstrate how Deleuze’s sense
of the excessive and extreme, that which I call the liminal and the subjunctive,
also finds support in Badiou and Derrida’s anti-essentialist theories of being. In
the chapters of this book I demonstrate the metaphysical art of such generations
of liminality and subjunctivity, in different eras of films that refract history as a
debate of structure and event, problematizing the repetition said to be intrinsic
to history as positive heuristic, while offering cinematic performativity as some-
times quizzical, and sometimes critical, re-enactments of embodiment, gener-
ating not subjects but liminality in the process.
In an article detailing the oft-discussed subject of Hindi or Indian cinema’s
perplexingly (to outsiders of the cinematic culture and reception circles) generic
and repetitive qualities and impact, Philip Lutgendorf takes up the question of the
generic evolution of Hindi cinema’s particular style. He references the cinema’s
characteristic of repetition, contesting a classic Marxist analysis of form, such as
Prasad’s account of “heterogenous conditions of manufacture” in the Hindi film
industry (Lutgendorf 2006: 240–1), and privileging instead a cultural-historical telos
whereby those familiar players—Sanskrit drama, folk tales, Parsi and Hindi theatre,
but especially the classic epics—maintain key roles in shaping the fundamental
structure of films. This structure is the repetition of plots, themes, and characters
from oft-told and well-loved epics. He shifts the explanation for “typical” Hindi
cinematic form from Prasad’s Marxist structural model to “the structure of the epics
(and … of a much larger body of popular narrative) rather than their specific content
that presents a parallel to the way in which film stories unfold” (242).
This account of Hindi cinema as product of a layering of formal elements
primarily derived from a determinant, indeed over-determining, structure of
mythic and epic provenance (Lutgendorf 2006: 250) seems problematic to me for
several reasons. First, this analysis does not explain why, within a short decade in
the current century, Hindi and other regional film styles, and indeed even stories,
have taken a turn toward the almost “postmodern” exploration of liminal subjec-
tivation, such as I explore here. Have audiences forgotten the ur epics and their
“structural” imperative for all mandates of storytelling? This seems unlikely in
the era of Hindutva nationalism and its recent televangelical successes with the
stories of the Mahbharata and the Ramayana. Second, this hermeneutic of all
cinematic form as a cyclical repetition and reproduction of a primary atavistic
narrative structure—largely that of the moralizing epics—is somewhat ethno-
centric, as Lutegndorf would himself admit. It partly privileges “a” Hindu
4 Introduction
mythology as synonymous with “the” national mythos, though Lutgendorf also
provides a summary of Islamicate narrative traditions that “structured” future
popular cinematic storytelling and forms.
Third, and here I must resort to the subjective with all its attendant risks, it
does not take into account the experience of a secular middle-class viewer, as I
myself was as a teen Hindi cinephile, who does not necessarily have a total and
familiar grasp of classic and traditional mythic and epic narratives, nor reads
the films instantly as duplicating or evoking such narrative frameworks, but
despite being a product of a secular and postcolonial educational system, never-
theless appreciates Hindi films for a variety of ludic, psychic, social, and sensory
pleasures. In other words, the link between cinephilia and cultural insiderness
or context-sensitivity may be less adamantine than Lutgendorf suggests (2006:
249–50), and the phenomenon of repetition in Hindi cinema may be more wide-
ranging, multivalent, and less purely contextual than the rehearsing of familiar
traditional epics.
Fourth, and most importantly, though far more rationalized and corpora-
tized today, new Hindi cinema is still made as a result of a vast team effort,
involving numerous functionaries and sub-functionaries and immense collabo-
rative yet discrete organization. There is a distinct return to the “studio” model
of production, as exemplified by the Dharma, Yash Raj, Ram Gopal Varma and
Company, and Mukta Arts production houses. Indeed, the end product of such
continuing artisanal efforts—not entirely dissimilar from Hollywood methods,
as Lutgendorf himself acknowledges—is a cinema coming to represent very
different kinds of repetitions of background, generic formations and constituents
(song lyrics, star texts, box office histories), context, conscious and unconscious
depth, allegory, inter-textuality, and metadiscursivity; themselves surfacing as
much more contemporary, intra-textual, and self-referential phenomena. The
cinema mines itself and its generic formations and constituents explicitly and
thoroughly for successive and successful allusions, citations, and quotations,
many of which I explore in the subsequent chapters.
Lutgendorf’s cultural historical hermeneutic lays bare, I believe, the arma-
ture of an organic enterprise in Hindi cinematic historiography and cinema
scholarship, which is to see the cinematic narrative as a structurally influenced
story, wherein every re-enactment or story is a replica, copy, or duplication of
an extant and privileged ur (often “national”) structure, rather than a re-activa-
tion, re-envisioning, or dramatic reiteration, whereby the present and the past
are prised apart as not temporally punctuated recalibrations of the same story. In
using Ramanujan’s rubrics of “context-sensitive” and “context-free” (Lutgendorf
2006: 247–9), Lugendorf treats the “contexts”—backgrounds and genesis—as
the stabilized cultural history of Hindi cinema, whereas I will look at “context”
or event, and its diegetic treatments as the critical “text”—trope and language—
of the cinema. With the aid of important scholarly work such as Lutgendorf’s,
this book’s formal analyses will be tied to a more probing reading of the herme-
neutic of structure and event (the latter not always a structural subset), and of
universality versus singularity, as an essential heuristic and problematic of the
story of the cinema itself, not as its totalizing explanatory schema.
Introduction 5
Against the grain of “events” as an imagistic for society, “structure” sets up
an indicative mode subtended by a metalanguage of order, as well as inversion.
In effect, however, structure’s indicative mode is always already permeated,
suffused by the event’s performative, apperceptive, subjunctive mode—one that
I will henceforth call liminality, or the liminal. My term “liminal” is drawn from
anthropology, political history, and performance studies, and refers to perfor-
mances of identity that generate multiple iterations and ongoing flux across
cultural and social boundaries that are elusive or at risk, and that signify a
process rather than an end. Liminality is the subjunctive category, a sub-set of
what anthropologists like Turner call structure.2 For me, the most useful account
of the cultural liminal as a performative zone is still that of the anthropologists;
Turner writes, “for every major social formation there is a dominant mode of
public liminality, the subjunctive space/time that is the counterstroke to its prag-
matic indicative texture. Thus, the simpler societies have ritual or sacred corrob-
orees as their main metasocial performances; proto-feudal and feudal societies
have carnival or festival; early modern societies have carnival and theater; and
electronically advanced societies, film” (1977: 34–5, 1984).
The liminal is the “what if,” the “collective reflexive,” the publicly ritualistic
mode of structure. It is also the “what if” zone of power relations; while Turner
sees freedom in the performance situation, Visweswaran has rightly returned
this symbolic anthropology to a consideration of the reality of power relations in
performance, and by extension, in my view, in liminality (Visweswaran 1994:
76). It will become evident later on that the liminal is the space of play and
performance that leavens the ordering of social structure: Hindi cinema has
staged, repetitively, this performance of the liminal within the structural frame-
work of Indian nation-building and state-formation—within relations of power
and governance and their ability to hail subjects—for decades.
Moreover, as repetition, Hindi films unearth the obsessively liminal quality
of re-enactments of identity that always straddle, and sometimes transcend, the
strict dichotomy of public and private existence. This is something that I discuss
further below, as a phenomenon of “countermodernity,” which stands, as per
Foucault, for a certain pre-modern relationship of subject to time and space that
exceeds a present and modern ratio of spatio-temporal vectors of self-formation
(Foucault in Drolet 2004: 45). This idea is also figured in Chakrabarty’s critique
of “Historicism,” as the West’s stagist theory of history according to which non-
Western countries were “not yet” ready for political modernity, as expounded
eloquently and elegantly in the introduction to his Provincializing Europe:
The achievement of political modernity in the third world could only take
place through a contradictory relationship to European social and politi-
cal thought … The political sphere in which the peasant and his masters
participated was modern—for what else could nationalism be but a modern
political movement for self-government?—and yet it did not follow the logic
of secular-rational calculations inherent in the modern conception of the
political.
(2000: 9–12)
6 Introduction
Hindi cinema’s repetitive re-enactments might be transgressive and destabilizing
of the strict dualities of public history and private memory, because all repeti-
tion may destabilize such dualities, especially repetition that is a performance
as opposed to a pedagogy, as Chakrabarty points out following Bhabha (Bhabha
1994: 208–29, Chakrabarty 2000: 10).
Perhaps the most generative schematic about “repetition” for my purposes
is Freud’s enshrinement as a “complex” (Freud 1959: vols. 9, 10, 12, and 17).
He wrote: “it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind
of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and prob-
ably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough
to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their
daemonic character” (Freud 1959: 17: 238). Though I will travel considerably
before and beyond Freud in my own “countermodern” move, in discussion of
critical and geographical traditions concerning the trope of repetition, he is a
force to be reckoned with. Synthesizing Freud’s many essayistic elaborations
upon repetition, Robert Smith writes, “Even the most esoteric form becomes,
qua form, a repeatable event and, in this regard, potentially public … Obsessive
actions are no doubt personal—they even serve to ratify the alleged particu-
larity of a given psyche—but their repeatability lends them a formal element
which simultaneously takes them beyond that psyche’s exclusive ownership”
(2002: 215). Repetition is thereby the critical and indispensable axis whereupon
the quiddity of pre-national, pre-colonial jouissances—the “countermodern” in
Foucault’s terms—become “publicised,” tried out, ritualistically and obsessively,
in a collective framework.
Might this not be the reason for the prevalence of this code of repetition in a
“popular” cinema that has remained obsessed with the “popular” as that which
exceeds, perhaps explodes, the boundaries of representation into the void of
incommensurable difference, i.e. the countermodern? To repeat obsessively in
popular cinema—and this is what the liminal subjectivations of Hindi cinema
appear to be doing, as most cinephiliac charges of stubbornly “formulaic” Hindi
film-making assert—is not only to ritualize an obsession with the problem of limi-
nality, but also to make it shamelessly public, thereby defying the confinement
of obsessive, “non-modern,” but potentially pleasurable, scandalous, incommen-
surable, or liberatory practices and subjects to a hidden realm, be it the private
sphere or the psyche. Moreover, if one follows Freud further in his thinking of
“repetition” as a psychic and analytic process, he states that “the greater the
resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remem-
bering” (emphases mine; Freud 1959: vols. 12 and 151)—aka “representing.”
To transpose this then, from the private analysis situation to one of public
or collective subject-recoveries: the more inevitable and irreducible obsta-
cles there are to such subject-recoveries, to persisting in such recovery opera-
tions or what might be called “getting the story right”—either in the form of
repression, liminalities, fragmentations, segmentations, state or state-sponsored
action, non-state and pre-modern, countermodern, or liminal constituents, etc.—
the more repetition or “acting out” presents without representing. It repeats
without re-membering (re-membering defined here as conscious retrieval, not
Introduction 7
involuntary repossession) those core and incommensurable countermodern limi-
nalities (Freud 1959: 12: 150–1). Here, as Chakrabarty has written, “historical
time is not integral … it is out of joint with itself” (2000: 16).
Popular cinema is a natural site for such “acting out,” or repeating to bypass the
pursuit of remembering or representing a “right” mythic and ontological self and
story, in favor of enacting or performing a collective but dispersed epic of tele-
ological differentiation. Repetition is the crucial screen and mirror for enacting
difference, not capturing and taming it. One might say that cinema repeats “not
as a memory but as an action” (Freud 1959: 12: 150), while letting it be thought
(sometimes) that it is acting out a fully recovered memory, an onto-mythology,
of the subject. In this public re-enactment of pre-public ritual, such as cinema,
the pre-public countermodern “repeatedly” perforates the containment of public
nation-statist modernity (Smith 2002: 217).
There are four chapters in this book that look at the repetitive and recursive
historic discourses of structure and event in the Hindi film public performatic:
Partition and gender embodiments, the enactment of Muslim embodiment, the
new enactments of masculine embodiment in the neoliberal era, and the queer
masquerade of heternormativity in the crossing from Bollywood to diaspora.
National history’s discourse of repetition flows into Hindi cinema’s ongoing
discourse of subjectivation as scenarios of re-enactment of embodiment, and of
identifications as discrete iterations, involving both avowals and repudiations.
The historical model of repetition—of events folding in upon themselves as
they unfold, with multiple outcomes—is the concomitant referential matrix for
a story-level, generic, and citational model of repetition, as performances and
trials of embodiment that lead to liminalities. From 1948 to the present, I argue,
Hindi cinema has represented liminal identities of one sort or another as ambigu-
ities that put the coherent nation-state and subjectivation under scrutiny. I stress
that, though structures and patterns of repetition as critical tropes of cinematic
historic accounts of subjectivation materialize in more intense liminal messages
and performances in the nineties, they are actually a long-standing and constitu-
tive characteristic of Hindi cinema.
The liminal emerges when a new subjectivation is attempted, usually as
response to a current critical event; but with a history of that event, its becoming,
haunting its present iteration. It might be possible to model this mathematically
by saying “liminality = embodiment = enactment,” though given the nature of
the latter two terms, their order might easily be reversed. According to Badiou’s
influential elaboration of the event and being, the “evental site is an entirely
abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented
in the situation” (2005: 175). Such a “multiple” Badiou describes as being the
historic subject is adumbrated in what he calls the “singular” in the same work,
that which belongs but is not included. Badiou writes, “all situations are struc-
tured twice … there is always both presentation and representation. To think this
point is to think … the danger that being-qua-being represents, haunting presen-
tation” (2005: 94). What contains or “frames” this danger to presentation, or to
an appearance of order or structure is, for Badiou, the “state of the situation …
by means of which the structure of a situation—of any structured presentation
8 Introduction
whatsoever—is counted as one, which is to say the one of the one-effect itself”
(95). This “state of the situation” emerges as the state in historical society, or
what Badiou calls “metastructure,” that which keeps in check the abnormal
multiple or void appearing within the count, the liminal threatening to shade into
the singular:
metastructure guarantees that the one holds for inclusion, just as the initial
structure holds for belonging … there is always a metastructure—the state
of the situation … It is by means of the state that structured presentation is
furnished with a fictional being; the latter banishes, or so it appears, the peril
of the void, and establishes the reign … of the universal security of the one …
(2005: 97–8, 103)
I will contend in this book that this state is not only “fictional”, as Badiou says,
but also “theatrical.” Badiou’s metastructural state has, for Derrida, the power
of the “absolute performative” (2009: 214). What is clear from that phrase is,
of course, that while holding the other players in place in a sort of ontological
cordon, the state nevertheless is not immune to the lures of performativity itself,
and is, however much a constitutive lawgiver or matrix, also a player. That the
state is a player or a performer, even as it is an absolute right- and law-giver
(thus an ‘absolute performative’)—even in Badiou’s sense it “makes up” or holds
things together like a gel, base, or foundation (easily thinkable stagey, cosmetic
words for a concept of the cosmos)—can also be adduced from Derrida, asso-
ciating the state with the ultimate mark of power, i.e. “ipseity,” or the power to
name itself as “self” among others.3 As this ‘ipseity’ marks the state’s absolute
sovereignty—its formidable authoritative essence which, ironically, is also the
metastructure for its equally quintessential internal fissuring, as both sovereign
and beast according to Derrida (2009)—this ipseity also marks its complicity
with theatre and performance, for to play roles means to assume, or to have the
power to assume or arrogate, a name, a role, a self, an “ipse.” The theatricality of
the state or metastructure is a concept that we shall return to again and again in
this book, but especially in the first chapter.
Crucially for my analysis of cinematic historiography or representation,
Badiou continues to say:
state of the historico-social situation … the essence of the State is that of not
being obliged to recognize individuals … the role of the State is to qualify,
one by one, each of the compositions of multiples whose general consistency,
10 Introduction
in respect of terms, is secured by the situation, that is, by a historical presen-
tation which is ‘already’ structured …
(2005: 105)
This is also the metastructure that ensures the maintenance of the distinction
between the mass presented (belonging) and the citizens represented (included):
“the State always re-presents what has already been presented” (Badiou 2005:
106). The bourgeoisie and the citizenry are both presented and represented: “the
State … is always consecrated to re-presenting presentation: the State is thus
the structure of the historico-social structure, the guarantee that the one results
in everything” (106). The singular is presented, and the liminal not even that;
neither is represented in the “one” that the state counts and re-secures.
Some nineties films present liminality arguably as a shock effect of massive
cultural technological and economic change: new media, digitalization, satellite
and communications technology explosions, financialization and virtualization
of life, for instance. As new globalized subjects were being forged under the
hammerings of a virtual or virtuous postmodernity or neoliberalism, the coun-
termodern and subaltern as original, counter-rational, archaic wounds repeatedly
appeared as contrary iterations skeptical of a script of transformative transcend-
ence, either cultural or socio-economic.5 The films I will discuss, however,
grapple with even more palpable, tangible, and unassimilated shocks of political
and historical events and processes, whose catastrophic impact calls forth rituals,
indeed orgies, of performative self-fashioning. It is these proliferations of self-
fashioning that the official state is called in to contain, because
And yet, such unbinding appears to constantly threaten the question of represen-
tation in Hindi cinema, earlier mostly politically and thematically, and now also
aesthetically and formally. For Badiou’s analysis, the site of this unbinding is the
political event, that which “does not suit the philosophical clarity of the political
… which makes politics into such a strange domain—in which the pathological
… regularly prevails over the normal” and which is the inescapable haunting of
structured being by the startling synthesis of an excess and a void.6 The political
activist is “a patient watchman of the void instructed by the event, for it is only
when grappling with the event … that the State blinds itself to its own mastery”
(2005: 111).
However tense the Indian public aesthetic debate about the relative worth
of the presentational versus the representational might be, the very existence
of such a tension suggests that presentation—the singular that belongs but is
Introduction 11
uncounted—is still a possibility within the socio-historical structure, despite it
perhaps not being included by the state. Indeed, Hindi cinema has always dealt
with issues of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, class, and other “popu-
list” issues, even if it has not ultimately set their status as normative or “normal”,
and even it if has instead always tended to privilege the “normal,” either in the
sense of the “feudal family romance” or the “bourgeois social romance.” The
presented as singular still belongs in the visual text of the cinema. However, the
problem of representation is compounded when it is given the task of presenting
the “unpresentable,” as Badiou calls it (111), which I translate as the violent
transformative event that flies beneath the radar of both the presented and the
represented, the singular and the normal. This is the realm of the liminal, whose
overlap with the category of the singular presents the ultimate challenge, as well
as a tantalizing possibility to representation in addition to presentation.
When the masses are violent or turbulent, how does a cinema already juggling
the gap between the presented and represented—it does this of course by natu-
ralizing and mythologizing history (Badiou 2005: 176; Barthes 1957: 129, 141)—
depict that? Political violence, struggles over national space, and socio-cultural
changes are the ur evental sites, “the site of the unpresentable” (Badiou 111), which
produce the scenarios and screens for iterations of liminality, and are in turn
shaped by them. Public violence is the radically “other” event—in the radically
othered and not repeated context—that seems to lead forth structure only to derail
it because it “is not a part of the situation … it is on the edge of the void” (Badiou
2005: 175). The event that is unmoored from its obligation to be a part of either
mythic structure or statist metastructure is the radically contextually other, for
which there is not presentation, which is historical in Badiou’s sense in that histo-
ricity is absolutely “relative” and “non-natural” (176). Hence, again, whilst the defi-
nition of natural situations is global, the definition of evental sites is local (ibid.).
Textual or hyper-textual subjects of modernity and postmodernity require
contextualization in material, however; reticulated and displaced durations and
locations, or histories and events. While in his recent book on Indian cinema, Rai
(2009) saw identities and bodies in the cinematic experience as purely “pre-indi-
vidual,” nonlinear, non-representational, pre-conscious, and nonhuman, even as
a pure human-media interface, I argue that to move away from a conception
of identities, bodies, and affect as spatially, sensorially, individualistically and
politically “grounded,” and cinematically “represented” is a mistake. Liminalities
exceed and frustrate subjectivation, but they are not without social ground and
political realities—the physical substrata of performativity—that generate visible
effect. Unlike Rai, who follows closely Brian Massumi’s lead in replacing both
the “regulating codifications of the Static” (Massumi quoted in Rai 2009: 52; read
as “the state” in my formulation), and the “regularizing codings of the ‘social’
or ‘cultural’” (ibid.; read as the “national cultural” in my formulation and the
“socio-historical situation” in Badiou’s) with what he calls “the transitive mode
of power”—read as the connectivities of human-media interface (Rai 2009: 52). I
refuse to relinquish the claim that the liminal emerges out of grounded historical
contexts and texts of repetition found in statist and national-cultural iterations,
and articulate events and embodiments of subjectivation.7
12 Introduction
Had Hindi cinema’s liminal subjects been purely postmodern, their enact-
ment of selfhood might have disavowed space-time coordinates of historicity
altogether. This, however, as I hope to show throughout this book, is not the
case; instead, the liminal subjects in Indian cinema experiment with a number of
possible and desired lived relationships with the present and other temporalities.
As Foucault has argued in “What is Enlightenment?”, if modernity is an align-
ment of temporal consciousness, an attitude of engagement with lived time in the
present moment (Drolet 2004: 45), and if engaging with the modern as a temporal
present point allows a full inhabiting of space in the present, by contrast, a coun-
termodern attitude necessitates defocusing from the present as a stable, habitable
space. The countermodern gestures toward the pre- or the post- , to an elsewhere
and another time. Thus the primary form a (post-)modern aesthetic that takes in
Hindi cinema, in representing and invoking the liminal national subject found in
violent times and places, is a play with the inherent repetitive or mimetic ability
of cinema harnessed to explore the possibilities of history as a narrative structure
of repetition or iteration of countermodernities.
Hindi cinema has a quintessentially countermodern aesthetic that mobilizes
plural, alternate temporalities and settings through evoking a subject that enacts
itself as a potentially palimpsestic iteration, and thereby as liminal. This cinema
concerns itself with multiple, iterated, recursive, and successive relationships
of human, space, and time. It manifests, however, a strong quest for habitable
locations that permit inhabiting the present without forgetting a past difficult
to remember. It experiments with the idea of historic memory—my term for an
entente between contending views of history and memory as viable modes for
living through the experience of difficult temporality—which allows one to live
in the present without necessarily forgetting the past, and also allows a potentially
open vision of the future. Location in such a present enables the management of
a troubling history as neither dead nor overwhelming, but as permitting the drive
toward a future of plural possibilities. Such a futuristic or possibilitarian orienta-
tion is not a conscious urge or project of the cinema; it is, however, an aggregate
of many narrative resolutions of portrayals of homelessness or dispossession.
Structures form upon ideological frameworks as much as upon the apparent
temporal and spatial ordering and location of events. As Ray writes of the classic
Hollywood cinema, evoking Althusser’s concept of “ideological apparatuses”:
In the Indian context, the political frame has inevitably meant an engage-
ment with questions of colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial history, and
has tended to be dominated by discussions about the place of cinema in the
discourses, policies, and practices relating to questions of nationhood and
citizenship.
This keeps the national space of theatre and the sociopolitical space that human
bodies inhabit in a relationship of traffic and transfusion with each other,
making it impossible to separate the interpenetration of the representable and the
un-representable. Derridean deconstruction and the Lacanian left merge here—
Hindi cinematic representation of the historic or political event can be under-
stood as a site of “event-ness,” not of mere “eventfulness,” in which democracy
itself is staged and restaged as an “act,” as well as “re-acting”—and the theatre
of cinema is an enactment of democratic experiment that does not rest in a single,
finite event, but continues to explore the potential of “event-ness” and of “thea-
trocracy” in national symbolic life (Stavrakakis 2007: 128), something especially
remarkable in the 2008 film Mumbai Meri Jaan.
Chatterjee and others have argued persuasively that, in India, the space of
the material is external public space. They have suggested lived social space
was bifurcated into the material public realm versus the spiritual (and femin-
ized) private realm (Chatterjee 1997) within anticolonial nationalism. Private
feminized space was evacuated of any trace of materiality, even of the sexed,
laboring, or reproductive bodies of women. This legacy of binary spatial spheres
in Indian socio-historical discourse is transmuted in Hindi cinema, which prob-
lematizes the separation of the material and the psychic by commensurating the
trauma of the material (or the outside), through the psyche’s circuits of desire (the
interiority of protagonists). The shock of encountering a public space jarred and
riven by a traumatic material modernity marks the emergence of the colonial
and the “postcolonial” real. In it, one sees an earlier Indian spatial commensura-
tion of the material and of the psychic, wherein the world outside and the world
at home were not strictly separable (Appadurai, “Street Culture”; Chakrabarty
1991), a commensuration still finding form in Indian cinema primarily through
the ongoing travels and travails of the liminal subject.
In a sense, the crashing of the material onto the languages of representation
that are available—the cinema, the media, citizenship and national belonging,
and law enforcement—makes a film like Mumbai Meri Jaan a timely and
historicized reflection on the dilemmas and styles of liminal representation
in contemporary Indian cinema. The quest for lived space by liminal subjects
subsequently creates disjunctures in cinema’s temporal consciousness. On one
hand, there is a residual pre-colonial social tradition of the psychic viability of
public and material space, as not yet the post-independence real; in it, the mate-
rial need not necessarily be traumatic, nor completely exteriorized, though
poverty and exploitation have been endemic features of South Asian public
space throughout pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence times. On the
other, there is the post-independence experience, in which public materiality
28 Introduction
seems undeniably to evoke the Lacanian real: a space of loss, disenfran-
chisement, and political negativity. The importance of this space lies in its
conductivity, nevertheless, of a pre-colonial legacy of commensurable public
and private, and material and psychic realms. Spatial dispositions thus offer a
possibilitarian outlook in Hindi cinema; films of several genres and decades
attempt to inhabit and organize available space. While this trend started early
after independence—Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) comes to mind—in the
contemporary neo- or “post-” postcolonial cinema, like MMJ, this possibili-
tarian recuperation of the material public continues to occur amidst various
experiments with the citizen liminalized by varietals of the real, as we shall
see in the first chapter.
In some ways the cinema and its public spatial apparatuses—billboards, signs,
posters, advertisements, star sightings, product endorsements, phone ringtones,
etc—are a superimposed hyperreal that de-materalize the real, to the extent to
which this is possible (since the real cannot at some level even be apprehended). It
is the hyperreality of an image-drenched postmodern aesthetic that makes avail-
able a certain new configuration of lived space, where the psychic and the real
can attempt to co-exist. The shock of the material is progressively more muted or
resorbed in cinema by the countershock of the hyperreal—of flaneuristic virtual
mobility—and this is a factor of speed, in many ways. Indian cinema, if now
the hyperreal, was, according to some, always already the first and sole space of
flaneuristic motility in India. Mazumdar, for example, has discussed how, due to
marketing practices in pre-colonial and colonial times, India did not develop the
“shop window” marketing phenomena of the early capitalist West (2008: 95). The
urban flaneur of the West lacked social identity as well as space in India. It was
the cinema that provided this flaneuristic space and subjective identity for the
urban subject. Cinema became the hyperreal in the sense of the ultimate combi-
natory space for virtuality and mobility (Mazumdar 2008: 92–3); in a limited
sense, the ultimate “shopping experience”.
This became truer following the late eighties: “The presence of program-
ming from different parts of the world introduced a notion of simultaneous time,
which promoted a hyperreal viewing experience in India” (Mazumdar 2008: 93).
However, critically for the purposes of my argument, this hyperreality of the
cinema, with its sequential speeding up of time, leads to a muzzling of the shock
of the material existence of the national real. The speeding up of time, something
that cinema has become better and better at doing, as much through camera work
as through new editing techniques (Yash Chopra’s Dhoom series is pertinent
here), is the imprimatur of the hyperreality that re-organizes space to animate
a historic memory, functioning positively towards the generation of a future of
possibilities beyond a traumatic materiality.
Alternatively, an apperceptive historical consciousness, one that sees itself
seeing itself and seeing history through itself, acutely aware of its own loca-
tion and situation (that is, one’s “s/p(l)ace”), such as can also be found in MMJ,
approaches an apprehension of the real within the discourses of the symbolic and
the imaginary in ways suggesting the embeddednes of liminality in represen-
tation. In this not value-free, non-neutral second style, that of an apperceptive
Introduction 29
historical consciousness—something usually perceived as the sentimental
utopianism of the Hindi cinema—the singularity of a South Asian postmoder-
nity expresses itself as a hyperreal cross-woven with a proxemics that allows a
post-independence commensuration of private and public, psychic and material
realms.
I will demonstrate in the following chapters of this book how, in major nodal
points, Hindi cinema concerns itself with the proxemic politics of bodies—of
inhabited spaces, of placed headcounts (Badiou 2005)—in its decades of aporetic
subjectivation as contested inclusion. However, I also have a personal proxemic
experience and aporetic apperception to recount here. On my last visit to the
national film archives in Pune, in connection with this particular project, an
“event” highlighted for me the fruitful synthesis of postmodern and pre-modern
material and symbolic aporias in the late capitalist era of post-independence
India. It highlighted the emergent, possibly “uncounted,” futures of “postcolo-
niality” amid the fluid, disjunctural temporalities possible in nation space and in
cinema, which makes the newer cinematic assemblage familiar to a dispersant,
migratory global audience. It certainly focalized my inquiry upon the role of
the countermodern local or locale in deciding upon the futurity or possibility
of cinema other than the space-time of the modern developmentalist nation-
state. The account that follows will partly bring to mind Mazumdar, Gopalan,
or Gopinath’s theoretical moves toward a non-narrative but mobile imaginary of
Indian cinema, i.e. an experience of space as a chronotope of memory formation
that is future-oriented, while located in apparently anachronistic or current spatial
practices, including practices one must remind oneself to keep forgetting. Mine
was a countermodern experience of a temporally populous space that points at its
own ongoing metamorphosis into a future memory of the past, as Deleuze would
say (2001), as well as of other pasts. It reanimated my understanding of cinema
as an apperceptive historic medium that bypasses the time of the nation-state and
the “pre-/postcolonial” dyad, and seeks alternative, countermodern, disjunctural
locations and temporalities of memory. Though this synthesis is mainly played
out in the cinema, its other stage is “nation place,” a place that is a space brim-
ming with what Appadurai calls “the enchantment of multiplicity” (2006: 17).
I almost did not get out of Pune, Maharashtra, that day in June 2009: as I was
leaving the National Film Archives late that day in order to meet the driver of
my car to the airport, my hotel’s rental car lady called to inform me that, due to
a public march and attendant road closings, I had best make arrangements for an
“auto,” a nearly sci-fi like fantasy of transportation cannibalized out of the anti-
quation of the modern—a tottering three-wheeler passenger conveyance trans-
mogrified out of the two-wheeler “scooter,” both ubiquitous and renowned for its
frequent upsets—generally avoided by “foreigners” like myself, whose dollars
will rent the latest air-conditioned four-wheelers. Listening to her voice in the
hallway of the archives, itself a counterintuitive hybrid of the technological and
the antiquated/dilapidated (an institutional analogue of Indian megacities like
Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad), my information-retriever identity experienced
both dismay and a setback. I despaired both of finding an auto that would take me
as far as the airport, and of being safely transported with my luggage in one of
30 Introduction
those relics of transportation engineering. I was pulled back into the contradictions
at street level, which inform what Zakaria has called this “illiberal democracy.”
A religious procession of thousands in honor of Sant Tukaram—a patron saint
of Mahrashtra, on whose life the film Sant Tukaram (Prabhat Film Company,
1936), which won the Venice International Film Festival award in 1937, was
based—had set off from Pandharpur in Maharashtra, and was snaking its
way through Pune, also a cantonment town and a new information technology
metropolis, a silicon valley wannabe. The city was paralyzed; traffic was frozen,
the Bombay–Pune road and other major arteries of rush-hour traffic were closed.
I left the archives early, my researcher’s timetable out the window in response
to this local event, and found myself an auto. I explained to the driver the urgent
nature of my need to reach the airport. He did get me there, albeit for a fare that
was no doubt a windfall for him but a relative pittance for myself; I was only too
glad not to miss my flight.
