Hindi Cinema

Hindi cinema is full of instances of repetition in its themes, narratives, plots,

and characters. This book focuses on the phenomenon as a crucial thematic and
formal code, which grows problematic when representing the national and cine-
matic subject. It reflects on the cinema as motivated by an ongoing crisis of self-
formation in modern India, taking into account 60 years of films.
The book looks at how cinema presents liminal and countermodern identi-
ties emerging within repeated modern attempts to re-enact traumatic national
events, so as to redeem the past and restore a normative structure to happen-
ings. Establishing structure and event as paradigmatic poles of a historical and
anthropological spectrum for the individual in society, the book goes on to
discuss cinematic portrayals of violence, gender embodiment, religion, economic
transformations, and new globalised Indianness as events and sites of liminality
disrupting structural aspirations.
After revealing the impossibility of accurate representation of incommensu-
rable and liminal subjects within the historiography of the nation-state, the book
highlights how Hindi cinema draws attention to the problematic nature of the
thematic of nation, through an ongoing engagement with the nation-state as a site
of eventfulness. It is a useful study for academics of Film Studies and of South
Asian Culture.

Nandini Bhattacharya is Professor of English and affiliate of Film, Women’s

Studies, and Africana Studies programs at Texas A&M University, USA. Her inter-
ests include South Asia, postcoloniality, cinema, gender, and transnationalism.
Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University, USA

Editorial Advisory Board:

Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University and Calcutta;
Michael Fisher, Oberlin College;
Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania;
David Hardiman, University of Warwick;
Ruby Lal, Emory University, and
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University and Bangalore.

This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first,
across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have empha-
sized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic
involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation
between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times
and places; and third, between colonial and postcolonial histories, as theoretical
positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the
questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three
kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history.
Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core
issues of human society and its self-representation over the centuries.
While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the
world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological, and cross-colo-
nial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited
books by young, as well as established, scholars that challenge the limitations of
inherited disciplinary, chronological, and geographical boundaries, even when
they focus on a single, well-bounded territory or period.

1 Subaltern Citizens and their Histories

Investigations from India and the USA
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey

2 Subalternity and Religion

The prehistory of Dalit empowerment in South Asia
Milind Wakankar

3 Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora

Edited by Deana Heath and Chandana Mathur

4 Subalternity and Difference

Investigations from the north and the south
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey
5 Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India
Changing concepts of hybridity across empires
Adrian Carton

6 Medical Marginality in South Asia

Situating subaltern therapeutics
Edited by David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji

7 Hindi Cinema
Repeating the subject
Nandini Bhattacharya
Hindi Cinema
Repeating the subject

Nandini Bhattacharya
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Nandini Bhattacharya
The right of Nandini Bhattacharya to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
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

List of figures viii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Structure, event, and liminal practices in recent Hindi films 33

2 Imagining the past in the present: violence, gender, and

citizenship in Hindi films 69

3 The man formerly known as the actor: when Shah Rukh Khan
reappeared as himself 110

4 Romancing religion: Bollywood’s painless globalization 126

5 Love triangles at home and abroad: male embodiment as

queer enactment 153

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

Academic criticism of Indian popular cinema displays a particular penchant for

reductive typologies and stern agendas of improvement, based on a standard that
no actual filmmaker ever seems to achieve—only the scholar-critic, it appears,
possesses the knowledge to imagine the ideologically perfect film …
Lutegndorf, “Is There An Indian Way of Filmmaking?”
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 10:3, 2006: 240

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:

Once counted as one in a situation, a multiple finds itself presented therein. If

it is also counted as one by the metastructure, or state of the situation [trans-
latable as “state” within the context of my analysis], then it is appropriate to
say that it is represented. This means that it belongs to the situation (pres-
entation) and that it is equally included in the situation (representation) …
(2005: 99)

The difference between presentation and representation, in terms of the subject

of being, is the subject that belongs versus the subject that is included, i.e. those
that are “present” versus those that “count” for the state. Badiou calls the subject
that both belongs and is included, that is both presented and represented (the
 Introduction  9
former by the structure, the latter by the state), “normal,” and that which is
presented but not represented, belonging but not included or counted (the latter
by the state), “singular.”
The singular is thus already on shaky ground, as presented in the site/situation/
structure, but not counted by the metastructural state. Its exile from the normal
and its overlap with the liminal is completed in the instance of the “evental site,”
defined earlier as “an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that
none of its elements are presented in the situation,” a close affine therefore of
“Singular terms … [that] are composed, as multiples, of elements which are
[also] not accepted by the count [of the state]” (emphasis mine; 99), though they
may be presented within the situation. The singular as the “uncounted”—“this
[singular] term exists—it is presented—but its existence is not directly verified
by the state” (99)—is therefore marked by the contagion and the contiguity of the
liminal, which is neither present nor inside of the count, i.e. neither presented by
the society nor represented by the state.
Liminality is also the irreducible remainder, which Adorno has suggested
thwarts any totalizing conceptualization, however (well) intended, of the object’s
aporias. Singularity and normality, or (structural) belonging and (state) inclusion,
also align on another axis of the formalist cinematic paradigms usually termed
“presentation” and “representation.” It is typically said of Indian cinema that it is
“presentational,” unlike Hollywood cinema that is considered “representational”.
Built on a very broad distinction between non-Western film as more cathected
with non-cinematic forms such as theatre, performance, and spectacle, whereas
Western (especially Hollywood) cinema is more “realist”, this characterization
of Indian cinema as “presentational” would suggest that its roots include “prole-
tarian” identifications and pleasures, whereas the “representational” classic
Hollywood film aligns itself with narrative “modes of the bourgeoisie, realistic
theater and fiction.”4 To read the cinematic formalist paradigms, in terms of the
paradigms of Badiou’s theory of being and event, would reconfirm the alignment
of the presentational with the unruly proletariat or populace, who elude the count
of the official state and whose stories are not always amenable to “classic realist”
telling, and the affinity of the representational with the aspirational “stable”
bourgeoisie, whom the state includes and “represents”.
Of course, it is the perennial drift toward the hyper-real presentational—and
one might argue the “populist” or populous—that bourgeois criticism of the
Indian cinema has long regretted, expressing instead its preference for some-
thing more truly representational, i.e. a so-called “normal” reality. The new
celebration, or at least resurgence, of the liminal in contemporary Hindi cinema
further alienates this longing of the intelligentsia and the cultural elite for a more
“intelligent” cinema, whereby such putative elites demonstrate their willingness
to devitalize the “singular.” The state that “represents” this group, to return to
Badiou again, is the

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

The State is fundamentally indifferent to belonging yet it is constantly

concerned with inclusion … It is not for nothing that governments, when an
emblem of their void wanders about—generally, an inconsistent or rioting
crowd—prohibit ‘gatherings of more than three people’ … thus proclaiming
that the function of the State is to number inclusions such that consistent
belongings be preserved …
(Badiou 2005: 107–9)

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”:

the … Cinema never simply reflected contemporary events … the movies

responded to what Althusser calls the mass audience’s ‘relationship’ to those
events—a perception of them determined to a large extent by the movies
themselves and the historic weight of the tradition the cinema had adopted …
(1985: 68)

Hindi cinematic repetition, a significant ideological, formal, and thematic appa-

ratus or “tradition” in this sense—that mediates historical events not as repre-
sentations of some tangible reality, but of an ongoing imaginary relationship with
that reality—combines with a historical discourse, perhaps a dream, of repeti-
tion of structures and events as Indian nation-building. Both history and cinema
 Introduction  13
use the trope of repetition to effect the de-centering of the subject as counter-
modern. The event is, therefore, the object whose ideological re-enactment also
re-activates in each instance the hope and desire for a changing historical and
cinematic subjective moment. Just as national and unofficial publics have long
been engaged in contestations of the “location” of the nation in historic “time,”
thereby deploying certain well-worn binaries—tradition versus modernity, indi-
geneity versus globalization, the material and the hyper-real, the pre-colonial and
the colonial, the modern and the postmodern—so Hindi cinema today gestures
at the contestations of the pre- , the post-, and the “neo-” colonial in the “reel”
reflection of the real. In the process of rereading the event through the apparatus
of repetition, the specter of countermodernity is revived.
Thus, when we have, as Shohat has argued, not only a “postcolonial” moment in
decolonized “third world” countries, but also a simultaneous “neocoloniality” in
those same countries, when nominally decolonized countries still operate under
the power of “gringostroikas” (Shohat 2000: 132–3), cinema spectatorship, as in
India, may well be a segmented pre-/anti-/de-/post-/neocolonial citizenry, differ-
entiated by differential spatio-temporal experiences as much as by shadings of
gender and sexual politics, class, ethnicitiy, urbanization, Westernization, etc.
For this spectator or citizen, nothing in the “present” particularly integrates the
dissociative reality of spatio-temporal crosshatchings and differential affect. The
“repetitive” dynamic of cinema and cinematic history mirrors post-independence
South Asian differentials of political power and civic rights, and local, regional,
or communal disarticulations of power and rights among “authentic” and “inau-
thentic” subjects of decolonization and globalization; those who experience
national space and time on quite distinct topographical registers and asymmet-
rical developmental clocks. Hindi cinema is consumed by different time, space,
and affective registers within the putative present moment in India. A mélange of
personality cults, star followings, generic foci and obsessions, stylistic and tech-
nological innovations in film-making, and plot and theme staples and “remakes”
have reflected this wide range of spectatorial differences within the “postcolony.”
Perhaps the most critical basal fault-line, in this regard, is the awkward
contemporaneity of the neocolonial and the postcolonial in India today, which
suggests a paradoxical conflation of past and present, collapsing the radical
discreteness of separate events in time and turning a discourse upon history into
a neoliberal presentist static, instead of a modulated and sequential narrative
about time. In other words, within the so-called “post”-colonial world of India,
neocolonialism’s crosscurrent disaggregates citizen-formations as articulated by
different fortunes of decolonization. This radical and disaggregative plurality is
one of the social “realities” that support the persistent discourse of repetition in
Hindi cinema, perhaps in addition the cultural need for that discourse. As per
Foucault’s cartography of history, “It is the historian’s task to uncover discur-
sive and nondiscursive practices in their plurality and contingency, in order to
reveal the fields that render intelligible an otherwise heterogeneous collection of
events” (Flynn 1994: 39). My work here on Indian cinematic history’s spaces and
times of subject-making as a history of discursive practices of repetition engages
precisely with this task.
14  Introduction
In the co-implication and co-existence of neo- and postcoloniality (Shohat
2000: 133), in these displacements and transformations of space and time, neoco-
lonialism reappears and repeats, yet rephrases and dislocates postcolonial aspira-
tions, producing an ironic phatic aporia of the subject in the process. Discourses
of national integrity, development, security, and terror express the imbrication of
two displaced temporalities of the future of colonialism—“post-” and “neo-”—in
the liminal modality of repetition.
If in the nation the colonial is “pre-”, “post-”, and “neo-colonial” simultane-
ously, the cinema is potentially the allochronic, as well as synchronic flickering of
the “pre-” postcolonial upon the screen of a “postcolonial” postmodernity that has
appeared as the cultural cargo of a primarily neocolonial vessel. Cinematic stylistic
and thematic divergences, which can perhaps be called aesthetic pluralism—real
versus hyper-real modes, modernist versus postmodern aesthetics—capture and
cover the resurgent countermodernities of the colonial and the anti-colonial within
the post/neo/colonial. In this way, different eras, configurations, and grounds of
the social, the material, and the psychic intersect in cinematic text and image. The
crosshatching of style and message is a temporal dialogue between the colony and
its aftermath (but not its end), as much as a distance between the ex-colony and its
“postcolonial” spaces (i.e. between West and East). Therefore, it is crucial to map
this particular temporality and spatiality of the “postcolonial”—its co-extension
with the pre-colonial, colonial and neocolonial—upon other co-extant binaries
of real and hyper-real, modern and postmodern, in cinematic narrative and styles
redolent of countermodern forces.
I have identified historical discourses of durable structures and mutable
events—frequently found in cinema as particularities of statist nestings of events
within the circuit of national-cultural structural codes with either repetitive or
differential outcomes—as constitutive grounds for the discourses of iterability
and performativity that “embody” the liminal in the various films I discuss.
Events that are the staging spaces for reenactments of the subject are very much
still to be found coded through available indices and icons of the national and the
statist, and throughout this book, therefore, national and statist space and time
will remain key players.
Critical discussion of Hindi cinema used to be dominated by variations on the
concept of the nation (Chakravarty, Vasudevan, Rajadhyaksha, Prasad, Sarkar,
etc.). Even in a retrospect of his own work on cinematic melodrama and that of
the prevailing discourse on Indian film, Vasudevan wrote in 2010:

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 hermeneutic has more recently been supplemented by analytics of trans-

nationalism, space, urbanity, audiences, ethnicity, sexuality, new media, and
cinema’s metadiscursivity and postmodernity (Roy, Mazumdar, Jaikumar, Virdi,
 Introduction  15
Gopalan, Rai, Gehlawat, etc.). Most of this latter body of scholarship defines
identity as plural but coherent categories within the nation, such as gender, reli-
gion, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. In navigating these two bodies of scholarship
toward a yet-unexplored discussion of the formal juxtapositions of “iterability”
in cinematic story and cinematic historiography, I further take into account
work by scholars of film, postcolonialism, feminism, anthropology, performance
studies, subaltern studies, and area studies to effect my own substantive shift in
reading a cinema that has hitherto been seen primarily as the image gallery of a
fractured nation-state. I depart from other bodies of scholarship by calling for an
investigation into the concept of identity itself, as a fluid and liminal formation.
Consequently, I put the theories of the “event” proposed by Badiou, Derrida,
Turner, Sahlins, and others in dialogue with the theories of pre-national and
precolonial, colonial and postcolonial subjectivity as proposed by Chakrabarty,
Ramanujan, Pandey, Amin, Das, and more to show how the re-mapping of the
South Asian event—in terms of its historic potential for expressing liminality and
subjunctive identities—brings out the operations of the countermodern as key to
India’s cinematic modernity, as well as to postmodernity. Unearthing repetition
as a Hindi cinematic and historical master tool of handling the sensitive topic
of subjectivation (becoming subjects) is not merely another way of pointing out
the uniqueness or distinctness of Indian cinema, or of the interpretation thereof.
Instead, it is a crucial underscoring of cinema’s handling of the “real” in a social
and political setting, which presents the liminal subject within evolving aesthetic
and representational frames that resonate with the insights of poststructuralist
and postmodern queries into the subject, and might have fruitful implications for
the disciplinary study of cinema in general.
The first chapter of this book, “Structure, Event, and Liminal Practices in
Recent Hindi Films,” discusses historical discourses of repetition in their codi-
fications as durable structure or mutable event. I cover three different political
attitudes to the liminal by way of various implicit historiographies in three
recent Hindi films that dramatize citizenship. Through comparing the theories
of Sahlins, Ramanujan, Massumi, and Derrida about the nature and signifi-
cance of the temporal event, and applying them to Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi
(“A Thousand Such Desires,” 2003), Rang de Basanti (“Paint It Saffron,” 2006),
and Mumbai Meri Jaan (“Mumbai My Life,” 2008), I demonstrate how the
films exemplify different styles of historic narration, either privileging larger
structures and historic fables of the national-cultural, or invoking a statist view
of history as reiteration of events that produces indeterminacy as to whether
they are repetitive and identical or successive and dissimilar. The latter inde-
terminacy inevitably raises the vexed question of development or progress and
their ethics, in addition to logic. Thus, the implicit historiography of Hazaaron
Khwaishein Aisi—a directorial voice-over synthesizing disparate political and
private experiences of heterogeneous subjects in postcolonial times—reflects
Sahlins’ conception of modern national history as reiteration of mythic, pre-colo-
nial, and anti-colonial structures. Rang De Basanti, on the other hand, reflects
Ramanujan’s view of event-based histories of the modern state, representing as it
does the critical historical “event” as a privileged statist utterance, which ends up
16  Introduction
flattening out the heterogeneity, affective specificity, and radical diffuseness of
events and their actors. Lastly, Mumbai Meri Jaan departs from the notion of any
event’s stasis, instead recalling Derrida’s view that repetition implies alteration:
no event, context, or identity is coeval or reducible to another or to a particular
form. Moreover, in this view, every identity or event is potentially unreadable.
Mumbai Meri Jaan rearticulates altogether the nation-state, structure-event
binary in foregrounding as its subject the unclassifiable resistance of the dispos-
sessed and the hopeless, the politically uncounted public. Since the nineties the
liminal has emerged as the strongest constituent of the public, as Hindi cinema
breaks with its past forms.
In the second chapter, “Imagining the Past in the Present: Violence, Gender,
and Citizenship in Hindi Films,” I consider how depictions of South Asian post-
Partition tropes of violence, abduction, and rescue of women—representing
liminal sexual identity-formations and porous national borders between India
and Pakistan—return in the enactments of persecuted or marginalized women
in Hindi films of the forties, fifties, and notably, after the nineties. Films like
Mother India (1957), Garm Hawa (“Hot Winds,” 1973) and Veer-Zaara (“Veer
and Zaara,” 2004) re-tell the story of the disenfranchised woman, whose romantic
or sexual misfortune hints at the continuing trauma of the gender violence of the
1947 Partition, putting into question the cohesion of the nation-state itself. These
films address women’s experiences in India’s modernity as important “events”—
defining Indian citizenship as part of a long history, with many iterations of these
events—but indicate how the female citizen is repeatedly an elusive subject at
risk, regardless of the eras of setting and filming.
The third chapter, “The Man Previously Known as the Actor: When Shah
Rukh Khan Reappeared as Himself,” shows how manipulations of ethnic limi-
nality and star text ambiguities—similar to racial “passing”—previously made
it possible for Muslims to become superstars in Hindi cinema. Rarely, however,
did a Muslim star play a Muslim character on-screen. This chapter’s focus is
on Muslim contemporary male super-star Shah Rukh Khan and his first perfor-
mance of Muslimness as on-screen liminality, in a recent film titled Chak de
India (“Three Cheers India,” 2007), which seemingly abjures the star’s “passing”
only to re-inscribe the character’s “passing” as the film’s primary story. Shah
Rukh Khan plays Kabir Khan, the Muslim captain of the Indian men’s hockey
team and, after dismissal as a result of anti-Muslim prejudice, the successful
coach of the marginalized Indian women’s hockey team. Despite the ill treat-
ment that Kabir Khan receives, his relentless syncretic evocation of “playing for
India” against the grain of communal rivalries and gender boundaries displays
the statist mode of national integration: an enactment of ethnic liminality as salv-
ific and a simultaneous avowal and erasure of ethnic liminalities. Shah Rukh/
Kabir Khan’s Muslimness is set in motion by this film’s statist mode precisely to
rewrite the event of anti-Muslim communalism as the potential starting point of
communal integration.
In the fourth chapter, “Romancing Religion: Bollywood’s Painless
Globalization,” I contrast the unruly liminal body of super-star Amitabh
Bachchan, in his socially conscious “angry young man” films of the seventies
 Introduction  17
and eighties, with the docile male bodies servicing the state and official economy
in later popular family romances built around consumerist lifestyles, notably the
trend-setting Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (“Who Are We to You?”, Sooraj Barjatiya,
1994). In the 1990s, the Indian economy was officially liberalized. Critics have
argued that this represents arrest of a singular narrative of nation-formation in
favor of one aligned with world capitalist dominance, and that the ethos of liber-
alization flattened political dissent under neocolonial imperatives that have now
been successfully privatized. In Bollywood, too, the male body underwent a
transformation from spectacular resistance to painless corporatization; mascu-
linity was recast as a new liminality, slickly traversing separate gendered spheres
and palliating potential class struggle. By foregrounding conjugal melodramas
of the rich as the stuff of social history, such films dissolved social crisis, class
conflict, and the critical event into neoliberalism’s triumph over popular dissent.
In the fifth and final chapter, “Love Triangles at Home and Abroad: Male
Embodiment as Queer Enactment,” queerness emerges in the twenty-first century
as a new articulated liminal category in South Asian diasporic identity narra-
tives. Ostensibly heteronormative films depict love between men in transnational
spaces, reincarnating South Asian liminalities as viable diasporic masculinities.
In box office favorites Kal Ho Na Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Come,” 2003)
and Jaane Mann (“Beloved,” 2006), two straight men bond over their love for
the same woman so much as to “act” queer before diegetic and exegetic specta-
tors. However, queer masquerade paradoxically re-stabilizes heterosexual object
choices in these two films; comically performed homosocial relations end up
subtending and surrogating “serious” heterosexual romance. Homosocial affect
is, moreover, protean: these films show heteronormative nationalism and queer
performance serving interchangeably as vehicles for primordial nationalism
(language, religion, culture) in transnational contexts. The geopolitical sites and
transnational trajectory of “global South Asian” homosociality are as unexpect-
edly sutured as the odd re-inscribing of primordia and heterosexuality through
performing queerness. The characters in the films effortlessly traverse a world
strung between Bombay and New York, and in their transnational repertoires of
male embodiment, queerness as a flexible scenario accommodates both so-called
Eastern and Western values within the frame of nationalist brotherhood. As an
allegory of masculinist nationalism, but as its split double, queer performance
estranges the viewer from any possible critique of a patriarchal and hetero-
normative nationalism in the diaspora. Beginning with a review of the films of the
“tall” hyper-male Amitabh Bachchan hero of the seventies, I trace a “rhizomatic”
embodiment of masculinity in Bollywood’s new transnational heroes.
While an extended discussion of form in Hindi cinema is largely beyond
this book’s scope, I do wish to make two observations extending the forms and
conventions of the subject to another “vernacular” art form that circulates in
India, i.e. calendar art. In tracing the complex ebbs, flows, and crosscurrents of
demand and supply in the popular Indian calendar art industry and its consumer
base, Jain has recently alerted us to the flow and play of transactional and mate-
rial relations in the conception, production, circulation, and consumption of the
popular calendar (Jain 2007). Stylistically, vernacular art in India, such as the
18  Introduction
bazaar calendar works, athwart aspirations of colonial and postcolonial European
Enlightenment-inflected rational bourgeois modernities, by offering visual
aesthetics and affects as non-representational (the visual or performative frame
does not lay self-legitimating claim to a pure or “realist” capture and representa-
tion of the object or the scenario, effecting instead a dynamic return of visual art
to the singular thing out there in the world, the “real”). Jain also re-categorizes
the power of the image, often sacred or divine, to intercede in entirely secular
transactions, as well as public and private exchanges of affect, faith, and profit in
Indian marketplaces and other economies.
Being presentational and participating in a performative ethico-politics, rather
than in a juridical representation of the subject, like calendar art, Hindi cinema
tends to favor “not a just image” but “just an image”8 (though the films themselves
often iconize and valorize their performative presentation of change as reform).
Moreover, Hindi cinema captures the transactional religio-secular hybridity
of vernacular art; by unmooring from representationality and re-anchoring in
performative politics, Hindi cinema, like Indian calendar art, retains a political
voice, a seat in the popular parliament of critical perspectives on institutions,
power relations, and disciplinary regimes of the nation-state, thereby main-
taining diverse and often discrete claims to the ethico-political. Moreover, both
of these formal characteristics confirm my assertion that Hindi cinema is a quin-
tessentially liminal form in the anthropological sense discussed above, because
it does its cultural work and has its cultural effect within the realm of the popular
subconscious, both eluding and exceeding the agitprop earnestness of postcolo-
nial modernist aesthetics (Jain 2007: 7–18).
Popular cinematic and journalistic discourses upon Hindi cinema after inde-
pendence appear to have had very little problem with the “naïve reflection” school
of filmic analysis, and cinematic form was held by such discourses to be subser-
vient to the project of “reflecting” the “nation” accurately and widely. An edito-
rial in Filmfare (6:17, 16 August 1957) titled “After Ten Years of Independence”
declares (italics mine):

in some vitally important departments the majority of our films today, if

they are not actually worse than those of 1947, are certainly no better …
The inspiration then was drawn mainly from the life of the people, past and
current, and the films reflected the culture, customs and way of life of the
country, which is what films should do … Today it is the exception rather
than the rule for the average film to serve that first principle of motion picture
production … The remedy lies in the filmgoers themselves, their developing
taste and judgment and in the conscience of the average producer—both
elements of dubious efficacy for some time to come … On the credit side it
must be said that the proportion of good pictures in the annual output has
risen steadily … there is no doubting the progressive achievement in respect
of quality and content as well as in the production vales of our pictures …
Among the best features of progress is the keen and growing interest taken
by the Government in the industry, manifest in a policy which is designed
to foster and encourage it without undue interference and control … Several
 Introduction  19
of our pictures have won distinguished awards at various international film
festivals in competition with the world’s best product, the names of our
stars are getting to be known and the doors of the world market are opening
slowly to our industry with vast populations avid for knowledge of us and
our country …

In unhesitatingly declaring the accurate reflection of national life as the summum