On the way, I saw the many pilgrims patiently, and sometimes noisily, domi-
nating the city’s thoroughfares, normally chock-full of autos, public transporta-
tion, two-wheelers of various size and volume, and luxurious air-conditioned
road-hoggers such as the one I had forfeited to Sant Tukaram. The pilgrim men
were dressed in kurtas, dhotis, and turbans, and carried saffron pennants; the
women in colorful saris carried festive tasseled mini-cushions on their heads and
brought up the rear with the children. The time could be now, or a hundred years
earlier. A spatio-temporal vortex, in which countermodernity had checked my
project and an inquiry into postmodernity had suddenly opened up. As Majeed
has eloquently laid out in his discussion of nationalist autobiography and travel,
a primary criterion for anticolonial self-determination used to be that subject’s
ability to mobilize the technologically unfettered body within national space.16
Indeed, if a nation cannot lay claim to its own spaces, and if national subjects
cannot determine their own modes of travel within that space, national subjec-
tivity remains unrealized, as Gandhi repeatedly demonstrated with his anti-colo-
nial marches, wherein the walking body was a form of protest against usurpation
and displacement. This vortex of stoppage was, in a sense, reminiscent of, and
indeed evoked for me, the quandary that the Gandhian-Nehruvian mindset is said
to have faced in reclaiming and claiming national space and styles of mobility as
hallmarks of nationhood. I just happened to be on the losing side of it this time,
but hadn’t my side already lost once before? A fate well deserved, perhaps, for
underestimating the walkers.
National space, always at a premium, had been reclaimed by the saint and his
followers, mementos of a pre-modern cosmopolis still wrapped in chains of faith
around the feet of God and prophet. The material and the symbolic, the counter-
modern and the postmodern, had comfortably coiled around each other to expel
nothing more than an undue sense of their incompatibility, such as mine was in
that moment. As Joseph writes of the impure space of the early post-independ-
ence nation-state:
I would differ, however, that this impurity obviously and naturally persists beyond
early post-independence modernity into a late neocolonial postmodernity.
My proxemic account of urban space as it collided with myself and my
“research agenda” in the summer of 2009 demonstrates that “nation space” is
still at a premium and critical in the contest between political actors, and reli-
gious identities and entities; legitimate citizenry, “illegitimates”, and migrants;
feminist discourses and heterosexist or sexist fantasies; nationalist and globaliza-
tion discourses; vertical aspirations and sprawling ground-level miseries; devel-
opmental and exceptional neoliberalisms, and primordial discourses (Ong 2006);
and, above all, countermodernities and (post-)modernities. There is no declared
winner. Visibility itself is affected, enhanced, refracted, or reduced by all of
these contests and antagonisms on the ground of the nation. In the era of moder-
nity, these contests were depicted in Hindi cinema as realist or naturalist narra-
tives of epic or social melodrama, often predicated on countermodern “values.”
Those slick city flicks of the fifties, a belated and displaced black and white noir
dominated by the star texts of Guru Dutt, Dev Anand, Geeta Bali, Waheeda
Rehman, etc. are replicated 50-odd years later by other archival gestures, in
which postmodernity is already archived in the popular imagination as a reality
lived on the ground and yet as a visual repertoire for self-fashioning of old and
new liminalities.
“Rather than history containing space, different spaces … contain history,” as
Susan Stanford Friedman has argued of postcolonial Indian fiction,17 except that as
spatial optics and logics transmogrify in late capital, so does the temporal dimen-
sion, whether it is intrinsic or external to ideas of historical time. Temporality
becomes a-historical and “aspirational,” time becoming the ticking chroneme of
a bright “future,” of a coming revolution of lifestyles, aspirations, and mobilities.
Benjamin’s angel of history must still gaze with terror and pity, but look forward
this time. In recent films like New York (Kabir Khan 2009) and Kambakht Ishq
(Sabir Khan 2009), we see a globalization of space and bodies that has been
afoot since the late-twentieth century, in films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
(Aditya Chopra, 1995), Company (Ram Gopal Varma 2002), Being Cyrus (Homi
Adajania 2005), and Dhoom 1 and 2 (Sanjay Gadhvi 2004 and 2006). The cine-
matography, as well as narrative, of such films is a quest for global panoramas of
postmodernity, of hyperreality, where new relations between spaces and bodies
may be configured, albeit via a language of economic exceptionalism inspired by
neoliberal economic experience. The mobility of the hypermodern or postmodern
globalized Indian body is coeval, however, with the saturation of nation space by
different liminal bodies: the poor and itinerant, the disabled, the mendicant, the
32 Introduction
unidentified, the unclassified. Moreover, even the global or globalized body is
usually the traveling foot of the compass of extraterritorial nationality, whose
fixed foot, conversely, is nation space, both material and discursive.
This book will look at the post-independent state’s image archive of a hyperreal
class-consolidated civil society being produced at the post-statist conjuncture,
even as religious nationalism and ethnic conflict seem to drive the transformation
of this postmodern capitalist state in an indeterminate (and to some retrogres-
sive) direction. The de-centering of in-name-only “postcolonial” developmen-
talist optics and texts by postmodern hyperrealities and simulational styles will
be analyzed through a wide-ranging historical survey of Hindi films, ranging
from 1949 to 2009, as well as through focused readings of particular film and
star texts. Some of the cinematic themes that particularly reflect this de-centering
of “national” subjecthood—diffusely present as chapters of this book—are the
nation-state duality, or what I will call the “double role” performance or appear-
ance of state and nation; gender violence and citizenship claims; private and
public religion and power in India and in the diaspora; and fixing and dismantling
embodied ethnicity and gender and sexuality on screen.
This book has no predictive, let alone oracular, aims. It does not find or propose
that the Hindi cinema industry is “poised” in certain ways, aesthetically or politi-
cally. Predictability is highly rare in the industry, its regulations, financing and
products, and consequently so is intentionality. Most film personnel I speak to
tell me that they see no particular “trends,” “directions,” or “intentions.” Things
have come and gone, and they always will. Other than the aesthetics and pacing
of camera imposed by a globalized televisualism in an “illiberal democracy,”
perhaps the only other influential mode and aesthetic impulse derives from resur-
gent, and never quite absent, competing countermodernities. But these tenden-
cies do not quite a philosophy or theory make. Film industry folk who deny
intentionality and a consensual logic must be given some right to articulate what
they do and make.
Again, in terms of representational techniques and codifications within the
cinema, the return of the West in recent cinema is systematized as an “event,”
even a major historical mega-moment comparable to that other armed rebellion
during anti-colonial struggle. In terms of further techniques and codes, this
book does not attempt to navigate the fruitful terrains of song and dance and
other aesthetic grammars of the Hindi cinematic code that have recently become
significant renewed areas of inquiry within the field of Indian cinema studies
(Gopal and Moorti et al). While these aesthetic grammars would no doubt yield
insights regarding questions of temporality and space that will be addressed
through the anthropological and historical dialogues in this book, such a study
remains beyond the immediate purview of the questions sought to be answered
within the framework of this project. I welcome and look forward to such engage-
ments in the future.
1 Structure, event, and liminal
practices in recent Hindi films
The countermodern
While different representations of various liminal identities will be examined in
films spanning over 60 years (1948–2009) in the following chapters, in this first
chapter I use the aforementioned four films to explicate a theory of history and
of the historical event—especially the violent event—that grounds this cinema’s
Structure, event, and liminal practices 35
discourse of history. I think of the violent event and its aesthetic of the citizen-
subject as a countermodern element within the discourse of Hindi cinematic
history in Foucault’s sense,1 and perhaps in a Nietzschean sense. The counter-
modern allows history to be understood as differential weighting of structure or
event, whole or part, and a radical questioning of their connection that rewrites
the subject’s status in each iteration and foregrounds the liminality of identity.
Foucault’s scattered yet ubiquitous articulations of the countermodern privilege
the polythetic substrata of experience, space, and time over the monistic locus of
subjectivity or selfhood, which he calls “catastrophic,” as in his comparison of
Christianity’s “appropriation of morality by the theory of the subject” versus the
Greek “search for styles of existence as different from each other as possible”
(1990: 253–4). In a related context, within Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality,
violence has an underlying public pietistic function, a performance of sublime
conviviality that undergirds history.2 Historical discourse in the Indian cinematic
context is markedly pervaded both by a sense of disjointedness—of time out of
sequence—and a sense of the sheer public performative potential of violence. The
disjointed spatio-temporal figurations and ideations that mark the post-independ-
ence nation-state’s “postmodernity” as countermodern has been prefigured by
other scholars who have engaged with questions of modernity in the anti-colonial
setting. In these accounts, modernity, nationalism, and the state were not neces-
sarily polarized, co-extensive, or successive. For instance, Chakrabarty’s account
of the “pre-nationalist” colonial Bengali comprador class shows their polythetic
affiliations of identity characterized by an evasion of fixed and regulated contexts
and temporalities that concepts of statehood, nationhood, tradition, and modernity
suppose and impose. Chakrabarty describes the comprador Bengali upper-caste
male’s organic and “pragmatic” tactics of negotiating new foreign rule by creating
an apolitical, non-secular private realm of “mytho-religious” practice (2000: 222)
that was differentiated from, and privileged over, the public spaces of Mandarin
work for the British. This mytho-religious realm, remarkably Nietzschean in many
senses, where gods, ancestors, and daily rites formed the core of identity complete
with household pieties, including animal sacrifices, challenged, or rather ignored,
the hegemony of the public space of labor for the “state,” without, however,
invoking the oppositional political figure of the “nation.” If anything, any idea
of the nation may instead have been a spectral constituent of the public space of
the state and official economy to this pre-national comprador class (Chakrabarty
2000: 222). Hence, the anti-colonial idea of the “nation” as a political rival of the
state would have been irrelevant to this pre-national “pragmatism.”
The crucial psychic and subjectivating distinction of it would have been that
which exists between an apolitical private as well as public (ibid.: 218–24). This
pre-national distinction does not map neatly onto a colonial or postcolonial vocab-
ulary of liberatory (domestic) nationalism versus repressive (foreign) state-ism.
Its spatialities and temporalities are not so much antithetical as dis-“junctural,”
de-centered, dis-“placed,” and un-“timely.” The indirection, the indifference that
the comprador pre-nationalist subject presents to the colonial state and its appa-
ratuses is not revolutionary or counterrevolutionary; it is seemingly aphasic and
catachrestic.
36 Structure, event, and liminal practices
In later anticolonial “nationalist” thought and practice, however, Chakrabarty
argues that such indifference and evasion of the category of the “nation” morphed
into an emergent political consciousness of nationalism, wherein locus and chro-
nology—or a determinate chronotope—acquired a new urgency and constitu-
tive significance.3 The amorphous and oblique idea of the pre-national, spectral,
as well as mytho-religious, gave way to the morally triumphal antithesis of the
now fully “foreign” colonial state and its repressive public apparatus regulating
anticolonial “nationalism.” Therefore, public and private now seemed to be more
precisely and claustrophobically charted onto state and nation, while simultane-
ously, colonial rule threatened to penetrate deeper into the psychic, as well as
civic, structures of emergent nationalist consciousness. No pre-national, primal,
pre-political private could remain, just as the official state and economy could
no longer be a non-constitutive outside, a purely pragmatic exteriority. As the
nation consciously diverged from the official state, it also paradoxically became
more fixed in a psychic and physical space dependent upon its antithetical status,
becoming the displaced reversal of the state, like a spectral trace. This colonized
nation then, in fact, transformed the private, which it appropriated, to impose a
more regulatory framework upon it. Private space became partly feminized and
the male nationalists’ laboratory for the newly gendered discourses of “public”
nationalism (Chakrabarty 2000: 224; see also Chatterjee 1993, 1986).
Indeed, in a further series of syntagmatic reconsolidations, binarizations,
and realignments, the public and the private were prised apart and yet coun-
terpoised to be each other’s refracted images. If the state and the nation were
exteriorized categories equally subordinated to male mytho-religious interiority
in pre-nationalist times, a new public-oriented anti-colonialist nationalism both
disavowed and yet reinstated the regulatory regimen of the colonial state within
a non-secular mythos, and only partially recovered the mytho-religious within a
private sphere. This was now reconceived as a feminized heteroglossia consti-
tuted by its separation from the publicness of colonial officialdom, as well as
male nationalism. A prime instance of such deployment of the distinctly mytho-
religious as the new feminized private is the concept of the nation as mother
goddess: both god and ancestor—two concepts that Chakrabarty claims were
influential in demarcating and separating the pre-nationalist’s “mytho-religious”
space—became domesticated in the figure of the goddess of anticolonial imagi-
nation, whose paean is the nationalist hymn “Vande Mataram.” 4
Since colonial times, the Indian state and nation have been neither identical nor
antithetical, despite efforts to shape and characterize them in that way; they have
been, rather, a shifting collage or confluence of multiple spatial and temporal
consciousnesses or assemblages. Within the post-independence chronotope,
state and nation continue as each other’s ideological and spatial other, as well
as double, and thus engage in a pedagogical dialectic (Bhabha 1994) with each
other. For instance, when the nation made its home in the private sphere sancti-
fied by the relocated mytho-religious, it also partially dragged the state in with
it in the form of new disciplinary and disciplined practices and functions of
anti-colonial nationalism. It is this ongoing co-implication of the state and the
nation that Indian cinema engages in its conversation with history, as a double
Structure, event, and liminal practices 37
movement of event and structure with multiple spatial and temporal points of
origin and iteration. This unfixed plural assemblage of space and time is still the
hallmark of Indian modernity, postmodernity, or countermodernity.
While the state and the nation are not fully polar, neither are the public and
the private, despite anti-colonial nationalist pressures to articulate them as such;
instead, private and public are often co-articulated. Referring back to Chakrabarty
once more, just as the nationalists’ deployment of the private as a laboratory
for keeping alive a banned nationalism brought into the public understanding of
nationalism plural private mythologies of identity, so similar plural privates now
inform the mythic repertoire of twenty-first-century public nationalism, images
of which we see in Hindi cinema. These later privates are partly derived from the
“mytho-religious” effects of pre-nationalism, as well as from the plural privates
of the high anti-colonial nationalists. But they do not, tout court, correspond to
some totalizing private ethos of nationalism in the sense of being purely oppo-
sitional to bureaucratic apparatuses of statecraft. Instead, they are intrinsically
plural, anti-totalizing (not to be confused necessarily with anti-totalitarian), and
both pre- and post-hegemonic. In all, then, the spatial and temporal hinterlands
of anticolonial subject formation—past and present—invoke the category of the
countermodern, and dismantle concepts of fixity and linearity. Here, regional or
communal disarticulations of power and rights are noticeable in their catalyzing
of differentials between the “haves” and the “have-nots”, between “authentic”
and “inauthentic” subjects of decolonization and globalization, among those who
experience national space and time on quite different topographical registers and
asymmetrical developmental clocks. Uncertain or indeterminate subjects play
or try many roles state-saturated societies impose on them, in order to nego-
tiate identities and identifications regarding that state, and multiple migrations,
scenarios, enactments, and trans-border identifications and nomadic identities
are common.
However, for Sahlins, beyond the duality of the prescriptive and the performa-
tive, there is not a necessary or sufficient difference between how an event is
experienced or recounted differently by collective versus individual subjects of
history, or at different moments of collective or individual recounting. Sahlins
only briefly acknowledges contextual variation. While privileging the longue
duree temporality of what he calls the “structure of the conjuncture”—that is,
event as the conjuncture of happening and structure—Sahlins shortchanges the
question of the contextual specificity and plurality of those serialized but not
equivalent conjunctures (as Benedict Anderson theorizes them, which I cover
below). A second conception of the event, with regard to the idea of contex-
tual specificity, and its fate in the Indian “modern”, derives from Ramanujan; he
writes:
not much has been shown (except some laudatory words on TV channels) by
way of the fight against corruption being continued after the group members
are gunned down under government orders. A better and far more universal
ending would have been to show lakhs of people coming out on the streets to
protest against the government’s orders to kill the six friends …
(Film Information 2006: 2)
In other words, the event does not stand outside of a certain inevitability of plot,
of theme, or heavy “representation.” It does not become the trigger:
completely freeing the theatre from the weight of the ‘illusory imitative-
ness’ and ‘representationality’ … through a transition to montage of ‘work-
able artifices’ … any aggressive aspect of the theatre … that subjects the
spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and
mathematically calculated to produce in him [sic] certain emotional shocks
which … become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the
ideological side of what is being demonstrated—the ultimate ideological
conclusion …
(Eisenstein 2002; formatting original)
The event as montage or attraction would not so much iterate a certain historical
grand narrative as constitute a new spectator, who “himself [sic] constitutes the
basic material of the theatre,” guided “in the desired direction (frame of mind)”
(Eisenstein 2002: 303–4). I will return later in this chapter to the importance of
the reconstitution of the spectator in the following discussion of the later film
Billu Barber, whose “a-historicity” enables, I suggest, a stronger thrust toward
animating spectatorship, rather than re-animating grand structural historical
narratives of subject formation.
Instead, in RDB, history becomes inseparable from aesthetic event or framing,
a mediated re-enactment. Violent rebellion as “event” becomes the hinge meta-
phor for anti-colonial struggle, but only as mediated within Sue’s reverie about
postcolonial citizenship as India’s love-fest with a new West, inaugurated by the
awakening of romance between herself and the leader of the Indian students,
a “modern” Sikh named Daljeet or DJ. Event cannot, therefore, escape grand
cinematic and historical metanarrative (Eisenstein 2002: 304–5), nor “blow up”
46 Structure, event, and liminal practices
the minds of spectators, politically speaking, so that they can break free from
the repetitive historical structures that bind them to the same dead-at-the-scene-
of-action outcomes that reduce repetition to sameness, not difference (Deleuze
1994), all claims to neo-patriotism notwithstanding. One character affection-
ately refers to his friends as “nautanki saale,” or “public vaudeville types”;8 true
enough, if one considers that their very revolt is recorded and choreographed
on a “cinematic” register complete with alternating “historical footage” in sepia
overtones, and their apologia is publicly “mediated” via All India Radio. They
are eulogized on national television by youth and students nationwide as model
revolutionaries, whose statement of violence is thereby already mediated by
national-statist “tolerance” for apparently intolerable crimes against the state,
and ploughed into a national-statist enunciatory stream. The state and the nation
are then, once again, realigned.
What exactly are the possibilities for embodied liminality in such supposedly
transparent postcolonial allegories of politics as history, and history as a political
narrative, mediated by memory resurrected as and by the aesthetic? One sees in
RDB not a shift in the representability of nationalism, but in the representability
of a neo-imperialist West’s commerce with a decolonized nation-state, presented
through the ever-useful mythos of an interracial romance. Aamir Khan, the star
and DJ of RDB, now scolds the national public in commercials for not making the
nation more tourist-friendly. Managing the topos of nationalism in an era wherein
liberalized economies have made “soft power” imperialism the dominant force
in decolonized state formations, RDB cannot but operate within the liminality of
the representational dilemma of crisis-ridden (neo-)nationalism, hailed anew as
the white (wo)man’s burden of neocolonial reform.
This hailing of a neoliberal nation-state is the actual aesthetic project of RDB,
which paradoxically suppresses liminal countermodernities. No national subject
exists who is not preemptively gathered up in the British director Sue’s repre-
sentational apparatus of the anti-colonial and decolonized nation-state. And
while fatuous or infatuated Western female figures sympathetic to natives are
not unusual in the literature and film of empire as well as within nationalist
historiography,9 Sue’s novelty lies in her occupying the three roles of character,
historian/narrator and diegetic director of her film, whereby there is a complete
containment of all resistive and anti-dominance discourses and actions within
her own pet aesthetic project. In this schema, only the metropolitan gets to repre-
sent or present the peripheral. The actors exemplify the “universal” modernity
and consumerist affect of global “youth culture,” erasing differences and specifi-
cities of time and place.
Thus, RDB’s “event” repeats itself to produce not alterity, but a neoliberal
state-driven identity, a hegemonically anti-hegemonic approach to history.
It is this specific mandate that necessitates its collapse of event and struc-
ture, misreading the violent event’s repetition as a solitary stand-in for the
more complex story and changeful narrative of systematic exploitation that
marks both colonial and postcolonial histories, and sweeping up all genuinely
countermodern liminalities, such as the unreconstructed Hindu fundamen-
talist subject, into the magic web of timeless nationalism. Anti-state violent
Structure, event, and liminal practices 47
events thus appear as the only history in town, but that history is not read
as intrinsically mutable, as a generator of ruin, even though some of the
scenes of the film are set among architectural ruins. Instead of suggesting
the singularity of the decolonized present for those who inhabit and embody
it, every “present” image is literally “hyperlinked” to a virtual “past” image.
In one notable scene, the young Muslim college student Aslam Khan barges
through a door bristling against his family’s “communalism” to emerge on
the other side in his past “historical” incarnation as a Hindu revolutionary,
whose struggle against empire must also break through into a recognition
and rejection of divisive communalist thinking. Alternating between specta-
torship and performance—the youth are initially avid and passive television
watchers, and only reluctantly become actors in Sue’s docudrama—the Indian
characters nevertheless uphold the integrity of the line separating appearance
and reality as two intact realms of “happening” that evince the structurally
iterative relationship of past and present. The present is a repetition of the
past, and re-enactment is duplication. In each historical re-enactment that the
film within the film presents, the event is a self-contained temporality, with no
difference between past and present times, past and present alterities, and the
liminalities generated not just by politics but also by historical duration. The
anti-colonial armed robbery of the train at Kakori in Sue’s film is cinemati-
cally dissolved into the attack upon neocolonial arteries of power and knowl-
edge in RDB, i.e. the youth’s brief takeover of All India Radio followed by a
gun-battle with anti-terrorism forces. The youth mobilized in the colonial past
are merely sepia originals of angry youth today.
No gap opens up—either in Sahlins’ sense of what needs to be understood as
not an identification but as a conjuncture, nor in Ramanujan’s sense of a disjunc-
ture—between a collective or universal experience, then or now, and a singular
experience now or then. Refusing to allow a gap between temporalities of the
event leads to an absence of liminal identities. Limialities must be submerged,
subjugated into iterations of the universal nationalist subject, whether secular
or fundamentalist. Violent subversiveness also operates lyrically as narrative
montage and disjointed imagery such as multiple optical printing superim-
posing past upon present, rather than recognizing the difference between past
and present. The event is almost infinitely repeatable, in contexts that are almost
entirely semblable. For it is not an uneven trajectory of history within a nation-
alist telos that RDB is detailing, despite its assertions to that effect; instead, it
is documenting the struggle of neo-imperialism’s visual matrix to imprint itself
upon the visual matrix of neo-nationalism.
Indeed, given its abjuration of irreducible liminal, countermodern, and
singular embodiments subtending an “eventful” history, RDB visibly performs
the contradictions inherent in Hindi cinematic and historical subject formation,
at least from the fifties to the nineties. Its narrative of subject formation is medi-
ated by mystifications such as Indian national history, as the post-globalization
West’s “passion” for hailing the seamless re-enactment of the anti-colonial past
in the neocolonial present. Its attempt in so doing would appear to be the innate
urge of “mockumentary,” or:
48 Structure, event, and liminal practices
the fiction film’s intersections with documentary—and its quite common
arousal (purposeful or not) of what we might call the viewer’s ‘documentary
consciousness’: a particular mode of embodied and ethical spectatorship that
informs and transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real
(Sobchak 2004: 261)
The viewer, whose historical and cultural competence alone produces the spec-
tatorial ethical affect of “neo-patriotism” that the film aims for, the kind of patri-
otic spectator hailed by such epistemes of filmic ontology, is in fact frozen in
an epistemologically stagnant situation, which equates colonial and neocolonial
political traumas. The historiography of public violence in RDB, which strings
along all historic events with the same chain of unvarying temporality, produces
subjects who are the “forever-changing-nothing-new” that Walter Benjamin saw
as characteristic of modernity (Gilloch 1996), and that Ramanujan lambasts as
modernity’s malaise.
In RDB, as I have said before, literariness and textuality are foregone in the race
for eventfulness. The film is immersed in the “event,” in some senses as discussed
by Tarlo in her book on the 1975 Emergency in India under the Congress leader-
ship of Indira Gandhi (2003: 6). Tarlo explains that anthropological method has
often disdained a focus on “event” and preferred study and analysis of “structure”
in societies. In her own work on the Emergency, Tarlo advocates and actualizes a
departure from an anthropological veneration of structure, because while struc-
tures are undeniable, influential, and real, “events” are not only obviously “real”
and palpable (and documentable, dateable, locatable, and so on), but in fact often
determine structures and embed and “emplot” structure in historical writing and
representation. The Indian Emergency (1975–7) was such an event, which picked
Structure, event, and liminal practices 49
up extant threads of political debate, dialogue, and dissension, and catalyzed
their distillation into narratives of history—narratives that “report” but also
induce revolution—and whose literariness and monumentality are subsequently
memorialized in official records, archives and buildings (Tarlo 2003: 21–61). The
Emergency’s narrativization of Indian political history is indeed a potent trace
and subtext, arguably, in RDB’s chronicle of youth frustration and mobilization
against political corruption. However, departing from Tarlo’s idea of the event as
an “emplotment” and not a series of identical repetitions in history, RDB is so
invested in the latter concept of the “event” as to refuse or fail to acknowledge the
literariness, the evolving constructedness, of the history the events purportedly
repeat. The film indeed misses “narrativity” and remains “mimetic” in a sense
that is temporally and ideologically foreclosed.
a political decision that is made outside the juridical order and general rule
… The condition of exception is thus a political liminality, an extraordi-
nary decision to depart from a generalized political normativity [Badiou’s
‘normal’], to intervene in the logics of ruling and of being ruled …
(quoted in Ong 2006: 5; emphasis mine)12
The terrorist is a liminal entity or phenomenon, who throws into radical doubt
the constitution, coherence, or consistency of the modern developmental nation-
state and its borders. The apparent immutability of “frontier” thinking must
today be transmuted into a border performativity, in which the very iteration
of multiple differences, in different voices and tongues, will lead to an identity
map that is not about equivalences and translations but about simultaneous dis-
identifications (Chow 1991: 98; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 26). This is exactly
the condition of the citizen recently re-contextualized as the border-crossing,
deterritorialized terrorist in Hindi cinema.
Since the 1990s, depictions of violence have accelerated in Hindi cinema,
recalling acerbic points of view, for example “Violence is not an event but a
worldview and way of life” (Taylor 2003: 209). Hindi cinema’s discourse of
violence reaches the apogee of its investigation into the question of “be-longing,”
of the status of the citizen, incipient since the fifties,13 with the border as the
new prophylactic, splitting—condensing as well as displacing—state legitimacy
into the twin tropes of terrorist violence and citizenship, rather than maintaining
terror as a purely externalized threat to the integrity of the body politic, some-
times metonymized as the “foreign hand” (Bose 2009). The tropes of violence
and citizenship are twinned in the sense of Derrida’s iterative signifying contexts:
contextually varied repetition signifies sameness as well as difference, re-enact-
ment rather than duplication (Derrida 1988). The threat to security has spun
beyond the discovery of violence in the alien terrorist (predictable difference, as
in Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap, 2004) to the terrorist masquerading as citizen
and the citizen masquerading as terrorist within the body politic (unpredictable
sameness, as in MMJ).
This postcolonial process of subject formation, whose unconscious is saturated
by the experience of violence, can be discerned in a formulation from Homi Bhabha:
Core and periphery strictly speaking are relational concepts that have to do
with differential cost structures of production … the concentration of core
processes in states different from those in which peripheral processes are
concentrated tends to create differing internal political structures in each, a
difference which in turn becomes a major sustaining bulwark of the inegali-
tarian interstate system that manages and maintains the axial division of
labour …
(Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 78–9)
The Dalit, untouchable, or, in this case, unspeakable and un-nominated, is the
pivotal node of the management of labor (class and race conjoined in “caste”)
by the nation-state system (nation) via the regulatory regime of ethnic “class”-
ification (ethnic/caste hierarchy). The tributary structure that feeds this core-
periphery interstate system, according to Balibar and Wallerstein, is the domestic
economy. There, in the process of capital accumulation, ethnicity and race can
be manufactured (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 79), amidst other processes, via
Structure, event, and liminal practices 53
domestic relations of labor. The history of nationalism is actually the history of
racism, or that of materially determined, as well as state-generated, labor racism
and ethnicity-generated caste racism.15 In India, this state-generated or state-
subtended racism often takes the form of discrimination linked to ghettoized
work: unpaid or low paid and unstructured labor producing and reproducing
domestic and global core-periphery relations. In this sense, the vendor is “bare
life” as unstructured labor—he sells street liquor, does odd household jobs, or
acts as a rag-picker—to be created and identified as a different “race,” an internal
other—insaan (“human”) with no nam-o-nishan (“name or address”). His “non”-
identity is constituted by his un-“class”-ifiable laboring place in core-peripheral
structures of serfdom straddling the neoliberal states’ zones of exception (Ong
2006), and its logic of internal “race”-ing of its captive labor force, an articulation
of ethnicity and race via modalities of class and labor (Balibar and Wallerstein
1991). In this film, history, as we understand the term in the age of “nation-
states,” is a product of racialized thinking, where the subject is enacted through
various mise-en-scènes of dehumanized labor.
At last, Hindi cinema appears poised to re-present the liminal in the hollowed
out individual instance, without representing her or him through morally grand
political or ethical rhetoric, or even through the classificatory discourses of citi-
zenship and census taking. Indeed, since the vendor hardly ever speaks and is
never spoken of—barely noticed—by any of the film’s characters, the bar on
“representation” is maintained throughout the film though he is undeniably
“present.” His only self-identifying act is that of “acting” as the aspirational
citizen attempting poise within global capitalist praxes and spaces of consum-
erism. However, while he attempts to perform “citizen” and cross securitiza-
tions that exclude a deracinated and de-classed workforce, he is instead produced
and enacted as an example of bare life who is an undeniable but inarticulate
entity, without representation, given only within a “re-presentation,” a hollow
duplication that gestures unmistakably to his liminality as farcical and absurd
performance of citizenship (another sort of nautanki). However, the disjunctive
iterations, the proliferating enunciatory possibilities of his very performance
also re-articulate citizenship itself as liminality. The vendor’s staging of his
own social death—a race and class apart—is not a hall of mirrors, nor an echo
chamber; it is repetition with a difference. Terror and trauma now invade classi-
ficatory structures of licit citizenship; the anonymous, un-identified terrorist can
be a citizen, and the citizen can and does now inhabit the terrorist’s alienation.
In this film, therefore, we find the quest for the one who “belongs” within
the count, the true citizen—a critical South Asian fable of decolonization—loop
back and re-emerge as terrorist act and aporia. The vendor, the man without a
”name,” switches to enacting terrorist rather than citizen when his bare, meager
entitlement from globalized capital—handling a bottle of perfume that costs
10,500 rupees, a sum beyond his wildest imagination—is brutally challenged. A
failed assertion against capital backfires into a failed prophylaxis against terror,
both failures threatening the prime assemblage of neoliberal consumerism, the
global mall realizing and hyperrealizing external and internal core-periphery
relations.