bonum of Indian cinema, this editorial and others like it in contemporary film
journals would appear at first to be promoting a theory of film as a naïve represen-
tation of national life, merely a sort of ethnographic product and export. However,
it is productive to re-read this lengthy quotation as evidence of the interrelated
presentational and transactional quality of Hindi cinema discussed above (Jain
2007). Primarily, the relationship between cinema and nation-state posited and
advocated by the 1957 Filmfare editorial is one of cinematic performance (char-
acterization, mise en scène, theme, or narrative) as presentation of the emergent
nation-state and its multitudes. Only secondarily and disapprovingly does the
editorial see film-making in India as the business of telling “realist” narratives
that might result in “shoddy imitations which have nothing of our national life
in them beyond the language, the costumes and the names of the characters”—a
clear dig at Hollywood influences.
Also during this period, debate on the future of film in India was well afoot; the
S. K. Patil Film Inquiry Committee had been appointed by Prime Minister Nehru
himself in 1951, in response to major agitations by film producers, exhibitors, and
distributors since at least 1949 to institute needed reform in taxation and revenue
structures, as well as by film appreciation societies and cinephiles demanding state
intervention in improvement of cinematic taste and audience awareness. Though
nothing came for a long while of the economic subsidies, infrastructural support,
and tax restructuring proposed by the Patil Committee, its recommendations
did result in the establishment of the Film and Television Institute, the National
Film Archives, the Film Finance Corporation, the Indian Motion Picture Export
Corporation, Hindustan Photo Films, and the Indian International Film Festival.
These were all successfully transacted concessions to the surging demands of the
film industry for government recognition and support.
My book is also concerned with spaces, cinematic and socio-politico-histor-
ical. I reflect upon what might be seen as a national longing for liminality, or
for a space to be national, i.e. placed. My thinking about this topic is indebted
to a thought-provoking essay by Niranjana, “Nationalism Refigured,” wherein
she explained the emergence of the new “‘post-national-modern’ (not the post-
modern, and not the postnational) to describe this situation (in post-independ-
ence India) in which old terms are acquiring new significations” (2000). Though
I am struck by the prescience of her finding of “new identities” in popular cinema
that has taken “new directions” since the 1990s—as will be seen below, this is
exactly my contention in chapter two of this book—there are three foundational
points where, in my view, her analysis does not go far enough. First, I would
disagree with her axial claim that “Unlike gender, however, caste and community
(or religious identity) are not privileged sites for the representation or staging of
20  Introduction
modernity and nationhood” (2000: 139). On the contrary, I feel that it is an undue
sidelining of these “other” new identities in favor of working out the strategic
deployment of the “female modern” that leads several feminist critics of Indian
cinema into a too narrow visual aperture upon the complexities of Hindi and
Indian cinema’s refraction of the identity question. Indeed, when I discuss the
refracting of the question of modern identities through the figure of the woman in
Indian films of the forties and nineties in the second chapter, I suggest precisely
how gender or sexual identities are not precipitated prior to other identity narra-
tives and performances, but are located squarely in the latter’s midst in ways that
are mutually constitutive of the entire complex of gender and sexuality, ethnic,
religious, and communal identities.
Second, I find it more profitable to engage with the question of identities in
Indian cinema as a long-term and historically embroiled process, not merely an
inevitable outgrowth of post-Nehruvian modernity re-morphing miraculously in
nineties cinema (Niranjana 2000: 139, 141). Again, this forms part of my argu-
ment in chapter two. Critical to my project is the contention that Hindi cinema
has been grappling (at least since 1948) with the fundamental indeterminacy
of identity within an evolving historical discourse of nationhood that predates
cinema. I hope to show this mostly in the second chapter, but also in the first
chapter’s analyses of reiterative and recursive cinematic ideologies and praxes
of historiography, as opposed to so-called “modern” breaks from the past, which
result in fatefully and faithfully revealing supposedly fresh and unique events to
be commensurate repetitions of prior conjunctures in the mythic structures of
national history.
The third point of my dissent from Niranjana is in shifting the emphasis away
from her (and other scholars’) key term, “nation.” My book will engage ener-
getically, but not quiescently, with this rubric of a putative “national” cinema. Of
course, many eminent industry figures—including D. G. Phalke, V. Shantaram,
Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Yash Chopra, and Aamir Khan—have made films
with the figure of the nation as the ground of their cinema. Much troubles this
claim of the Hindi cinema in India as a “national” cinema, however. My conten-
tion is that the idea of the nation in this cinema is just a contention, a ground that
is ultimately a figure for absence. Nationalism is, therefore, a top-level simula-
crum in this cinema. It is the figuration of the ground of absence as itself the
figure that in part makes this cinematic discourse of nationalism a modernist
mirage and a postmodern simulacrum.
When I interviewed Hindi cinema industry personnel, many indeed ridiculed
my use of the world “nationalism.” What “ism,” they asked, was signified by
the industry’s unswervingly commercial nature—capital-“ism”, perhaps, they
asked archly.9 Sarkar argues in his strategic reading of Indian cinema as an alle-
gory of the South Asian Partition that the overt disavowal of it by Hindi cinema
auteurs like Yash Chopra is a sign of their “oblique depictions of the experience,”
an obliqueness and dissociation, which Sarkar reads throughout the corpus of
1950s Hindi cinema as calling for an allegorical reading to uncover the foun-
dational stratum of Partition trauma (Sarkar 2009: 121). I agree with Sarkar’s
call to read the allegorical or disavowal mode of major film-makers since the
 Introduction  21
Partition—whereby the fiction metastasizes its own distance from the “real”
event, making the referential linkage oblique and only partially decipherable—
as a “meta-allegory” (2009: 124) constitutive of the form of Hindi cinema set
upon precipitating the nation as a “sublime object of ideology” trumping the
trauma of Partition. I argue, however, a need to take further the disavowal mode
itself as a primary constitutive rhetoric of the Hindi cinematic apparatus, and
as a meta-allegory of the cinema’s frisky disavowal of over-determined critical
concepts such as nationalism and nationhood.
Indeed, in many senses, what makes Lutgendorf’s “ideologically perfect” film
(Lutgendorf 2006: 240) is the restructuring of the discourses on film diegesis and
modes of production and their relationship to a “real” by ideology’s overdeter-
mining and transformative power (Ray 1985). The overdetermination of ideo-
logical restructuring is most apparent in the “distinguishing characteristic of the
sign—but the one that is least apparent at first sight—[which] is that in some way
it always eludes the individual or social will” (Saussure 1965: 17). If film-makers
have disavowed an explicit concern with Partition, a ruse that can be unveiled only
via acutely allegorical strategies of viewing their films, I might suggest that other
disavowals—such as that of the iconic concept of “national-ism” that I encoun-
tered—might point to a constitutive structure of disclaimers in Hindi cinema,
extending beyond the thematic and historical node of the Partition. This structural
pattern of disclaiming, if specious, should still be taken seriously as an ideological
form of genre consolidation in Hindi cinema. Film-makers’ habits of disavowing
specific theme or content should, critically, be de-linked from specific ascriptions
of false consciousness and productively re-linked to a habitual abjuration of icons,
like nationalism, in favor of flexible liminalities, such as commercial, cinematic,
civic, and spectatorial identities that are always in flux.
In other words, it is through the habits of disavowing—discursively and tech-
nically—fixed cathexes to discrete and immutable unitary themes, ideologies,
purposes, and frames of subjectivation that the generic and generative form of
Hindi cinema might be understood. A short reprise of recent Hindi films like
Mumbai Meri Jaan (Nishikant Kamat, 2008), Don I (Farhan Akhtar, 2006), Rang
de Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006), and Raajneeti (Prakash Jha,
2010) reveal that a new era of experimentation with characterizations, themes,
and visual and narrative techniques in Hindi cinema has merely distillated a core
quality since its inception: its ability to simulate the blank space of the nation, or
the nation as a quintessentially blank and writable space. The question of space
or place is highly important here. Space or place are recurrent and productive
topics for a project on the “national” or its simulations; the space where the figure
of the cinematic nation ought to cohere is, and has, been the ground of national
cinema. And yet, this space is revealed in historical and personal musings as
permanently unfixed, and frequently perambulatory or dislocated. In this space
the nation itself is cinematic, or a representation of experimental manifestations
of spatialized subjects. This is a point to which I will return in chapter two.
A new turn to hyperreality, simulacra, intertexutality, and metadiscursivity is
now prominent in this cinema, as viewers of the current crop of films, such as
Ram Gopal Varma’s ouvre, Dev D (Anurag Kashyap, 2009), Fashion (Madhur
22  Introduction
Bhandarkar, 2008), Ek Chalis ki Last Local (Sanjay M. Khanduri, 2007), Oye
Lucky Lucky Oye (Dibakar Banerjee, 2008) etc., might concede. This hyperre-
ality and metadiscursivity extend to identity politics. Identities are now overtly
geo-televisual, globalized, pluralized, decentered, hyphenated, and disjunctive,
as well as simulated in many new Hindi films (in Don I, for instance). Indeed,
in this post-subjective moment, identities in Hindi cinema are crystallizations
of liminality that together, at best, constitute a simulation of the “nation” or
the national. This post-subjective moment forcefully precipitates recognition
that, instead of being a mirror of reality, of a juxtastructure10 of identity and its
symbolizations, Bombay cinema has always been hyperreal. The history of this
cinema might be written as the progression of representational work from the
material to the hyperreal.11
A good instance of this occurs in a recent kitschy juxtastructure of the mate-
rial and the symbolic in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in a scene of
the signing of Amitabh Bachchan’s photo—recently shit-spattered—for the hero
Jamal by a disembodied Bachchan himself.12 From the kinesthetically dizzying
mixing of the suturing eye-line match of Boyle’s spectator rushing horizontally
along at the diegetic fan’s breathless pace and the vertiginous descent of the
camera onto a photograph being held out by an invisible hand to an invisible but
very tall man, we can tell that the Big B autographs Jamal’s copy of his image.
However, the intersecting camera and eye movements that provide a duplicated
suture—with implied fan and implied star at first—disrupt suture in favor of
the image itself within the image on screen. The star’s photograph standing in
absentia signifies the dual spectrality of the star, these two spectralizations also
occurring in the pro-filmic metadiscourse on Amitabh Bachchan the superstar,
and the extra-filmic metadiscourse of Slumdog Millionaire upon stardom.
This image becomes the thing itself rather than its sign, and replaces the
body of Bachchan, or at least makes his image the desired object of his own
gaze as ours, and it also vanishes the character in favor the spectatorial posi-
tion within and outside the shot, the film. Put another way, this image is the
node of convergence of star and spectator, both spectralized yet living only in
the spectatorial function itself and in possibilities of suture with the star/image
per se. The exegetic spectator knows that the image collapsing the relational
polarity of the cinematic gaze has circulated from a communal “body”—the
public toilet with the waste-pit underneath—and has the potential to transmit
infection from live public bodies to the iconic but invisible hero, to whom the
entire film is in any case a partial homage. The image and the star or spectator
do not, however, know this. They are impervious to this infection of knowl-
edge. The effacement of the characters, spectators, and stars from the screen
itself—leaving nothing thereon but an image that mirrors the star, whose eye is,
however, also that of camera and exegetic spectator and a copy of their desires,
staunches the flow, the transmission of the real, the body of the public, with a
simulacrum of presence multiply mediated and thereby distanced. The flow
of organism is stopped by the inscription of a magisterially and mechanically
delivered signature—the autograph—arresting the tremulous and messy body
of the fan and the public.
 Introduction  23
This signature itelf is a replacement, a hyperrealization, moreover, of material
and affective context and content.13 The real meets the hyperreal; Big B’s absent
body—forever sought and never gained—replaced by his signature, transforms
mirror into simulacrum, Bachchan’s sign for his flesh and blood. The cinematic
production of the hyper-real is itself a copy of the larger cinematic tendency
to dismantle mirroring with suturing that destabilizes and rips up ontologically
distinct subjectivities, proclaiming that the image is both the star, the spectator,
and no one at all, as well as everyone, i.e. the public that defecates. Fecal matter
and sign are contrastive, as well as mutually illustrative. The public’s bodily
waste, public materiality, in the form of excrement on the photograph, is neither
redeemed nor recognized by the sign, the star signature, which itself does not
inhabit its own embedding and imprinting, its clearly mechanically repetitive
gesture building not momentousness, but sheer self-duplicating momentum.
Hence, Bachchan’s bodily absence combined with the spectrality of his image
and the mechanical-ness of his signature—foregrounding absence in signature of
“signification,” of collaborative meaning-making—serves to “re-inscribe” that
which the shot pretends to disavow: the absence of meaningful difference, of
meaningful subject positions and affect, in favor of the production of simulacra.
Even when star texts were holistic and iconic, they simultaneously coded an
absence and a hyperbolic presence, as Majumdar has shown (2003). Majumdar
has argued that the classic Hindi cinema encrypted the melodramatic text and
the star text in its multiple roles, in order to reinforce the power of a cinema
where meaning remained in excess of its modes of representation: meaning
remained incoherent and sometimes anxious (2003: 90). According to Majumdar,
the proliferation of the Hindi cinema star text in double or multiple cinematic
roles was an “attempt to grasp at and establish the ‘truth’ of the actual ‘being’
of the star,” because otherwise the phantom “otherness” of the star remained
forever elusive and inaccessible (91). It follows that the question of the other,
of the liminal presence of others, spectralized even the very iconicity of indi-
vidual “heroes” of Hindi cinema and sought multiple avenues of expression in
the “double” or “multiple” role.
Today, because of media, advertising, and multi-platform communication
technologies in India, the actor’s star text is greater yet than the sum of the parts
of their film roles (Shah Rukh Khan is the best example of this). The star’s image
as a product endorser is prolific, extra-cinematic, and ubiquitous. Hence, the
“expressive incoherence,” with its attendant “liminal” possiblities of otherness
that melodrama and multiple-role casting were said to allow yesteryear’s actors’
star texts to exhibit (Majumdar 2003: 90), now continues in the market-driven
pluralization and de-centering of the actor’s commercial appearances outside of
the film frame, i.e. outside of the cinematic appearance of stardom. These new
proliferations of the star text are driven by an extremely coherent and focused
logic of the marketplace. Anupama Chopra writes that past star icons had been
wary of plugging products; this use of their star text seemed to endanger their
stardom. Dilip Kumar apparently declined proposals to endorse products, saying,
“Hum ishtihaaron ke liye nahin bane hain” (“I was not made for advertise-
ments,” Chopra 2007: 158). Whether or not stars did endorse products, this much
24  Introduction
is clear: it appeared critical that they not appear to do so. To appear to do so
would be to squander their star text in the service of popular consumer culture.
Not to be “consumed” casually and publicly, the star text was meant to be a
hoarded commodity, to be multiplied only in order to enhance or mystify star
appeal and alienation, and to hint at the idea of otherness personified by actorly
polyphormousness.
In the newer eras of Hindi cinema we see the classic melodramatic mode and
the idea of an iconic star with a hoarded and secret liminality giving way to what
might only be called a speed rush of hyper-real simulations, ambiguous charac-
terization and casting, remakes, and remixes (in the music industry). This new
stylistic signature is indeed the mark of a recurrent and singular postmodernity
in Indian cinema. The entry of vast amounts of “new talent” into contemporary
Hindi cinema is also further evidence of this de-centering of the older star text
with the newer postmodern text: more is less, copy is as alluring and charismatic
as original. What might the present postmodern and consumer-conscious mode
of Hindi cinema have to do with the absence or obsolescence of the past melodra-
matic mode of that cinema? How does the proliferation of the hyper-realized star
text on extra-cinematic media—including national advertising space—affect
the creation of a postmodern symbolic of Hindi cinema today? And regarding
the question of liminality, has untapped and uncommodified “otherness” been
entirely lost in the flood of marketed demystification of the star text as a coherent
extra-filmic site of consumption (product endorsements), or located itself else-
where even though star power must still encompass some of this spectral quality
for the film to work at all, according to the schema of visual consumption
suggested by Majumdar (2003: 90–1)? If the residue of otherness, of elusive star
essence is whittled away by the ubiquity and overproduction of the star text in
advertising and marketing, what happens to the cinema’s actual ability to suggest
a non-consumerist, non-materialist (but embodied) liminality?
Given the absence of a “photo” effect (Ellis 1982), whereby the filmed object
is felt to be simultaneously absent and present in this postmodern moment of star
hyper-realization and hyper-representation, and as the power of the star image
to suggest multiple embodied liminal identities is now replaced by higher speed
cameras delivering pastiche, parody, fragment, disjuncture, and deconstructive
narratives of identity, I would argue that the cinema now finds liminality not so
much in the shadowy otherness of the star text, as in fractured representations
of character through new casting choices, and in fractured ideas of subjectivity
inherent in the new film-making style itself. Such choices and representations
show up in the hyperrealities popularized by the globalized technologies and
look of post-nineties Hindi cinema, wherein simulacra and metatextuality are
themselves cinematic themes, narratives, and languages of cinema. I devote
considerable discussion to the hyperrealities, simulacra, metatextualities, post-
modern surface, and globalized technologies of Rang de Basanti, Mumbai Meri
Jaan, and Billu Barber in the next chapter of this book.
I argue, therefore, that identities in Indian cinema have always been figured
liminally, and they continue to appear that way despite the alterations to star text
in a hyper-mediated consumer culture. This is because identities are discursive
 Introduction  25
constructs, as postmodern understandings would suggest, and both unitary and
liminal identities are indices within that discourse. If one asks what an Indian is,
one must also ask how that identity is produced. What is an Indian? In a sense this
book extends to a study of Indian cinema some critical questions that Amin has
asked on the meaning of citizenry and nationhood: “The story of Indian nation-
alism … is written up as a massive undoing of Colonial Wrongs by a non-violent
and disciplined people” (1994: 2; see also Anderson 1991). Following Amin, I
want not only to refute a unitary assumption about the citizen’s body and identity
in the cinematic nation, but also to anatomize and graph it into its constitutive
liminalities. What if Indians became “Indians” because or when the British colo-
nized them? Or when the pressure of neoliberal economics pushed against and
extended the idea of authentic “Indianness”? Or when the diaspora inserted them-
selves into the national fabric as de-territorialized votaries of the nation?
I will therefore distance myself somewhat from the use of the term “post-
colonial” with reference to Indian cinema in the rest of this book, usually only
including the term within quotation marks; “postcolonial” suggests to me a
strong bias toward assuming that the cinema and its “material” had an achieved
identity that film-makers were consciously or unconsciously realizing. I would
have much preferred consistently to the use of the term “post-independence”
throughout, whatever the limitations of this latter term, as it rids analysis of these
teleological or ontological assumptions about Indian cinema. However, as a prac-
tical matter, the term “postcolonial” cannot be entirely avoided since it serves, at
the very least, a shorthand and near-patois function in the matter I am discussing;
still, I am eschewing the temporal and teleological assumptions implied by the
notion of the “postcolonial,” as the postcolonial assumes an inevitable cathexis
of cinema and the nation with a particular relation to temporality and historical
periodization as expressed in the progression of modern or postmodern, colo-
nial or postcolonial, etc. I instead argue for a reassessment of Indian cinematic
content and form as a recursive folding and looping back through the cinema’s
own textual and contextual history; I propose that cinema in India has always
been postmodern in a singular and non-eurocentric way. The preference for the
term “post-independence” in this book is guided by that understanding of Indian
cinema’s specific postmodernity.
As Barthes proclaimed, myth is that which transforms history into nature
(1957: 129). Indian cinema might thus be seen as a mythology whereby a political
history of disjunctures is naturalized into a unitary ideology of the nation: “the
reality of the world into an image of the world” (141). The chaotic material order
that resembles Lacan’s real, the politically and socially ambiguous identities that
crisscross it, and the incredulous gaze on the rift between the two, are conjoined
into a mythic narrative concerning that very rift, ambiguity, and chaotic mate-
rial.14 Following Barthes’ analysis, cinema is the myth that literally stretches the
sign or form of the national/liminal/historical into a form of the fecund/regen-
erative national/natural. However, the principle of inchoateness in the shape of
unruly liminal subjects keeps obtruding upon the perfect coherence of so-called
national form. To elaborate, after an era in the late nineties of excessive essen-
tialist constructions of pure “Indian” identities in Hindi cinema—Subhash Ghai,
26  Introduction
YashRaj films, and, indeed, Aamir Khan led the way here—Indian cinema is
now transparently engaged in the projection of “national” identity as in itself a
liminal, indeterminate concept: terms that are potentially useful are pan-national,
pan-regional, post-national, etc.
The post-subjective turn in the Indian film is still predicated on the intersec-
tions of spaces and bodies, on habitable loci, however. Lived space is a mutual
configuration of the material and of the psychic. Its materiality allies it to Lacan’s
real, where materiality is a traumatic reminder of that which one seeks to tran-
scend by crossing over into realms of desire, i.e. into the symbolic realm of
language, representation, and the psyche. Hence, retaining a focus on embodied
identities, on laboring, and on political life that operate within (overlapping)
spheres of legitimacy and violence, remains crucial even within this neoliberal
postmodernity. Violence embodies and also confuses bodies and identities; as I
said earlier, it would be a mistake to see such South Asian postmodern cultural
formations detaching completely from a politics of national particularism, from
embodiment, and to think that a ground that is ultimately a figure for absence is
not itself figurative.
This is particularly evident in the cinematic discourse of political terror and
state sovereignty, wherein, no matter how disembodied and “imagined” repre-
sentations of state-ism and terrorism are, the palpable human body is undeniably
present in both the anti-state and the statist perpetrators of violence and venge-
ance. The iconic and darsanic embodiment of the “fighting machines,” who also
gyrate in contemporary MTV-dominated styles to the pulsating beats of physical
sexuality in the song and dance sequences of films like Main Hoon Na (Farah
Khan, 2004), Mission Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000), and Fiza (Khalid
Mohamed, 2000), express the impossibility of the evacuation of laboring and
political bodies.15 Foucauldian analyses of bio-power only reinforce the reality
that ethical geographies expressing nationalisms of “spirit” imply that, no matter
how liminalized and even de-territorialized identities are in the contemporary
transnational moment, identity is not unmoored from territories or bodies. Here
a concept from the Lacanian left on the postmodern human might be usefully
imported. As Stavrakakis writes about the potential of radical democracy, “If
democracy is to be relevant, it will have to be thought of as an invitation to invent
the body anew … And to invent space anew” (2007: 143). Only this recogni-
tion and acceptance of a radical dissonance—of the jouissance of unruly bodies
opening up the heart of the abyss, and yet keeping the abyss within mainstream
cultural discourse, within symbolic representation, rupturing and yet shaping the
social symbolic—can explain the play of identities within the postmodern self-
reflection of Hindi cinema.
In this cinema, “H”-istory may be understood as a site of incomplete and
chaotic “event-ness” in Badiou’s sense of the term, wherein:

[the] fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the

new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a betrayal,
not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and
divine positivity. In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid
 Introduction  27
absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another
fidelity—fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness
of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social—within the
framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the
irreducible lack in the Other …
(Stavrakakis 2007: 127)

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:

the bourgeois nationalisms that fueled optimistic economic policies in

many postcolonial states also provoked intense debates on the meaning
 Introduction  31
of citizenship … for many citizens in these postcolonial states, mobility
became a key to psychic survival in a volatile and rapidly changing world
… The translocal and regional disruptions highlighted a neglected arena of
social movement theory: the impure space of the early nation-state and its
importance as a link between colonial, imperial, and contemporary transna-
tional processes
(1999: 6)

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

In this chapter I concentrate on Hindi cinema’s constitutive syntagm of history

as repetition. Recent Hindi films have self-consciously and conspicuously fore-
grounded their diegeses—as much mode as content, as Metz reminded us (1982:
119, 144–5)—as the voice of history deliberating on the problems and strategies
of historic representation as historic repetition, and more indirectly, addressing
the problem of the socio-historical presentable, the representable and the unpre-
sentable (when absolutely inevitable). I have framed and outlined these problems
in the introduction to this book. Three such films—Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi
(Sudhir Mishra, 2003), Rang de Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006),
and Mumbai Meri Jaan (Nishikant Kamat, 2008)—show history’s exegetic
repeating structure as the governing allegorical frame of diegetic re-enactments
of colonial and neocolonial trauma by “national” actors, who hope to redeem
history by re-enacting its plot or structure within critical social scenarios, but
generate rather unexpected outcomes. Their attempts to pin down and stabilize
the apparent imperatives of national history within the post-independence state
frequently produce incoherence and indeterminacy instead.
A fourth film, Billu Barber (Priyadarshan, 2009), mimes historically patterned
representation as situationally contingent repetition in the staging of diegetic
subjects or characters as mobile and mutable signifiers of cinematic signification
itself, subjects who incessantly and fluidly re-enact and repeat one another, thus
forcefully staging and reframing one of Hindi cinema’s most alluring scenarios,
its fetish—subjective identification or duplication between diegetic and exegetic
star and fan—as its very mode and content. Billu Barber is one of the strongest
instances yet of Hindi cinema speaking to and of itself of the codes of repetition
it deploys to make meaning and subjects in the cinema experience. Its metadis-
cursivity is the secondary modality for the primary cinematic idea of recycling
and repetition of subject-forming events, both social and cinematic.
All these films illustrate the turn toward a singular poststructuralism incipient
in Indian cinema since its early days, which differs from a general Euro-American
construct of poststructuralism in being concerned with the human in an older
political sense of being socially and temporally grounded, yet segmented. This
turn uncovers processes of identity formation and marginalization that still assert
the allure, but not fixity, of the term “subjectivity” within the fluid parameters of
“subjectivation.” This humanist political residue is expressed in this cinema by
34  Structure, event, and liminal practices
presenting liminal actors playing at being fully embodied political subjects; their
very innovations and failures are symptomatic of an underlying aspiration toward
a realizable embodiment. Throughout this chapter and this book, my evocation
of difference in re-enactments of extended and extensive structural motifs will
draw upon formal techniques and strategies of film-making. In this chapter I
will concentrate on depictions of the violent event in later Hindi cinema as a
paradigm for the emergence of difference and liminality: that of the escalating
violation of the 180-degree rule in scenes of rapid action and violence, which
automatically confuses the audience about their relationship with the actors on
screen with whom they might identify.
All four films I discuss in this chapter are paradigmatic of the latest co-implica-
tion of cinematic and historic discourses of representation as repetition in the age
of postmodernity, as well as neocolonialism, but such repetition is not immune
to fissures where the irrepressibly embodied and subjective human shows itself.
Badiou argues the importance of the idea of the multiple in a definition of the
one, or of being. He outlines the ways in which a “situation” or “set” and its
constitutive multiples inevitably evoke the specter of the void and of inconsistent
multiples, of that which is outside of the name of the one, or the “count-as-one”
of the multiple. Badiou’s attention to the problem of number or the multiple in
ontology—that which leads him to pronounce that ontology is, after all, math-
ematics—lends ballast to my thesis on subject formation in Hindi cinema as the
dialectic of structure and event, or of what Badiou might call the meta-structure
or “state” of the situation (both an ontological meta-structure and the historico-
political state) and the situation itself with its consistent multiplicities. Put in
socio-historical terms, such as Badiou himself does, I am tracing the develop-
ment of an idea of a unified subject as a product of the attempt to integrate,
arrange, and contain multiplicities within the figure of being or oneness (what
Badiou calls the “normal”), a project of subject formation that is overseen by
the “state,” which stands outside of the count itself, but provides the constitutive
outside which enables such a count and such a situation (of the normal). While
this relationship of state, situation, and subject might seem coherent and stable
enough, I explore the murky space or the gap between the situation and its state,
wherein ruptures and inconsistencies of evental heterogeneity, of inconsistent
“multiples” or the “void,” “excess,” or “un-presentable” in Badiou’s text—limi-
nality in mine—overturn the apparently stable equation between a situation (the
structured event), the subjects who form the constituents of the socio-historical
situation (consistent multiples of the structured event), and the meta-structural
state that is necessary to monitor and re-insure the stability of the entire struc-
ture, the count-as-one (Badiou 2005: 93–111).

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.