54 Structure, event, and liminal practices
The policeman’s enunciation of “Citizen!” that I mentioned earlier reminds
the film’s viewers that, in the communal discursive proliferations of the instance
of so-called citizenship, the so-called citizen may be the terrorist, another ironic
reflection upon the quandaries of global security agencies. The meaning and
nature of citizenship is ambiguated. Moreover, as MMJ shows, the so-called
patriotic Hindu-identified citizen may also be a person who imagines a state of
personal vigilantism—another sort of anti-establishment monadic terrorism—
replacing the police force, thereby adding another challenging dimension to the
state’s security crisis. Finally, the police in MMJ are not only stereotypically
brutal, but perhaps also brutalized by the postcolonial national elite. When they
do try to intervene in the crimes of powerful citizens, elite hegemonic interests
intercede with their superiors to defang them. In MMJ one sees a moment of
hesitation, of slippage between ethical and penal, visible in the resistance of the
police to elite hegemonic interests. This becomes evident in the police’s eventual
reluctance to participate in the hegemonic and othering discourse of the state and
the so-called national subject, the licit citizen. In contrast to the hardly actualized
policemen of HKA, in MMJ the police have feelings and cry; their sympathies
with the citizens they watch and protect ebb and flow as visibly as their loyal-
ties to the state they serve. They are, in the final analysis, nearly as liminal as
the terrorist or the citizen, because they strain to be realized beyond the func-
tion of “excrescences” of the national state, agential representatives who may not
exactly belong, or blend in, with the citizenry.16
In MMJ, as we have already seen, the state certainly has feelings, just as the
police do. The state interrogates its subjects within the paradigm of its own
affect, thereby channeling the relationship between state and citizen into an
“evental site” where the state is on one hand teetering upon the verge of being
another affective participant in the drama of the nation, and on the other acting as
the security implement of a normative and totalizing situation. If the state can be
humanized, ethicized—with brothers who cry as they perform their law-enforce-
ment duties against their brothers in Deewar, and policemen who cry, reflect, and
philosophize in MMJ—then the state is partly reconfigured as another liminal,
disjointed, fragmented participant in the national discourse along with other
liminalities. In MMJ, the embodiment of the state’s affect, as well as the limi-
nalization of the state in the evental site, is clearly glimpsed.
Citizens are being put on stage, as spectators and as actors:
[they perform within the available] notions of citizenship [that] are infused
with public images, official definitions, informal customary practice, nostal-
gic longings, accrued historical memory and material culture, comforting
mythologies of reinvention, and lessons learned from past rejections … the
anxious enactments of citizens as actors
(Joseph 1999: 5)
“Billu Barber”
Another less cataclysmic trend that might be associated with this new radical
indeterminacy of identity is that of the incorporation of the spectator within
the cinematic frame itself, what I will call a “reverse direct address” mode, as
seen thematically throughout and quite dramatically in one shot of the film Billu
Barber (Priyadarshan, 2009), hereafter BB. By “reverse direct address,” I refer to
a dialectic of the exegetic spectatorial gaze becoming absorbed into the diegetic,
wherein the exegetic spectator is literally resorbed into the texture of the film as
onscreen image, asserting affinity as well as iteration, or the audience’s actorli-
ness. The urge fully articulated or “signaled” in BB, to apply Deleuze’s insight on
repetition and theatricality, is to replace the concept of filmic “representation” (an
actor socially, politically, and affectively representing or speaking for his fans)
as false abstraction, with the idea of material and psychological repetition (the
actor and fan as interchangeable signs onscreen) as real signification (Deleuze
1994). In BB, this is achieved by patiently experimenting with and fine-tuning the
spatial and psychological “distance” that separates actor and audience, star and
fan, so that the actor and audience step in and out of each other’s “visual” frames,
in what Sobchak has called “cinema’s visible inscription of the dual, reversible,
Structure, event, and liminal practices 57
and animated visual structure of embodied and mobile vision.” She describes this
as looking “at,” as well as “through,” vision (2004: 150, 149).
BB serves as recent Hindi cinema’s perfect “sign” of the “correct distance”
in theatrical spectatorship, which makes the difference between actor and spec-
tator into a doubling or repetition that demonstrates that “which in eternal return
makes him [actor or spectator] ill into a liberatory and redemptive repetition”
(Deleuze 1994: 23). This might also be read as the re-spatializing and distance-
reducing mechanism whereby repetition works toward the attainment of a kind
of psychic stasis via instinctual drives that exceeds the pleasure principle, aka
Freud. If the compulsion to repeat is to work towards restoring “an earlier state
of things,”19 and if this work involves a spatial mechanism of relocation to a
psychic “ante-riority,” i.e. to an ante-psychological psychic “home” defined by
instincts and not by psychoanalytic ideals of conscious self-retrieval (i.e. repre-
sentation), then spectatorial maneuvers to become one with stardom (as per the
Metzian formulation of screen viewing as streaming self-projection or mirroring,
as imaginary signification) is a similar spatial maneuver “through the individual
psyche” and “into a phylogenetic past” (Smith 2002: 220). For this, melodramatic
form is naturally found to be the best medium of articulation, because melo-
drama bypasses representation in favor of re-enactment or repetition (Brooks
1994: 19). Such a required embodiment appearing as the symbolic consubstan-
tiality or “phylogenesis” of spectator and screen image is also effected by other
identifications or duplications in classic melodrama, often bodily marks or signs
upon the body, such as the proverbial locket—“La croix de ma mere” (Brooks
1994: 18)—that effects recognition and (con-)substantiation of lineage claims,20
like the twin beeping lockets we find exhorted in high melodramatic registers in
BB’s film within the film.
BB is the story of a Bollywood star and his long-lost childhood friend, Billu,
the village barber, being reunited by a series of fantastic twists of plot during
location shooting for a film that would appear to be a Hindi remake of Star Wars.
The relationship of the Bollywood star and his fandom is at the thematic core of
the film. To consider the individual psychic formation, spectatorship is concerned
with achieving the proper distance needed for “repetitions [of selfhood], particu-
larly of the aesthetic variety … [to work as] sallies from a repressed wish that
has been condensed and displaced [what I would call a wish not only to have the
star but to be the star]” (Smith 2002: 220). The illness of cinematic spectatorship,
the trauma of the unfulfilled promise of representation of spectator by actor, then
has a built-in healing system achieved by manipulating spatial possibilities, as
BB suggests.
Since desiring spectatorial identification, as proposed by Freud, Metz, and
Deleuze, is quintessentially an act of perversely reaching a psychic stasis beyond
pleasure by refilling an absent auratic image with a compulsive spectatorial self-
presence, or of going beyond the pleasure of desiring as identification to reach a
far more anterior psychic interior of desiring as identity, an ante-psychological,
and pre-psychoanalytic realm of instincts, then such spectatorship is essentially
a spacing and distancing trick, skill, or pedagogy. The more the star’s absence is
recognized, the more the spectator repeats or enacts the star instead of despairing
58 Structure, event, and liminal practices
or lashing out—as an exteriorization of principles of the imaginary signifier or
of interiority as anteriority—and the less the absence of the star “signifies” as
disrupting or disabling viewing pleasure. Eschewing the conventional pleas-
ures of representation for the absorption and repetition of actor and spectator
in each other by determining the “correct distance” between actor and spec-
tator—whereby the psychic distance needed for viewing pleasure morphs into
the psychic distance covered in condensation and displacement of the imaginary
into the signifier—BB invokes and activates a foundational yet liminal principle
of spectatorship and repetition as an emergent preoccupation of Hindi cinema.
To consider the “phylogenetic past” of this spectatorial self-formation, specta-
torship in BB is a fundamentally collective and communal act of repetition and
of re-traditionalizing of modernity. The privileged access ultimately granted to
the humble barber Billu by the star Sahir Khan works out as a type of celestial
visit to the village as a whole. When Sahir chooses the little village of Budbuda
for the shooting location of his new “sci-fi” mythological, the “star”-struck
villagers, including Billu, experience the God-like Sahir Khan in their midst, in
their village, upon their soil; erstwhile they had been engaged in single-minded
abortive attempts to enter Sahir Khan’s space from afar. Along with a collective
merging of star and fan, therefore, Sahir Khan’s “appearance” validates a “past”
mythopoesis, whereby traditional communities and publics expected Gods and
saints to be demotically immanent as well as transcendent.
In the film, “material” absorption and iteration do not, however, equate to a
physical mirroring or reflection, a production of identity or sameness in the sense
of equivalence (Deleuze 1994: 1–3, 19, 22); rather, they instantiate what Metz
has described as “identifying only with something seeing” (1982: 97), i.e. a self-
consciousness of dual location within the spectatorial continuum, what Deleuze
describes as the signification of difference in repetition produced only within the
spectatorial relationship, and only when viewer and image are set at the correct
distance in relation to each other within the trajectory of the gaze (1994: 23).
Productive difference, itself intrinsic to repetition (Deleuze 1994), depends in
theatre and in other signifying systems of repetition upon the spacing and posi-
tioning of the signifiers, which “testify to the spiritual and natural powers which
act beneath the words, gestures, characters and objects represented … [such signs
or signifiers] signify repetition as real movement, in opposition to representation
which is a false movement of the abstract” (ibid.: 23).
In BB, one particular shot exactly bears out the status of material repetition as
the true producer of the authentic movement and animating spirit of this cinema,
that of the indeterminate and canny splitting and rematerializing of the trans-
cendent subject, when it insistently adjusts the spatio-temporal lag between the
differential subject positions of spectator and image famously proposed in Metz’s
idea of the “missed encounter” and “unauthorized scopophilia” of the cinematic
viewer.21 The protagonist Billu looks in wistfully upon a scene of film shooting
where the star is Sahir Khan—played by actual megastar Shah Rukh Khan—his
long-lost childhood friend. Contrary to the expectations, even demands, of his
family and community, Billu has thus far refused to “cash in” on his link with his
childhood friend. He has refused to enter the world of the cinema and the iconic
Structure, event, and liminal practices 59
star, no matter what the pressures of communal status, financial need, or even
personal longing. He is now separated from the star by the diegetic mythos of
celebrity-hood, the technical armature of the shooting of a diegetic film, and the
necessary cinematic separation of spectator and actor redoubled (since already in
the filmic “missed encounter” the spectator and the actor are never in the same
spatio-temporal frame).
In one single frame, Billu is almost “seen” by Sahir Khan, but this, too, ends in
failure. Goaded by his family and community’s pleas and demands to get personal
audiences with Sahir Khan, Billu reluctantly joins other villagers in soliciting
the idolized Sahir Khan’s attention or notice. Intrigued by a hauntingly familiar
voice—that of Billu joining the villagers’ choral hailing of his name—Sahir
looks intently for a few seconds at his fans perched on a tree branch in an effort
to get closer to him and to be hailed by him as successful spectators and adorers.
For a deftly triangulated instance, in which the fans are the common object of
the gaze of diegetic star (Sahir), the camera eye, and exegetic viewer (ourself), all
within the depth of field internal to the screen, we see a serried rank of spectators
including Billu himself, a fan like us, waving back at the camera, at Sahir, at us.
In a moment of pure illusion, the spectator seems to have finally reached the goal
of being imported, transported, spirited, and absorbed within the frame of the
film, of having crossed the line between screen and spectator, thereby defying
the convention of the impossible contiguity of spectator and image.
As Sobchak writes insightfully:
all the bodies in the film experience—those onscreen and offscreen (and
possibly the screen itself)—are potentially subversive bodies. They have
the capacity to function both figurally and literally. They are pervasive and
diffusely situated in the film experience. Yet these bodies are also materially
circumscribed and can be specifically located, each arguably becoming both
the “grounding body” of sense and meaning since each exists in dynamic
figure-ground relation of reversibility with the others …
(2004: 67)
In her evocation of the “literal and the figural,” the transcendent materiality of
cinematic subjectivity is once again cited or sighted. The visual object of the
exegetic spectator—the diegetic spectator and fan, who doubles the exegetic
spectator’s desire and position—becomes a potential re-embodiment or re-enact-
ment of the spectator as both spectator and image onscreen (also in Metz’s sense
of the “imaginary signifier,” as both a perceptually undeniable presence and an
empirically unquestionable absence), by literally recombining the spectator as
actor and image.22
This may at first appear to be recalling something of the visual economy of
darsanic encounter in Hindi cinema—something that Prasad has, for instance,
seen as typical of the Indian cinematic phenomenon whereby the Metzian
“missed encounter” gives way to a plenary communal phenomenon of the
godhead showing themselves to a rapt and absorbed spectator—but what it
actually demonstrates is the dismantling of the presence-absence binary, not
60 Structure, event, and liminal practices
its affirmation or dissolution. This scene comprises both an imaginary and
a symbolic mode, because the actors in this scene of address are themselves
spectators of the shooting, like Billu, involved in processes of identificatory
merging, as well as discrete transactionality, with the star of the film and of
the film within the film. The spatiotemporal separation of image or actor and
spectator has been bridged by the incarnation of spectator(s) within the frame
as actor(s), closing the gap, waving back at those outside—like us or like Billu
at other times—viewing the frame and ruing their separation from the actor
as endless and inevitable. Like the terrorist, the spectator is neither insider nor
outsider, yet both. However, Billu’s act of faith here ends in the metaphorical
reaffirmation of the line separating screen and spectator in the form of the
tree branch that falls under the burden of spectatorial liminality, taking down
the other villagers but landing squarely on Billu’s back in particular. The rude
awakening of the painful accident and the reiteration thereby of the line sepa-
rating actor and fan ruptures the moment of potential recognition and attention,
or dissolution of their difference and distance, in obliterating Sahir Khan’s
fleeting pro-prioception of his friend.
Another longer durational moment of the potential doubling of spectator and
actor occurs when Billu is seen bringing a shattered and stained mirror back into
his barber shop from the garbage dump. A band of local goons had thrown all his
tools into the dump as revenge for their disappointed expectations that Billu could
get them closer to the star Sahir Khan. Stripped of his own temporary stardom
in his village—whose name Budbuda means “bubble” according to the Monier-
Williams Sanskrit–English dictionary—when he seems to either not want or be
unable to relay contiguity with stardom, Billu re-enters his life as a poor barber
by pausing the cinematic freight-train, so to speak, to look into the broken mirror
as he props it up against the wall. Whereas his blurred and discolored image in
the badly damaged mirror immediately pertains to the damage done to his local
“image,” this frame is also a meta-discursive allusion to “image,” because it is
an existing visual signature of the idea of the “performer” in Hindi cinema. Two
notable examples are the actress Rekha as Umrao Jaan in Muzaffar Ali’s film
Umrao Jaan (1981) and Smita Patil as Urvashi in Shyam Benegal’s Bhumikaa
(“The Role”, 1977). As the title of Benegal’s film especially suggests, this moment
of the actor’s gaze upon her own image in the mirror is a momentous suturing of
the actor as spectator, performer, shadow, and image. It highlights the reliance of
the actor’s image upon the spectatorial presence, without which the cinema espe-
cially resonates only with the actor’s absence. The “insupportable” distinction of
actor and viewer is marked by “mirroring,” which undeniably signifies separa-
tion (absence), as well as the mutual construction and constructedness (presence)
of both identities.23 The two spectatorial points finally merge with this substi-
tution of mirror for screen. In other words, when finally the spectators physi-
cally enter the space of the object of cinema—the image that used to be another
but is now the spectator—and are yet also watching themselves watching their
imaginary signification, the difference between screen and mirror is no longer
sustainable, and representation increasingly becomes “copying,” re-presentation,
reactivation. Indeed, even at the level of the cinematic apparatus, Metz points out
Structure, event, and liminal practices 61
how the cinema involves not just one reduplication but many, “a series of mirror-
effects organized in a chain” (1982: 51).
Shattering, mirroring, etc., have homoerotic connotations within Perso-Arabic
literature; how these homoerotic connotations permeate subjectivation as well
as spectatorship will be more extensively addressed in chapter five of this book,
in which male embodiment and the star-spectator relationship will be consid-
ered again, but a brief reflection on homoerotic connotations in Sahir Khan and
Billu’s story of mutual subjectivation and spectatorial formations is also worth
considering. Within Perso-Arabic discourse, the image of a shattered mirror has
figured at two levels. According to Kugle, “The broken mirror that in [pre-colo-
nial] Sufi rhetoric represented the heart shattered in passionate love now [that
is, post-1857] refers to the ego made subservient to pious prayer that unites a
community of patriotic believers” (2002: 38–42). The suppression of “Persian”
culture as “effete, slothful and corrupt” by colonial-era Islamic reformers such
as Altaf Husayn Hali (1837–1914) in favor of “an imagined earlier, ‘purer’ Arabic
poetry that had the manly virtues of vigor, fortitude, directness, and ‘natural-
ness’” (Kugle 2002: 38–9) can be seen as reversed in BB, signifying the return
of the countermodern and the liminal in homoeroticism. Here, I invite consid-
eration of the other level of spectatorial subjectivation signifying hidden coun-
termodern formations of passionate male-male affect—the shattered mirror as
the image of the self-ruptured in love for the impossible love object—which can
also be considered to be determining Billu’s gaze into the mirror. As the invoca-
tion of Sahir and Billu’s “dosti” suggests, the suffering of Billu as the disenfran-
chised, proprietary bourgeois male seeking status and access as a member of the
“public” to the “star” could also “screen” this other “private” subjectivation of
homoerotic identification with an unattainable auratic object.
Indeed, Brett Farmer has argued that certain relations to seeing, or certain kinds
of spectatorship, have long functioned in cinema as indexical of certain kinds of
homosexual subjectivity. Using as his example for discussion Hector Babenco’s
film adaptation of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Farmer writes:
Cinema has long functioned as a vital forum for the production of gay male
meanings and identifications to the point that a certain type of film specta-
torship has become a veritable shorthand for male homosexuality in various
cultural discourses … extraordinarily intense [male] spectatorship functions
in Kiss of the Spider Woman as one of the more spectacular and readily
legible signs of that character’s homosexuality …
(2000: 23)
Billu not only refuses to “be seen” but also to “see” Sahir for much of the film.
My suggestion here is that BB’s emergent enunciation of new political and
spectatorial desiring subjectivations in Hindi cinema remains most frequently
articulated through the figure of homosocial desiring subjectivation between
men. As Billu “sees himself” in the mirror, the recursive and chiasmic image
of him seeing himself seeing himself as image mirrors the potential subjectiva-
tion of male star and spectator, image and viewer, actor and fan, as twin entities,
62 Structure, event, and liminal practices
and one vector of this chiasmic subjectivation is the passionate intensity of the
repressed homosocial identificatory and desiring gaze. The history and relation-
ship of Sahir Khan and Billu figures serially and interchangeably as the story of
the empowerment of the common “man,” the fan in the cinematic universe, as
well as the ethnic and sexual “minority” in the body politic, homoerotic intensity
as a “minority” alterity coming into sharper focus upon the canvas of “normal”
visibility. When the prohibition upon seeing is finally overcome by Billu, the star
and the fan can finally be reunited as long lost friends, or “dosts,” without homo-
erotic passion having to be declared.
In keeping with concurrent new tendencies of radical subjectivation in ethnic
and sexual politics, as well as new spectatorial subjectivations in contemporary
Hindi cinema, reverse direct address signals, taking the viewer into the frame, or
through successive layers of apparatus–technical, imaginary, symbolic, identifi-
catory, fantasmatic, secondary, theoretical, etc.—into a new future for the cine-
matic mise en scène and medium, implying a positioning of spectator, subject,
and actor as fluidities on a visual and spatiotemporal spectrum, a fluidity that
seems to be occurring around the same time as other experimental “subjecti-
vations” also become visible. For instance, at the same time as “bare life” is
embodied in MMJ and BB—each time in the expressive, deadpan close-up views
of actor Irrfan Khan’s now-trademark face for such roles—new direct visual
subjectivations of the Muslim as embodied by Shah Rukh Khan (in BB and since
Chak de India, 2007; see chapter three) are in progress. These parallel exper-
iments in subjectivation of bare life and the Muslim (aka “terrorist,” “homo-
sexual,” “disenfranchised”)—both identities performed within cinematic history
as examples of “non-identities,” or nomadic citizenship articulated disjuncturally
concerning the state that delimits them within certain zones of exception (and
sometimes exemption)—may not stand in a purely coincidental or accidental
relationship with each other. These may instead be linked interpellations, whose
symptomatic expression may be the relatively new reverse direct address mode
of the (frequently homosocial) visual, suturing the male spectator or subject and
the image or actor within a time-space flow hitherto monitored and syntactically
jointed, as discussed previously.
This new cinematic spectatorial fluidity reflects and shapes the ambiguation
of identity, of liminalization, of identity, unfolding as non-identity and incom-
mensurability, omnipresent in exegetic life. Robert Ray has identified a similar
repetition and re-enactment trend in seventies Hollywood in the form of camp,
re-issues, and sequels, which sometimes deployed well-known characters and
actors migrating from film to film, especially in sequels and camp versions (Ray
1985: 261–3). He identifies it as “fostering the kind of ironic relationship to the
movies that results from an increased awareness of an art’s intertextuality” (263),
and also relates it to a wider socio-political crisis of American national identity at
the time. The explosion of such an intertextual reactivation strategy as one of the
modalities of repetition or copying in Hindi cinema does imply a more ironic and
stylistically self-conscious spectator of that cinema as moviegoer; seeing stars
and character types “migrate from film to film, the audience inevitably became
aware of these characters’ artificiality … this new widespread sense of films’
Structure, event, and liminal practices 63
‘made’ quality represented a major departure in the direction of self-conscious-
ness” (ibid.: 263). However, like Ray, I also see Hindi cinema’s employment of
this intertextual repetitive strategy in the form of “reverse direct address” as
a heightened self-consciousness of the manipulated and surreal nature of civic
identification and political subjectivation, beyond cinematic spectatorship, in
the sense of an uneasy political recognition of liminality in historic events and
mythic narrative structures themselves.24 Repetition as reverse direct address is
an attempt at enacting non-representational heterogeneity: the signifier repeats
both the putative signified and signification itself. The image repeats the imagi-
nary and the symbolic, the spectators and the spectatorial gaze upon its object.
In a sense, as Metz has indicated, all cinema performs the illusion of dupli-
cation: it drums up the absence of its signified in the excessive presences of
its signifier on screen (Metz 1982: 45). However, in RDB, MMJ, BB, and other
films, the appearance of a performative excessive presence in the screen space
of absence opens up the very possibility of radical uncertainty, of liminality, in
Metz’s words in “all the really perceived detail … [of] unaccustomed perceptual
wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree” (1982:
45). What the pert trope of direct repetition in BB evokes particularly powerfully
is the palpable excess of a signified that forces open, literally, the screen, as a
membrane holding reality and reflection, signified and signifier, presence and
absence apart, so much so that the mirror is forced to become a “true space”
(ibid.: 43), wherein the embodied spectator can literally inhabit the ghostly space
and body of the star within this mutual dissolving of representation and reality,
of absence and presence, in endless re-enactment.
A review of the abundance of tropes of repetition in BB will be helpful here:
the film within the film is the excessively presented and excessively improb-
able Hindi filmic narrative staple of twin brothers lost at birth, a familiar Hindi
cinematic ur-fiction that its specific audience robustly and raucously endorses
and enlivens. The twins are separated at birth but are “technologically” linked
through twin electronic keepsakes worn around their necks, which beep upon
physical proximity, because this particular instance of filmic fiction is also a
copy of Star Wars, involving that other excessive Oedipal fiction of dual and
indeterminate identities, of the heroic son who must kill that evil father who was
once very much like himself. These nested “identifications” and “identities” are
presented as futuristic and techno-tropic: East meets and copies West.
Additionally, the hero Sahir Khan is a Muslim, like the actor Shah Rukh
himself, but in the film is also a version of bare life that his fans and lost “twin”
Billu embody, because he actually came from the same masses as his audience.
Sahir Khan carries his fans, therefore, into his image onscreen and thus ends up
“copying” them in his very embodiment. If this were not enough repetition, in
the “shooting” narrative, the diegetic actor who has forced himself on to the cast
by persisting in petitioning Sahir Khan, and who is meant to identify the twins
as the type-cast “police inspector,” keeps forgetting his lines, so much so that the
diegetic audience, now glimpsed as corralled off the shooting space, again facing
and mirroring the “real” film’s “real” viewer, is heard chanting his forgotten
lines:25 at birth the twins’ mother declared them “twin stars” in the firmament,
64 Structure, event, and liminal practices
pushing us back upon the pregnant possibilities of Star Wars as exegetic mother
lode of the futuristic signified of Hindi cinema.
The star is twinned and duplicated in the fan/spectator/friend. They are, in fact,
the two lost “brothers” of the film within the film, but the pathway to “re-cogni-
tion” in their case is rerouted from the technological—no beeping keepsakes as
they approach each other across the multiple separations and boundaries between
them—onto the affective; Billu hears at the last possible moment, upon the last
possible twist of his track as he does his best to distance himself from his now
famous “brother” or “dost,” how much his friend, once so like him, still loves
and misses him. And thus the “twins” are rejoined as each other’s soul mates and
reflections. Iteration upon a single “starry” axis conjoins everyone in the cine-
matic spectrum: the exegetic fans, the diegetic fans, the unglamorous protagonist
Billu, the star and the image, the cinematic apparatus, cast, and crew, until the
image of the star turns out to be quite literally a reflection of the fan or audience
via Billu and his peers, but never consolidated, absolute, or determinate.
By rewriting the dominant paradigm of darsan according to Indian cinema
criticism as a viewing mode26 —whereby the public frontal encounter with the star
or icon is said to trigger absorption in order to create devout passivity and resist
or efface audience subjectivation as an activating, individualizing process—
without bypassing the theory altogether, as Gehlawat advocates (2010: 21–3), the
scene of audience “absorption” in BB revises, I propose, the very meaning of the
star to audience darsanic or viewing relationship, by empowering the audience
actively to modify iconicity as mode of publicity, to appropriate the icon to reflect
felt social, public needs, and to create transactional identities. As Jain (2009) has
argued with regard to Indian religious art, bazaars, and transactional publics,
and as Srinivas (2009) has argued in relation to active fan culture in South Indian
cinema, audiences in Hindi cinema continue to emerge as active in their nego-
tiations of images, and actively position themselves on a continuum, like the
“police inspector” wangling a special appearance deal with a star who remains a
star but also a brother. Identification in the Metzian sense does not foreclose the
possibilities of symbolic reenactments of the darsanic or iconic, of transactional
activities of self-formation as differential and Dionysian public formations, and
of the re-channeling of public identities into private interests. Indeed, we see
the co-existence of the darsanic and the imaginary clearly in BB, for the star’s
alignment with, and reproduction in, the fan is unmistakably posited precisely
upon the notion of the star’s “stardom.” There is no reproduction here without the
invocation of aura, however reactivated the latter might be.
It is, therefore, critical to understand the centrality of the twinned historical
and cinematic tropes of repetition in Hindi cinema that belie an actual reliance
on the countermodern, as Hindi cinema appears to pursue its so-called post-
modern apperceptions of national life. BB (2009) actualizes, or at least gestures,
at a wider set of possibilities of subjectivations and futures than were imagined
possible even in MMJ (2008), by tweaking the trope of repetition of cinematic
event and subject. This accelerated trajectory suggests the hold that the motif of
repetition has on the cinematic imagination, as well as the ways in which new
technologically radical compressions of time and space might indirectly aid in
Structure, event, and liminal practices 65
the generation of other radicalities of subjectivation. We see here an ongoing
interweaving of South Asian modernity’s publics and visual apparatuses, what
Joseph calls “Emergent Publicness as Visual Modernity” in the formation of
nomadic concepts of citizenship (1999: 29), engaged through cinema and other
media, as well as through political agitation and mobilization in past and present
anti-colonial, pre-national public formations.
Any discussion of the state and the nation in the Hindi cinematic context must
also keep in mind the affect that can and does subtend the theory and concept
of the state, the sort of affect that pushes the “excrescent” police outward, closer
to the edge beyond which lies the void, excess, and liminal countermodernities
that the state tries to contain. Their affect is, in part, the state’s affect; the state
is hegemonic but can also be reactive, emotive, or sentimental, and of course
“nationalist.” It can oppress the Muslim, but can also look for ideological and
visual matrices within which to accommodate the Muslim’s “otherness,” some-
times in direct response to engaged public pressure. As Shah Rukh Khan’s
recent performances nest deeper into the potentialities of embodying enactments
of Muslimness27—cultural and countercultural liminal subjectivations never
completely disengage themselves from vectors of spatio-temporal engagements,
from physical substrata of performativity, from contextual embodiments—other
66 Structure, event, and liminal practices
political and cinematic subjectivations also proliferate their articulations for
differential recognition by the state.
The enfolding of idioms of state, nation, countermodernity, and liminality
generate some of the representational dystopy of the films I discuss. The
nation and the state seem to come freighted with what I would call specific
“chrono-tropes” in cinema. When the focus of cinema is an “event-based” past
or present, wherein the “event” is flattened out as both overwhelmingly atem-
poral and overwhelmingly duplicative, as in RDB, the state seems resurgent as
the dominant political unconscious; when the focus of cinema is on a longitu-
dinal history with “structures” that inform “happenings” or events, as in HKA,
an idea of a plural and trans-historical but normative “nation” seems on the
rise. However, the seemingly liberatory and oppositional construct of the nation
as more authentic is largely a by-product of cinematic formal experiment and
innovations in narrative voice and “chrono-tropes”—we have seen this in HKA
and RDB—which both essentialize and liminalize the ideological contestation
between state and nation.
This conundrum—wherein the longitudinal concept of nation versus the
presentist model of state are repeated in the cinematic meta-conscious as repre-
sentational stand-ins for the past (history or myth) and the present (modernity
or postmodernity); those latter are in turn seen as notations along an unbroken
hymn of sustainable nation-statehood—is also manifested in other repetitions of
liminal identity that attempt to “get it right” in the modern Indian nation-state
and in Hindi cinema: sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and gender. The formal exper-
iments choreographing the dialectics of past versus present, nation versus state,
and structure versus event, produce the cinematic texture. Nothing expresses this
relationship of liminality and cinematic texture better than the following state-
ment by Victor Turner:
for every major social formation there is a dominant mode of public liminali-
ty, the subjunctive space/time that is the counterstroke to its pragmatic indic-
ative texture. Thus, the simpler societies have ritual or sacred corroborees as
their main metasocial performances; proto-feudal and feudal societies have
carnival or festival; early modern societies have carnival and theatre; and
electronically advanced societies, film …
(1977: 34–5)
Thus, this cinema is not only a liminal space of public reflexivity, of social
subjunctives one might say, in its function; it also uses presentational strategies
invoking liminality to mediate and visualize the “structural” and the “eventful”
in the national political narrative. Films not only adopt structure and event as
teleologies and modalities on socio-political questions, but also deploy cinematic
narrative conventions—presentational texture and aesthetics, non-realist and
non-continuity editing, (non)linear plots, presentational speeding and slowing of
time, and a jouissant embodiment with the propensity for jumbling and blurring
realist frameworks of time and space, especially in the popular musical mise en
scène—to foreground liminality as the counterweave in historical narrative as
Structure, event, and liminal practices 67
“structure” or “events.” Maintaining a secular historical telos, a normative and
consistent structure, in the face of distressing gashes in the fabric of pluralist
democracy—inflicted by ethnic particularisms, aggressive global capitalism,
religious nationalisms, patriarchal revivalisms, and a notable speeding up of visu-
ality—are the critical challenges of this national statist historiography. Liminality
serves as the crucial link between pliant diurnal events and durable static history
as a techne and aesthetic for a national mythopoesis, already straining to accom-
modate the singular within the structural and normative, to naturalize, history.
The aforementioned category of the speed of vision in the Indian context of
the global media-text is the emergent style of etching liminality as a subjunctive
mode within a cinematic mythos, as exemplified in RDB, MMJ, and BB. Paul
Virilio has drawn our attention to the mechanization and instrumentalization of
vision as a historical process: starting around the Renaissance, slower spiritual
and material collocations of the human subject withered in favor of atrophying
distance and materiality in human engagement with art. As Renaissance optical
technologies began to strain toward greater instantaneity and reduction of the
distance that used to make the aesthetic experience spatial as well as material—a
“movement in time,” a slower unfolding and making of representation forming
both spectators and their visual experiences and objects (Virilio 1994)—they
set a new clock ticking, culminating in the instantaneity of contemporary visual
technologies and their transmissions.28
It might appear that thus begins also the atrophying of the countermodern as
a collocation of spatial and temporally discontinuous, non-contiguous frames.
However, Hindi cinema has an oblique relationship to this history of temporal
and aesthetic subjectivities: here speed and a countermodern aesthetic are not
necessarily incompatible. While Hindi cinema poses important counterevidence
to Virilio’s thesis—in the past it compressed space and dismissed “real” tempo-
rality in concocting a psychic tonic only in the “exotic location” song and dance
sequence, without exalting instantaneity as an otherwise significant narrative or
visual technique—it has shown an inexorable movement toward instantaneity in
representational techniques of cutting, editing, tracking, etc. in approximately
the last 15 years. Generally these techniques are read as instances of a global
aesthetic of communicational instantaneity and simultaneity: satellite transmis-
sions, MTV-ized visual styles, and other contemporary entertainment and infor-
mation technologies and their disseminatory practices. However, I would argue
that Hindi cinema’s “new” speed is an ongoing articulation of a longstanding
tendentious relationship of national space and liminal subject negotiated within
the contestation between (post-)modernity and countermodernity.
South Asia has seen many urgent contestations of space, such as the Partition and
refugee migration cycles, as well as massive urban slum formations. The history
of space in modern South Asia is spectacularly traumatic and chaotic (Sarkar
2009: 2ff.). I would agree with this in the sense that liminality of political and
aesthetic representation does indeed form the core of Hindi cinema’s articulation
of nationalism. This core is a fractured and fracturing one that destabilizes “state”-
ly contours. The traumatic political struggle of centripetal liminality against an
engulfing statist frame of nationhood in South Asia has manifested itself most in
68 Structure, event, and liminal practices
the politics of spatial rights and belonging. The story I told in the introduction to
this book about the spatial contest in Pune that slowed down national “modern”
times—the story of many strikes, processions, marches, and other public protests
in India—and in which I, the secular scholar of cinema, found myself involun-
tarily stuck in so-called non-secular time, is a case in point. If “cinema, as the
modern medium of representation, reveals from the very outset a preoccupation
with the problematic of depicting trauma” (Sarkar 2009: 21), then one index of
growing trauma in Hindi cinema is an aggressively accelerated visual rhetoric of
space and movement responsive to traumatic violence and displacement.
Hindi cinema’s protagonist is traumatized most often by a challenge to their
spatial belonging, and the liminal subject’s accelerating struggle for spatial rights
with regard to the nation-state manifests itself in a speeding up of trauma. Hindi
cinema’s gradual speeding up is the visual index of the liminal subject’s frenetic
adaptation to a chaotic decolonization and the crisis of geographic space in
South Asia, particularly evident in the four films discussed above (Rogoff 2002).
While Asian consumerist modernity has more recently heated up and acceler-
ated national temporality as a specific modality of global aesthetics, the South
Asian subject has had a far longer history of traumatic dislocating violence,
and is habitually and reflexively positioned in relation to multiple violences.
Violence, as we know, accelerates movement: the subject rushes away from
perceived threats, hurtles towards perceived prey, refuses to linger physically
and visually (in Virilio’s sense, abjures slow temporality) over scenes of horror
and landscapes soaked in blood. In the process of reacting kinetically to trauma
by enacting a differential of movement speed, the liminal South Asian subject
and spectator are therefore co-constituted by spatialized experiences of national
time, and temporal experiences of spatial violence. Herein, as in other modes, the
countermodern still prevails, despite donning the look of postmodernity.
The liminal object of violence in Hindi films might experience a merging with
the medium, an instantaneous death recalling Bazin’s idea of cinema itself as
mourning for loss and death, yet a repeatable mummification of life (1967, 2002).
In representations of deadly violence upon the subject, speed reaches a negative
climax in the absolute elimination of duration, i.e. total instantaneity. The gun
flashes and the bomb blasts in a moment that unites the visual and the diegetic
experiences of perfect instantaneity as the flipside of immobilizing mobility. In
these new representations of violence in Hindi cinema—those where the camera
focuses on carnage and death squarely and head on—the protagonist and the spec-
tator share a mise en scène in which the body and the eye both crash into the still-
ness of death. Maximum speed results in total immobility. The subject collapses
into its opposite, the annihilation of subjecthood, a near-perfect approximation
of the liminal. Speed, the apogee of a postmodern form, turns out to re-enact the
eventful and contingent matter and temporalities of the countermodern subject.
Liminality as a product of a sometimes violent spatio-temporal instability
remains the content, the critique, and the strategy of Indian cinema: its telos,
its techne, and its articulation of the shifts in the presentability of subject and
violence. It is these shifts that I trace in the rest of this book, albeit discontinu-
ously and non-teleologically, in their formal and meta-discursive aesthetics.
2 Imagining the past in the present
Violence, gender, and citizenship in
Hindi films
Kalikattaiya gori,
Baby-austin-e chori
Dhakuriar lake-e
Piya ko saath leke
Chole she enke benke
Moderrrn [sic] shaaje
Purush tare dekhe palai chhati dheke
Bole, “O Baba e ke? Moderrn Bama je! Bama Bheema je!
Moderrrn Bama je! Bama Bheema je!”
The accent is on melodrama throughout the film, except in the early passages …
One melodramatic sequence is piled upon another and the story is relentless in
its exposure of the evil in men. But one cannot commend the writer for the
brutality and violence with which he makes the characters achieve their objects.
However noble the end may be, it does not justify the means [i.e. violence] …
(22 November 1957: 23)
In noting the departure from a certain kind of classic or socialist realism or stark
neo-realism, wherein the hardships of village life would be unsentimentally
unveiled, the reviewer of course draws attention to the fact that the caesura at the
film’s mid-point links as much as it separates: melodramatic quality is traceable
to the desires and expectations of the lumpen, who supposedly crave melodrama
over brutally ethical resolution. This reviewer leaves unresolved the status of
the melodramatic in film except to write that “Mehboob displays a rare under-
standing of the hopes and aspirations of the simple villagers … But in the second
half, in which drama takes firm root, Mehboob shows a tendency to lay undue
stress by melodrama” (23).
The reviewer’s note of the caesura serves to remind us that the secular moder-
nity of the film’s establishing and concluding shots are utterly dispelled by the
cyclical melodramatic ordeals of the mythic mother, whose heroic struggle is
precisely that of restoring the sacred to the familial within traditional authority—
in the form of parents, elders, or husbands—has failed. Here I draw upon Ravi
Vasudevan’s influential analyses—in turn drawing upon Peter Brooks’ theories
of melodrama—upon the trope-ing of melodrama in the Indian cinematic context
as also the recovery of the sacred in the familial context, and the evisceration or
disembodiment of this sacred in social crises (2000: 115; also Thomas 1989: 14,
15, 19, 27; Rajadhyaksha 2003; Mishra 2002). Comments on the reprise of the
real and the realization of the sacred as parents or household gods make melo-
drama seem culturally essential: “melodrama … penetrates to repressed features
of the psychic life and into … family dramas” (Vasudevan 2000: 115). Thus, it
has been said, when the older Radha shoots her own son Birju, she is doing so
for a greater good than her own love and family; she is saving the honor of the
village, which inheres indiscriminately in its women.
While melodrama typically relies on the mythologization of femininity and the
obscuring of sexual politics, in Mother India the mythos of motherhood is doubly
Violence, gender, and citizenship 79
enshrined in nationalist associations of the righteous woman with the goddess
and the mother land. The woman as mother therefore has to replace failed tradi-
tional patriarchal authority in crucial cinematic moments of crisis that figure
the larger crisis of women at risk. Radha goes to beg food for her children from
Sukhilala, who only too eagerly lets her in through his massive, studded doors,
an early image of both incarceration and securitization of the subject. Facing
rape by Sukhilala, the almost vanquished Radha, or “Mother India”, played by
the legendary star of the era, Nargis—significantly caked in mud from the recent
flood, and therefore actually quintessentially “Mother Earth”—turns from her
molester to the household deities, before whom he dares intend her violation, and
questions their power or existence. The sequence that ensues is a reverse shot of
dialogue between Radha and Sukhilala’s household goddess Lakshmi, the Hindu
goddess of wealth, with Lala hovering somewhere off-center.
Lakshmi appears to be a silent witnesses of sacrilege at first: Radha flings her
mangalsutra (symbol of her married status) upon the shrine, upon which Sukhilala
puts a gold chain around her and calls her his “Lakshmi”; the imbrication of sex
and money in these catachrestic displacements will be obvious. As Sukhilala
begins to lead her away, a nearly hopeless Radha laughs bitterly and addresses
the deity and spectator, saying “Devi, did you not feel shame in coming in my
shape? If you’ve come as me, then you should feel no shame in my dishonor” (my
translation). Radha seems to be saying that she intends to implicate the goddess
in the loss of her virtue should the rape occur. Addressing the sacred construction
of womanhood in the profane world of women’s devaluation, is the hunted and
haunted Radha turning rebel against a gender-violent society? As ominous as this
might be, the mood darkens further. The reverse shot shows Lakshmi resplendent
and still, a mere doll in Sukhilala’s house. Suddenly the camera switches from
medium to extreme close-up. Radha’s mud-caked face with the huge rolling whites
of her eyes—the face of the indigene, the subaltern—glowers in bitter anguish at
the camera and makes the following address through clenched teeth, “Don’t laugh.
Don’t laugh. You may bear the world’s weight, goddess, but you would not have
been able to shoulder the burdens of maternal love” (my translation). Obviously
sutured with the goddess as witness in this reverse-shot sequence, the spectator
hears the maternal manifesto as a parallel discourse of the fallen woman’s self-
vindication. What should have been abjection momentarily turns into defiant
confrontation between two images of female godhead.
The reverse shot shows the same silent goddess. Radha continues in extreme
close-up, saying, “Once you are a mother, your feet will stray too.” An odd state-
ment within patriarchal morality, to say the least—unless read as a stunning
critique of patriarchal hypocrisy—this moment of defiance cathected through
human encounter with indifferent or powerless divinity is cut short by Sukhilala
stepping in to remove the goddess. However, Radha suddenly draws secret strength
and wrestles the little shrine from Sukhiklala’s hands. The 180-degree line is now
crossed so that Radha and the goddess are on one side of it and Sukhilala on the
other side, where Radha previously stood. Radha says, “The goddess will not go
anywhere. The goddess has given you wealth and brought me before you as the
indigent/indigene. I will tell the goddess that it is easy to point the way but hard
80 Violence, gender, and citizenship
to tread it; to watch the public farce is easy, but to become the public farce is very,
very hard.” The bitter story of inequality is being told as the story of exploitation
of famished rural women, but not without an echo of the story of the violated
female citizen or of the woman performing roles as a dancer and actress.
There are several roles that Nargis the actress plays in this scene: the victimized
woman, the defiant subaltern, the legal defendant, the goddess, the fallen woman,
etc. The challenge of this scene is to transfer Radha across the line separating
moral decline and moral triumph both physically and thematically, and the camera
work achieves this axial swiveling and crossing remarkably self-consciously, the
editing cuts palpable and clumsy to make the journey unmistakable, laborious
technique drawing attention to itself and to spatial possibilities and situational
contingencies that unfold to marginalize Sukhilala, and foreground Radha
and the goddess as at first interlocutory and then identificatory. The goddess is
re-activated in Radha as familial virtue (ghar ki laaj, or honor of the household)
when Radha crosses the 180-degree line to join the goddess physically, instead
of standing addressing her/us as either supplicant, defendant, or subaltern. The
dialogue and the visual metaphors are at odds now, for, in contrast with her recent
defiance, Radha is now in an identificatory mode, clutching the shrine to herself,
tears streaming down her face, pathos replacing rage, and Sukhilala cordoned off
to the other side of the central axis of vision. In mythology, Radha is the consort
of Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, the god of the Hindu trinity who is known
as the preserver and also the husband of Lakshmi. In the classic Indian epic the
Mahabharata, Krishna preserves the threatened honor of his friend and protégé
Queen Draupadi, who is also known as Krishnaa. The film consciously deploys
these parallels as a duplicating device that hails the Hindu woman as goddess
but also as beloved of the gods and protected by them. Now the exegetic viewer,
the film’s audience, is no longer on the goddess’s side of the 180-degree line, but
standing somewhat sheepishly off to the side of the dramatic scene, spectators of
the divine melodrama, whereby Sukhilala is now faced with Lakshmi and Radha
confronting him. Radha’s merging with the goddess returns the familial to the
sacred and the spectator to the less charged space of gazers, not addressees.
The dharmik is seemingly restored after the tyrannies of the conjoined
economic, (pseudo-)legal and sexual are obliterated: the sexual predator is struck
down, the mother is restored to her children. Thus, Radha/Nargis recovers her
faith just in time to reclaim the goddess; the moment of discordant liminal dis-
identification, of the singularizing emergence of the rebel in Radha, passes.
However, as she drops in apparently devout submission and helpless tears to
the ground, a physical movement ensues, one seen during the opening sequence
when the elderly Radha’s face is in close-up, and one seen later in Radha as the
new bride. In the scuffle with Sukhilala over the shrine, Radha’s Mangalsutra
is returned to her miraculously, and the familiar shot of Radha turning her face
to her right and examining this miracle of marital symbolism is repeated. Every
re-framing of this apparently motivated shot has thus far signaled a decep-
tion and a deprivation, rather than its diegetically presumed opposite, and this
instance of the shot is no exception. Faith is apparently restored via the familial
and the conjugal, through an imagined covenant, in which the goddess seems to
Violence, gender, and citizenship 81
contract to return Radha’s suhaag (her marital bliss or husband), as well as her
children’s lives. But the fact that Radha’s husband never returns, and her beloved
younger son dies at her own hands, proves that this promise of restitution was
also illusory.
Radha then persuades the villagers not to abandon the earth that is their
mother. A scene of reconstructive dredging of the flooded fields follows, and the
village population returns and reconstitutes as the pre-Partition territorial map of
India (Mishra 2002: 65). In this scene, as previously in the motivated close-up of
Radha with the Mangalsutra, however, the melodramatic graphing of a plenary
topos of restitution—as the restitution of sacred and traditional authority—is
utterly catachrestic, because once faith is lost, the loss must return as remainder,
as it does in the future crisis of the heroic mother’s favorite son turning dacoit,
abducting the village moneylender’s daughter, and being shot by the mother to
save the village’s honor (as elder and mother, for her the abducted girl’s honor is
the honor of the village). Mishra and others have argued that the film’s resolution
clearly privileges the “non-violent,” law-abiding Dharmik tradition in Radha’s
heroic elimination of the rebel agitator Birju (Mishra 2002: 65, 81–7); this is to
overlook the catachrestic function of the scene of the mother’s rape (a national
preoccupation at Partition), and its return in the abduction of the moneylender’s
daughter (which pits members of the community against each other on the iden-
tical issue of women’s honor, as at Partition), which signifies the irreducibility of
memories of betrayal and abandonment. Indeed, if as Mishra reminds us, one of
the ur-texts of “Mother India” in India is the story in the Ramayana of Sita and
her abduction by the demon king Ravan, that great ethnic and ontological other of
Hindu normativity; that story of epic violation is never quite resolved, remaining
an overdetermined gender and racial black hole in Hindu mythology (ibid.: 69), a
perennial catachresis of the performance of female virtue or normativity.
Radha’s original moment of alienation, that the gods are about to fail her and
her honor, returns via Birju’s irreversible rebellion to haunt the bright future
of Nehruvian village India with its dams, cranes, tractors, jeeps, trucks, farm
machinery, and pylons. The old Radha is shown in the opening credits as
grasping a clod of the earth on which she sits, while as the frame opens the heavy
machinery operates at a visually higher angle than her prostrate body and almost
threatens her; while grasping the clod, her head turns right in the motivated shot
I have already mentioned, in seeming incomprehension of what is happening
behind, around, and above her. Her seemingly complete and certainly abrupt
recuperation and self-recovery from trauma and outrage in the near-rape scene, I
have suggested, is an enactment of the forced recovery and so-called re-natural-
ization of the abducted woman. However, given its duplication of the motivated
shot of Radha’s face turned to her right in close-up, the proleptic first scene of the
film is also thick with memory as “undying” loss of faith, which quickly leaches
into visual notations skeptical of the “developmental” logic of normative moder-
nity. The excessive melodramatic stutter of the scenes where Radha dissociates
from her female embodiment and empowerment—the old woman’s unmeaning
handling of ancient earth broken by new machines, the young bride’s removal of
her bridal ornaments, and the cathexis of the female protagonist with the divine
82 Violence, gender, and citizenship
sign on the scene of attempted rape—is the undoing of the static of develop-
mental synergy. Yet, these scenes are precisely where technique comes alive with
titanic energy: “Photographed in Gevacolour with prints by Technicolor, ‘Mother
India’ presents beautiful, though at times dramatically meaningless, vignettes of
the countryside. But it is in the filming of the dramatic passages that cameraman
Faredoon Irani shows his craftsmanship” (Filmfare, 22 November 1957: 23).
The averted rapes of the soil and the woman are equally dramatic and equally
doomed, because nothing determinate or “progressive” in terms of women’s
experience of violence and modernity emerges from such successive framings of
mother, woman, native, victim, rebel, or other.
The Filmfare reviewer’s apparently casual waffling on the stuttering excess
and hyperactivity of formal control over melodramatic content and intent is
more significant than it appears. If, as Rajadhyaksha reminds us, Metz identified
spectatorship as a form of self-identification, as the “imaginary signifier,” and if
spectatorship and citizenship are also both concerned with forms of “self-identi-
fication,” the Indian state was undoubtedly engaged in both in the 1950s.7 Thus
Rajadhyaksha’s motif of “identification” of the spectator (Mishra 2002: 65, 77)
encompassing and exceeding the sense of self-identification to enclose a sense of
“social” identification (Vasudevan 2000) leads to a third political and historically
weighted space of “identifying” citizens, which is the plural political narrative
of re-adjudicating women’s “lost and found” identity or citizenship claims in the
Abducted Persons Act (1949–51), as well as women’s legal rights as envisioned
by the state after Partition in the Hindu Code Bill (1951–6) (Virdi 2003: 67–73).
These three manifestations of the uneasy pursuit of the ideal citizen or spectator—
the individual, the collective, and the gendered—are aestheticized precisely in
the melodramatic technical “excess” of the supposedly dramatic realist Mother
India, that “representative” document about India’s female citizen: mother, sexual
victim, lumpen, and figurehead of lost communal integrity and vanished authen-
ticity, that must be forever reprised through reimagining the sacred and the resto-
ration or destruction of the gendered body of the nation, within the static or statist
discourse of modernity and law, and in the Nehruvian visual frame of factories
and dams superimposing on the body of a torn and crushed mother earth.
In this sense, the film is a vehicle for the burning question of the 1950s in
cinema: who was the citizen-spectator for whom films were to be made in the
new nation? What was the relationship of the filmic event to historical memory
or structure? Identifying the film’s “cultural syncretism” (Mishra 2002: 63) is the
beginning of a response. Identifying its cultural unraveling is a further neces-
sary heuristic. The presumably unconscious grafting of the anthropological
episteme upon the historical one—structural myths dominating an analytic of
“eventfulness”—in the film’s body was best realized in one of those “technical”
and “excessive” melodramatic moments, when the invocation of the almost
denuded earth mother Radha restores the sacred community; the villagers return
to fall back into a formation that spectacularizes and spectralizes the map of
(pre-Partition) India. Yet, though the villagers’ graphing of “India” in the after-
math of the critical event of assault on Radha and her renewed enfranchisement
answers questions about spectatorship, citizenship, and national integration in
Violence, gender, and citizenship 83
one perfectly contrived moment and move of history as structure, this image
cannot obliterate the trace realization of the iterated troubling of the sacred in
the context of rape (read as rape of the mother, whose inarticulate incestuous
overtones—the moneylender is, after all, also of the village, whose emblematic
mother he attempts to rape—are to be repeated, in a sense, in the future rape of
his daughter by the mother’s son, which she will read as the rape of her “own,”
i.e. village honor).8 The chain, once broken, keeps unraveling, and the sacred or
the communal cannot eventually be restored familially, even though this is a part
of the film’s melodramatic desire and address to the spectator.
In Vasudevan’s sense, Mother India’s uneasy mix of dramatic realism and
melodramatic extravaganza, as also its perhaps accidental allegory of the unrave-
ling of the narrative of the sacral, the national, and the woman/native/other, as
in Partition and its aftermath, is the very source of its fantastic and national
phantasmagoric power. Its direct address of a predominantly, indeed overwhelm-
ingly, Hindu nation appears to transcend the communal problem, but in fact its
extravagant awkward suturing of chaste and rebel femininity and other sexual
scandals reveals its persistent haunting by the specter of rape as harm to the
“Hindu” female/maternal/divine/national body. In this regard, it is noteworthy
that cinematic and popular discourse of the “Muslim” threat peaked in 1956. I am
referring especially to FilmIndia and its cantankerous and conservative editor,
Baburao Patel, an institution in his own right in the film industry. Patel’s 1956
editorial “Is Nehru Trembling?” hails Indian and Pakistani Muslims as untame-
able religious bigots, genocidal and fanatical proselytizers and sexual predators,
as well as US-backed terrorists and rioters.
To those familiar with contemporary Indian politics, none of this will seem
unfamiliar. The anti-Muslim charge sheet of the fifties is, almost word for word,
unmistakably a foreshadowing of anti-Muslim complaints of the communalist
future. Nehru was castigated by FilmIndia as a delusional internationalist and an
appeaser of bloodthirsty Muslims in the following terms: “His appeasement of
Muslims in the pursuit of an ideal secular state has created a colony of sulking
traitors right in the midst of millions of his worshippers” (May 1956: 7; see also
FilmIndia, April 1956: 10). The Muslim as terrorist and rapist of Hindu women
is India’s post-Partition ghost in the mirror (Devji 1992; Mufti 1995; Pandey
1997; Khory in Baird 1993: 121–2). It is no surprise then that the same Baburao
Patel was said to have co-written a special brochure published for Mother India’s
publicity in 1957, which:
begins and ends with the assertion that the film is about Indian women’s
chastity and its sanctity … ‘The woman is an altar in India … Indian women
have thrown themselves into the sacrificial fire to escape even the defiling
shadow of a foreign invader … This India of the olden days still lives in the
700,000 villages of India’ …
(Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal,” 1989: 20)
Patel’s authorship of this brochure is at least plausible given his journalistic impri-
matur; both deploy the subtext and text of the abduction of Indian women by
84 Violence, gender, and citizenship
unscrupulous and inhuman “others” nurtured by ex-colonials and their “interna-
tionalist” successors.9 Here, once more, is the “foreign hand” (see also chapter one).
If Partition and abduction are partially hailed “events” in the historical imagi-
nation of Mother India—one that traces event to latent historical structure, but
hints at the failed restoration of pattern and universality in re-mapping pre-Parti-
tion India as the village community, bringing back instead the chaotic instance
in complex visual notations, such as the almost-rape scene and the shots of Radha
dissociating from her femininity—the little known Lahore (1949), directed by
M. L. Anand, tackles a story of a woman victim of Partition and abduction.10
It is important to note the train of continuities and discontinuities here in the
films’ themes, Nargis’ star text, and her present versus her past. Nargis had by
this time acted already for Mehboob Khan, her director in the future Mother
India, in the film Taqdeer (1944), and her Muslim antecedents, as well as illegiti-
macy as the daughter of a Muslim courtesan and a Hindu father, were also well
known. In Lahore, Nargis plays the abducted Punjabi-Hindu girl Leelo, whom
her lover Chaman (played by Karan Dewan, son of the producer Jaimini Dewan)
rescues from their home city of Lahore when border crossing is dangerous and
illegal. The film begins with studio shots of Lahore streets and storefronts, and
evidently signals the cosmopolitanism of pre-Partition Lahore, a fact also abun-
dantly documented in other literature and film (FilmIndia, July 1949: 47). The
camera then pans to domestic interiors, where Chaman’s family is shown as
troubled by a feckless father and an equally feckless brother, while Chaman,
his mother, and his disabled youngest brother live in daily fear of poverty and
eviction. Leelo’s home is relatively stable, but she is waiting to be married off,
hopefully to Chaman, her childhood sweetheart. Chaman leaves Lahore for his
studies, and the Partition causes Leelo to be left behind in Lahore, where she is
abducted and immured by a Muslim man and his mother.
Lahore’s startling conjuncturality is the way it forms the sub-text of Radha,
the story of the abducted woman Leelo, as well as the star text of Nargis that
Rosie Thomas and Parama Roy have so carefully detailed. Yet these concatena-
tions find no mention at all in extant filmographies of Nargis, Mother India,
etc.11 Indeed, I would suggest that the scene of attempted rape in Mother India
is an over-determined transformation of Leelo’s story in Lahore, and Nargis’
life up until that point, in ways that transform a reading of that scene. The
thematization of gendered citizenship as an unresolved melodrama revolving
upon questions of female chastity and political identification of the citizen is
discussed in Thomas’ careful and brilliant essay on Mother India, “Sanctity and
Scandal”, despite her rather un-rigorous location of the law in the realm of the
colonial (Thomas 1989: 18), but she, too, makes no mention of the direct address
of Mother India to the spectator of the post-Partition “Hindu” and anti-Muslim
nation. Mother India read as the post-figuration of Lahore makes explicit the
importance of reading the Muslim actress Nargis’ masked star text as begin-
ning in 1949 with Lahore, its exposition of the abduction and rescue problems
re-emerging unmistakably in Mother India’s unqualified direct address of a
Hindu nation. When Chaman and his brother come to Leelo’s rescue from the
implicit sexual slavery of the Muslim usurper, she says dolorously: “I have been
Figure 2.1 Lahore (1949). Courtesy of National Film Archive of India, Pune.
86 Violence, gender, and citizenship
out of the house [a euphemism for rape] … I am darkness, your world will not
be able to lighten me” (my translation).12 Darkness has descended upon the land,
and its face, on- and off-screen, is that of a Muslim and a woman.
The spectator of Lahore reads a tale of gender and chastity through the “contam-
inated” body of the Indian Muslim actress embodying a story of border-crossing,
even though the film could not cross the border, since it had been banned in
Pakistan ( FilmIndia, July 1949: 47). By this time, Nargis’ star text was becoming
inflected with many layers of stories of abduction and betrayal: her mother had
allegedly not only made her available to act in films for her friend Mehboob Khan,
but had “sold” her to a wealthy Muslim prince, as courtesans sometimes were
(Thomas 1989: 23). This story might be apocryphal, but it no doubt contributed to
the creation of Nargis’ star text as the Muslim woman of dubious sexuality who
later came to embody the chaste Mother India. Nargis plays the abducted Leelo
with a despair and deathliness that cannot but evoke something of her own life
as we know it from Thomas and Roy’s accounts. “Shattered” by her mother’s
“abduction” of her from a respectable life (ibid.: 30)—she had wanted to be a
doctor—and experiencing the circumscription of her career and romantic hopes in
her public affair with the very married and very controlling Raj Kapoor, her Leelo
is an “impersonation” (Roy 1998) of womanly disenfranchisement, refracting the
pathos of the character as the pathos of Nargis’ own star text. To this pre-Mother
India phase of the formation of her star persona critics have paid no attention, but
it recuperates the story of abduction and recovered citizenship in crucial ways that
can be added onto the texts of Mother India. One such text that has gone missing,
I would argue, is Nargis’ “abduction” into the persona of Mother India.
As audiences in the fifties might have known, K. Asif, the maker of Mughal-
e-Azam, another great epic of “modern” India that looked back to a glorious
Mughal past as a time of the “cultural syncretism” (Mishra), had in fact decided
to cast Nargis as Anarkali, the heroine of that film.13 However, after he began
the project in 1944, he ran into various difficulties, such as the Partition, the
loss of film personnel to Pakistan, and communal riots (Kabir, 2005: x). Finally
resuming work on the film again in 1949, Asif now found Nargis unavailable, as
she had meanwhile become committed to other projects and to her married on-
and off-screen lover, Raj Kapoor, and his R.K. Studios. She turned down Asif’s
renewed offer of the part in Mughal-e-Azam. Instead of playing the Muslim
heroine Anarkali as she might have, Nargis acted out, first, her mother’s wishes
in appearances for Mehboob Khan and entering the publicity of films; second, the
honorary “ideal Hindu woman” vis-à-vis her paramour Raj Kapoor, who would
never convert to Islam so she might become his second wife (Thomas 1989: 23);
and third, the “devoted” wife of her Hindu husband Sunil Dutt, who also never
converted, though she was Bombay cinema’s top female star and he a relative
newcomer when they married. Lahore is the cinematic text where this abduction
text peeps through and starts a chain of connections between star text and char-
acter throughout Nargis’ career, revealing her repeated experience of transacting
autonomy for acceptance and familialization. It is also unquestionably a moment
when cinematic and political repertoire intertextually conjoin to interrogate and
fix the identity of the female subject. Mother India is the film text where this
Violence, gender, and citizenship 87
abduction has become codified and absorbed into the national narrative of sacred
womanhood, though not, I submit, without the seams showing.
Rajadhyaksha’s potent allegorization of the identificatory energy of the newly
nationalized state towards its gendered and raced citizens and minorities, and
the suturing of this identificatory process with cinematic hailing of the citizen
spectator, is instructive, but it, too, makes no mention of this specific juridio-
political process afoot in the fifties, and a cinematic narrative popular in the
nineties, that of describing and enumerating the “lost,” “violated,” or abducted”
citizen, usually a woman. It is this process of gendered and raced “identification”
in cinema’s mediating and liminal space between civil society and state that I
am looking to explore.14 In Nargis’ fairly short active career, a good bit of time
(1949–57) was spent working out the image of her Indian Muslimness, as well as
her Indian womanliness. It is in the context of the state’s crisis—fiscal and other-
wise—in identifying its “proper” citizens and its “proper” cinema, that such
“ascriptive” identities become critical, as evident in the fortunes of the Hindu
Code Bill, women abducted during Partition, and, last but not least, the cinematic
mediation of such phenomena of citizenship in the fifties through the figure of the
sexually at risk woman. Mishra, for instance, writes:
Among the many issues canvassed by the nationalists, two of the most signif-
icant dealt with the secular ethos of the nation and sectarianism … the larger
nationalist program … was always predicated upon a visionary egalitarian-
ism dramatically at odds with the real social divisions in the country …
(2002: 66; see also Coward in Baird 1993: 32–3)
Figure 2.3 “Hindu Code Debate?” FilmIndia, November 1951: 33. Courtesy of National
Film Archive of India, Pune.
92 Violence, gender, and citizenship
“Retired Hurt” suggests a battering of the principal architect of the bill, the
eminent jurist Dr Ambedkar—an untouchable by birth—by the dominant forces
in Congress who remained prejudiced against untouchables. The tattered Hindu
Code Bill is held up in the centre of the boxing arena by a pugilist, while a
Muslim Congress member says, “Envious of Muslims, eh?”17 Nehru, the
co-architect of the bill, holding aloft the weapon that appears to have wounded
Ambedkar, says, “I am sorry you are going this way, Ambedkar!” The cartoon
“Hindu Code Debate?” depicts various Congress members shamelessly exposing
their anatomies and proclaiming their virile masculinity in different ways to
prove themselves to be high caste men, even if they supported the bill. Such
cartoons document the cinematic meta-discourse tacitly supporting opposition to
the Hindu Code Bill as unduly empowering minorities, women and, incidentally,
performers, especially embodied by the last figure to the right of the cartoon
(Dhagamwar in Baird 1993: 236–4; Virdi 2003: 69–71, 79–81).