Structure and event: cinematic histories

In a similar vein, I wish to think of the “event” as a keenly contextualized coun-
termodern experience of national history, as opposed to the abstracted universal
experience that might better be described as a structural phenomenon. Here I
would invoke for the event LaCapra’s term “structural absence” (1999). I begin
by considering three further perspectives on the “event”—a stud in the wheel of
history that concerns all four films I discuss in this essay—which place different
emphases on the status of the “event” in structural discourses of history, and
yet continuously evoke a root sense of spatial and temporal disjunctures and
pluralities as constitutive of both structure and event. First, according to Sahlins’
structuralist account of the discourse of history, the “event”—so preponderant
in national historical accounts—is a crossing, or a conjuncture as he calls it,
between the “happening” and the “structure” of collective mythemes of cultural
memory. The structural frame of history, according to Sahlins, is studded with
“events” that are its constitutive stops and notations, but also vehicles of the
basic theme or burden of that history, a history marked by a collective (or plural)
38  Structure, event, and liminal practices
consciousness or voice, as well as a longue duree temporality. In discussing the
“vexed problem of the relation between structure and event” (1985: xiii), and
in calling “‘structure’—the symbolic relations of cultural order … an historical
object” (1985, vii), Sahlins reminds us of the essential structural nature, whether
performative or prescriptive (1985: xii), of this sort of historiography of “events,”
in which:

an event is not simply a phenomenal happening, even though as a phenom-

enon it has reasons and forces of its own, apart from any given symbolic
scheme. An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropri-
ated in and through the cultural scheme does it acquire an historical signifi-
cance … The event is a relation between a happening and a structure (or
structures) …
(1985: xiv)

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:

One might see ‘modernization’ in India as a movement from the context-

sensitive to the context-free in all realms; an erosion of contexts, at least in
principle. Gandhi’s watch (with its uniform autonomous time, governing his
punctuality) replaced the almanac … In music, the ragas can now be heard
at all hours and seasons. Once the Venkatesasuprebhatam, the wake-up
chant for the Lord of Tirupati, could be heard only in Tirupati at a certain
hour in the morning. Since M.S. Subbulakshmi in her devotion cut a record
of the chants, it wakes up not only the Lord, but anyone who tunes in to All
India Radio in faraway places …
(2001: 436)

Ramanujan sees the dense and knotty discourse of pre-modern nationalisms

indifferent to the state giving way to the standardized fluid temporalities of offi-
cial nationalism within its “count-as-one” as both structure (consistent multi-
plicity) and event (consistent multiple).
In the modern event’s flattening out and loss of specificity may be seen the
continuation of anticolonial nationalism’s reframing of the pre-colonial non-
contiguity of secular state and non-secular mytho-religious nation as syntagmatic,
 Structure, event, and liminal practices  39
culminating in a constitution of identity as national-statist. It is in this reading
of history as an aggregation of commensurable events that the state and the
nation become truly entwined—inseparable—a process that, by Chakrabarty’s
account, began with anticolonial nationalism’s need to define itself quintessen-
tially vis-à-vis a state, even if oppositionally. Anderson, in his account of the
function of time in national consciousness, describes “history”—i.e. national
history—as a thought experiment for the flow of undifferentiated time through
unmarked space, calling it the “idea of a sociological organism moving calendri-
cally through homogenous, empty time [which] is a precise analogue of the idea
of the nation, which is also conceived as a solitary community moving steadily
down (or up) history” (1991: 26). Upon this empty homogenous time, the modern
state, which is the tribunal presiding over the antagonisms of civil society, as
Marx said, introduces the concept of non-simultaneity by virtue of its necessary
role as the arbiter of the particular and colliding interests of its subjects. It stamps
icons of temporality that may be singular but are also always commensurate;
these it calls “events.”
To re-read this in Badiou’s terms, the state suppresses an account of the
“event” as “evental site” or “abnormal multiple,” a “multiple such that none of
its elements are presented in the situation … it is on the edge of the void … Just
‘beneath’ this multiple … there is nothing, because none of its terms are them-
selves counted-as-one” (Badiou 2005: 175). The evental site’s closeness to the
void and to incommensurability is precisely what the state covers up with an
insistent “count”—each event is a succession or repetition of what has already
been counted as consistent within the national socio-historical situation. This
situation is often deemed the social “natural” or organic, since nature denies
history’s inconvenient unruly singularities (Badiou 2005: 176). Barthes recap-
tures this hegemony of the “natural” in deeming myth as “naturalization” of
history. That the state is invested in this hegemonic naturalization of historic
heterogeneity and incommensurability is suggested by the term “naturalization,”
which defines citizenship as the process of being counted as one element and set
within a natural and non-singularizable multiple. The state engages the event as
the crucible for endlessly reproducing a repertoire of national consciousness that
can faithfully reiterate a stable and monolithic structure, untroubled by internal
fissures and fault-lines, as well as remain defined primarily via its ambivalent
co-implication with the state. By such an account, the event is both context- and
surprise-free; none of its constituents are “in-consistent” in Badiou’s sense (2005:
175). It connects the state and the nation, and Anderson has therefore described
not the nation, but the nation or modern state.
Modern events thus become two-dimensional notations in time of the inter-
woven rhythm of unconscious structures of memory and agonistic incommen-
surabilities that is pre-national history. Anderson’s concept of flow is derived
from Benjamin’s “empty homogenous time” of modernity, the very thing that
Ramanujan laments. Anderson’s diachronic conceptualization of national subject
formation is conscious of temporal and spatial duration, but is less conscious of
diachronic and synchronic incommensurabilities—those mytho-religious chrono-
topes of the pre-colonial comprador indifferent or hostile to the official state and
40  Structure, event, and liminal practices
economy, and to the homogenous time of nationalist modernity. Ramanujan’s
lament on modernity is an important re-reading of the relationship between fixed
events and fluid structures of histories within the homogenizing matrix of empty
national-statist time. Ramanujan’s idea of an “Indian” context awareness can be
understood as antithetical to Anderson’s “serialities” of the dispersed but cotermi-
nous experience comprising the national. The idea of seriality evades or erases the
incommensurable differentiations built into unofficial and uncounted experience
of incommensurate others—those “abnormal multiples” bordering on the void,
which Anderson does evoke in his memorable phrase “remembering to forget
[difference]”—whose othering creates the same and the state.
A full history of heterogeneous affect is missing here. Ramanujan mourns
the inability to reclaim, indeed liberate, the event from the state as the doppel-
ganger or mouthpiece for the nation. He argues that the contextualized, unique
event is auratic, and that standardized eventfulness is static (or statist), that
modernity and its standardization or serialization of the contextual speci-
ficity of the pre-national cultural artifact or event is a loss of the particular,
the heterogeneous, the animated: the Venkatesasuprebhatam is not the unique
song sung idiosyncratically and irreproducibly in the temple, but merely
duplicated with each rendition when sung irreproachably by the disembodied
Subbulakshmi over the airwaves, enacting what I have called the erasure of the
countermodern. The pre-modern “event” for Ramanujan is singular experience
counter to the “modern” experience in that it does not betoken sameness, stasis,
or succession.5 For him, history is studded with events that are recognizable as
pinpoints marking contextual experiences and situated knowledges, and do not
present themselves merely as commensurable variations on a collective and
consolidated historical set of elements, the set that Sahlins and Badiou refer to
as “structure” in different senses. Further, Ramanujan sees the event not as a
conjuncture—in Sahlins’ sense of the conjuncture of structure and happening
(see Sahlins, above)—but perhaps as what Shahid Amin has called the histor-
ical “contingent” (1995). Ramanujan’s viewpoint enables a new perspective on
Hindi cinema’s historic linkage with radical counter-discourses and contingent
liminalities, which have always peopled that cinema and have generally gone
unglossed.
My purpose in comparing and contrasting the logic and dynamic of the
universal versus the particular in Sahlins, Ramanujan, Badiou, and Taylor is to
reroute them through the doubt posited by Jacques Derrida concerning the effi-
cacy of the “event” as final arbiter of the anxiety of subjectivity, detailed in his
canonical essay, “Signature, Event, Context.” Derrida argues that the event is
both iterable and other: the same and different in each context. Iteration is both
repeating and othering. In his reading, the event is always already marked by the
imprimatur of context (1988), or rather by the particular contextuality necessi-
tated by a particularized identity, experience, or act. In this regard, Ramanujan’s
position is markedly close to Derrida’s; it also foreshadows the countermodern
echolalia that Indian cinema’s singular postmodernity—that we see in Rang de
Basanti, Mumbai Meri Jaan, and Billu Barber—has begun to offer on the infinite
polymorphousness and liminal status of the historic event.6
 Structure, event, and liminal practices  41
Sahlins, Ramanujan, and Derrida thus offer three theoretical perspectives on
“eventfulness,” (the fullness of time, so to speak) that locate varied cinematic
discourses on the (sometimes) violent event in national history on different
points of the spectrum, linking the particular event with collective structural
myths. While all three critics agree on the link between event and structure,
I read Sahlins as offering a more tenacious view that somehow the structural
mode is more determinative of the singular event than not; Ramanujan would
stand behind a radical contextualization of the particular event as the only avail-
able means of mooring particularity to an even notional structural conscious-
ness or unconscious; Derrida offers radical doubt about context itself, with its
attendant binary framework of structure and event. It is the Ramanujan-Derrida
complex of thinking of the event in relation to structural history that is most
helpful in decoding the ongoing Hindi cinematic trajectory of the Foucauldian or
Nietzschean countermodern performative modality, though the Sahlinsian train
is not unknown in film-making, as we shall see next.

“A Thousand Such Desires”: Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (hereafter HKA) seems to bear out a Sahlinsian
model of historiography; a re-securing of narrative voice that underpins a struc-
tural mode of historiography is omnipresent. The narrative takes the form of
the “re-telling of history” in an omniscient, structuring directorial voice-over,
conjoining the eventful lives of a set of Indian college students who act with or
against the postcolonial nation-state during the traumatic events of the National
Emergency (1975–7), when Indian politics and civic life underwent tremendous
challenges as a result of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s crackdown on civil
liberties and political and fundamental rights. The directorial narrative voiceover
is occasionally striated by the voice of the film’s “revolutionary” protagonist,
who frequently juxtaposes these modern political subjects against an immutable
national past and tropicalities of anti-modernity and pre-colonial life. The story
opens in 1970s New Delhi, with the college friendship of Siddharth Tyabji and
Vikram Malhotra, who both love the same cosmopolitan young woman, Geeta
Rao. Siddharth, the son of a minor politician, eschews a guaranteed bureaucratic
career and comfortable upper-class life to become an anti-government Naxalite
rebel, joining his lot with the ultimate anti-state countermodern ideology of
the Indian seventies. It is his “revolutionary” voice that crosscuts the director’s
voice-over in the narrative. Geeta loves Siddharth, but upon his disappearance
from their circle, marries a successful IAS officer, a potentate of the postcolo-
nial nation-state, while Vikram, the son of a former freedom-fighter, joins the
state’s corrupt politico-economic junta and becomes a political and business
wheeler-dealer.
Geeta eventually leaves her husband to join Siddharth. When they are brutal-
ized by the provincial police (Geeta is raped while Sidhharth watches), Geeta’s
ex-husband rescues her but will do nothing for Siddharth. Vikram agrees to
rescue Siddharth, but is hospitalized due to a minor accident in the same hospital
where Siddharth lies fearful of discovery and recapture by the police. He is,
42  Structure, event, and liminal practices
however, spirited away by his Naxalite followers, and Vikram is grabbed instead
by the brutal policemen and nearly beaten to death. As he is beaten by the police,
he cries out repeatedly asking if they know who he is, invoking his status and
influence, in vain, of course, as the provincial police feel that Delhi’s long arm
is not long enough to reach them. At the very last moment, Vikram is rescued;
he survives with permanent mental and physical disability. The irony of this is
obvious: accidentally changing places with his political and romantic adversary,
Vikram becomes the victim of a pre-national political that he thought he had
mastered.
Geeta and Vikram are the primary victims of political violence in HKA.
These violent events are meant to reinforce an ironic view of a corrupt democ-
racy’s “leveling” effects, citizens’ political affiliations and social status notwith-
standing. The three characters who experience violence choose different paths,
yet experience highly unforeseeable consequences: it is Geeta, the cosmopolitan
city girl, who returns to the village with Vikram, now disabled, and Siddharth
who abandons revolution and goes abroad to study medicine, which he hopes
will be less confusing. The film’s apparent lack of comment on the betrayal of
the revolutionary cause by Siddharth, and its undifferentiated representation of
the inchoate modern and countermodern experiences of citizens torn between
elite postcolonial backgrounds and shocking subalternizing experiences over-
laid by gender difference, represent the film’s refusal to probe the singularity of
each event. Instead, the characters’ experiences are seen as fitting into a homog-
enizing “national” history of structural statist violence, a sense also reinforced
by the precedence given to the voice of the Naxalite and “intellectual” ideologues
and dialecticians in the narration. This narrative clearly has structural ambi-
tions and academic intonations in its historiography and textual citationality:
its very title and epigraph are drawn from verse by Mirza Ghalib—a survivor of
another uprising against the colonial state, the failed 1857 anti-colonial mutiny—
mourning another kind of shredding of the national illusion of consistent multi-
plicity. The twists and turns in the protagonists’ divergent lives are indicated less
by the rebel articulations of diverse subaltern publics—the police or villagers
are never individualized—and more by a “historical” postcolonial national elite
commentary on resistance to an oppressive state.
“History” in HKA emerges as already always emplotted within readerly
subjectivities, both with the film audience as exegetic readers of the cinematic
text and with the characters as diegetic internal readers of “history.” As we will
see below, Rang De Basanti is unselfconscious about the function of reportage
embedded in its own representation; HKA, however, is acutely self-conscious
about reportage and the “literary” and the “mythic.” In another way, HKA is
concerned with political events as well as with their “literariness.” HKA does not
represent history as emplottable merely in the abstract and faceless genealogy of
structure, but populates it with characters and narrators who are “readers” of a
historical narrative, of sentimental genealogies and mythologies of nationalism
and revolution re-enacted within frames of historical and traumatic events—such
as the Emergency and the brutal suppression of the Naxalite movement in rural
India—that continue to scar the national body and memory. The most important
 Structure, event, and liminal practices  43
of these events is the student-led Maoist revolution of the 1970s, but the film’s
literary and political allegory harks back to a much earlier past of nationalist anti-
colonial struggle, the 1857 mutiny. Furthermore, the cynical Vikram’s father is a
former congress activist and anti-colonial freedom fighter, jailed many times by
the British, yet jailed again during the Emergency for so-called seditious activi-
ties. History repeats itself indeed.
This embodiment of the plot of revolution in telling the story of history is
a continuing homage to a structural history or historical structure of eventful
being. The nation is narrated here through a chronicle of violence that engages
and embodies multiple but classified subjects who people a seemingly epic history
of decolonization. If there is liminality here, it is suggested as a threat to nation-
alist historiography and allied with a corrupt state: a pervasive modernity that
longs for moorings in historic structure shrugs off liminal polymorphousness in
the nation. Violence is seen as a pitched battle between bad state—chiasmically
co-opting liminality as illegitimate law enforcement, employing countermodern
agents negatively—and this good nation, preserving the convenient dialectic of
their encounter.
Still, while purportedly telling the story of a collective national structural
consciousness stamped with postcolonial congress party modernity, HKA cannot
help registering this polyglossia of countermodernity culminating in chaotic
violence, as in the revolutionary Siddharth’s (incredulous but reconciled) voice-
over that locates the 1,000-year-old countermodern in the “backward” indige-
neity of Bhojpur, simultaneously an indigenous ur-subaltern structure where
statist modernity has failed to register (though this view is later seen as over-
simplified), and the crucible of brutal encounter between rogue police, Maoist
revolutionaries, as well as sleek (and incredulous and unreconciled) Delhi-based
tycoons.
Here the brutal police are a particular instance of the chaotic hybridization
of pre-colonial and postcolonial, pre-modern and modern, past and present, and
countermodern and post-enlightenment. In that sense, as an entity that is never
actualized, they are Badiou’s “excrescence,” the category of being within the
socio-historical situation that is included but does not belong, that is represented
but not presented, agential without embodiment (Badiou 2005), which is the situ-
ation of the police who are brutal without being actualized or embodied in any
other sense; they do not count as citizenry, but they do count as the muscle of the
state. Their absence in the film’s final frames, which show Gita and Vikram back
in the village serving the revolution, reinforces the salutary image of a revolu-
tionary nationalism that is singular but presented or embodied, that trumps the
counter-revolutionary state and its just barely managed primordial excrescence,
the local police.
Thus, in using for his title the phrase “Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,” or “A
Thousand Such Desires,” from the melancholy Urdu poetry of Ghalib—an influ-
ential identitarian voice for Indian Muslims ravaged by the despair of the failed
1857 anti-British mutiny (or the first war of independence)—to gloss the 1975
Indian Emergency, when constitutional rights were suspended by Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi’s ruling congress party, director Sudhir Mishra invites comparison
44  Structure, event, and liminal practices
as well as identification with an established historical discourse (one might call
it a tone, mood, or affect, but those certainly come framed in the syllables of
political subjectivation), which proposes an enduring “integrationist” urge of a
collective unconscious for a reassembling of frictive and fissiparous forces in the
postcolonial body politic, indeed, for the mythical nation.