FilmIndia’s cartoons suggest the shaping of public, secular national identity
by the ambiguities of a Hindu-centric consciousness experimenting unhappily
with modifying its theistic foundations, the urgent demands of “modern” gender
politics replacing traditional consensus on a hierarchical structure of society
(Coward in Baird 1993: 24–32). This discourse has the ring of the “structure
of the conjuncture,” in Sahlins’ words (1985: xiv). In discussing the “vexed
problem of the relation between structure and event” (ibid.: xiii), and in calling
“‘structure’—the symbolic relations of cultural order … an historical object”
(vii), anthropologist Sahlins suggests a structurally implicated nature—whether
performative or prescriptive (xii)—of historical “events,” wherein:
Hindus … had all their laws shuffled and reshuffled till Hindus started
looking like Christians in marriage and Muslims in succession. All the itch
for making laws was spent on detraditionalizing Hindu men while leaving
the 40 million Muslims of the country severely alone out of sheer fear of the
Violence, gender, and citizenship 93
usual Islamic repercussions … The Hindu to whom this land belongs can be
sent to jail if he marries a second wife but the Muslim can simultaneously
throw four women into his bed as wives and four more as his mistresses and
then shake hands with Pandit Nehru as one more Maulana of Delhi …
(FilmIndia, June 1956: 4; italics mine)18
There are a lot of film-makers who had earlier suffered due to the Partition
when they migrated from Pakistan to India and became part of it. Though
they had suffered because of Partition, they never made films on Partition at
that time … They didn’t want to remind themselves of those times. But today
suddenly there is a spurt of nationalism which has become synonymous with
being anti-Pakistan …
(Interview with M.S. Sathyu; Joshi 2004: 65)
Figure 2.4 Print advertisement for New Delhi, FilmIndia, April 1956. Courtesy of
National Film Archive of India, Pune.
Sathyu very wisely, [sic] stuck close to the story of the disintegration of a
single Muslim family of Agra in Uttar Pradesh. Their trials and tribulations
helped in an intimate way, to depict the senselessness that lay behind the
enforced division of a nation on religious grounds. The fragility of human
existence amidst unbridled political chaos, was the central thrust of the
narrative …
(Chatterjee in Joshi 2004: 66; italics mine)
the [film] industry functioned then (as it still does) under the constraints
of censorship protocols which proscribed the representation of subjects that
might tend to inflame ‘communal passions,’ a proscription that ensured that
… Muslim religiopolitical identities except of an oppressively benevolent
variety renamed unnamed and unexaminable …
(Roy 1998: 165)
Garm Hava was actually banned for possibly fanning “communal passions”
before it went on, in a wonderful twist of fate, to win the President’s Silver Medal
for promoting national integration.23 Star & Style wrote in 1974:
This reviewer’s objection reminds one, once again, of the significance of temporal
distancing in performing an identity. There appears to be a right time, and a right
way to do so. An “un-historically” staged (unlike Mughal-e-Azam) film about
Muslim identity runs the risk of being interpreted, in spite of the precautionary
restriction to psychological realism only, and despite the so-called focus on the
family, as being precisely communalist. It is repeatedly remarked that the film
tackles the event of Partition at a temporal distance, but the historical structures
that are sniffed out are still those of Partition and thereby much too close for
comfort. Something is needed here to explain the crisis of representing the Muslim
as citizen against the backdrop of temporal double consciousness—always too
early and always too late, an indeterminate embodiment, spectral but carnal—that
surrounds the question of the Muslim’s subjectivation in national memory.
As has been asked of women, so it might be asked if the only good Muslim is a
dead Muslim? If as Chakravarty has suggested, “The historical film has been the
privileged site of elaboration of the Muslim sensibility,”24 a Muslim-centered film
that, however family-focused, deals with questions of modernity and identity in
the present, doubly defied the taboo against representing the Muslim as neither
past nor dead, and as both embodied and carnal. What is entirely lacking in
Chatterjee’s analysis aforementioned (Joshi 2004: 66)—the corpse of Amina, the
sexualized and violated daughter—returns to haunt us now as the Muslim and
woman dead out of necessity. Once again, we see violence against the minority
as being gendered when the context is live, not mythic or foreclosed.
The film, it has been noted, closes with the “progressive,” probably “socialist”
motif of the “return” of the Muslim Salim his son Sikander, joining millions of
dispossessed Indians, rather than “lost” others, across the border. As much as that
return should function as closure, the central trauma of the film forms around the
romantic and sexual tragedy of Amina, whose death prevents total closure of the
filmic and the political narrative of Muslim experience in post-Partition India, a
narrative of the state’s betrayal of its citizens, in some ways not unlike the foun-
dational betrayal of women at the core of Mother India. In the case of the Muslim
citizen, cinema’s relationship with historiography is incompatible with a notion
of conjuncture that is not murderous—yet.
The fate of Janki in New Delhi partly prefigures Amina’s fate in Garm Hawa, but
averts Garm Hava’s tragic closure for women by the intervention of an aesthetic
of the aesthetic privileged over the linguistic politics in the “heart” of the nation,
the capital New Delhi, to reinstate the hymeneal romance. Garm Hava, on the
other hand, did not mince matters, though it was said to. The body of Amina at
her suicide is dressed in bridal garb, and the ever-dignified Salim (her father
played by the powerful actor Balraj Sahni, in his last screen appearance) watches
the body wash away among the last of his memories of pre-Partition life. One can
see why a film such as this, 25 years after the Partition, garnered criticism for
being both separatist and belated; it falls into the fissure between the structures
100 Violence, gender, and citizenship
Figure 2.5 Amina and her mother, a still from Garm Hawa. Courtesy of National Film
Archive of India, Pune.
of history and the metastructure of the state, and thus into a visual liminality. At
the heart of the film is the drive to redefine the “Muslim” as an Indian citizen,
and as someone who has no desire to “cross” the border, as this land is her land,
while simultaneously laying such hopes out on the bier of violated femininity.
This is a predicament, an impasse according to critics, making it a cinematic
record of belated and/or missed opportunities; “Ajab,” reviewing the film in 1973,
brings up the question of “The kind of Muslims” that Garm Hava departs from
norm in depicting: “characters drawn from the Middle-class family,” the average
Muslim who is also a citizen—in other words, not a political problem or a threat.
Other reviews of the times are more guarded in their containment of the damage:
“A major triumph of Sathyu is that he has made Hindus play Muslim character
and vice versa” (Movieworld, 28 May 1974). Garm Hava seems to have been a
cinematic crossroads of sorts, one wherein the subjunctivity of enfranchisement
and citizenship are re-enacted.
Needless to say, the analogy with antagonisms in cricket—in Lagaan against the
British and in Gadar against Pakistan—might play a small role in the associa-
tions of “home turf.”
Visually lurid recreations of the tense traumas of flight and survival during
the Partition and its massacres, train stations in the earlier scenes and trains in
the later scenes where Deol “beat the Pakistanies on their home turf,” rewrite
the entire political narrative of the Partition in Gadar, re-consigning the Muslim
to the category of national traitor, elevating the Indian Punjabi Sikh to the
role of national hero and saviour, and fixing the de-naturalized woman as the
porous embodiment of communal conflict and contestation (Menon 2004; Aiyar
1995). The film’s acknowledgments are preceded by the following “historical”
statement:
The Producers dedicate this film to those Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who
in spite of suffering irreparable losses and facing enormous tragedies at the
time of Partition in 1947, painstakingly rebuilt their lives and brought up
their families with extraordinary determination, hard work and sacrifice
contributing to the noble task of Nation building.
Figure 2.6 Gadar film poster. Courtesy of National Film Arcive of India, Pune.
104 Violence, gender, and citizenship
Sakina is depicted debating with a Muslim cleric about interpretation of women’s
rights in the Sharia, a discourse that hints unmistakably at the debates raging
within twentieth-century Islam about the weighting of pre-modern, counter-
modern, and modern forces in Islam concerning gender ideology. Beyond even
this, the entire nation-state of modern Pakistan is also tarred with the same brush
as being irredeemably corrupt, chaotic, derelict, and, in the end, risibly incom-
patible with enlightened modernity.
By contrast, enlightened modernity is apparently resurrected on the Indian
side in Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara (2004), where we see another scenario of
repetition with difference, or a re-activation, of the core doubt of Lahore, Mr.
and Mrs. 55, Mother India, Garm Hava, and Gadar—namely, the identity of
the normative citizen. The resolution here is in the partially feminized embodi-
ment of the title character Veer Pratap Singh, the brave “rescue” pilot of the
Indian army who languishes in a Pakistani jail for his devotion to Zaara Hayat
Khan, daughter of a Pakistani politician whom he fails to “recover,” unlike the
frenzied Tara Singh: the train station here is a scene of re-abduction by Zaara’s
compatriot and fiancé, Razaa Shirazi (played by the Hindu actor Manoj Bajpai)
clearly gesturing at invasion by the Pakistani. Veer Singh is played by Shah Rukh
Khan, who begins with this film a clear sentimental shift into embodied gender
ambiguity—men are meant to be captors, not captives—though not yet into an
ambiguation of ethnic embodiment such as we see in Chak de India (2007; see
chapter three) and Billu Barber (2009; see chapter one).
Gender embodiment continues to be the site for articulation of difference, when
the film’s ideological structure demands a recuperation thereof, as in Gadar.
However, unlike Gadar, rather than resort to a historical or diachronic register
of iteration to re-discover the Muslim as archaic, countermodern, and thus
singular, Veer-Zaara allows a modern singularity to emerge via the appearance
of the liminal in gender embodiment and enactment. What enables difference
to emerge here as the dominant outcome of the cinematic syntax of synchronic
repetition is the displacement of crisis onto the male body, which simultane-
ously enables the importation of a discourse of difference rather than identity
from the singularizing diachronic to the universalizing synchronic register.
Given the insistent “modernity” of Veer and Zaara themselves, at least—the
setting is most definitely a contemporary India—the film only sparingly evokes
Muslimness as archaic and passé, and neither is it a “period” film. Without the
availability of ethnic otherness, however, representations of singularity cannot
become commonplace within cinematic and socio-historical synchronic struc-
tures without transforming the normative in some other way. In this case, this
transformation resulting from the recurrence of diachronic representations of
singular difference within the synchronic frame is replaced by the liminalization
of gender embodiment—especially male embodiment—as gender re-enactment.
Veer-Zaara begins with Zaara traveling to India, without her family’s knowl-
edge, to bring her Punjabi Sikh nanny’s ashes to India as per her nanny’s wishes.
The nanny’s story is never detailed; we just know that she was exiled to the
Pakistani side of the border and wished to be “returned” to the land of her birth
after her death. Thus, Zaara’s story is palimpsestic in its encoding by the prior
Violence, gender, and citizenship 105
history of another, older woman, who somehow crossed into the wrong country
during Partition, and wishes to be reunited with her beloved homeland. Later in
the film we see Zaara herself as an older woman who has chosen India as her
own homeland, since it is that of her beloved Veer, replicating the nanny’s choice
in some senses, especially since she is also shown as tending to young children
in a school. Yet Zaara’s story diverges from her nanny’s in that her nanny has
remained relatively unassimilated—she did not see her belonging as inclusion,
whereas Zaara insists upon inclusion. Never knowing the personal and affec-
tive circumstances of the nanny’s life in Pakistan, the viewer, too, hesitates to
surmise true identity between them. While Zaara’s romantic choice of the Hindu
Indian Veer is entirely disruptive of paterfamilias, her movement into India had
been non-conformist but legal. While Zaara’s passage to India is politically and
legally unmarked and unremarkable, the nanny’s much earlier and possibly cata-
clysmic passage remains even more unmarked. It is not unlikely that the nanny’s
earlier story is entirely unmarked and silenced primarily to enable the represen-
tation of her difference from Zaara and, crucially, of modern India from modern
Pakistan. A complete re-enactment of the nanny’s story in Zaara’s is eschewed,
therefore, by the temporal separation of the nanny’s story as belonging to a less
enlightened past time in a less modern country, and Zaara’s—as we shall see—to
an apparently more modern present in a more enlightened country.
The nanny’s apparently unwed status and sexual neutrality also contrasts
clearly with Zaara’s romantic assimilation with “Punjabi” India, which begins
when she meets Veer’s family after being “rescued” by him from a hillside acci-
dent on her first cross-border trip to dispose of the nanny’s ashes. Veer’s foster
father—a very “Punjabi” Amitabh Bachchan—blesses her as a proxy Hindu
wife. Zaara can be reabsorbed, clearly, into the “lost” Indian side of her Punjabi
Pakistani self, via Veer Singh and his Punjabi relations, who immediately iden-
tify her as a returning bride, a sort of returned object of abduction (though this
is suppressed in the ethos of Punjabi joviality and bon vivre). The nanny’s near-
lifelong existence and exile in Pakistan is therefore merely a story of rupture, in
suturing which Zaara’s life enters simultaneously into rapture and the rupture of
hostile state relations.
On her way back to Pakistan, as Zaara and Veer ascend a bridge between
railway platforms, Veer says in an uncanny echo of Partition discourse on trains,
“Actually, there is a cutthroat race for seats.” Zaara’s face is shown as freezing
just as Veer speaks, and we encounter her Pakistani fiancé Razaa striding
toward them, dressed in traditional garb that marks him instantly as “Islamic”
and thus archaic, though Veer and Zaara are clearly contemporary and modern,
and dressed accordingly. Just as the lovers are crossing a bridge separating
and joining two platforms, they are met by the ominous Razaa. Subject posi-
tions are re-shuffled here to re-enact Gadar’s crucial scene of successful rescue
as a scene of successful re-abduction. As Zaara is “transferred” from Veer to
Razaa at the train station, the camera cuts to a limp and unfeeling handshake
coming undone between Razaa and Veer, superimposed over the figure of Zaara
standing between the two men representing Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India.
However, rather than the clear separation between winners and losers achieved
106 Violence, gender, and citizenship
by Gadar’s transfer of Tara Singh from the pursuers’ side to Sakina’s side across
the 180-degree axis, Veer and Zaara remain trapped on the further side of the
180-degree axis, where they both seem to be equally in Razaa’s power. The
almost sociable encounter at the train station, in a thematic, social, and aesthetic
re-enactment of the traumatic station scene in Gadar, is the beginning of Zaara’s
abduction, but will also be the beginning of Veer’s later “abduction” in a move-
ment that joins men’s, rather than women’s, destinies to the “female other.”
The story of abduction is then a story of triple abduction: it was the nanny,
unidentified and unidentifiable, who begins the chain of events, whereby Zaara
crosses the border and is recaptured, and Veer crosses the border and is unable to
return, like the dead nanny. Even though he is a true hero and a lover, his enlight-
ened attitude, as opposed to that of his Pakistani enemies, leads him to meekly
suffer the fate of a captive, an abducted person, “like a woman,” silently and
without protest. He agrees to be arrested and detained in a Pakistani jail when
told by Razaa that Zaara’s future happiness will depend upon it. A silenced differ-
ence that is a willed mark of enlightened modernity is a far cry from a silenced
difference that is an involuntary reaction to primal and primordial aggression.
Veer Singh stops speaking while in the Pakistani jail, but this is a choice, not
a fate. This displaced embodiment of womanliness is axial for difference as a
trope of national historical diachrony to cross into difference as a critical marker
of synchronic national history. The movement of identity as difference from
the diachronic to the synchronic register of national history depends upon the
displacement of gender embodiment from the female to the male body in cinema,
because since men actually experiencing the fate of women—in however many
different ways that might be interpreted—was unlikely or, at least, unrepre-
sented, this fictional identification and its accompanying silence became a stra-
tegic moral tool, a choice, and not the end of representation.
As films of the twenty-first century—such as those discussed in detail in
chapter one—demonstrate, more and more recent Hindi cinema is experimenting
with a magnification of the national public discourse upon the indubitable reality
of difference or liminality within the nation, by paradoxically resorting to a less
is more approach. Besides the liminality of identity that results from the criss-
crossing of temporal and spatial codes of repetition, as discussed at the begin-
ning of this chapter, the other primary vehicle for this approach is a new kind of
re-enactment of gender embodiment—men who take women’s place in suffering,
but can never be mistaken as actually feminine, thus recalling Partition’s subjec-
tive iterability encompassing both sameness and difference, which both mirrored
and othered—which have liminalized both gender identity and gender behavior.
Actor Shah Rukh Khan is himself the most prominent vehicle for this. As he
proceeds along his career path of many fascinating liminal ambiguations—schiz-
ophrenic to superstar (Darr to Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge), homosocial to
supervillain (One 2 Ka 4 to Don 2), carnal to spectral (Dil Se to Kal Ho Naa Ho),
Hindu to Muslim (Veer-Zaara to Chak De India), etc.—he begins in Veer-Zaara
in particular to embody a sentimental masculinity that hints at feminization,
without eschewing heroic masculine codes of gender, a signature terrain of limi-
nality. Unlike the hyper-male star of Gadar, Sunny Deol, Shah Rukh Khan was
Violence, gender, and citizenship 107
already recognizable as a somewhat more androgynous and ambiguous figure (a
professed Muslim superstar frequently playing Hindu males in Indian movies,
after all, must be an ambiguous figure), and such an inversion of gender roles in
the captivity narrative is therefore not very problematic within the more “sophis-
ticated” Yash Chopra oeuvre.
Since Veer-Zaara, masculinities in Hindi cinema have continued emerging
as more and more polythetic; instead of the violent aggression characterizing
national masculinity, such as that found in Gadar, the new heroes of the new
cinema act in ways that link them closely with femininity and bare life, but do not
de-naturalize them. The ambiguation of gender experience and the sentimental-
ized masculinity of Veer Singh in Veer-Zaara inscribes this difference from the
engorged masculinity of Tara Singh in Gadar as a positive enlightened moder-
nity, thereby marking a critical shift in national-statist enactments of responses
to violence in modernity through re-enactments of embodied gender. Instead
of relegating difference to a countermodernity characteristic of the past, newer
films liminalize the countermodern within the present “security” crisis of the
nation-state in stories of border crossing that re-enact inter-communal abduction
as romantic rescue, militant vigilantes as law-abiding and self-sacrificing citi-
zens, and gender identities and behaviors as radically contingent, in accordance
with the liminalizing logic of representation as repetition.
As a last note, however, the liminalization of gender embodiment in performa-
tive settings does not entirely replace the liminality of ethnicity, in Khan’s case
especially. Khan stands for, and possibly embodies, a clear new trend in Hindi
cinema of multiple ambiguating re-enactments of the citizen subject, as we have
already seen in chapter one, and as we shall see further in the next chapter. While
his gender liminality functions actively in Veer Zaara’s re-articulation of singu-
larity as the primary condition of synchronic representation (as discourse, as
story)—however much the mythic condition for synchronic representability (as
civic inclusion, as naturalization) might rely on the fiction of similar and equal
presentation, and however much the socio-historical fact of synchronic presenta-
tion might in fact be one of indistinguishable self and other—in one scene near
the film’s end, Khan’s Muslim identity is redeployed as the inevitable liminal
torque, in addition to gender ambiguation, upon which the film’s layered reflec-
tions on citizenship and subjectivity turn. While being acquitted by a Pakistani
court though a prisoner-exchange program with India after a long incarceration,
Khan reads a poem referring to himself as “prisoner number 786” about the fact
that his belonging, as well as that of his Pakistani lover, to either nation-state
always remained a plural, indeterminate, empty as well as excessive sign. He
refers to the soil of the two countries as being interchangeable at a primal level
of apperception, referring simultaneously to the once unified status of India and
Pakistan as well as to his own fungibility as an incommensurate sign in both
countries, since he is a Muslim citizen of India descended from Pakistani Muslim
migrants here playing an Indian Hindu imprisoned in Muslim Pakistan. Often
used in South Asian Islam, “786” happens to be the numeral equivalent referring
to the first verse of the 113 suras of the Quran: “Bismillahi r-rahmani r-rahim”
(“In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful”).
108 Violence, gender, and citizenship
Not only is Khan’s ontological Muslimess hereby re-enacted in this perfor-
mance of his liberation from Pakistani Muslims, who are thematized as his
own people, but this re-activation of “786” is also an iteration with a difference
that is forced through as being commensurable with national unicity: in Yash
Chopra’s Deewar (1975), “786” is the number of a badge given to the hero Vijay
(played by Amitabh Bachchan) by a Muslim co-worker. It saves his life, in fact,
and this catachrestic transfer or gift has since been recognized as an op-sign of
communal harmony and national integration in Hindi cinema. Its re-cognition
or re-activation in Veer-Zaara iterates the text of unicity in singularity that is
doubly instrumental in the context of Shah Rukh Khan’s dual sub-textuality, first
in being the Indian Muslim who represents the Indian citizen abducted by the
Pakistani state, and second in re-inscribing onto his body the states of liminality
experienced by women during Partition. This plural inscription of singularity
as unicity—the charismatic and iconic number 786 fragmenting, and yet substi-
tuting, the star text of Khan in this instance—becomes an enunciatory possibility
that the nation-state so desperately needs and seeks in modern times. While the
logic of representation requires differentiation, without which there can be no
communication, only silence, as we have seen earlier in this chapter’s discussion
of the silence on Partition, the modern state is reluctant to produce difference
through the construction of singularities such as non-parallel identity for self
and other on a diachronic or temporal register, or to officially characterize its
minority citizens as un-presentable as well as un-represented (neither counted
nor spoken of), or to resort to a total non-response as a mark of difference from
the barbaric other as that would be both politically and discursively suicidal. The
solution is in indirection, therefore, or in re-directing the cognition of liminality
and singularity as incommensurable into a so-called “re-cognition” of the poten-
tial for the national-statist self or citizen to survive by mutation and fragmenta-
tion, by re-membering, re-presenting the presented minority by invoking gender
and ethnic liminality, and by making, along the way, an affectively wrenching
courtroom drama of the whole thing.
The grand legerdemain of Gadar and Veer-Zaara is their re-membering of the
nation-state as a gendered and embodied scenario for romantic rapture, and their
manipulation of a critique of the state as an agent of rupture and differentiation.
Scholarship of the nineties has highlighted the atrocity of some recoveries:
‘abduction’ as defined by the act of 1949 assumed that any and every woman
located in the home or under the control of a family or individual of the other
community, was eligible for recovery, regardless of any indications to the
contrary …
(Menon 1998: 24)
Gadar, as we learn from Gahlot, was supposedly based on the real story of Boota
Singh, a Punjabi Indian who married a Muslim woman during the violence, subse-
quently lost her to the recovery efforts mandated by the Abducted Persons Act,
made his way to Pakistan, failed to recover his wife, and died there a “shaheed,”
or martyr, according to an Indian romance of Partition. Romantic melodrama
Violence, gender, and citizenship 109
obscures the progressive recognition of the excesses of national citizen identifi-
cation. Gadar makes a calculated bid for exploiting the excesses of spectatorial
identification with characters of ruptured romance who are seen as victims of
bad, diachronic readings of regional history. Gadar’s story of redone recovery—
or recovery done twice—is a jingoistic re-appropriation of nation vis-à-vis the
foreign woman’s body (if the women of Pakistan want to return to their Indian
lovers, should not Pakistan itself regret its rash rupture from India?). It produces
a freakish hyper-masculine superhero as the liminality generated by tackling
synchronic singularities that are supposed to populate only the archaic other,
but in fact characterize the contemporary self that cheers on as Tara Singh tears
through the Pakistani landscape with his burning train and his loot of Pakistani
bodies, proving that the anxieties of identification and differentiation require
repeated re-staging, blurring diachronic and synchronic registers, and merging
the normative with the very murderous excess that is a sign of radical alterity.
Veer-Zaara’s more “contemporary” treatment of a very similar double recovery
adopts equally duplicitous modes of writing structural political disequilibrium as
fortunes of individual naturalizations, whose triumph over the politics of nation-
states completely drives aground any redemptive plot of neighborly understanding:
the “progressive” transnational romance and its “softening” of masculinity re-ener-
gizes distorting representations of ethnic others, because retaliatory violence
cannot be accommodated within the synchronic register without foreclosing repre-
sentation. Could Hindi cinema’s turns and twists, subterfuges, prevarications,
and allegories of Partition experiences have arisen from what in the introduction
to this book I call a covert acknowledgment of the temporalities and spatialities
of the countermodern that challenge and dismantle a progressive national-statist
structural discourse of “natural” progression, or progressive “naturalization” of
the citizen? Hindi cinema’s mythic naturalization of the structures of violence
informing South Asian early modernity as the romantic, solitary, solipsistic, indi-
vidual, or familial “event” of abduction and appropriation would suggest so, as
does the repetition of this “event” as evidence of both the stress and the success
of recording the irreducible heterogeneity of countermodern and “in-consistent”
(in Badiou’s sense) elements within the discourse of the nation-state and the myth
of its historic nature. One isolated comment does not a manifesto make, but Yash
Chopra, the director of Veer-Zaara, declares his solipsistic stance as follows:
‘I was in Jalandhar during Partition … I have seen riots in great detail from
close quarters. I have seen people dying, looting and burning. From that time
to the present, I have not been involved in any political party … In the world
every tragedy is caused by politicians …
(Joshi 2004: 113)
Shah Rukh Khan, hereafter SRK in this chapter, has been seen by some as not
only articulating the new zeitgeist of a post-globalization billion-strong India, but
also as a star text for legitimating a new hybridity for an erstwhile liminality, aka
the Indian Muslim (Singh 2008), one that can “subvert and complicate … a linear
and narrow interpretation” of Hindi cinematic output since the 1990s as bearing
the mark of a hegemonic Hindutva (ibid.: 1–2). According to Sunny Singh, SRK’s
is a star text that gave a face to a new generation undergoing monumental social
and economic challenge and change, and managed to produce the stable category
of the “middle-class aspiring Indian,” a category that “may appear to occupy a
hotly contested liminal space” (ibid.: 3, 2; emphasis mine) due to myriad fractal
articulations of national identity.
Singh’s article is intriguing and at times compelling in proposing the
Ramayana as the grande syntagmatique (à la Metz) of Hindi cinema, which SRK
has helped to embody as a manifestation of Rama, the virtuous hero. Taking
its cue from Mishra’s work (2002), which argued for the Mahabharata as the
grand syntagmatic of Hindi films and Amitabh Bachchan in his “angry young
man” roles as its embodiment of Karna, the troubled hero, Singh analyzes several
of SRK’s films, including Chak De India, as instances of the new materializa-
tion of the hero in keeping with the new national mood of optimistic aspira-
tion. He argues, moreover, that SRK’s successful representation as the virtuous
Hindu god Ram in the epic Ramayana successfully complicates, indeed scuttles,
any dogmatic argument about a takeover of the Hindi cinema industry by anti-
Muslim Hindutva-centric forces.
While it is true that SRK has long and successfully played Hindu characters
on screen in Hindi films, presenting the most successfully secular face of Indian
demographic diversity despite being known as a Muslim (Shiekh 2006: 136),
the fact remains that Chak de India is SRK’s first significant appearance as a
Muslim protagonist in a Hindi film. It is also true that very few other prominent
Muslim actors in the history of Hindi films have ever merged their off-screen
lives and on-screen star texts in this way, by appearing as a Muslim in a film (a
rare exception being Dilip Kumar). Actors have travelled in the opposite direc-
tion, of course, playing Muslims while being real-life Hindus; the reverse has
generally not happened.
When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself 111
On a point further along the trenchant critique of nation-statist ideology
than Singh’s argument travels, Shahnaz Khan has elaborated Hindi cinematic
schemas for representing Muslims as depoliticized or good versus fanatical or
bad (Khan 2009: 88). Between Singh and Khan the range of options span from
Muslims as facilitating an integrationist view of a new liberalized and ascendant
global India, versus Muslims as an element of the national multiplicity who must
be re-politicized. Singh’s reading of the Muslim as embodied by SRK eschews
the question of Muslim particularity, and certainly of Muslim embodiment, as
irrelevant to the new national repertoire that successfully includes hybridity. To
be “Indian,” in this sense, is to bypass altogether the question of any “particular”
embodiment. Khan’s reading of the Muslim in the film Fanaa (“Storm of Love”,
Kunal Kohli, 2006) insists upon the Muslim as embodied and incommensurate
within the story of the modern nation unless reconfigured as patriotic; in Fanaa,
a terrorist Muslim has to be physically destroyed despite being the male protago-
nist of the film’s romance narrative. To be “Muslim,” in this reading, is to be
nothing but a “particular” problematic body that demands address.
These two readings, it might be argued, relate ethnicity to the pan-national
narrative as structural (Singh) versus eventful (Khan). The axial difference
between the structural accommodation of ethnicity and its “eventalization”
as excess—in Badiou’s sense (2005)—is the presence or absence of Muslim
singularity as embodiment. If one sees the Muslim male in the Hindi cinematic
repertoire as successfully amalgamated hybrid, the singularity of Muslim male
embodiment gives way to the Muslim’s commensurability as structural and
archival (Taylor 2003). If, however, one sees him as perennially threatening an
alienated incommensurability, a liminaility exceeding the norms and bounds of
the hegemonic nation-state complex, his embodiment needs to be re-enacted,
re-performed repeatedly to assure his “belonging” to the hegemonic script and
to salvage his “evental” act of non-belonging from the nothingness and excess
of incommensurable liminality. Khan outlines, in her discussion of Fanaa, the
work that the filmic narrative must do to recuperate the Muslim by destroying the
Muslim male body as violent, excessive, and liminal.
However, a third option for representing the Muslim has not been considered
thus far. I will call this option that of re-embodiment; it neither avows the physi-
cality of the Muslim as ethnic-ized, nor is it in-“different” to its potential for
masquerade and performance. From this I would argue that, despite SRK retaining
his Muslim name throughout his career, the fact that he departs from norm in
personating a Muslim man as a Muslim actor in Chak de India (2007) is of great
significance, but not necessarily because this signifies a liberatory pinnacle of the
triumph of post-communal harmony. Indeed, in this essay, I would contend that
SRK’s first major filmic appearance as a Muslim character in 2007 is a familiar
Hindi cinematic exercise of inert repetition, meant to normalize the liminality
of the Muslim by re-embodying Muslim masculinity as feminized. The Muslim
character played by the Muslim actor is, in this sense, a doubled embodiment that
generates sameness in the form of displacement of ethnicity and its re-coding as
femininity as the condition for and of representation. Doubling SRK’s real-life
persona in this new formation in his star text does not generate “identity” as
112 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
heterogeneity and “difference.” Instead, it paradoxically ensures that his “differ-
ence,” i.e. Muslimness, remains bound within the rigid and foreclosed logic of
representation that is premised upon the homogenous essence of the nation-state.
In what follows, I hope to show how invocations of difference in the film are
invariably diffused by foreclosing race and gender identities as interwoven and
commensurable.
In Chak De India, SRK’s character, Kabir Khan, coaches the much belittled
Indian Women’s Hockey team to an unprecedented and unanticipated landslide
victory at the Women’s Hockey World Cup, thereby apparently demolishing sexist
biases and discrimination against Indian women. The film depicts the derisive,
sexist and non-egalitarian treatment of the women’s team from the very outset by
the Hockey Association itself, particularly by its highest officers, who run it as a
male fiefdom. Kabir Khan, the erstwhile Indian men’s hockey team captain had
been expelled from the team seven years before, upon the accusation of betraying
his team into defeat against Pakistan in the Men’s World Hockey championship
match.1 Having disappeared thereafter, he reappears and volunteers to coach
the women’s team amidst showers of ridicule and insult. His coaching results in
besting and overturning all the accumulated misogyny and contempt for women
commonplace in Indian society, however, and the restoration of the women’s pride
in themselves as athletes and as women. The film repeatedly codes this pride as a
form of honor, previously “lost” and now regained thanks to their coach.
Besides the progressive representation of women’s rights and abilities, there
are other salutary vectors in the representation of identity politics within the
Indian national-statist official ideology of secularism in Chak de India. Thus, for
instance, in showing the sport of hockey—India’s official national sport—as the
equal domain of official discourses of equal rights and privileges creating rational
and enlightenment discourses of gender politics, and that of entirely primordial
and unreconstructed hetero-patriarchal and ascriptive identity networking and
clannishness, the film dismantles handily what Thomas Blom Hansen charac-
terizes as an artificial secularist polarity of “dirty” politics and “pure” cultures
in India within the specific arena of official sports, a realm one might call both
intensely political and cultural (Hansen 2000: 255). Deftly, Chak de India shows
that the actual discourse of Indian secularism, which seems to be its primary
import and, indeed, export, is enacted not merely within the so-called “modern”
rationalist, dispassionate, progressive, and Westernized enunciations of public
and civic citizenship, but is also a part of the passionate cultural articulations
of pre- and countermodern communities, civil societies, and communalities
attached to “national” sports in the pre- as well as post-independence eras.2 In
fact, in the film’s opening shot, which is that of the momentous hockey match
between India and Pakistan where Kabir Khan fails, the commentator says that
the “game” has always been a matter that goes beyond sports, hinting unmistak-
ably at historic rivalries and tensions between the two uneasy neighbors, (Hindu)
India and (Muslim) Pakistan. The problem of being secular, it suggests, it not
merely political but also a longstanding cultural nationalist issue.
However, all such discourses of representation of female gender and ethnic
politics assume a kind of “straightness” of the discourse, whereby the protagonist,
When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself 113
the player, straightforwardly represents—either restoring or foregrounding—the
essence of an identity that has been lost, displaced, misconstrued, or simply
repressed. In other words, there is no doubt in such interpretations of “repre-
sentational” discourse of the possibility and the probability of a full “capture,” a
metaphoric fulfilment, of a plenary empirical entity, a being that is whole, recu-
perable, and unchanged by translation or transition, by interpretation and semi-
otic re-ordering or transmission. Semiotics and semantics are seen as congruent
and paradigmatic in such discourses of representation. If one shifts attention,
however, from the “representational” emphasis in Chak De India as being that
of Kabir Khan, aka SRK, successfully “representing” Muslims and women as
beings endowed with rights equal to Hindu men, it begins to emerge that such
portrayals of full subjectivation in the film are based on a legerdemain of partial
equations and incomplete transferences, whose origins lie in a principle of repre-
sentation or portrayal as “camp” in the sense of enactments that transform stable
ontological essences.
As Farmer writes on this, “camp prioritizes gender as the ultimate style of
stylistic performativity,” and, drawing upon a range of theories of camp, continues,
“camp shifts the emphasis from seeing gender as an essentialized ontology, a
fixed expression of an inner truth, to seeing it as a performative production”
(2000: 114). The most influential such theory in contemporary discourses of
sexed and gender identity is that of Butler, who has argued most eloquently and
forcefully proposing gender as a form of performative masquerade, as in camp
enactments in which “all sorts of resignifying and parodic repetitions become
possible” (1991: 23; 1990: 31, 137–8). I invoke the category of camp with regard
to Chak de India not to suggest its deployment as a conscious attitude, but rather
as a residue or sediment of what appear to be, on the surface, entirely serious
aspirational enactments of the gendering and ethnic composition of the inclu-
sive and tolerant democratic nation. Camp style and masquerade are activated
by the film in three senses at least. First, the treatment of oppression as a matter
inviting a camp subterfuge is evident in the film in SRK’s very hyperbolic acting
style, especially his emotional close-ups, which always incorporate an element
of self-distancing and self-consciousness from the role and moment; it is always
apparent to the viewer that SRK is conscious of himself as the actor acting. In
certain roles, this has made for a very interesting and protean range of simulacra
of expressivity when SRK embodies strong emotion. This style of performance
is camp because it quite clearly, though subtly, enunciates the thin invisible line
between performed affect and the intentionality of performance. SRK’s style of
camp acting might on the one hand seem simply to be an instance of over-acting
or “hamming,” of inflated melodramatic thespian extravaganza; on the other, it
might easily be understood as what Farmer has called “subjective masquerade,”
which derives logically from the privileges as well as pressures of the star system
(2000: 124). A certain reflexive style of performance is meant by “subjective
masquerade,” whereby the actor in acting gestures at his “acting,” and also
gestures subtly (or perhaps not, in SRK’s case) at a shared awareness between
themselves and the audience that “this is me acting.” It is a style that deploys and
foregrounds the shared theatrical awareness of everyone—that the actor is not
114 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
the character they are playing—as the heightened parallel text that simulation is
the very meaning of simulation. As Kuhn has written:
An actor’s role is assumed like a mask, the mask concealing the performer’s
‘true self’ … In effecting a distance between assumed persona and real self,
the practice of performance constructs a subject which is both fixed in the
distinction between role and self and at the same time, paradoxically, called
into question in the very act of performance.
(Kuhn 1985: 52, cited in Farmer 2000: 124)
While, in the case of other actors this mutability, this fluidity of impersonation
is often suppressed, such is the aura of SRK’s star text that, in his case, this
fluidity of assuming a “role” is in fact played up and foregrounded as a parallel
meaning of the cinematic text and its histrionic imprimatur. Chak de India is
not self-conscious, unique, or intentional about this dimension of SRK’s perfor-
mance style; in part, this style is a given, a matter of his star text peeping through
in a certain default tongue-in-cheek, almost pantomimic metaperformance that
seems to hover between solipsism and narcissism.3 In this regard, therefore, the
auratic authority of SRK’s star image or text succeeds in the sort of “recupera-
tion” and consolidation of artifactual enactments of that image text that Dyer
has called highly unstable and difficult to achieve (1979: 16). This self-conscious
reflexivity of histrionic style—this ironic “knowingness”—has all the marks of
camp as a parodistic unsettling of fixed notions and constructs of gender and
(self-)representation.
The second way in which camp emerges as a dominant vector of gendered
performance is in the treatment of the athlete characters as a troupe of performers
to be retrained to give their best performance yet. The women are re-educated
into identifying themselves as “team India” from their proclivity to identify
themselves parochially and regionally as state champions; they are redeemed
in the eyes of the callous Hockey Association and a derisive public as genuinely
great players given the right coaching and circumstances; finally, they demolish
any perceived contradiction between being great athletes and perfectly normal
Indian “women.” Indeed, the women are re-educated to see themselves in a
different “role,” to “play” a new part, not as third-rate athletes expected to lose,
but as champions and victorious Indians. The gender of the female athletes is,
in this sense, not achieved until the climax, when they emerge as women who
win the Hockey World Cup. Until that point they are perennially in training, at
first as mutually antagonistic and competitive solo players, and finally as female
champions and champions of femaleness, actualizing their optimal gender iden-
tity and role.
Finally, and most obviously, camp as unfixed performance of gendering or
gendering as performance is activated in the “feminization” of Kabir Khan—
who has no apparent heterosexual family or companion—who joins the Indian
women’s hockey team as coach on his own initiative, to restore his own “honor,”
and to raise the status of women in India. While on the one hand this characteri-
zation resembles the disguise of Arjuna as the female dance teacher Brihannala
When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself 115
in the palace of King Virata during the 14-year exile of the Pandava brothers in
the Mahabharata, it differs in the fact that this masquerade of re-embodiment as a
gender double involves no fatuous or comic disguise, transformation, or masking
in Kabir Khan’s case. He coaches the Indian women’s hockey team as a Muslim
man without wife or family. That this diegetically implies no perceived sexual
threat from him is equally obvious and startling, given that Muslim men in India
have traditionally been stereotyped as sexually profligate, voracious, and espe-
cially threatening to the Hindu female “other.” The most ready explanation for
this would also be the most persuasive one, i.e. Kabir Khan is not a threat to the
women because he is emasculated or feminized, and his performance as a “man”
living and traveling with a whole group of young and physically vigorous women
causes no anxiety because he is not seen first and foremost as “virile.” The logic
and aesthetic of gender as a camp outcome in the film is completed with this
placing of a man “in the place of” women.
What, then, might the conflation of Kabir Khan as Indian Muslim, and the
female hockey players as Indian women, as finally successful and accepted
nomenclatures of identity and citizenship mean? After all, Kabir Khan, who is
consistently compared to discredited women at the beginning of the film, achieves
his own re-subjectivation, his own re-naturalization as Indian by elevating a
team of non-Muslim Indian women as “natural” athletes, as well as women.
After being slandered as a “traitor” while the captain of the Indian men’s hockey
team, and exiled from sports and public view for seven long years, the only way
he can reinvent himself and re-enter the world of hockey is by volunteering for
the supremely un-coveted job of coach of the Indian women’s team, a team that
sexist Indians consider born losers. Coach Khan’s re-subjectivation as Indian
(though Muslim) is, thereby, conditional upon the recuperation of Indian women
as successfully Indian, athletic, and feminine. To go further, his re-subjectivation
is, in fact, equivalent to the full subjectivation of Indian women. As a mistrusted
ethnic minority, in order to re-enter the nation and to represent it as well as be
represented within it, Kabir Khan must re-perform the category of gender, not
ethnicity, to break stereotypes and transform fixed perceptions. While seeming
to maintain the idea of political and aesthetic representation as stable, unprob-
lematic, and “straight”-forward, Chak de India actually deploys the strategy of
camp, which plays with the fluidity of gender performances, of gender as fluid
performance rather than stable essence, thus destabilizing representation in the
very act of so-called representation. Women and Muslims may gain “representa-
tion” in this film, but it is gained by the stratagem of repeatedly subverting the
notion of identity itself by forcing it through the gender-bending of camp strata-
gems that destabilize gender and other representations altogether.
However, the film’s almost maniacal invocations of “Indianness” and “India”
ensure that, in the end, ludic and heterogenizing possibilities of camp are
checked. By rearticulating Muslim rights in the rubric of women’s rights in post-
colonial Indian democracy, the film makes way for the particularity of Muslim
male embodiment—including its potential implication in a vigorous debate
within Indian Muslim communities about the rights of Muslim women—to be
evacuated. “Difference” intersectionally tripled and compounded—the Muslim
116 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
star appearing as the Muslim character who is a proto-feminist supporter of
oppressed women—adds up to a sublimation and erasure of “difference” as the
ground of identity.
I first began work on this essay in the fall of 2003, when the Bharatiya Janata
Party government was still in power in India. I had been pondering the relation-
ship between the latest Hindi films and politics in India for a while, making a
note of the cinema’s recent refashioning of gender politics, images, and roles
in an era of “militant Hindutva [which] seeks to homogenize India’s multi-reli-
gious society into its neo-fascist image.”1 Hindutva, in brief, is best described as
“Hindu-ness”; a presentist, ethnophobic, reactionary socio-political ideology in
India and abroad, it is at least equal parts piety and civilizationalism. Hinduism
may or may not be a civilizational way of life; Hindutva is. Its major political arm
in India is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is the political instrument of
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The cultural arm of the RSS is the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (“World Hindu Forum,” VHP), which has many outreach
outfits in the Indian diaspora (Narula 2003: 2, 11, 53; Van der Veer 1994: 108, 117,
119, 130–1, 134, 122–6; Malik 2003: 29; Mukta 2000: 443).
If caste is a bio-moral category, Hindutva nationalism is a bio-civilizational
category. It is based and steeped in notions of pure blood, though not on concepts
of race as such:
This conception of ‘race’ is very slippery indeed and can use the epistemic
resources of culture and civilization or spirituality and religion or ‘blood’
and nation without necessarily having any epistemic responsibility for the
use of any of these ideas …
(Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 413)
Observers of Hindu nationalism have drawn out the several interwoven strands
that constitute its seeming cultural politics and economic policy (Searle-
Chatterjee 2000: 498; Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 408, 409; Malik 2003: 26–9; Van
der Veer 1994: 132). Bollywood, too, leads the critic beyond an exclusive focus
on a single political party as a state apparatus of calculated violence to a wider
framework, on the intimate meaning of violence twice mediated in national
culture: both as a political iconography and choreography of civic life and
conflict, and as representational matrix or classic scenario of a pantheistic film
industry. The paired logic of globalization and neoliberalism as new economic
policies provides a material frame for the paired imagistic of a national culture
128 Bollywood’s painless globalization
of representation and the representation of cultural nationalism. In Bollywood
cinema, national identity is frequently a flourishing Hindutva.
There are two primary geo-bytes for the staging of triumphant NRI-friendly
neoliberalism in Bollywood. One is, and has always been, Bombay—gritty,
sexy and cosmopolitan; the other, more shifting site is, currently, the bucolic
Punjab.2 In DDLJ, Yaadein, and Pardes, the green fields and waving crops of
the Punjab served as an imagistic location for the NRI’s reabsorption—never
plenary, but calculated to tantalize, energize, mobilize—into “Indian” life, as
in the famous opening montage of DDLJ showing women dancing through
the fertile landscape. A relatively similar terrain and imagistic appears in the
opening sequence of Pardes, a film that articulates something that I call “bridal
nationalism”, its theme being the re-Indianization of an NRI tycoon, who chooses
for his debauched Americanized son a Punjabi girl who exposes the son’s false
Indianness and finds herself a more truly Indian/NRI husband, played by Shah
Rukh Khan. However, even this exceptional young woman is entirely framed and
captured within paternalistic homosociality: her father and the tycoon ultimately
jointly endorse her rebellion and legitimate her revolt against their initial choice.
She is also the mouthpiece of triumphalist NRI re-nationalization, as when she
regales the tycoon’s party of select San Franciscans with a folksy blend of nation-
alist crooning.
Why the Punjab? The choice of Bombay as a locus for renegotiating late capi-
talist modernities is rather obvious; Bombay, the gateway to India, has always
been a consciously metropolitan chronotope.3 More frictively, however, the
Punjab’s resurgence in the imagistic can be explained by a polythetic analysis.
First, the Punjab of the green revolution signifies prosperity mythologized as
neoliberal and entrepreneurial, when really it is a result of environmentally
degrading structural subsidies (Ramakrishnan in Hovden and Keene 2002:
246–51). Second, Punjab is the birthplace of bhangra, an eastern cultural form
of music proven capable of ideal syncretic fusion with Western beats. Finally,
though, a political rationale underpins and subtends these cultural ideoscapes.
Until the nineties, secessionist Sikh nationalism had made the Punjab threat-
ening and unavailable to the national imaginary (Varshney 2002: 79–80). After
the subsidence of Sikh nationalism in 1990, Punjab was reopened, and not acci-
dentally, Bollywood’s mythopoesis and fetishizing of Punjab—the other para-
disial location Kashmir, alas, had been lost—corresponds with the recovery, one
might say, of an entrepreneurial part of the Hindu extended family feared lost.
This Punjabi revivalism is again, actually, politically, and economically moti-
vated—not an accident.
The wildly popular formulaic fusion of Punjabi locales and the story of neolib-
eral manifest destiny for a new nation is similarly not accidental, but a fusion
of this new nation form and late capital in the renationalization of the diasporic
Indian. If “a takeover of Indian politics by the Hindu nationalist ideology is highly
improbable” (Varshney 2002: 86), a takeover of Bollywood imagistic—bolstered
by NRI goodwill—has been achieved. Thus, in Ek Rishtaa, megastar Amitabh
Bachchan appears as an industrialist whose foreign-educated “techy” son takes
on the factory’s labor boss in a bloody fight sequence, proving that capitalists are
Bollywood’s painless globalization 129
right and have the better social plan after all. Citations of the West and the NRI—
though the latter term was not coined until recently—are not new in Bollywood.
The genre and industry are indeed committedly metadiscursive, keenly aware of
their teleological transnationality and indeed of their proto-diasporic fixations,
relentlessly evoking a proto-globalized world since the early twentieth century.
However, the refiguring of global “Indianness” as ultra-capitalist, paternalist,
and predominantly “Hindu” reinforces emerging scholarly findings that reli-
gious nationalisms are fundamentally economic and political, not religious or
cultural phenomena. The neoliberal ideal and its potential for determinist social
and economic hegemony masked as regeneration found a spectacular frame in
neoliberal Bollywood’s adoption of the tenets of economic and political nation-
alisms, and its recasting of them in terms friendly to religious and cultural
nationalisms. This is especially evident in the NRI-conscious and NRI-oriented
films of the nineties and thereafter, films like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun! (hereafter
HAHK!, “Who Are We to You!” 1994, Sooraj Barjatiya), Yaadein (“Memories,”
2001, Subhash Ghai), and Pardes.
Moreover, this recasting of secular national politics as a play of fissiparous
anti-secularism is especially clear by contrast with Hindi cinema of the 1970s
and ’80s, where piety took a quite different form. Instead of serving as a
representational matrix for docile male bodies servicing the state and official
economy as in popular nineties family romances built around consumerist life-
styles, notably the trend-setting HAHK!, 1970s and ’80s Hindi film was domi-
nated by the unruly liminal body of super-star Amitabh Bachchan, in his socially
conscious angry young man films, presenting the male body and its passionate
piety as ultimate resistance to the corrupt and non-egalitarian state. Having thus
far described the twinned reproduction of identity in the neoliberal crucibles of
territorial and deterritorialized subject formations, and the new civilizational and
familial hegemonies of Hindutva identified cultural nationalism in Bollywood, I
wish to contrast them with an earlier Hindi film’s scene of pious sadomasochism
in one of those notorious and bathetic song-and-dance sequences in “formula”
Bollywood films.
Of the many possible choices, I have picked a scene from an Amitabh
Bachchan film, Mard (1985, Manmohan Desai), which offers the old look of
subaltern negotiations of hegemony in a pooja or worship context typical of
pre-liberalization Hindi cinema. To understand the construction of a suitable
viewership for this scene one must recognize Bachchan’s iconic status. Dwyer
and Patel write of him:
Regarded as the most successful Indian actor of all time, Bachchan developed
his persona of the ‘angry young man-hero’ in the 1970s … Consequently over
a period of time he was presented as a strong independent figure, ready to
fight for justice, physically powerful but also introverted and in some cases
ultimately tragic … promotional material projected the ‘material phenom-
enon’ of Bachchan, his ‘physical body, physiognomy, gestural repertoire,
physical agility, and costume’
(2002: 184–5)4
130 Bollywood’s painless globalization
Mard depicts the struggles of Raju/Mard, the child tragically separated at birth
from his patriot father, who carved the name “Mard” on the infant’s chest at
birth. Marked by the sign of anti-colonial paternal hopes and crisis, both physi-
cally and symbolically, Raju/Mard becomes an iconic text of traumatized hyper-
masculinity.5 Mard grows up into a world of neocolonial nativist hegemony still
dominated by “foreign” influences, whose freakish occidentality expose them to
relentless popular caricature as anti-national remnants and mutants of the colo-
nial encounter, reviled puppets and stooges of the neocolonial West’s continuing
market hegemony in pre-liberalization India and in Hindi films. Named Raju as
an adult, he extends his father’s nativist legacy of a categorically phallic resist-
ance to neocolonial native elites portrayed as effeminate, as well as female.
Lutgendorf puts it best:
The film’s pooja or darshan scene, however, serves up a pathos whose influence
softens, even destabilizes, the masculine affect of the hero.
Darshan is the direct encounter with deity that characterizes Hindu spir-
itual subjectivity. Dwyer and Patel summarize the phenomenon of darshan in
Bollywood:
a two-way look, the beholder takes darshan (darshan lena) and the object
gives darshan (darshan dena), in which the image rather than the person
looking has power … darshan can have enabling as well as authoritative
functions … The star frequently appears in tableau scenes that seem to
invite darshan, thus hierarchizing the look and giving the star associations
with the traditional granters of darshan, notably kings and gods …
(Dwyer and Patel 2002: 33)
Darshan has also been seen as the basis for the aesthetic norms of frontality
and the gaze in painting and calendar art in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
art, both precursors of the cinema (Mishra 2002: 1; De 2005). Darshan also has
connotations of the full frontal encounter with the male “megastar” in films
(Dwyer and Patel 2002: 44), a relationship I explore in chapters one and five in
full contrastive detail for its gendered implications.
In Mard’s pooja scene, where darshan is doubly mediated—once for the
hero and then for the exegetic spectator—Raju/ Mard waits for his long-lost
mother, found toiling in the native neocolonialists’ labor camp, in the temple of
Bollywood’s painless globalization 131
Sherewaali Ma (Tiger Goddess or Vaishno Devi, a popular North Indian incar-
nation of the female mother deity). His father—played by Hindi cinema’s then
most famous action-star and he-man, Dara Singh—toils in a separate part of
the prison. The narrative bypasses the father, however, to focus on the mother’s
incredible escape, synchronically intercut with a temple devotional that Raju/
Mard dominates physically and psychologically. Raju/Mard’s mother escapes the
prison guards through the kind offices of the goddess’ sacred animal, the tiger or
sher, and stumbles into the temple, miraculously regaining her power of speech
in the same instant.
While Raju’s mother is undergoing her fortuitous and miraculous escape, the
camera cuts to Raju/Mard’s passionate but challenging invocation of female
subaltern power. The goddess Sherewaali and Raju/Mard/Bachchan lock gazes in
a visual dynamic, wherein Raju is abjectly sado-masochistic as well as demand-
ingly confrontational, repeating his demands of the goddess with synchronically
self-inflicted wounds. The populist and idealized mise en scène of the temple
and its congregated worshippers provides a grassroots community backdrop
for the primarily solitary struggle of Raju/Mard against the greedy and corrupt
neocolonialist Indian capitalists. The song rolls on; its lyrics include “The rich
have everything, but the poor only have mother and father; don’t take their one
wealth away from them” (my translation). As the song reaches its climax, Raju/
Mard/Bachchan’s frontal gaze is rapidly and repeatedly reversed with that of the
goddess, thereby positing a taut continuum of identification and disidentification
of goddess and devotee, which fully exploits Bachchan’s own iconicity.
From this point, strengthened by renegotiation of agency in its maternal Shakti
form, Raju/Mard/Bachchan inexorably triumphs over the thugs and villains.
I shall attempt interpretation(s) of this reunion and its ideological yield. First,
renegotiation of subalternity as heroic, but virtuous, masculinity cathected
through the mother—imagistics for a nineteenth-century version of male Indian
nationalism imagined as a mother-son bond—enables a spectacular expression
of subaltern masochistic affect as popular, anti-hegemonic discontent. As Jigna
Desai writes, “the gendered subaltern signifies the space of the conceptual failure
of the nation” (Desai 2004: 11). Second, critical decolonization is crudely repre-
sented here as self-mutilating pain; its resolution occurs in reunification with
the maternal, against the backdrop of an empathic but non-familial, anonymous
collective, perhaps a kind of hybrid between a political mass and civil society.
This recuperates affect for a compassionate masculinity and a feminized nation-
alism, both radically “weak” for contemporary Hindu nationalism.
The traumatized mother-son pair indexes the inevitability of pain as the lot of
the socially disempowered, but their reunion also endorses the liminal publics
of a morally resurgent anti-hegemonic nation, including various gendered subal-
tern countermodernities. Re-site-ing and re-citing anticolonial struggle within a
decolonized context as an individual and liminal legacy and performance—the
son repeats the father’s traumatic anticolonial resistance to immoral authority,
as the protagonist repeats the inscription and performance of heroic post-inde-
pendence trauma by a filmic and pro-filmic prototype in Deewar—the hero’s
masculinity gingerly balances several contested representations of the slippery
132 Bollywood’s painless globalization
genders of nationalism and nativist neocolonialism. The anonymous communal
tableau in this scene emphasizes not the power of the unambiguously united
familial collective—as tableaux will do later, shown below—but the family and
nation cohering only in publics who share and witness trauma, abjection and
triumph, as serialized challenges to multiple and cynically gendered sources of
social authority.
The nineties’ neoliberal Bollywood film has, by contrast, regenerated piety
as social deterministic reorganization: the domestic male Hindu icon and the
flash of global money. Also, in the very repertoire of mobilized gendered iden-
tities within the religious nationalist paradigm, the neoliberal Bollywood film
has suppressed three other related social categories that used to play culturally
authoritative, if incidental or secondary, roles in earlier Hindi cinema: women,
religious minorities, and the urban poor. This new Indian self-fashioning
underscores the scholarly consensus that these fundamentalisms are finally
about a particular shape of modernity: a neoliberal one that shirks the chal-
lenges of a more nuanced role for civil society (Falk in Hovden and Keene 2002:
93–4; Chatterjee 1986, 1993). That such modernities are frequently genocidal
as well as gender violent is evident in the dilemma posed to Indian feminists
by the BJP’s embrace of a demand for a Uniform Civil Code as its gesture of
support for Muslim “women.” To review briefly, the the BJP and its precursors,
Hindutva-centric political clusters in India, have long been vocally claiming
that Muslims enjoy rights unavailable to the dominant majority as a form of
minority “appeasement.” Any event that has allowed Muslim personal law to
be a primary determinant of issues relating to marriage, death, birth, inherit-
ance, or adoption—as mandated by the constitution for all ethnic communi-
ties, and certainly as frequently exploited by Hindus as any other group—has
raised reactionary anti-minority outcries of Muslim appeasement (Agnes 2004:
xxxiii, xlii-xliv; Varshney 2002: 64; Hasan in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 76–8,
80–2; Sarkar in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 92–9).
The BJP’s apparent and paradoxical championship of Muslim “women’s”
rights is not only a snake in the basket for Indian feminists—for its true objects
and concerns are not women—it fortuitously (for the BJP) also embodies the
political statement of the BJP that “‘Muslim appeasement,’ … is the cause of
communal conflicts in India” (Varshney 2002: 8; Basu in Jeffery and Basu 1998:
4, 11; Hasan 1998: 71–3, 86–7). The BJP joined the outcry against so-called
Muslim appeasement to argue that personal law is anti-woman; it used the 1986
Shah Bano divorce case to argue for the repeal of Personal Law for Muslims
in India. On the basis of this case’s final decision upon appeal, which is widely
held to portend further appeasement of Muslims, “Parliament passed the Muslim
Women (protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill, which prevented Muslim women
from claiming maintenance under the C(riminal) P(rocedure) C(ode)” (Hasan
1998: 74).
This particular indirect form of paternalist mobilization of women proceeds
hand in hand with other forms of “Hindu” mobilization, including fanning anti-
minority, even genocidal, sentiment among Hindu women themselves, within
and without the female enclave of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh7—the BJP’s
Bollywood’s painless globalization 133
ideological fount—the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (Bacchetta in Jayawardena and de
Alwis 1996; Basu in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 3, 10, 11; Sarkar 1998: 98–102).
Although the BJP is no longer the ruling party, its alignment with the zeitgeist of
neoliberalism also persists in the successful and seemingly irreversible cultural
nationalist mobilization of a transnational and diasporic Indian modernity. This
mobilization makes an evocation of an Aryanized and firmly patriarchal Hindu
pantheon at a crisis in the filmic story a condition of representing “Indianness.”
It is also essential that women be mobilized yet subordinate non-agents in the
films (Bagchi in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 115, 124). Bollywood’s patri-
archal and paternalistic reorganization of the nation and the family serves as
an iconology of state- and official economy-regulated gendered and structural
violence. The neoliberal mobilization of a transnational and diasporic Indian
modernity engineers the political transformation of foreign/NRI investments
into an emotional and cultural nationalism, mediated by neoliberal Bollywood
as the event of diasporic return to rebuild a transnational “family” as a super-
nationalist act based on paternalist mobilizations and manipulations of women
(Bachchetta and Bagchi in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996).
In the nineties, therefore, an entirely more chilling new globally powered wind
started blowing through Bollywood, engendering a distinctive re-mediation of
the iconography, choreography, and gendering of primordial piety onscreen.
Piety in Hindi films used to be enacted by the solitary believer, sometimes a
woman, pleading with a particular familial deity. The alternative scenario of
piety and prayer would depict an emotional male worshipper who would usually
be found making his case to the gods in a public setting, such as a communal
temple, as in Mard and other Bachchan vehicles featuring young men seeking
social justice. In both cases, the patriarchal familial as a backdrop for the indi-
vidual’s personal interaction with deity was conspicuously absent. In Bachchan
vehicles, in particular, the male challenger played by him usually demanded and
received darshan (frontal encounter and audience with deity) within a context
of homelessness, social disenfranchisement, or even illegitimacy or virtual
orphanhood. Piety and pathos were both enacted as solitary or oppositional,
as well as the last resort and purview of various unrepresented publics living
precarious lives. These were sometimes rebellious or desperate acts of negotia-
tion with a personal god, but the entire exchange usually occurred outside the
paterfamilial organization of social life, and, indeed, often as a communally
witnessed and framed appeal against the excesses of familial, patriarchal, and
state hegemony.
In the nineties, changes occurred in that mise en scène of piety. The first critical
feature of this altered mise en scène is a revival of the (sometimes transnational)
familial tableaux, reminiscent of earlier films such as Mehboob Khan’s Andaz
(1949)8—or a representation of patriarchal and (Hindu) primordial hegemony—
as a central imagistic of the representation of piety. Within this representational
logic, the family displaced other publics to acquire publicity; it became a public
and promoted space for negotiations and transactions relating to gender, class,
and ethnic hierarchies. The family, as headed by a powerful patriarch, usually
played by a greatly refashioned Bachchan or a reinvented bellowing and chilling
134 Bollywood’s painless globalization
Amrish Puri, explicitly presented itself as the matrix for intensive crosswebs of
economic and interpersonal drives, sanctioned by the majoritarian regime. The
second critical feature of the altered scene of religious activity was the attenu-
ation or absence of pain or trauma in the individual’s negotiations of gendered
identity and politics. These two representational changes in Bollywood’s pooja
mise en scenes—reauthorizing an authoritative and flourishing paterfamilial
structure as arbiter of social power and as publicized identity, and erasing indi-
vidual trauma—are concurrent with the institutionalization of neoliberalism in
India since the 1990s (Varshney 2002: 72), the diasporization and new look of
Bollywood film (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 30, 173–82), and, most especially, with
the reconfiguration of transnational “Indianness” as rabidly Hindu-centric and
patriarchal in India, and culturalist or proselytically multiculturalist9 in the dias-
pora (Rajagopal 2000: 467, 489).
Of the US Indian diaspora, Arvind Rajagopal writes:
Of course, forms of Hindu patriarchal resurgence are not identical—to say that
would be making the “Bosnian fallacy” (Rajagopal 2000: 467)—but uncanny, or
perhaps canny, linkages are to be found in transnational sociocultural and cine-
matic representations and ideologies of the pious Indian family, Indian gender
relations, and Indian identity. This argument runs parallel to Aihwa Ong’s prob-
lematization of “the popular view that globalization has weakened state power”
(1999: 6). I believe, like her, that “Globalization in Asia … has induced both
national and transnational forms of nationalism that not only reject Western
hegemony but seek, in panreligious civilizational discourses, to promote the sanc-
tity of the East” (ibid.: 18; emphasis mine). The complex linking of national and
diasporic transnational identities and exchanges—cultural and financial—gener-
ating both concord and discord has been analyzed by Jigna Desai (2003: 45–61).
What these links join together might be called, in Gill’s useful term, the mythic
structures of “market civilization” (Gill in Hovden and Keene 2002: 123–51).
New pooja scenes in Bollywood project calm plenitude depicting familial
tableaux, wherein hegemonic familialism and civilizationalism, if diegetically
challenged at all, are never overturned, especially not for the claims of the rebel-
lious or incommensurate individual. These new worship scenes do not contest
a socio-political hegemony clearly associated with territorial or deterritorial-
ized Hindu nationalist success stories. The RSS itself operates within a familial
framework. Smita Narula writes of RSS Hindutva’s genocidal activities:
Bollywood’s painless globalization 135
The RSS was founded in the city of Nagpur in 1925 by Keshav Baliram
Hegdewar with the mission of creating a Hindu state. Since its founding,
it has promulgated a militant form of Hindu nationalism as the sole basis
for national identity in India … the RSS ideologue, M. S. Golwalkar, based
much of his teachings on the race theories of Nazi Germany …
(2003: 41–68; also Malik 2003: 28–9)
Krishna Sharma, the leader of the Delhi Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)
Mahila Mandal, has justified the tearing open of wombs of pregnant Muslim
women by Hindu rioters and the gang rapes of Muslim women that are said
to have been videotaped …
(Sarkar 1998,:102; Basu in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 167–84;
Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: viii; Kumar 2005)
The protection of tradition then requires the demonization of “other” women and
other men’s “women” (Kannabiran in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 33).
Entirely suppressing the reality of violence underlying neoliberal cultural
nationalisms, Bollywood’s neoliberalized imagistic reflects a practiced and
common sleight of hand, thus enshrining gender violent ideologies as tradition
(Desai 2003; Radhakrishnan 2003: 119, 123, 127). The diaspora constitutes a crit-
ical deterritorial space for this reconstitution of Bollywood cinema since at least
India’s economic liberalization policies in the early 1990s (Hopkins 2002: 17–44).