“Paint It Saffron”: Rang de Basanti

Rang De Basanti: A Generation Awakens (henceforth RDB) engages the notion
of a structural mode of historiography but in so doing reifies a statist discourse of
the “event,” which is enacted diegetically minus any sense of the radical disjunc-
tures, discontinuities, or contingencies attending discrete events, contexts, and
happenings. Events in RDB appear hailed as a collective consciousness only
in the sense of an inevitable response to a hegemonic state: the colonial state-
induced resistance; the neocolonial state induces resistance; resistance is always
similar in mode and appearance, because it is not about the particular subject or
context. It is, rather, the state hailing its citizen savior through its crisis and rein-
venting itself. Erasing distance and difference between iterations and successions
of events erases their singular specificity, as well as the discontinuity scuttling
the structural frameworks of history. Radical colonial youth resisted oppression,
and so radical neocolonial youth mimics the same resistance in diegetic layers
of mimetic reconstruction that gesture toward the extra-diegetic, i.e. the reified
character of nationalist awakening. When RDB was released, and as its subtitle
indicates, it was hailed as an example of “neo-patriotism,” this becoming a label
also conveniently attached to the revival of lead actor Aamir Khan’s—until
recently—flagging career and fortunes. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, this would
be the ideal instance of the third world text that can only exist as political alle-
gory, without any of the literariness that attached so self-consciously to HKA, as
mentioned previously. RDB suggests the bad clone of Ramanujan’s notion of the
singularity of an event: a too-perfect re-enactment of a past event in the present
completely reconciles the event with a static perspective of history, free from
disjunctive temporalities and incommensurable alterities.
RDB diegetically tackles the containment of differences, including those of
gender and citizenship, in the echo chamber of history as an extended reverie
traveling back to a British colonial past and agency. A British colonial jailor’s
granddaughter, Sue McKinley comes to India as a film-maker, and mobilizes
a group of disillusioned and disunited young Indians. The politically apathetic
Indian college students whom Sue meets and mobilizes find new inspiration
within the diegetic aesthetic register: “consumed by the characters they portray
… They realize that there’s not much difference between 1930s’ British India
and today’s free India, inasmuch as the country is currently ruled by corrupt
politicians.”7 The students “audition” before the director Sue to establish their
credentials as duplications of “patriotic” freedom fighters, their dormant nation-
alism only emerging as a result of their performative experience. The aesthetic of
performance provides the portal into the political in the conceit of film-making
itself as a historico-political narration, the diegetic director’s voice-over. The
 Structure, event, and liminal practices  45
performative matrix also projects the national past as the ur-story of the statist
present, by structuring the representation of diegetic film-making as a trope of
serial re-enactments: superimposed images of anticolonial revolutionaries and
the boisterous contemporary youth, and visual bytes splicing historical event
and filmic or film-making event, past and present (such as actors preparing for
historic cinema in Technicolor, intercut and superimposed with filmic enactment
by them of historic events and actors in sepia tones). Comments in the review by
trade journal Film Information cannily glance at the film’s immobilization in an
aesthetic and teleology of “eventfulness” that would not necessarily mobilize the
masses:

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 consequences for ethical spectatorship, however truly intended, of disa-

vowing the radical alterity produced by temporality itself is a disappearance of
radically other singularities: a coherent though virtual narrative of national inte-
gration can be produced consequently, as in the film’s story of bringing both the
Hindu fundamentalist and the Muslim atheist into the fold of a “modern” secular
and cultural nationalism, blessed by Western mediation.
Even if the point of simplistically enacting or duplicating past as present
and vice versa were merely to point up the epistemological status of ontolog-
ical phenomena, of positing the cinematic object as really the experience of the
“knowing” national cinematic subject10 —an epistemology of spectatorship that
Sobchak describes as “distinctive subjective relations to a variety of cinematic
objects, whatever their textual features” or:

an experienced difference in our mode of consciousness, our attention

toward and our valuation of the cinematic objects we engage … to blur …
the line between two ontologically different modes of existence while, in
fact, constructing hermeneutic play between two different sets of epistemo-
logical criteria”
(2004: 261–2)

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.

“Mumbai My Life”: Mumbai Meri Jaan

While in HKA and RDB the status of the “event” is differentially weighted as
contestations of powerful nationalist-statist discourses of history, Mumbai Meri
Jaan (hereafter MMJ) begins to displace the nation-state, structure-event binary
altogether, in order to privilege the lowest common denominator of the polity,
foreground bare life, and expose the radical liminality or void at the heart of
iteration, re-enactment, and re-presentation. MMJ shows the event as the site of
explosion—the evental site, wherein the constituent subsets of the represented
are un-representable, inconsistent, in Badiou’s sense—of the unitary subject of
national-statist history, and the implosion of that subject’s relation to the collec-
tivist narrative of a structural consciousness of national history, or the meta-
structural securitization of the state. It proliferates the liminal subject by showing
bare life’s denied access to either legitimate emplacement in census or passport
schemas—the national or global context(s)—or serialization in structuralist
accounts of national history and belonging. We see in MMJ an instance of “bare
life” in Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay), a much denigrated and humiliated Tamil
street vendor and slum-dweller, who makes a precarious living selling country
liquor, while being assaulted at every turn by evidence of the local inequalities
and contestatory differentials of global money and power in neoliberal India.
Here, besides Badiou’s account of the also excessive void, Derrida’s definition
of the event as a re-recording of a radical trace comes to our aid. Derrida’s radical
questioning of the space-time of the violent “event,” his retention of the consti-
tutive suture of the event as both other and the same—erstwhile and present—
generates a horde of post-globalization liminalities both “literally” invested in
the national or global context, as well as bare of context, such as those in MMJ.
In the globalized India of MMJ, liminality directly flags postmodern discourses
as countermodern discourses,11 as, for instance, when the outsider or terrorist
figures as a prominent syntagm or paradigm of a new aspirational Indian homo
economicus. Notably, in the state response to violent terror, one marks the emer-
gence of a dynamic new formation of liminality, as the terrorist becomes the
latest in a series of liminal identities that approach postmodern simulations of
“bare life” (Agamben 1998) as hyperreality.
50  Structure, event, and liminal practices
Hindi cinema’s representation of the terrorist assemblage—by which I mean
the quadruplet of the perpetrator, violence, the afflicted state, and the citizen—is
a culmination of its expertise in offering liminality and liminal exceptionality
as the ground of the elusive nation. While in recent years, the terrorist has been
depicted in Hindi cinema as more and more virtual, as an embodied weapon, as
a projectile body simulating a mediated attack on the fabric of the nation-state
in films like Dil Se and Mission Kashmir, as a liminal but embodied identity the
terrorist—like the homeless or the undocumented dispossessed—fits the cate-
gory of the “political exception,” which Carl Schmitt defines thus:

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:

the Unconscious speaks of the form of otherness, the tethered shadow of

deferral and displacement [citizen=citizen; but citizen=terrorist; therefore
 Structure, event, and liminal practices  51
terrorist=citizen?]. It is … the disturbing distance in-between that consti-
tutes the figure of … otherness … It is in relation to this impossible object
that the liminal problem of … identity and its vicissitudes emerges …
(1994: 64; emphasis mine)

The terrorist embodies and generates the subsumption of particularities by the

universalizing logic of global capital accumulations, as well as the resistance
that then follows (Balibar). It is an identity split along the axis of sameness as
constituted by difference, and to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben, an identity that
is, precisely, not identity (Agamben 1990). Such is the elusive “signature,” the
indeterminate identity, of the unknowable terrorist nesting among citizens, of his
or her unpredictable sameness, rather than predictable difference.
Beyond an empirical socio-historical function, MMJ’s focus on violence
indicates a full circle of the film’s engagement with citizenship, by way of
throwing in doubt the licit “citizen,” who seems reasonably to demand perfect
accountability from the nation-state. A foundational and originary post-inde-
pendence crisis of citizenship, one we are to see in the following chapters, is
re-enacted with a vengeance and a difference in a policeman’s derisive enunca-
tion “the citizen has come!” when mocked by the “common man” about failing
to solve the crisis of terrorism in Mumbai. Moreover, in public discourse in
India today, the Muslim citizen is usually conflated, without differential, with
the Pakistani terrorist, the new “foreign hand” in the body politic; this theme
will be discussed at length in chapter three, with reference to Shah Rukh
Khan’s appearance in Chak de India (2007). The image of the rational citizen
is being contested or replaced by an image of the citizen as also hopelessly
hierarchized, corrupt, compromised, anonymous, shadowy, and terrorized, as
well as—potentially—terrifying.
Echoing its “docu-dramatic” predecessor Black Friday, which attempted
a historic retelling and witness-bearing of the panicked narrative of the 1993
Mumbai blasts, but, with the 2008 Bombay train blasts as its context, MMJ’s
title still echoes the lyrics of a fifties song from a police thriller (CID, 1956),
“Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan,” nostalgically evoking a Bombay that once allowed
a comfortable nestling of urban realism within a romantic narrative of the city
(Aguiar 2011: 151). The continuity between lyric and title inheres in a persistent
realist romance of Bombay’s zest and chutzpah as it triumphs over phenomeno-
logical challenges, because popular virtue in the fifties still seemed to triumph
over the narrative of urban noir, of shadowy lives lived amidst violence—“insaan
ka nahin yahan naam-o-nishaan (“a being here has neither name nor address”).14
This romantic urban noir narrative is overwritten when the vendor Thomas takes
his family to a hyper-modern neo-global mall—trying out the role of the newly
entitled national homo economicus—where he is insulted and evicted for handling
exorbitantly expensive perfumes. His evident poverty and lack of buying power
adds to his crime, because it proves that poor people reproduce and that poverty
spreads into the global mall (Rai 2009: 166). In a city reeling from the shock
of back-to-back terror attacks—widely blamed on the city’s Muslims, the other
reviled foreigners besides “Madrassis” or Tamils in Bombay—the vendor (who
52  Structure, event, and liminal practices
is without “nam-o-nishan,” a full name or address) falls between the cracks of
this biopolitical conundrum and finds himself out on the street with his family.
Mutely suffering his humiliation and rejection, he then overhears the spoilt
college-shirking daughter of a rich household where his wife works as maid say
that one way to subdue the state that forces education on its paying citizens is by
calling in a bomb threat. He is then shown inserting a coin into a payphone—
remembering the young woman’s casual joke, “You don’t know what one rupee
can do”—and reporting fictitious bombs. His ability to spread rumors brings
multiplexed globalization to its knees , endowing him with a new sense of power.
He has the satisfaction of seeing rich Bombayites fleeing malls and buildings
upon the false bomb alarms he has called in, and the mall from which he was
thrown out is raided by police. The perfume store owner is “thrown out” by the
police, as once he himself had been.
Since the film Achhut Kanya (Franz Osten, 1936), forms of bare life, such
as untouchability, have been rarely covered by Hindi cinema, despite emergent
articulations of Dalit identity in Indian political and social life. Not only does
the cinema not present, let alone represent, untouchability, it never articulates a
reason for its lack or for its absence. To ask, as Rao has, “If caste and especially
Untouchability, is the deep structure of secular and religious configurations of
community and nation, can we address India’s political modernity without an
account of the subject who inaugurates that modernity—the Dalit?” (2007: 153)
is not merely to ask whether there is a conspiracy of silence, a disarticulate polit-
ical discomfort, or simply an attitude of indifference. It is, rather, to ask, what
happens when bare life, and thereby liminality, begins to figure as the constitu-
tive trope of Hindi film-making, as it seems to be in the process of becoming. As
Balibar and Wallerstein have shown us, tropes of nation and state are inevitably
subtended by racialized categories of labor, which in turn replicate and reactivate
core-periphery relations existing on the global scale between core-peripheral
nation-states and their differential but symbiotic pasts and “destinies”:

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)

It is in the praxes of self-enactments—such as education, religion, lawfulness,

consumerism, etc.—that the curtain parts and the drama of national identifica-
tion unfolds. Praxes of the “live body” are themselves the vectors, the molds,
 Structure, event, and liminal practices  55
for theories and methodologies of subject formation in cinema and globalized
nationhood (Joseph 1999: 8). In MMJ, bare life must assert itself by non-juridical
means, through stratagems of rumor, indeterminate threats and petty persecu-
tions (see Joseph, above) to intervene in a deadly neoliberal state-stamped reality
of “public images, official definitions.” Thereby, the citizen is both the actor and
spectator of violent terror.
The idea of a spectatorial matrix overwhelms all other modes of identity. In
his retirement speech the veteran policeman Tukaram Patil17—who was seen
earlier as skeptical of the modern citizen’s demand for accountability—refers to
stealing his schoolmaster’s spectacles in childhood, an act that got him expelled
from school. Spectacles, he confesses, always fascinated him, for he thought he
would see further with them. Upon this, Tukaram ruminates, his father told him
that he had better join the police, or he would surely enter the criminal world.
Becoming a policeman, however, frustrated his expectation of someday being
vouched clarity of vision. The modern Tukaram’s speech is redolent of longing
for lost vision, for a lost faith that just as his name iterates that of the nineteenth-
century saint, so contemporary post-independence events would repeat struc-
tural myths of pre-independence nationalist historiography. Tukaram confesses
to having misunderstood things he has seen, of being a confused spectator who
did not know how “to act,” so absorbed was he by the national drama unfolding
before him. His speech reveals the complex interweaving of actor and spectator
positions in national and cinematic discourses of citizenship.
Liminality of the viewing subject or position affects visibility. Violence is
the ultimate “limning” or marking of the link between citizenship and limi-
nality, a border that both contours and liminalizes citizenship. Whereas the
cinema’s visual heft might consist of classic realist techniques of shot-reverse-
shot, flat camera, depth of field shots, tableaux, close-ups, high to medium key
lighting, point-of view shots, eye-line matches, etc., these have been replaced by
a distracted and fast shot-duration camera, low key lighting, disjunctive visual
compositions, tilted camera, pastiche and collage rather than montage, wide-
angle cinematography, long tracks, pans and zooms, crane shots, rack focus,
multiple optical printings, etc. These aesthetic modifications—primarily used to
narrate fast-paced political, suspense, horror, and thriller dramas involving rapid
and violent movement and action, or to convey the hip distractedness of “post-
modern” rhythms in the global south—connote political liminality, suturing
proliferating and heteroglossic points of view and vantage as the core of national
subjecthood, as well filmic narrative. In this cinematic “limning” of violence we
have the final answer as to why the citizen’s identity is nothing if not liminal, as
is that of the terrorist; the citizen and terrorist are sutured entities, as are actor
and spectator, cinematic diegesis and exegetic reality.
Thus, in MMJ, national life or cinema and national subject or spectator are
indeterminate and liminal in four separate evental sites of violence: the critique
of the media’s coverage of communal violence; the citizens’ visual misreadings
as they witness communal violence and suspect and attack each other; the sense
of helpless, disjointed, and compromised policemen watching a black and white
film (an older cinematic register) as though it were in color (as Tukaram Patil
56  Structure, event, and liminal practices
opines in his farewell speech); and in the citation of a different era of urban
violence as in the older Bombay noir CID (1956) in the film’s title and title-track.
The film, however, swivels back to optimism in the end, this turn suggesting a
lingering belief in the salvific idealization of performance as the exorcism of
“bad conscience” (Levinas 1998: 143). When the vendor’s false threats lead to
the cardiac arrest of an elderly nouveau riche man visiting the mall, the vendor
repents, atones, and takes responsibility, as though he and his “victim” were
indeed equals and mutually responsible and responsive beings. Doing so, he
refashions resentment toward the other whom he has so far burdened by his very
existence into an acknowledgment of responsibility that was never extended to
him by that other. The vendor’s repentance, therefore, alchemizes Nietzschean
bad conscience into a Levinasian version thereof, but one that bare life must bear.
This alchemy or re-enactment that turns bare life into the guilty party with a
“conscience” works to further the logic whereby to be the citizen is no longer to
be, but to act.18 Liminality thus implies performativity in the borders, between
fields and spaces of “doing.” If violence and civic performance are both “doing,”
the liminal in representation appears in cracks along the suture of civic and bare
identities, or between citizens and terrorists. Liminality as a performative, polit-
ical and ethnographic category and limit case thus acts as the ground for social
identities in the modern and postmodern Hindi cinematic universe, with violence
as the poignant stylus for their delineation. What could be more spectacular to
do with or against the state, but to show violence, re-enacted as endogenous or
exogenous, sometimes sexual, sometimes communal, sometimes nationalistic,
sometimes terrorist? In MMJ, such liminal subjects—the vendor, the Muslim,
the terrorist—populate the context of the violent event in spectral ways. They are
neither us, nor them, yet both.

“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.

The state, the nation, and liminality as techne

The films I have discussed stage the contest between the idea of the state and the
idea of the nation in a liminal performative space, inviting and evoking public
reflexivity and re-enactments. Both the state and the nation have discourses of
history; but whose history, and how remembered? This is where the contin-
uing imprint of the countermodern can be most clearly seen. State and nation
mandate significantly different discourses, but they stand not necessarily for a
clear binary division of such discourses, but for multiple fractured and over-
lapping (dis-)articulations. The statist static always threatens to dominate, to
drown out, individual or liminal cries and whispers, and this triumph of the
normative over the singular and the liminal seems paramount in the half a
century of cinema since India’s independence. However, during certain periods
in post-independence India, the state came to be perceived as powerless and
limp, promoting a cinematic and social quest for alternative and subaltern lead-
ership (Kazmi 1998: 145). On the heels of critics as diverse as Agamben (1993),
Pandey (2006: 46, 53, 64), and Spivak and Butler (2007), I also bear in mind
that the state is crisscrossed by vectors of emotion and randomness, a concept
Butler evokes when she writes:

If we pause for a moment on the meaning of ‘states’ as the ‘conditions in

which we find ourselves,’ then it seems we reference the moment of writing
itself or perhaps even a certain condition of being upset, out of sorts: what
kind of state are we in when we start to think about the state?
(2007: 2–3)

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 Calcutta lady

Riding a Baby Austin
In Dhakuria Lake park
With boyfriend by side
She struts and weaves
In moderrrn [sic] garb
Men see her and run under their umbrellas
They say, “O lord, who is this? The modern woman! The modern superwoman!
O Modern Woman! O Modern Superwoman!”
Hindi/Bengali folk lampoon ridiculing “modern” Indian woman,
early twentieth century; my translation

My grandmother taught me this limerick. I remember wondering vaguely about

it, thinking, why was this so funny? Why did my grandmother, mother of six
surviving children, derided by her husband as an illiterate fool, sing this song
with such relish, when she might herself have aspired to the constitution of a new
womanhood, apparently terrifying to late colonial Bengali masculinities? Given
her own experience of shaming control, why did she acquiesce in the lampooning
of the modern independent woman of late colonial India?
This query brings me to the subject of this chapter: the dialectic of a structural
consciousness of cultural nationalism that romanticizes national womanhood
and the living record of widespread violence against women in twentieth-century
South Asia, as they converge in the liminal performances of gender that are
70  Violence, gender, and citizenship
staged throughout this time. I hereby ask, what are the implications of imagining
national history in the national gendered present tense? How do messy structures
of feeling, belief, and conflict affect experiments of graphing history within the
events of gender violence that puncture the fabric of majoritarian cultural nation-
alist glorifications of nation as woman and goddess? Do historical discourse and
religious discourse form each other’s “supplements” in shoring up the frontiers of
nationalist thought, “making nationalism and patriotism out to be a religion—if
not indeed the religion—of modern times”? (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 95).
Then, returning to consider the temporality implicit in this structuralist historic
narrative, what are the consequences herein of treating gender as a “structure of
the conjuncture” in tracing “history” through “events” in the Hindi cinematic
imagination (Sahlins 1985)? If cinema is a liminal space of public reflexivity
(Turner 1977; Rajadhyaksha 2003: 34), what sort of historiography of gender has
been developing over the years in Hindi cinema, and what does it mean to repre-
sent something “happening” within the historical structures of gender in that
cinema? What is the status of the legal, civic, or violent gender “event” in Hindi
films about national identity?
In 1952, Baburao Patel, the irascible and inimitable editor of the popular film
journal Film India wrote:

our power-crazy Gandhian Politicians ushered our freedom by dividing our

land, by allowing the rape of thousands of women, by killing thousands
of men, by uprooting millions of people, by making millions homeless
orphans and finally by appointing our enemies as trustees over our nation’s
granaries …
(Film India, May 1952: 9)