This reconstitution of Bollywood as neoliberalized accompanies a new cinematic
aesthetic, plot, and ideology, reflecting and refracting new diaspora-inspired
136 Bollywood’s painless globalization
consumerist ideologies, and a certain notion of “modernity,” of which gender, as
we have already seen, forms one strategic vector. This phenomenon of a territori-
ally, ideologically, and materially cross-cathected national modernity is now well
recognized, especially through ethnographic concepts, such as Ong’s notion of
“flexible citizenship” and the “new modalities of translocal governmentality and
the cultural logics of subject making” (Alessandrini 2003; Desai 2003: 48; Dwyer
and Patel 2002: 215–218; Ong 1999: 15; Spivak 1997, 2008; Stokes 2004). Kamat
et al. stress that the translocal Indian diaspora are a belated product of the purely
local in India, the results of twinned local phenomena nationally and in the US
(Kamat, Mir, and Mathew 2004: 8, 11–4). In this way, Indian diaspora cultural
identities are often amalgams of (caste-based) national or primordial and (tech-
nological) transnational or modern aspirations. Since the flip side of a violently
gendered Hindutva in the era of economic liberalization, technocracy and
cosmocracy is the genesis of a transnational Hindu modernity, whose common
matrix is capital-conscious consumerism (Malik 2003: 28; see also Rajagopal
2000: 470; Rao and Sarkar 1998: 102–3), it then makes entire sense that conspic-
uous consumerism and mobile transnational capital emerge overwhelmingly as
major aesthetic hinterlands of neoliberal Bollywood (Desai 2003: 47). Even the
antecedents of this Hindutva are firmly grounded in commercial interests trans-
lated into cultural nationalist communalism (Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 411). The
Arya Samaj itself was a precursor of the VHP and the RSS (Menon and Bhasin
1996: 28; Menon in Jeffery and Basu 1998: 30).
Women are traditionally considered consumers par excellence in most socie-
ties; a culture’s economic preoccupation is often justified by shifting consumerist
roles on to these conspicuous consumables who are maintained as conspicuous
consumers. If women are the embodiment and symbol of conspicuous and inno-
vative consumerisms, if women are supposed to drive the consumerist apparatus,
their supporting roles in scenarios of capitalist cultural nationalisms are crucial.
Neoliberal Bollywood’s gendering practices and repertoires show that screen
women’s simultaneous mobilizations as conservative, traditionalist, consumerist,
and modern is analogous to Hindutva religious identitarianism itself, gender
rhetoric and ideologies inserting a notable margin of acquiescence masquerading
as agency. The capital-conscious, consumerism-struck, upwardly mobile popu-
lations who largely undergird Hindutva in India have their counterparts in the
diaspora populations abroad who have steadily grown in numbers, influence and
visibility in their host countries.11 These diaspora groups, some now cosmocrats
and high-power financiers, form the apex of a substantial population graph that
consumes Bollywood films abroad (Mukta 2000: 448, 458).
Indeed, these upwardly mobile groups now find a self-representational imag-
istic in neoliberal Bollywood’s peripatetic plots and lavish “international” life-
styles. Women adorn themselves and the home in this imagistic. “Family” films
like Yaadein, Taal, and HAHK! blatantly cited product ads as backdrop, as well as
plot engine. In Taal, the hero and heroine simulate a first kiss by sipping coyly out
of the same coke bottle; later, when the heroine is trying to decide between her two
equally cosmopolitan lovers during an MTV contest in Canada, another shared
bottle of coke stirs up romantic melancholy as well as nationalistic nostalgia. “It’s
Bollywood’s painless globalization 137
good for love,” her new suitor says, while actress Aishwarya Rai’s dreamy eyes
conjure up the old one.12 In Yaadein, coke ads are blazoned in the film itself, as
several commentators on the Internet Movie Database disgustedly observe.13 In
HAHK! glittering candy bar wraps and home PCs also play supporting roles as
romance as well as suspense apparatuses (Desai 2003: 47–8).
In a converse pattern of multinational product placement, as Dwyer and
Patel have written, “In recent years the overseas market [for Bollywood films]
has become more important than any of the domestic territories, with the UK
being the most profitable, followed by the US” (2002: 24). These claims are
easily upheld by quantifying the divide between pre- and post-globalization
Bollywood films by comparing data about the films’ gross collections in India
and overseas. The films I will compare are the already discussed Mard (1985),
the superhit Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (hereafter HAHK!, 1994, Sooraj Barjatiya),
and the less successful Yaadein. Data collected from the International Business
Overview Standard website shows that Mard (1985) had no overseas figures
listed and gross domestic collections of Rs. 478,648,665; HAHK! (1994) grossed
2,500,000 US dollars and 1,500,000 British pounds, in addition to a domestic
total of Rs. 1,110,576,940. Yaadein (2001) grossed 1,100,000 US dollars and
437,021 British pounds.14
Clearly, Mard is a pre-globalization film, at least in terms of overseas viewer-
ship; HAHK! and Yaadein are definitely post-globalization in terms of the same
viewership. Primordial civilizationalism as religiosity plays a significant role
in this post-globalization, neoliberalized Bollywood, either in an interpellatory
capacity toward the cosmocrat or cosmocratic family, or in a guest appearance in
Bollywood films as a naturalizer or mediator of modernity primarily imagined
as romance and technology, or the technology of romance, or the romance of
technology—as, for instance, in Yaadein. In a brief pooja scene in this film that
succeeds the title credits, we are shown an incredibly wealthy diaspora family
gathered around their household shrine worshipping Laxmi, the goddess of
wealth. The pooja is mediated and dominated by male priests and patriarchs.
The paterfamilias, played by Amrish Puri, a ubiquitous “villain” in Bollywood,
dominates not only by his arrogance but by the fact that he is the business
head of the family. His sister-in-law is as superficial as she is superfluous. She
is brusquely reprimanded by Puri when she chatters. During the worship, we
rarely see the goddess herself; our frame allows us to see mainly the assembled
patriarchal family and the priests, the politics of prayer. This family’s entrepre-
neurial success is also crudely publicized. In the middle of the pooja a cellphone
rings and the paterfamilias’ secretary hands over the phone to the paterfamilias,
who instantly engages in a chat about shares and stocks with someone in New
York. The family’s transnational business acumen is thus plentifully invoked.
Despite the look of glazed devotion on the faces of the family members, the
visual absence of the deity denies them and the spectator the darshan—or the
direct vision of the deity—that one would expect from a truly pious locked gaze
encounter with deity characteristic of Mard.
Darshan is never granted to the viewer in this scene, except when it is also
granted to the young male challenger to the dominant paterfamilias: the young
138 Bollywood’s painless globalization
tech-savvy nephew played by Hrithik Roshan, a rising young star and, again,
Bollywood scion. The viewer’s perspective must be aligned with the male youth.
Presumably, darshan is delayed in this scene in Yaadein in order to recover the
pious gaze as the dynastic dynamic of the screen/mirror male/deity cathexis.
The techno-media-savvy nephew speculates aloud that this year the shrine is
a hot spot because the family’s business shares fell the year before. The priests
remonstrate, the paterfamilias looks daggers. However, the young hero is unre-
pentant. Later we discover that his main gripe at this point is the absence of a
family friend with three nubile daughters, who have returned to India because
the youngest had become a too keen on Western vices like smoking, drinking,
and partying (Rajagopal 2000: 474). The hero engages in a verbal duel with his
uncle, then steps forth and says, “Hi, Mata. We are well here. Perhaps more than
we need to be. You should be in India where people need you more” (my transla-
tion). Before the goddess can respond, the youth is whisked away by his ineffec-
tual but humane father, and upon prodding reveals his true frustration that the
diasporic have abandoned the mainlanders.
In her discussion of the history of publicized image production in late-colonial
and contemporary India, Jain emphasizes, among other things, the separation
retained between public and private uses of religious icons in multiple media and
product brands as “reterritorialization” and “deterritorialization” of religiosity—
“ongoing negotiations within the sacral era”—which allow competing postco-
lonial interests to appropriate the sacral for competing presentations of identity
(2007: 191). In her classification, Jain aligns publicity primarily with the forces
of the Indian “bazaar”—a largely pre-colonial and postcolonial formation that
has extended into contemporary formations of Hindutva-inflected but commer-
cially acute “modernity,” such as I describe in this chapter. Private sacrality,
deterritorialized as she sees it, remains aesthetically more subtle, subdued, or
even aspiring to Westernized “realism” in her account, which mostly concerns
calendar art in India. In the switch from the calendar art form to newer cinematic
mediations of sacrality, however, I would argue that neoliberalized Hindi cinema
presents a transposition of a “bazaar” aesthetic onto the private realm, perhaps
previously more subtle in accord with the tastes of a Europeanized indigenous
bourgeoisie, but now interiorizing the aesthetics and ideologies of the complex
cast that the bazaar embodies in India today, including Hindutva and its unlikely
bedfellows, such as corporate capital and neoliberalism. In other words, films
like Yaadein show Jain’s “bazaar” internalized, specifically as an aesthetic, but
also frequently as an ideology (as we will also see later in HAHK!).
These new representations of pooja and piety must now be mapped against
contemporary presentist defenses of Hindutva-guided atrocities against terri-
torial minorities such as Muslims, Christians, Eastern missionaries, and other
foreigners, as retaliation for the supposed sexual runs of such communities upon
Hindu women. One especially striking instance of Hindutva-style patriarchal
protection is offered by Mukta, who writes that in the London Swaminarayan
temple—“the much advertised ‘Europe’s first traditional mandir’” (2000:
460)—visitors are instructed that the practice of female infanticide in the state
of Gujarat originates in the attempt to save Hindu girl children from abduction
Bollywood’s painless globalization 139
by Muslim invaders (ibid.: 462). These gender fundamentalist doctrines can be
matched with Hindutva youth organizations’ forcible re-abduction of women
who were “raped” into love-marriages with Muslims, with the rape of Christian
nuns, and the resurgence of the practice of sati in Rajasthan (officially abolished
since the 1820s), or with propaganda at Hindutva meetings in the US, where the
prevention of exogamy is the focus (Patwardhan 1994; Mukta 2000: 449, 451;
Kumar 2005: 50–3; Rajagopal 2000: 476). The defense and protection of Hindu
women has now become the recognized propagandistic logic of Hindutva’s
ethnophobia.
In Yaadein, the entire Hindu pooja scene is based upon visual and material
cathexes of paterfamilial players. Their cathexes make them unresponsive to
superfluous mothers standing in the circle of piety, dominated and chastised by
overbearing men. In pre-liberalization Bollywood, a woman of the house—the
domestic subaltern—might have been the focal point of the piety on display. She
might have been mediator of divine messages, conveyor of pathetic petitions,
and the family’s moral arbiter, straddling the hero’s unjust politicized world
and that of divinity. In contrast, neoliberal Bollywood film usually depicts
pooja or religious worship as spearheaded by male performance, with sumptu-
ously dressed women acting often in instrumental capacities within a circuit
of familial surveillance.15 Women’s transactional fetishization has become
unmistakable in their frequent suppression and exchange. This is evident from
the parade of large numbers of consensually organized men—often several
generations of men—in these new scenes of pooja. A significant change is
thus observable in filmi16 scenes of worship from the 1980s to the ’90s, and
the early twenty-first century is precisely the replacement of the female or the
solitary male by the paterfamilial tableau gathered around the icon. Women
are relegated to a heightened consumerism or commodification, to helpless or
passive remonstrances toward their male kin at best. The logic of gendered
entrepreneurial piety is diegetic in Yaadein; in other popular films like HAHK!,
the filmic meta-parole features it prominently, as in the website that features a
“family” photo of the entrepreneurial men (only) of the Barjatiya family who
produced the film.
The tableau mise en scène is particularly striking because in it, not only
does the family rather than the solitary and often female individual worshipper
dominate, but men bearing the imprimatur of successful enterprise and patriar-
chal authority assume the dominant role. In Yaadein, we are introduced to the
wealthy diasporic family in the household worship or pooja scene, which also
stages diasporic oedipality. I would argue that this staging reinforces that the
pooja scene is the locus of concentrated paterfamilial power; any challenge to the
paterfamilias is most spectacular when made here. Actual women as mediators or
actors in scenes of social negotiations are subsumed by the patriarchal plots of the
neoliberal diasporic and Hindu nation. Women singularly perform pooja in one
recent blockbuster, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2001). A mother- and a daughter-
in-law, one in India and the other in London, are shown beseeching household
gods for their respective families’ wellbeing. However, the mother-in-law’s pooja
is clearly circled by her husband’s wealth and power as the sumptuous shrine
140 Bollywood’s painless globalization
indicates, all traces of female subjectivity unconnected to patriarchal power
erased; similarly, the daughter-in-law’s preservation of tradition in her domestic
pooja is as much an assertion of Hindutva-affiliated consumerist nationalism as
it is of her subjective spirituality. Her pooja is also framed within her husband’s
success and their prosperous diasporic status. The devotees of this transnational
family, moreover, clearly experience pathos but not traumatic pain as a conse-
quence of their devotion. There are no tears or crises in the prayer scenes. This
new configuration of pooja in the new Bollywood silences or overwhelms women
by engulfing them within patriarchal tableaux. And the profits of such patriarchal
familialization of devotion are clear from the imagistic constellations of pleasure
and prosperity that provide the mise en scène of this new piety.
Not only are women’s roles in neoliberal Bollywood attenuated to that of the
“consort,” but gender and consumerism are, indeed, the twin mirrors within
which Hindu religious nationalism redoubles and replicates itself. Sarkar writes,
for instance:
the suppression of the materiality of the event and of the processes that
inform the immolation … the concept of Sati submerges the material and
social bases of the event and gives a sense of religious euphoria to the mass
witnessing of the immolation …
(Sangari and Vaid in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 240–92,
particularly 243, 251–3, 258; emphases mine)
Bollywood’s painless globalization 141
In the collusion between religious nationalism and economic neoliberalism, the
fundamental axis of negotiation is the alternating familialization and violation
of women in transactional nodes between rival ethnic communities: women
consuming and consumed at different points along the axis (ibid.: 40).
As recent influential scholarship has suggested, modernity is no longer to be
understood as a Western phenomenon; instead, we must conceptualize several
overlapping and disjunctive configurations of alternative and adaptive moderni-
ties (Appadurai 1996; Van der Veer 1994: 132–4, 136–7; Ong 1999: 35; Varshney
2002: 76–84, 106–11; Raj 2000: 538; Kumar 2005: 182–3). The agency and power
of the diaspora to manipulate, collate, and reconfigure pieces of religion (read
Hinduism here), gender, culture, ethnicity, and family values in the larger picture
of transnational, adaptive modernities are considerable. Modernity is being
configured in the diaspora as “religious,” while both modernity and religion are
being digitalized. Take, for instance, how the cinematic image has been visibly
indebted to new technology since the 1990s:
the computer-aided technique that allowed for the diffusion of images and
the subtle transition of image to image differentiates this … [image] from the
clumsy montage effect of the 1970s and ’80s … [this] reflect[s] an important
shift in film theme, from a decade defined by the masala [spice or formula
film] and its depiction of violence to films defined by themes of family, love
and romance …
(Dwyer and Patel 2002: 177; emphasis mine; see also Rao,
“Globalisation of Bollywood”)
The “modernization” of the real and the representational easily accord with the
regressive spectralization of women.
This modernization and postmodernization of cinematic form are, moreover,
indebted to an extant Hindi cinematic tradition, whereby:
the kind of cinematic specularity that gets endorsed is not spectatorial iden-
tification with the modern as such but the modern inscribed within dharmik
registers that have a time-immemorial force: the modern hero doubles up as
the premodern hero from the nation’s epic past …
(Mishra 2002: 16)
Slick montage can easily be matched with the ability of the VHP “to forge a
sense of Hinduness world-wide, linking up Hindus throughout the globe as
one family with one collective will” (Mukta 2000: 445; see also Sangari and
Vaid in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 283). Derrida says of televangelism
and “globalatinization” of religions (by which he means the papal spectacle in
Western nation-states):
reflected in the neoliberal scenario of pooja. Not only that, but Ram’s imagistic
of male domination masquerading as benevolent paternalism (the Ramayana is
a complex, many-stranded story of race, class, and gender domination, of which
the Ram-Sita marriage forms only one strand), has largely replaced goddesses as
images of shakti (female power) in the Bollywood pantheon (Bhatt and Mukta
2000: 416). In Mard, we had seen such a goddess, the Maa Sherewali, or the Tiger
Goddess. Her autonomous female energy, however, gives way in neoliberal filmic
and societal contexts to the familial tableau of Ram-Sita, or to other male gods
of the Hindu pantheon. This other crucial component of filmic reconfiguration—
mirroring national and transnational re-masculinizations of Hindutva identity
(ibid.: 414; Kumar 2005: 239–40)—matches the dominance of male authority and
power within the familial tableau of neoliberal Bollywood.
A deft and well-wrought anti-racist, anti-imperialist discourse is used by
followers of Ram in India and abroad to justify the resurgence of anti-minority
nationalism as a response to perceived and putative attacks upon Hinduism.
Here, “the dominant religious community [Hindu, both in the east and the west],
given a political voice by the Bharatiya Janata Party, is said to be under siege”
(Mukta 2000: 443). The syncretic, polythetic religious traditions that flour-
ished for hundreds of years in India (Searle-Chatterjee 2000: 505–6; Varshney
2002) have vanished, particularly in the diaspora, and also in India’s more riot-
prone cities more than in its less riot-prone villages (Searle-Chatterjee 2000:
144 Bollywood’s painless globalization
506; Varshney 2002; Raj 2000: 540). Hindutva has successfully used “multi-
cultural” initiatives in the West by appropriating both victim status and libera-
tory rhetoric (Mukta 2000: 444–5; Rajagopal 2000: 472; Van der Veer 1994: 117;
Radhakrishnan 2003: 122, 127). Varshney, who argues for a “way of life” civil
society that is inter-communal and associational, critiques the stranglehold of
Hindutva’s cultural determinism that re-materializes culture’s performances in
the fields of the economic, social and associational, where religious identities are
revealed to be largely based on economic interests and experiences, and religious
fundamentalism is revealed to be fundamentally more economic than religious.19
Hence, Sen’s statement—cited in the epigraph for this chapter—starts to
become emblematically relevant to this analysis: markets and shrines were inter-
woven in Indian social life since pre-colonial times. Varshney has itemized five
characteristics of civil society—Habermas’ public sphere reconceived (Varshney
2002: 41)—that Varshney also partially questions (42–6). These five character-
istics are, first, space between state and family levels; second, interconnections
between individuals and families; third, independence from the State; fourth,
formal association, intra- and inter-ethnic; and fifth, voluntaristic not ascrip-
tive associations, or what I would call the performative possibilities of identity
construction (ibid.: 39–40). Though Varshney himself takes issue with and modi-
fies the category requiring voluntary, non-ascriptive motives for harmonious
civic associations, I find some utility in retaining that category as a component of
civil society and in re-training its perspectival vantage point on the Bollywood
imagistic. As Butler has written, a life that is not acknowledged as life cannot be
grieved, and a life cannot be acknowledged as one unless a set of social relations
exist that make it tenable or performable as a recognized life (2009). An ascriptive
framework of identity does not accommodate or validate those “other” lives that
do not fall within certain rubrics and frameworks of cognizability and sustain-
ability come forth with only a specific set of onto-juridical formulations of iden-
tity, such as immutable, immiscible ethnicity. This is why victims of communal
riots are dispensable and destroyable; it is because within the purely ascriptive
intra-ethnic set of affiliations that instigate communal violence, certain lives are
not sustainable, cognizable, or, therefore, grievable.
If we allow that ascriptive models of individual and associational identities
in tandem with state-sponsored cultural warfare do disrupt societies and civil
life, we have an analytic for the pre- and post-neoliberal Hindi film imagistics.
In Mard, and in the Bachchan-dominated pre-globalized era as a whole, it was
clear that the state, ideally and necessarily a non-player in Varshney’s list of
conventional civil society attributes, was indeed absent or, at most, a challenged
hegemon in Hindi cinema’s political imagination. Moreover, in that cinema, iden-
tity was available for experimental and voluntaristic performance, for contex-
tual re-significations and re-shaping of the relationship between the particular
and the collective, for iterations of difference. It challenged the “way of life”
stance of Hindutva ideologues that Hinduism is an eternal cultural standard,
rather than a rich and heterogeneous trove of cultural imagery and symbols, from
which people pick and choose their particular religious ideoscape and identity
(Searle-Chatterjee 2000: 511). Civilizationalism is hardly distinguishable from
Bollywood’s painless globalization 145
fundamentalism if it takes an essentialist and determinist trajectory on identity,
and if it denies the syncretic malleabilities and mutabilities of complex traditions
(Radhakrishnan 2003: 128).
Mard and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977, Manmohan Desai)—two feisty
Bachchan multi-starrers of the eighties—presented ethnic identities as
constructed and incidental, not primordial and essential; identities were even
depicted as institutionally derived (the police force and the law) and mobi-
lized by non-state actors (criminal cartels and foster parents). In Amar Akbar
Anthony, three brothers born to parents (who are by default Hindu) are sepa-
rated in childhood and brought up in Hindu, Muslim, and Christian environ-
ments respectively (Bachchan plays a hilarious Christian, Anthony). While the
film does deal in ethnic stereotypes—Amar is an upstanding policeman, Akbar
is a flamboyant Muslim entertainer, and Anthony is a tapori bootlegger with a
heart of gold—in the end the brothers unite to defeat their parents’ oppressors
who are, again, neocolonial thugs, and reunite beyond boundaries of blood and
race to rejuvenate the nation: in a symbol of communal unification the brothers
simultaneously give blood to a traumatized woman who turns out to be their
real mother. The possibilities of intra- and inter-communal peace seem real, not
chimerical. Because the state was a non-agent, if not a non-player, the films of
the eighties and the early nineties interpellated civil and communal life, respon-
sibility and justice, through the male protagonist’s solitary dispossession and
masochistic disempowerment, and subsequent communally witnessed recom-
pensation (however tenuous). Mard could attain social justice for marginalized
men; Amar Akbar Anthony could gesture at a voluntaristic familial politics of
minority empowerment and communal amity. The heroes’ very masochistic
piety, rebellion and violence were based not on an ascriptive, state-sponsored
identity, but on a logic of civic engagement, at least potentially pluralistic in its
particular form of multicultural nationalism.
With Bombay (1995, Mani Ratnam), the emergence of state-sponsored inter-
ethnic violence was vividly, spectacularly cinematized, albeit antipathetically.
Bombay’s watershed moment is significant because of its foregrounding of intra-
ethnic ascriptive identifications as the cause of ethnic violence, and of voluntary
inter-ethnic associations—like the film’s Hindu-Muslim marriage and family—
as the engine of ethnic peace. The city of Bombay has been the location of the
greatest number of riot-related deaths between 1950 and ’95—1,137 in total—
and is thus one of India’s most riot-prone cities, according to Varshney (2002:
7, 106). Though Varshney cautions against a radical disjointing of ascriptive or
traditional and voluntary or modern identities as a more theoretical than empir-
ical move, since Bombay ascriptive identification and state involvement are civil-
society disrupting factors both avowed and disavowed in Bollywood (Niranjana
2000: 138–66). As per the classic definition of ideology, Bollywood’s fascina-
tion with identity as ascriptive versus voluntary has solidified the conundrum
into an empirical reality that many now observe as a given. Since Bombay, films
have obsessively focused on untangling and exploring the political and human
nightmare of ethnic violence in the era of neoliberal global fundamentalism. The
associational power of Hindi cinema—indeed, its claim to be a civil association
146 Bollywood’s painless globalization
or civil society building institution in postcolonial India—has capitulated to two
civil society disrupting forces: state sponsorship of anti-minority feelings, and
the reinforcement of ascriptive ethnic identities.
Varshney has demonstrated that civil life with interethnic associations—many
of them business-related—discourage ethnic violence and segregation of ethnic
groups. The absence of associational transactions among them—the lack of civil
societal structures, in other words—are one of the causes of ethnic violence:
[There is]an integral link between the structure of civil society on one hand
and ethnic, or communal, violence on the other … the focus is on the inter-
communal, not intracommunal, networks of civic life … their absence or
weakness opens up space for communal violence … the associational forms
[of intercommunal civic engagement] turn out to be sturdier than everyday
engagement, especially when people are confronted with the attempts by
politicians to polarize ethnic communities …
(Varshney 2002: 3–4, 8–9, 11–2, 23, 46; see also Long in Hovden
and Keene 2002: 43–5, 52)
The separation of the political and the economic and the manifestations of both in
the forms named as “ethnic” or “religious”—within the national context—may
indeed be a necessary result of what Gill calls the “new constitutionalism” of the
global order, which “mandates a separation of politics and economics in ways
that may narrow political representation and constrain democratic social choice
in many parts of the world” (2002: 139). The economic and the political, when
denied linkage in the forms of inter-ethnic associations, find new mediation in
the category of “ethnic” or “religious” nationalism, and this forcing of a much
larger set of (generally) secular problems, regulations, institutions, and mecha-
nisms through the narrow bottleneck of the ethnic and religious produces neolib-
eral fundamentalisms in the guise of nationalisms. Thus political nationalisms
that are economically governed must travel the course of passionate intra-ethnic
identifications and associations and pick up passional traits.
Speaking in defense of neoliberalism, Robert Keohane writes:
The problem is not with Keohane’s mapping of political phenomena onto economic
bases per se; the problem arises from the limited conceptualizing of political and
economic phenomena as asocial and non-communal (Long in Hovden and Keene
2002: 42). The isolationism of intra-ethnic associations actually diminishes
possibilities of Keohane’s “harmony among people,” and economic and political
interests can thereby easily appear further sundered, making the inroad of other
Bollywood’s painless globalization 147
non-voluntaristic identity narratives likelier. Fundamentally, such neoliberal
arguments about the validity of (economic) institutionalism need to be modified
by rethreading the woof of social formations such as intra-ethnic and paterfa-
milial organization and ideology through the politico-economic and institutional
fabric.
In direct crosshatching with neoliberal international social theory, as articu-
lated by Keohane, Bollywood incubated a distinct paradox of the theory of asso-
ciationalism. Keohane writes:
In contrast, Varshney has demonstrated that civil life with inter-ethnic asso-
ciations—many of them business-related—discourages ethnic violence and
segregation of ethnic groups. The absence of associational transactions
among groups—the lack of civil societal structures, in other words—are the
causes of ethnic violence. Keohane’s neoliberal vision provides an important
theoretical backdrop and reasoning for why insular intra-ethnic identity—
ascriptive in Varshney’s sense, and also gendered—functions to bring about
rational, calculated violence that does not disrupt regulatory neoliberal logic.
The neoliberal social organization in India accommodates actors and associa-
tions that co-exist to promote economic efficiency and destructive physical
conflict. What they are missing, of course, are voluntaristic identities and an
economic organizational logic that stands outside of regulatory neoliberalism.
Bollywood mimics this phenomenon in depicting, in film after film, the family
saga as the battle between good and evil rewritten as the battle between ascrip-
tive insiders and outsiders in a strongly ethnicized and Hinduized (by default,
often) theatre of identities. Keohane’s optimistic and positivistic interpretation
of neoliberal institutionalism misses the crucial lack in an unreflexive theory
of associations that does not comb deeper for the cultural stances and social
reconfigurations generated by calculative rationalities of intra-ethnic and,
indeed, intra-familial economic phenomena (Keohane in Hovden and Keene
2002: 23; Long in Hovden and Keene 2002: 38; Ramakrishnan in Hovden and
Keene 2002: 242, 245).
The resurgence of state-sponsored ascriptive ethnic identification has taken
commodified, well-packaged shape in “diaspora delight” films like Dilwaale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Yaadein, Pardes, etc. As Mankekar, Desai, and others
have argued, these new NRI-dominated imagistics refamiliarize patriarchal and
paternal gender ideologies in the guise of rehumanizing them. The meteoric
emergence of the neoliberal diaspora aids the global dispersal of this neoliberal
Bollywood by supplying the critical market, as well as imagistic for this cultural
nationalist artifact. Indeed, as Kamat et al. have argued, the nation-state not only
148 Bollywood’s painless globalization
supplies the political imagination of a national media monolith like Bollywood,
but also creates economic migrants (and non-migrants) and their mental and
physical spaces as cultural subjects of an apolitical globalization (2004: 6, 19).
This gendered citizen is generated, as they have argued, as a result of twinned
territorial and, indeed, micro-level policies: education policies of the Indian state,
and immigration policies of the US government.20 Increasingly, as we have seen,
this state-sponsored deterriorialized audience has become the grande syntagma-
tique and the mirror or screen—in Metz’s sense of spectatorial identity (1999:
803–5)—of the cinema.
In films like Yaadein, Pardes, or Ek Rishtaa, individual and familial busi-
ness groups are set within intra-ethnic ascriptive identity frameworks, generally
Hindu. In these films, Hindus associate or do business with other Hindus and
retain intact—despite occasional failed experimentations with alternatives—
paternalistic and capitalistic structures. Bollywood characters’ associational
transactions—as, indeed, those of real NRIs and prominent Indian entrepre-
neurs—also retain collusive links with neoliberalized, structurally readjusted
states. The secular is not that secular, just as the religious is not that religious:
“What has … erroneously been construed as a straightforward struggle between
secular (modernist) and religious (often labelled ‘obscurantist’) forces, is in fact
better understood as a struggle between democratic and anti-democratic tenden-
cies” (Rouse 1996: 60; Varshney 2002: 76–7). The “I love my India” slogan is
rarely owned or challenged by women and minorities, who remain frozen in the
framed hierarchies of this cinema.
In conclusion, I wish to consider the success of the post-globalization
Bollywood film par excellence, HAHK! (1994), a mega-blockbuster in Indian
cinema history.21 The film inaugurated “modern” industrial trends, not only in
film marketing (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 25), but also in ushering in other heter-
ogeneous modernities as dominant referents of prosperous everyday “Indian”
life in the film’s visual collage. Its website describes it as “India’s cultural
ambassador in the world market” (note the [un]canny juxtaposition of “culture”
and “market”), and as “A Celebration of Indian Traditions.” This film was not
only hailed as a romance of family life, bringing new vigour to a Bollywood
that had tired its audiences with the blood-and-thunder genre of the super-
heroic angry young man as represented by Mard, but was also discreetly recog-
nized as a “brand-name” film, replete with signs of consumerist fantasies. Its
characters drink cokes, eat expensive candy bars, rollerblade, and wear costly
though garish designer clothes; they live in a Hinduized version of Western
affluence, use computers, and drive fast cars, wedding “wholesome tradition
and consumerist modernity” (http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/humaapke.
html). One writer called it “a three-hour wedding video about a family with
a house the size of a cricket stadium” (http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/
humaapke.html).
The patriarchal family romance plot is upheld by “Hindu” values and by a
media-friendly religiosity. One of the scenes depicts the families of the loving
young couples and their friends relaxing in the young men’s sumptuous home. The
evening’s entertainment turns out to be a “musical chair” of highly performative
Bollywood’s painless globalization 149
mimesis of Bollywood song by these Bollywood actors. This bears out the insights
I have referenced earlier about transnational Indianness performing its identi-
ties with the aid of a careful selection of artifacts and props, and adopting the
framework of performance itself as a self-consolidating and self-assuring action.
The specific songs, dances and dialogues that the actors—scenarios within the
scenario—mimic serve as the affective interactions between various characters,
repetitions without too much difference, an archive effortlessly mimicked. One
way that HAHK! succeeds is by skillfully meta-allegorizing Hindi cinema in
choosing cinematic performance as an imagistic for its accomplishment of a
Bollywood narrative function.
A central architectural presence in this film is the idealized Hindu temple,
near and around which the heroine’s family seems to have designed its identity
and habitus. This temple and its highly idealized reconstruction of a specifically
Hindu antiquity—pious and splendid—replicates many Hindu temples in North
America, particularly the newer ones. The characters also engage in a virtualiza-
tion of faith superior to any feats of electronic communication technology; this
is especially apparent in the wedding sequences. In this film, the older daughter
of a loving Hindu family is first married to the elder nephew of her father’s best
friend. When her natal family come to visit her after the marriage, a romance
rapidly develops between her sister and her husband’s younger brother, thus
preparing the ideal conditions for intra-ethnic endogamy. After the birth of a
son, the older daughter dies in a highly improbable staircase accident, just as her
sister and brother-in-law are preparing to tell the two families of their love. Her
younger sister, played by the charismatic and popular Indian actress, Madhuri
Dixit, now finds herself cast by both families as her sister’s replacement and her
brother-in-law’s intended second bride.
Despite the film’s consumerist and technological modernity, at this point the
younger sister and brother of the two households become curiously inept at the
most basic modes of communicating, such as phone calls, email, letters, or even
conversations with their families. A mid-night phone conversation between the
hapless star-crossed youth only results in a romantic song of loss and farewell.
The younger brother, the male star of the film, is denied any desire, right, or
agency whatever except the power of sweetly acquiescing in all that his elders and
the “family” wish. It is understood that the patriarchal family—still portrayed as
utterly benevolent—has the natural and ultimate say, and the young couple are
bound by their families’ consensual mandate. The day is saved in the end by a
faithful retainer whom the younger sister had been teaching English, and by the
family dog, Tuffy, who clearly has powers of extra-sensory communication with
the household deity.
The only remaining non-paternalistic or subaltern agency in this film is
re-imagined via family retainers or pets as primary worshippers. These subal-
terns intercede with the deity, however, only on behalf of the powerful families
that retain them. Gone is the subaltern’s interrogation of the waywardness of
the powerful. The feudal family retainer is instrumental in bringing about the
film’s denouement and its avoidance of a tragically gothic conclusion. He attends
the second wedding cognizant of the sundered couple’s pain, but as a feudal
150 Bollywood’s painless globalization
subaltern has no authority to speak of his knowledge. He does, however, have a
devout identity and the power of channeling a mute appeal to the household deity.
This leads him to appeal through a direct frontal gaze to the deity.
The parallels with the piety of the suffering but rebellious male in Bachchan
vehicles of earlier eras is undeniable here, but only in the contrast. In this
moment of tearful frontality and direct appeal, like Raju/Mard’s in its pathos
but unlike Raju/Mard’s in its distinct embeddedness in feudal familial hierarchy,
the pleasures of piety are meted out to converge in the not too distant future in
the hymeneal consumerist romance. As a result of the servant’s direct frontal
gaze and whispered appeal, the deity responds in a moment of darshan, of direct
and unmediated connection with the worshipper (darshan dena), and relays a
command to the also extra-perceptive dog, Tuffy, who rushes to the heroine,
writing her secret final missive to her lover, the younger brother. The interception
of this letter by her intended husband and brother-in-law leads to the discovery
of the prior romance and the happy ending. The elder brother graciously steps
aside upon discovery of the pre-existing passion between the younger brother
and younger sister, and all ends happily in nuptial glee.
In this staging of the miraculous, feudal familial power is redirected by a
moment of apparent subjectification of subalterns, yet, in actuality, this subjec-
tification is a further instrumentalization. It is presented as a reactivation of
communication, of transmissibility, of the romance of a theology that transcends
technology. It is mediation in its purest form. From the direct and conspirato-
rial gaze of the servant upon the audience, the camera cuts to an equally direct
gaze between the viewer and the household deity, an Aryanized image of Lord
Krishna, and from thence to Tuffy, whom the camera then follows. The power-
lessness of subalternity is glorified, romanticized, and deified into the triumph of
feudal Hindutva and its fixed ascriptive chain of intimate and social hierarchies.
The power of patriarchy is emphasized by the synchronous silencing and serial
re-envoicing of youth and other subordinates according to a quasi-gothic narra-
tive logic, as also seen in DDLJ and in Pardes. The gothic anxiety and terror
induced by the uncertain line between authority and tyranny keeps viewers on
edge only long enough to double the relief when the traumatic ambiguity of patri-
archal authority dissolves back into the luminous shimmer of familial prosperity.
The power of idols in starting chains of communication is not merely a “filmi”
thing, but was actually a notable media event in 1995, the year after HAHK!’s
release. As Julius Lipner writes:
Toward the end of September 1995 a classic media event involving the
image of Hinduism created a sensation … Images … were said to be
sucking in substantial quantities of milk. Some said it was a ‘miracle’ that
was a ‘a sign that the coming century would be a Hindu one,’ or that ‘a
great soul [had] arrived into the world.’ … What is interesting is the way
Hindus both manipulated various forms of the media and were manip-
ulated by them. Such agents of communication as computers, the press,
television, and the telephone ensured that within a day or two the same
phenomenon was being reported and repeated in Hindu homes and temples
Bollywood’s painless globalization 151
around the world in a context of Hindu solidarity that cuts across political,
religious, and social divides …
(2001: 321–2)
Heights of stardom
In Bachchanalia, the monumental collection of Amitabh Bachchan images
and stories, author Bhavna Somayya writes of Bachchan: “His growing
stature from an actor to a superstar is evident from his altering body language
reflected in the film posters over the decades” (2009: 11; emphases mine).
Superstar Amitabh Bachchan’s body, I suggest, tropes a vertical notion of the
hero, frequently captured in epithets applied to him, such as “towering” or
“lambuji” (“the tall guy”). In sharp contrast to the lateralization or the hori-
zontal montage of the hero’s body in a succeeding generation of “shorter”
actors, best embodied by Shah Rukh Khan, Bachchan’s “verticality”—not to
be confused with a transparent and literal stand-in for the phallic—is in fact
metonymic of the way new audience relationships to the actor’s body formed
and shifted along with the novel attention given to Bachchan’s height as he
rose to stardom (Joshi 2001: 56).
As metonym or syntagm usually function, a syntagmatic relationship is one
of limitations in which the contiguity and displacement of metonym take the
place of the condensations and resemblances of metaphor (Metz 1982: 202–5).
The relationship of Bachchan’s spectators with Bachhan’s “height,” as this
evolved over time and throughout his career, is a metonymic or syntagmatic
one that does not complete any given set of relations, transactions, identifica-
tions, and aspirations between, say, the very high and the very low. Instead, it
iterates distance and unattainability; it makes the very high or tall-standing
figure a pure presentation of its viewers, a pure singularity (that which belongs
in a set but is not included, is presented but not represented, in Badiou’s sense,
and thus in my sense here “presents” itself but does not represent its mass
spectatorial constituency). Without offering the possibility of representation of
the viewers, such a relationship is therefore metomynic or syntagmatic, predi-
cating desire upon the guarantee of its non-fulfillment and incommensurablity,
upon its incompleteness.
Madhava Prasad has described the effect of the “star”—after the Film Finance
Committee funding regulation reforms (1969) that led to state sponsorship of
a “realist” cinema, and the resultant reorganization of commercial mainstream
cinematic production—as the new “mobilizer” of the masses
154 Love triangles at home and abroad
The star became a mobilizer, demonstrating superhuman qualities and
assuming a power that transformed the others who occupied the same terrain
into spectators. As the auratic power of the represented social order dimin-
ished, there was a compensating increase in the aura of the star as public
persona …
(Prasad 1998: 134)
In this way, Amitabh Bachchan “stood (tall) for” his mass following without ever
being “one of” them; he effected his role as star or popular icon without ever
being “at the level,” so to speak, of the masses. He remained aspirational, not
rooted or grounded, or what might be termed in the language of Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, “rhizomatic” (2004). The visual text, the coding of the actor’s
body, allowed only a partial fulfillment of the narrative coding of Bachchan as
“man of the people.”
How did this work? How can the man of the people simultaneously be repeat-
edly and often successfully cast only as the man for the people? How can the star
belong and yet not be included, present yet not represent? The way to understand
this syntagm, metonym or conundrum of absent presence is to realize that Hindi
cinema in the Bachchan era did not want a too-close identification of star and
fan, however incomplete and complicated that alchemy still remains in the post-
Bachchan era. Arguably, the fascination and obsession with his height reflects a
pre-conscious deliberation, even a collective proprioceptive instinct. To retain
iconic, talismanic charisma, the star and the fan must not become undifferen-
tiated, indistinguishable, etc. The star, in representing fans, must not lose his
defining otherness, and become fully present without absence, or fully repre-
sentative and inclusive. Indeed, his presence must rather always gesture toward a
return from that utter abyss of the liminal and the void, which the incommensu-
rable hoi polloi represent with their cargo of excess and difference; the invocation
of that eternal return as also an eternal separation must never be done away with.
According to Valentina Vitali, Bachchan vehicles of the 1970s began to be made
very much with this intent, demarcating Bachchan’s difference from the masses
whom he seemed to represent (2010: 203). Bachchan vehicles actually strained
away, therefore, from their putative intended audience.
However, since the masses are themselves “singular,” in the sense of them-
selves belonging to the state but not being included, of being presented without
being represented, the discrete yet concomitant singularities of the fan and the
star were in fact the common grounds of syntagmatic (non-paradigmatic) identi-
fication of star and fan. Consequently, in the 1980s, Bachchan’s aura gets not just
doubled, but tripled, for example in a film called Mahaan (1982, S. Ramanathan),
where he is cast in a triple role, as a father and two sons. This is also the begin-
ning of a cresting of his presentation, what I would call the ultimate “high-rise”
mode. After this crescendo of the celebration of the vertical hero’s potential to
present a “larger-than-life” figure of the common man that morphed further the
higher it rose into the segmented transcendence of the hero, high priest, and
avenger, Bachchan frequently repeated these “larger-than-life” roles in a range
of films in the late eighties and the early nineties. The commonest epithet used
Love triangles at home and abroad 155
to describe Amitabh Bachchan during the mid- to late 1970s was “towering.”
The commonest shot used to photograph him is a full frontal, medium close-
up or low-angle shot, in which he appears indubitably monumental. However,
a parallel trend was already underway; the “chocolate boy” hero embodied by
Salman Khan (Maine Pyar Kiya, 1989, Sooraj Barjatiya) was also emerging.
Another such hero emerging at this time was Aamir Khan, as the vulnerable
teenage lover boy in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988, Mansoor Khan). It was
the body and image of Shah Rukh Khan (hereafter SRK), however, that instated
a new template for the Hindi film star body in the early nineties—a new sense
of community built upon the actor’s body, one might say—that came from SRK
being the recognizable boy next door. This new hero was rhizomatic and lateral,
embedded in the context of representation, rooted in a supposed public reality,
and evoking the phantasm of the hero as identified man “of” the people.1 Both
his physique and his performance were also distinguishable from a not very
muscular, highly lanky, and non-terpsichorean Bachchan, in the form of serious
brawny extension and professional dancing skills (Deshpande 2005: 196–7).
SRK, unike Bachchan, was the actor who seemed like the “ordinary man.”
The films where he “towers,” even symbolically like an Olympian above the
masses, are considerably less memorable or remembered; in some instances they
are remakes of Bachchan films, such as Don, and do not define his oeuvre. This
familiarization and demystification of the star body brought audiences closer to
the screen personality, coinciding with a certain democratization of the image in
the age of liberalized media in India, and inaugurated the birth of new audience
sectors whose relationship with the star became less hierarchical, less “darsan-
ic,” and more identificatory. The actor’s “commonness”—a new signature of the
actor in the cinematic context—enabled a new style of film-making, whereby
the actor and their audience were less impossibly distant from each other (some-
thing we have seen as the engine of narrative structure in BB in chapter one of
this book). Superheroes and heroes like Bachchan, Dharmendra, or even Sunil
Dutt were replaced by the boy next door, the actor with whom audiences could
easily identify. Yet, this new incarnation of the star also made the uncanny more
enactable: after all, the actors might be known to be Bombay denizens, or the
boys and girls next door from the provinces, yet they undeniably had an aura that
was an insuperable divider. Identification would remain uncanny because of the
irreducible remainder of the separation unbridged by representational mediation.
Repeated passages across the boundary between the known and the unknown,
the familiar, and the auratic—instead of smoothing access—in some sense inten-
sify the liminal, and heighten the experience of cinema itself as a liminality.
Perhaps this is one reason why, along with this new embodiment of the hero
as rhizomatically grounded, as the “man of the streets,” as opposed to phantas-
magorically elevated, a parallel trend surfaced of noir “underworld” films, popu-
lated by seemingly verisimilar, commensurable, and representational characters
moving within an uncanny and liminal nexus—both familiar and unfamiliar—of
crime, shadowy deeds, anti-heroes, and frequently tragic denouements. Parinda
(“Birds”, 1989, Vidhu Vinod Chopra) is a good early example of these, to be
followed by an entire slough of such films both depicting and sensationalizing
156 Love triangles at home and abroad
underworld lives and myths.2 Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that several
lateral heroes, regardless of their appearance in noir or underworld films,
have been reputed to have connections with the real Bombay underworld and,
equally significantly, their Muslimness has been cited as a voluntary, as well as
ascriptive, identification with the denizens of that underworld of whom some
are also, notably, Muslims and declared enemies of the Indian state.3 Though
a new Muslim hero rarely appeared in these films, they have become stamped
as a new brand of noir associated with the shadowy underworld, which made
news concomitantly with the newsworthy rise of the new hero and the renewed
fear of the Muslim canker at the nation’s heart. While a larger analysis of the
connections perceived between some of the new actors’ Muslimness, parallel
noir lives and connections, and “commonness” may not be undertaken here, I
think this triadic concatenation is quite meaningful in terms of potential read-
ings of rhizomatic actor bodies and their coincidence or co-implication—within
discourses of securitization, terror, civil and uncivil disobediences, and colonial
and postcolonial demotic uprisings—with the “ground” and the “underground”
of film-going publics.
As these new trends took off, however, Bachchan’s strange new liminal
appearances in Jaadugar (“The Magician,” 1989, Prakash Mehra), Toofan (“The
Storm,” 1989, Manmohan Desai), and Akayla (“Alone,” 1991, Ramesh Sippy)
suggest his inflationary embodiment of the vertical hero adjusting to these erup-
tions of the lifelike, “believable,” lateral hero right under his feet, so to speak.
By the 1990s, these eruptions would become runaway hits, and Salman Khan
(Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? 1994, Sooraj Barjatya), SRK (Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le
Jayenge, 1995, Aditya Chopra), and Aamir Khan (Rangeela, 1995, Ram Gopal
Varma; Ghulam, 1998, Vikram Bhatt) would make significant strides toward a
different kind of spectatorial subjectivation concomitant with a narrowing of
the gap between presentation and representation in the actor-spectator relation-
ship, via chocolate hero, bubblegum teenage loverboy, or tapori/boy next door/
desperado personas. Indeed, in the process of this narrowing of the gap between
presentation and representation, this “demotic”-ization of the hero, the new
heroic body absorbed some of the noir characteristics of the parallel genre of
crime flicks, as evident in the psychotic and violent registers of some “new hero”
films like SRK’s Darr (“Fear,” 1993, Yash Chopra) and Baazigar (“Gambler,”
1993, Abbas Mastan), and Aamir Khan’s Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (“From One
Success to Another,” 1988, Mansoor Khan) and Ghulam.
To return to Bachchan’s heydays, however, his laying on thick and fast of the
height and presence factors generative of the visual frisson of the spectatorial
relationship as that of god and devotee was dependent on deploying the syntag-
matic, metonymic, presentational visual dynamic as what the moment demanded
of the star persona. Whereas even as a towering figure Bachchan also tended to
be tottering and vulnerable—as in his emotional or dead drunk scenes—and
whereas this combination of strength and vulnerability partly explained his
cultic popularity (as I have said already, neither the identification nor dis-identi-
fication of actor and fan could be total), his image as cult demanded a less than
perfect fusion or satiety. A less than full identificatory submersion was needed
Love triangles at home and abroad 157
to generate the pleasure of repeat visits to the Bachchan shrine to survive the
assaults of demotic iconoclasm that were bringing down political denizens of the
world around him, and among whom he was known to move. He was close to the
Gandhi family, who ruled the country at that time with an iron fist. The Gandhis
were beginning to experience the fate of gods with clay feet: Indira Gandhi was
highly unpopular after the 1975 emergency; Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s younger and
rather scandalous son, died mysteriously in 1980; she herself was assassinated in
1984. Bachchan was implicated, possibly falsely, in a number of scandals associ-
ated with the Gandhi family. Ironically, Bachchan himself briefly joined poli-
tics the eighties, and his most “over the top” messianic film, Shahenshah (1988),
depicts him as a savior who is also “shahenshah” (“king of kings”).4
In cinema of the eighties, he served the function, in a sense, of resuscitating the
tarnished image of those who should have been the people’s idols, as Gandhian
politicians, but were not. He could not, however, be all of any one thing or only
one thing. Desh Premee (“Patriot,” 1982, Manmohan Desai) quite fantastically
offered him as both a lovable buffoon and as an Indian Christ; the patriot’s
unmistakably crucified look inaugurates an era (c. 1980–9) of accommodating
the conflicting yet conjoined aesthetics of fallibility, singularity, and power, be
the latter religious or political. As the ingredients of cult, godhead, power, and
stardom began to move ever closer together, the national prayer vigils under-
taken by devoted fans when Bachchan met with a near-fatal accident on the sets
of Coolie (Manmohan Desai) in 1983 served again to cement the link between
hero and god.
Godhead would remain an inalienable vector of star popularity, even when
the heroic icon “presented” the ambiguous negotiations of actor, king, spectator,
and god. When the icon explicitly set about dismantling iconicity, as Bachchan
would do in Nastik (“Atheist,” 1983, Pramod Chakravorty) by playing an atheist,
the result was a dismal failure (Somayya 2009: 172). More work would need
to be done on this thesis, but it may not be out of the question to suggest that
Nastik failed because it foregrounded too starkly the failure of the ethical prin-
ciple within the materiality of power, mirroring thereby the mistake the nation’s
political leadership had made. Godhead, in fact mediates and arbitrates the
inconsistencies and incommensurabilities of power and its subjects; for the actor
to negate godhead is to lose the power of metonymy to link partial truths. Clearly,
therefore, the tripartite equation of godhead, political leader and actor had to
be skillfully handled to achieve the right outcome of presentational exaltation
without the pitfalls of representational leveling vis-à-vis the spectator. The spec-
tator asserted his or her fantastic power to insist upon a certain cultural and
ethico-political ordering of rights and responsibilities that even the most “highly
presented” star ignored at his peril. The spectator demanded the invincibility
of the god as much as the glamour of the star; in this one instance, the popular
ascendancy of stardom was not unquestionable or unassailable.
In contrast, SRK has attained the honorific of “King Khan,” but has never
come close to approximating godhead in any of his roles: no aspiration there to
mediating religious and political authority and cinema. I suggest that considera-
tions of minority identity aside, this is a factor of the persistent dismantling of
158 Love triangles at home and abroad
the syntagmatic and presentational non-representative “verticality” of the iconic
Hindi film hero in the later generation of stars. Embodiment of heroic nature
by the new male stars of Bollywood Hindi cinema is remarkably differently
enacted, at least on the surface. Unlike in Bachchan’s case, these actors have
managed to stay away from a psycho-political multiple investment in the star’s
towering figure as a transcendent (dis-)location—a location not quite occupiable
by either star or spectator as conveyors of euphoric being—of spectatorial desire
for embodied and piled spiritual, political, and visual ecstasies. Lately SRK also
rather explicitly emphasizes his “secularity” (Chak de India, 2007) as well as
“apolitical” being (BB, 2009), and appears to aspire tirelessly to a more and more
perfect indexicality or representation of the common man, regardless of star
status, by portraying the star as also the common man (see chapter one).
Notably, one articulation of Bachchan’s singularity, a staging of Bachchan’s
“height” and his incommensurability with the “ordinary” person, occurred most
explicitly within heterosexual scenarios, as, for instance, where his much shorter
screen ladies are shown standing on stools or beds to attend to his sartorial needs.
In Benaam (“Nameless,” 1973, Narendra Bedi), Bachchan’s heroine Moushumi
Chatterjee is shown sewing a button on to Bachchan’s shirt while standing on a
bed; in the much later Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (“Happiness and Sadness,”
2001, Karan Johar) Bachchan’s screen and real-life wife Jaya Bachchan is shown
knotting his tie standing on a stool (Chute 2005). Such frames explicitly gendered
the polarity or incommensurability of Bachchan, and necessarily so, since hetero-
normative gender roles and relations used to be some of the most characteristic
enactments in Hindi cinema of presentation, of representational incommensu-
rability. Men and women tended to belong to different worlds, and, when found
present in each other’s worlds, were definitely not represented as included therein
but at best as complementary singularities. Bachchan’s was a singularity that
presented itself as an icon of plebian difference, but did not or could not in fact
be indexical of the plebians he presented; Bachchan’s “stature” thus precluded
him from “inclusion” in the worlds of fans, and also of gender others in the form
of female co-stars. Heterosexual romance predominated in most Bachchan films
as the only available dialectic of gendered relations, foreclosing other dialectics
of gendered being, transactionality, and engagement between men and women
characters. In contrast, in newer films by the new generation of lateral heroes,
male and female characters evince at least the possibility of representing them-
selves to each other as commensurable, readable, and engaged in a dialectic of
cohabitation, with social, familial, and sexual conjugations and contacts.
The shift from presentational to representational dynamics thus characterizes
the shift in male embodiment, as well as gender dynamics, in new Hindi cinema
versus Bachchan’s oeuvre; heteronormative gender relations have been another
crucial site besides the male hero’s body for the shift from a purely syntagmatic
and metonymic possibility in the articulation of the relationship between star
and spectator. Yet, one must not lose sight of the fact that, in critical respects,
such a shift is still merely cosmetic in the case of gender relations. As we shall
see later, the full articulation of a radically representative equation of the gender
or sex complexes continues to be deferred. While new male embodiments have
Love triangles at home and abroad 159
in some respects appeared in tandem with changing gender dialectics, femi-
ninity has continued to serve as the quilting point in the ideological free-fall of
masculinity, assuring the retrenchment of a seemingly protean and liberalized
ideology of masculinity in the cause of heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy,
metro-sexual and new age representational ethos and aesthetics notwithstanding.
Traditional heterosexual femininity has especially served to fix and prescribe
heteronormative and heteropatriarchal values as “family” values, insuring the
happiness of all genders and generations, regardless of the newer cinematic narra-
tive’s compulsive forays into the pleasures of metrosexuality and queer camp and
masquerade.5 This point will become significant in the further elaborations of
re-enactments of male sexualities in cinema later in this essay.
Lateral moves
I now turn to elaborating the new male embodiments of the Hindi cinema hero
post-Bachchan, with whom a more leveled identification of men and women
characters, as well as star and fan, became more probable if not yet entirely
possible or plausible. The new hero not only looked more like the audience he
represented in terms of body shape and language—showing far more rhizomatic
fluidity and energetic deportment as opposed to the laconic stiffness that char-
acterized Bachchan’s tall form—but anatomically he even bulged out laterally
with muscular enhancement dictated by the demands of a new MTV-ized song
and dance performance kinesthetic (Deshpande 2005: 196–7). Spatially, he also
began to travel further and further from the epicenter of the Hindi film mise en
scène and its traditional (hetero-)normative plots. Nitin Govil has described this
in the context of the morphing manipulations of the “singularity” of Bombay/
Mumbai as the point of spatial reference for Hindi films (2008: 209). They also
represent the projection of male bodies into a global imagistic of masculinity as
mobile, malleable, plebian-ized, serialized, and standardized, a fantasy of attain-
ability for aspirational narratives of the body, as well as the political economy of
globalization, an embodied “commons.” Indeed, these films adumbrate a devel-
opment that Vitali describes as continuing:
in the long term the opening up of Indian exhibition may also enable smaller,
commercially more adventurous, producers to claim a share of the market.
In the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, films produced in a shoestring [sic]
sought to gain a position on the centre ground of the industry by exploiting
precisely a visual ‘excess’ that more centrally located films did not dare to
touch, and then radically scooped up contexts of living and aspects of social
experience that had, until then, been bracketed from representation …
(2010: 243)
Figure 5.1 Kaante, offset lobby card. Image courtesy of Pritish Nandy Communications
(www.pritishnandycom.com).
Introduction
1 On “excess”, see Thompson 1986 and Barthes 2006.
2 Turner states: “This term, literally ‘being-on-a-threshold,’ means a state or process
which is betwixt and between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and
processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering struc-
tural status” (“Frame, Flow, and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality”,
Performance in Postmodern Culture, 1977: 33).
3 Pursuing the rhetoric and analysis suggested by Badiou’s term “fictional” and his
own term “absolute performative”, Derrida writes of “the theatrical space of the poli-
tics of our time”, wherein “the essence of political force and power, where that power
makes the law, where it gives itself right … passes via the fable, i.e. speech that is
both fictional and performative” (2009: 290–1).
4 I derive this formulation of the presentational and the representational as “prole-
tarian” versus “bourgeois” from Ray 1985: 35.
5 See also Govil 2008: 203.
6 Badiou writes, “politics stakes it existence on its capacity to establish a relation to both
the void and excess which is essentially different from that of the State; it is this differ-
ence alone that subtracts politics from the one of statist re-insurance” (2005: 110).
7 See Levinas on the “presence of the face” (1998: 33). Levinas views the image or
the “face” as a primary category in a different theory of language, because, for him,
language is not signification but invocation: “Invocation is prior to commonality.
It is a relation with a being who, in a certain sense, is not in relation to me—or,
if you like, who is in relation with me only inasmuch as he is entirely in relation
to himself [sic] … It is this presence for me of a being identical to itself that I call
the presence of the face. The face is the very identity of a being … neither a sign
allowing us to approach a signified, nor a mask hiding it” (1998: 33; italics mine).
This theory of immediate presence, a theory of being as invocation, is a contraven-
tion of Sausseurean or Derridean meaning systems, whereby signification, or its
de-centering, remains at the center of any system of meaning. The belatedness or
alterity of presence as signaled by a structuralist or poststructuralist theory of signs,
either as signifier or as signified, is tethered to a politics of absence, of mediation, of
deferral and de-centering. Levinas replaces those with a politics of identity that is
based on a theory of presence, of immediacy, “of personal identity, irreducible to the
concept” (37). Incidentally, such a theory of presence, of invocation, and of the “face”
also underlies the Indian onto-visual paradigm of “Darshan”, which has been glossed
by several interpreters as the unmediated showing of the deity’s face to the devotee,
providing a special, channeled, communicative access of the devotee to the deity,
wherein the (ineffable) image, rather than the desiring gaze predicated upon lack
(according to critical interpretations of the “male” spectator of classic realist cinema)
holds power and primacy. On Darshan, see Babb 1981 and Eck 1981: 5.
184 Notes
8 Jain 2007: 7–20. Her quotation of Godard’s credo for neorealism is on p. 9.
9 Conversations with Paresh Rawal (actor), Rahul Dholakia (director), and Anjum
Rajabali (scriptwriter) in July 2007.
10 I use this term as Metz defines it for cinema’s symbolic aspect, as joining some of the
features of a “base” or infrastructural context of signification for cinema, as well as
cinema’s historical and social contexts and aesthetic practices—its “enonce” or state-
ment, in addition to its enunciation.
11 Other useful accounts are Olalquiaga 1992 and Soja 2000: 331.
12 Bachchan is signified by dematerialized or disembodied contexts in this film in at
least three ways. First, the plot of Slumdog Millionaire—poor orphaned boy from
the slums bests corrupt hegemony and gets the girl he loves over social obstacles
to their union, in the process re-establishing faith and a system of justice—is the
happier version of the plot of several Bachchan hits, such as Amar Akbar Anthony,
Deewar, Shakti, Don, Trishul, Muqqaddar ka Sikandar, etc. In this sense, Bachchan’s
cinematic text is clearly Slumdog Millionaire’s urtext, an original that continues to
generate numerous re-enactments. Second, Bachchan in this film is the acknowl-
edged reigning superstar of Hindi cinema, whose arrival near one of Bombay’s slums
for a shoot causes a public stampede of fans running to see him, to be near him, or to
get his autograph. Third, Slumdog Millionaire’s plot engine is the hero’s recovery of
his lost love through his appearance as a guest on the very popular diegetic quiz show,
whose exegetic counterpart is the highly popular Indian version of “Who Wants to Be
a Millionaire”, reflecting the rags-to-riches dream of many an Indian, hosted by none
other than Bachchan himself. I recognize that Slumdog Millionaire is not a “Hindi”
film; nevertheless, I find it an apt choice to exemplify a Hindi cinematic phenomenon,
because the film’s symbolic, as well as imaginary, elements are suffused with Hindi
cinematic motifs and myths.
13 Here I refer the reader to Derrida’s highly charged reading of the allusive aporia of
writing: “Are there signatures? Yes, of course, every day. Effects of signatures are
the most common thing in the world. But the condition of possibility of those effects
is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibiity
of their rigorous purity” (1998: 20).
14 This process of mythologization subtends a second order of signification according
to Barthes’ model of myth, which consists of a second order of signification, taking
the “sign/signified” of language as its “signifier” and creating a new or second order
of signification or sign therefrom. The end result of language—its ultimate sign and
also its meaning—becomes the beginner signifier of the schema of myth and ends in
a second order sign that is basically a form, not a meaning or concept (Barthes 1957:
115).
15 Ong 2006: 22, paraphrasing Arendt 1998 (1958): 7–9.
16 The technologically fettered body would be the one guided in its movements by
colonial apparatuses of mobility and self-realization, such as the railways, prisons,
bureaucracy, or schools. See Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational
Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan 2007: 76–100.
17 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Feminism, State Fictions and Violence: Gender,
Geopolitics and Transnationalism”, Communal/Plural. 9:1 2001: 119.
3 The man formerly known as the actor: when Shah Rukh Khan
reappeared as himself
1 Raised by Muslim adoptive parents, the original saint Kabir was a Muslim weaver
whose name meant one of the 99 names of God in Islam, but he had followers among
Hindus and Sikhs, as well as Muslims.
2 Madan and Nandy suggest the “non-nativeness” and “non-naturalness” of secularism
as a Western ideal transplanted to unsuitable Indian grounds. These critics argue that
secularism in India is not a political phenomenon at all, as the grounds of tolerance
and mutual respect have long been communal and cultural, rather than official and
state-sponsored; they point particularly to secularism’s vexed status once categorized
as a Western “political” import (Hansen 2000).
3 Ashwini Malik, a film-maker and scriptwriter in Mumbai, says, “No one can direct
Shah Rukh Khan. Shah Rukh Khan directs himself as actor.”
4 SRK was himself a champion hockey player in high school, according to his testi-
mony in Shiekh 2006: 62.
5 The echoing parallels with minority citizenship as citizenship in name only, and not
in fact, will be hard to miss here.
6 Called the “wisest fool,” one of his poorly executed reforms was the “forced” token
currency, or the replacement of gold and silver coins with copper coinage in order to
strengthen the exchequer with bullion, an abysmally failed measure that Naik explic-
itly recalls in the context of criticizing Kabir Khan’s reformist zeal, the metaphor
pinning Kabir Khan to his Muslimness.
7 One member of the team, Gul, is Muslim, but she gets the least exposure as an indi-
vidual player.
8 Here I am drawing upon Hayden White’s reflections on the changed nature of
“historiography” in modern and post-modern formations, which draws in turn upon
Frederic Jameson’s work on modern and postmodern style: “literary (and for that
190 Notes
matter filmic) ‘modernism’ (whatever else it may be) marks the end of storytelling
… Modernism thereby effects what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘de-realization’ of the
event itself” (White 1996: 24–5).
9 Lal (1998) comes to mind here, though his essay does not account for the reconstitu-
tions, impersonations, and re-embodiments we see in Chak de India in Kabir Khan’s
portrayal as a Muslim played by a Muslim actor, who is not in the end permitted to be
“counted” as a Muslim.