Conjoined cinematic and political commentary from the redoubtable Patel—a

vocal and irrepressible critic of cinema and national politics in mid-century India—
lends exact support to Turner’s claim that “Quite often … public ritual dramatizes
secular, political, and legal status relationships” (1977: 36). In Indian nationalist
discourse, the performative and gendered and the political and religious cannot be
meaningfully separated: law, politics, and violence have been inseparably etched
on the canvas of religious identity in India. When the liminal is reflexively restruc-
tured in public, however, as in cinematic performances, gendered events as sites of
excess, as well as void, over-determine religious, visual, and political structures.
Gender and sexuality are axial to the discourse of historical thinking in this
context of framing the national secular. Twentieth-century Hindi cinema’s repre-
sentational topoi and imagistic of the “secular national” question—the framed
space demarcated from cultural, graphic, and political liminality—have repeat-
edly touched upon the nation-state’s paired crises of political and sexual terror.
Gender, like citizenship, hovers between inclusion, belonging, and liminality,
or between official representation, pure presentation as embodiment, and sheer
unpresentability. History often comes to be a question of imagining the struc-
tured and structuring past tense of the present, while memory comes to be a
mode of managing the liminal in its multiple non-present iterations.
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  71
In remembering history, questions about the gender of citizens, even as an
after-effect of the crisis of representing the besieged nation, have appeared
vividly in 50 years of Hindi cinema. Here I will focus on films such as Lahore
(M. L. Anand, 1949),1 New Delhi (Mohan Segal, 1956), Mother India (Mehboob
Khan, 1957), Mughal-e-Azam (K. Asif, 1960), Garm Hawa (M. S. Sathyu, 1973),
Gadar (Anil Sharma, 2001), and Veer-Zaara (Yash Chopra, 2004). Even a pre-
independence film, Mehboob Khan’s Watan (1938)—allegorizing the Indian
freedom struggle as a story about Tartar independence from Cossacks in central
Asia in some nebulous past and place—pours the historical present and an
imagined nationalist future into a purely fictive historical past, so that the past
becomes a living guide for the present national struggle. An associative tech-
nique of memory replenishes stark gaps in subjectivation in the present with
the romantic mists of temporal distance or pastness. The amplitude and “event-
fulness” of the cinematic mise en scène of the pre-Partition Watan—a nomadic
tribe of pastoralists resisting an elaborate and despotic imperial power, what Film
India called “one more story of the Tartars”2—becomes inconsequential, if not
a deliberate ruse to induce reflection upon the meaning of historical narrative
as itself a structural discourse and not a narration of particular or real events
(Jaikumar 2006: 22).
After the Partition, “social” and familial dramas with a nationalistic impetus—
such as New Delhi (1956), Mr and Mrs 55 (Guru Dut 1955) , Dekh Kabira Roya
(Amiya Chakraborty, 1957), and Kathputli (Amiya Chakraborty, 1957)—fore-
ground the impossibility of communicating the “unique” signature of violence
in these “events.” They denaturalize and make unavailable—constitutively,
according to Derrida’s notion of the impossibility of communication (1988)—the
“iteration” of the singular event, the event that felled the individual man, woman,
child, or citizen. Thus the Derridean impossible “iteration,” whose etymology
traces back both to repetition and alterity as concepts—to the repeated experience
that one is “lost” linguistically and ontologically in the transfer to the “other’s”
context and experience—conveys that the signified is never transcendent, and
cannot capture the unique, unitary embodiment underlying the voice or idea of
a referent. But “iteration” also suggests that, while singularity is not transmis-
sible, neither is syntagmatization without metaphoric or paradigmatic possibili-
ties. While communication foregrounds absence, it is also constituted by the
absence between extant terms. The referent, if one allows that term any positivist
existence, is always already split into specular self and other, but splitting here
suggests both displacement and condensation.
To recapitulate Derrida in his essay “Signature, Event, Context,” no “singular,”
specific “iteration” of the violent “event” contextualizing and situating the
female body in South Asia is adequate to capture the “experience” of that partic-
ular event, except within the “performative” medium itself, as of cinema or of
literature, wherein an “iteration” of the inherently undescribable situation occurs
as a mediation whereby the violated national body is re-imagined—though not
authenticated—not only as a frequently performed gendered role (from Aag
[Raj Kapoor, 1948] and New Delhi, to Gadar and Veer-Zaara), but actually as
an imperso-“nation” (to use Roy’s term) that constantly skips back and forth
72  Violence, gender, and citizenship
between national identities. Yet, as this would suggest, the violent event shares a
core of universality, as the enemy “other” often suffered as one did oneself.
The specularity of the female body (to remember Irigaray’s famous speculum
of the other), its hollowing out to catch the image of the specularizing state,
appears in a number of cinematic frameworks where the organizational logic—if
logic it is—closely follows a ritual of resurrecting structure in the very eventful
moment itself. In this eventful or critical moment (as Veena Das describes it) that
is the structure of a conjuncture—to recall Sahlins—a violent bodily action or
reaction is caged, gauged, or presaged in critical discourses lamenting the unre-
coverable erasure of the event in terms of pure memoir or historical discourse (for
instance, in work by Butalia, Menon, Bhasin). I argue that such un-recoverability
is inevitable not only in a Derridean sense of the case of language in general,
but in the specific South Asian “event” of Partition, wherein gendered genocide
was reciprocal and cross-border, re-enacted repeatedly on both sides of the puta-
tive border. This repetition explains the impossibility or difficulty of “commu-
nication” of singular experience—if not its entire “silencing”—in discourse on
gendered violence at Partition.3 The other suffered, in the moment, something
like that which the self did, and vice versa, and self and other thus mirrored each
other in that brief moment at least.
Duplication was never possible, but neither was complete alterity. The itera-
tion, rethinking the matter of communication of violent experience through
Derrida again, simultaneously foregrounds both the sameness and difference
mechanisms inherent in communication, in this case made more poignant by
the fact that the violence of Partition was experienced by a self and an other
that had historically been irreducible to an absence versus a presence (Hindu
and Muslim communities had for generations lived amicably side by side, as far
as religious identity was concerned) (Hasan 2000: 9). Besides, both Hindu and
Muslim (not to mention Sikh, etc.), Indian, and Pakistani women had identical
experiences of violation and loss. Some women themselves perpetrated violence
(Butalia in Hasan 2000: 188). The discourse of the survivor in the context of the
“event” of Partition violence comes shorn of any “personal” signature, because
so many repeated stagings and re-activations mobilize both difference and simi-
larity, alteration and repetition, such simultaneous mobilizations undoing any
possibility of concrete or singular “signification,” hence of “communication.”
The singular was impossible due to the repetition of the same experience
among both sides in Partition’s gender violence, even if identification was equally
impossible because of the recognition of the other’s ultimate agential alterity.
The impossibility of the singular is therefore established upon the double axes of
iteration’s capacity to “other” as well as to “mirror.”
On one hand, the struggle to “other,” facing the inevitable mirroring of
mutual violence and violation as iterated and re-activated experience—because
the different were also the same in both suffering and persecuting—caused an
aphasic retrenchment of subjectivity as singularity. There is no clearly denotable
alterity if the other mirrors the self across contexts. On the other, the discur-
sive event of personal and political violence is inherently im-“personal” or
non-singular precisely because the impossibility of iteration, as particularized
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  73
identification is also the very constitution of hatred and fear of the other as a
structural or collective entity; there is no communication across discrete and
concrete singular contexts with a murderous horde that inflicts collective trauma.
It might appear that I am arguing that the iterative mode generates not liminali-
ties of gender, but only structural universality regarding the experience of gender
violence. However, this is not entirely so. Just as iteration as individual and struc-
tural experiences of violence has two conjoint axes of repetition and alterity—
from the two together, liminality issued forth, like the ambiguous zone of the
boundary line drawn between peoples and nations, eloquently captured in Saadat
Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”—so iteration as past and present violence also
has diachronic and synchronic axes, and liminality continues to emerge in the
crosshatching of the two axes. By a diachronic axis I mean a temporal history of
the subject; by a synchronic one, primarily spatial. South Asian events of gender
violence have occurred across chronological periods, as well as across political
spaces. Within the diachronic axis, iteration functions more to generate alterity,
within the synchronic mode iteration’s cognition of alterity is given pause by the
uncanny recognition of self “acting like” the other. While women of India and
Pakistan, or Hindu and Muslim female citizens of both countries, suffered similar
experiences despite their differences during the traumatic time of Partition and
its aftermath of “recovery”—that is, in synchronic or spatial mode—women at
different points of time within nationalist historiography—that is, in diachronic
or temporal mode—had contingent experiences that were seen as marked by
polar and unvarying ethnic, communal, and religious heterogeneity: singular
differences.
If the spatial, synchronic mechanism of repetition produces the “selving” of the
other (repetition as sameness or universality), the diachronic, temporal mecha-
nism of repetition acerbates the “othering” of the self (repetition as difference
or singularity), though of course such dichotomies are always fragile. After all,
the boundary between India and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim, once indetermi-
nate, remained porous (as we shall see in discussion of Gadar and Veer-Zaara).
This crosshatched selving and othering, a coeval yet contrapuntal mechanism of
iteration—given the indeterminacy both of a new spatial axis differentiating the
two people who once were counted as one, and of a temporal axis of historical
structural differentiation between people who frequently saw themselves as at
least two—generated a specific kind of liminality as a consequence of attempts
to identify sameness and difference as spatial and historical phenomena respec-
tively. Liminality was further generated by the fact that such spatial and temporal
phenomena actually produce each other: memory is an associative mode filling
gaps in the present context from texts and chains of recollection, and history is a
mode of filling gaps in the text of recollection with objects and subjects from the
present context. In the crosshatching of the two contrapuntal yet simultaneous
axes of iteration—temporal and spatial, diachronic and synchronic—liminality
emerges in the discourse of gender violence at the moment of Partition, and in
future decades, every time the discourse of an iterability within the past criss-
crosses the discourse of iteration within the present, without sufficient actual
demarcation of the two as I have already suggested: the past is always a substitute
74  Violence, gender, and citizenship
or tonic for gaps in the present, and history is the past tense of the present and vice
versa. The gendered subject simultaneously suspended in the two is neither fully
avenged nor forgiven, neither fully here nor there, and neither fully us nor them.

Citizenship, secularism, and the nation-state

Cinematic discourse in independent India of the fifties was ineluctably concerned
with questions of civic identity, religion, and law, all of which make up multiple
strands in the discourse on secularism in India. In the late fifties, the epic
genre—Mother India (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960), for example—made
a significant if temporary comeback, and myth reigned supreme as a gesture
of transforming history to an illusory coherence and consensus that had eluded
bureaucratic, taxonomical counts. In the seventies, the “Muslim” drama Garm
Hava provided a path not taken in the later Gadar and Veer-Zaara: its stark and
uncompromising look at gender as the national incommensurable is indicated in
the murderous fate of the woman unable to cross national and ethnic borders. A
brief recapitulation of the “secular” in the Indian context is relevant here. In the
representative collection of essays edited by Robert D. Baird, Religion and Law
in Independent India (1993), Bhagwati reminds us that the term “secular” was
deliberately left out of the draft of the Constitution by Dr. Ambedkar, the prin-
cipal architect and himself an “untouchable.” The term “secular” was initially
excluded in order to allay fears (in the fifties) that its inclusion “might give the
impression of establishing a state structure inconsistent with the cultural ethos
of the Indian people” (Bhagwati in Baird 1993: 9). However, the initial decision
to exclude the term “secular” was not meant to “allow freedom of religion to
become an instrument for thwarting the progress of the nation to a new secular
social order” (ibid.: 15). The term was inserted in 1976 to mitigate developing
“communal strains” (ibid.: 9).
As all of this makes evident that the post-independence nation-state started
life with the problem of reconciling the diarchy of universalist secular values
and indigenous and plural traditions within the body politic staring it hard in the
face.4 This was particularly true between 1944 and ’56, the years of drafting of
the constitution as well as the controversial Hindu Code Bill, and of the opera-
tions of the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, intended to rescue
women and children who experienced communal violence at Partition. In 1951,
the Hindu Code Bill was introduced in Parliament by the Congress government;5
this bill sought radical changes in customary Hindu personal law regarding
marriage, succession, adoption, guardianship, and maintenance in an attempt
to “modernize” colonial law codified by the British on the basis of pundit- and
patriarch-derived interpretations of religious texts (Dhagamwar in Baird 1993:
215; Virdi 2003: 67–9). Finally, the Hindu Code Bill was passed and divided into
five separate acts relating to marriage, succession, adoption, and maintenance
(Virdi 2003: 70; Basu in Agnes 2004; Lateef 1990; Sethi 1974).
This bill met with vociferous opposition from Hindus, who felt that, despite
the secular guarantee of the Constitution, they were being unfairly singled out for
destruction of their “traditions,” while minorities (meaning mostly Muslims) were
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  75
not facing interference in their equally “traditional” personal laws (Dhagamwar
1993: 235, 241; Virdi 2003: 68). This discontent falsely memorialized colonial
authority as having maintained the policy of minimal intervention in indigenous
personal customs and law—or customary law—since the time of Warren Hastings
(Virdi 2003: 67–8). Since Muslim law was left untouched, the Hindu Code Bill
was seen as evidence of minoritization of the numerical majority, the Hindus.
Hindus protested vigorously against what they claimed was “unfair” victimization
of their identitarian rights and equally “unfair” privileging of Muslim personal
law during the Hindu Code Bill debates of the fifties; here was one originary point
for the recursive pattern of protest in later decades about Hindu “minoritization”
(Khory in Baird 1993: 128; Srinivas 1986: 4, 23). Muslims, in contrast, opposed
the establishment of a Uniform Civil Code—a universal code of private law for all
Indian citizens regardless of ethnic identification—enjoined upon future legisla-
tors by the original drafters of the Constitution (Virdi 2003: 70), arguing that this
would assault their rights as minorities. Apparently, all communities sacrificed
gender justice at the altar of national integration as well as communal cohesion
(Virdi 2003: 70–3; see also Sangari 2003: 181–213).
According to some views, legislation such as the Hindu Code Bill granting
women rights regarding marriage, divorce, adoption, succession, etc. cut
juridico-politically against the grain of the very religio-philosophical discourse
that underpinned a “traditionalist,” pre-modern, “dharmik” model of pre-
national identity (Coward in Baird 1993: 36; Larson in Baird 1993: 59–61, 65–74;
Mansfield in Baird 1993: 142–3; Rekhi in Baird 1993: 183, 198, 200–1, 205, 214).
These interpretations remind us that pre-national and countermodern notions of
the person, deriving from essentially religio-philosophical discourse upon the
individual in community, suffused and penetrated every level of secular juridico-
political discourse in independent India. Upon that canvas of the indeterminacy
of emergent citizenship and sexual and political terror during the Partition of
India and accompanying gendered violence, the fifties saw the superimposition
of self-recovery via a law known as the Abducted Persons Act (1949) passed by
both the governments of India and Pakistan after Partition (Menon 1997: 15–32;
Aiyar 1947; Butalia 2000; Menon and Bhasin 1993, 1996, 1998). On the Indian
side, the act was meant to recuperate the female Indian citizen and also, more
controversially, such minor children as had been born to her during the period of
her being “lost,” to their state of origin. Needless to say, this act was problematic
in conception and in execution; it was state activism for enumerating and iden-
tifying the female citizen. Among other scandals associated with the act was its
endowing of minor police personnel with authority to search, arrest, and forcibly
“rescue” and repatriate women deemed to have been abducted, even against their
will (Menon 1997: 19, 23). Menon describes it as “remarkable for the impunity
with which it violated every principle of citizenship [as the POTA, or Prevention
of Terrorism Act, and the TADA, or Terrorist Activities Disruption Act, would
do later in the terror-hazed nineties]—fundamental rights and access to justice”
(1997: 31). Women’s (sexual) chastity masquerading as their political legitimacy
dominated the political graphing of violation, and representations of abducted
and abductor proliferated trauma (Menon 1997: 22, 27–9).
76  Violence, gender, and citizenship
In the disputes and excesses of the Abducted Persons Act the gendered and the
Muslim subject of post-independence South Asia emerged as instances of limi-
naility, produced by the normalizing drive of post-independence civic identity
haunted both by structural myths of blood, kinship, purity, and legitimacy, as well
as by conflicts between inconsistent yet constituent subjects—those who were
presented but not yet represented, whose belonging was a physical fact but whose
inclusion would be a political act—whom the state struggled to make consistent
with its normative count of political inclusion. This threat of the simultaneous
void and excess also mirrored the constellated contradictions between social
liminalities and national-statist dicta characterizing the Hindu Code Bill debates
(Menon 1997: 21, 29). The frame of almost identical repeated violence enacted
against women of both communities and nations—themselves only just barely
separable, distinguishable—evoked, as I have already discussed, the paralyzing
liminality of the porosity of self and other. If a particular violent act against the
women of one’s community had to be condemned and indemnified, it had to be
done by suppressing knowledge of identical acts by members of one’s community
against the women of the other community. This tension of identifying and distin-
guishing self and other, insider and outsider, created a particular impossibility
of particularizing the event of violence in the moment as either familiar or new,
same or different, leaving open only the possibility of performing it repetitively,
whether as masked spectacle or as identity. The fact of brutal gender violence
strained against the rhetoric of its situational legitimation, as in all violence and
war, of course, but particularly in this case of civil war where subject, object, and
action were re-activations and re-enactments, mimicry as retaliation.
The topos of fractured and contested political representation by the state of its
inconvenient subjects resurfaced—along with renewed demand for a Uniform
Civil Code in diverse sectors of national opinion, including Muslims—in the late
eighties with the Shah Bano case, wherein a Muslim woman’s right to mainte-
nance after divorce was first granted under the provisions of the Indian Criminal
Procedure Code and then withdrawn and reassessed in terms of Islamic Shariat
law as a result of severe resistance and pressure from Muslim patriarchs as
unconcerned with women’s rights as their Hindu counterparts (Virdi 2003: 71–2;
Agnes 2004; Lateef 1990). Cinema, which had been associated with nationalism
since its earliest inception in India, has mirrored these fractured and contested
topoi of political representation and identification since the fifties at least (Khory
in Baird 1993: 134–5).

Past, present, Hindus, and Muslims: “epics” and “socials”

of the fifties
I begin with a survey of a relatively unknown film, wherein gendered citizen-
ship was mediated and filtered through the narrative of the refractory family
romance, wherein rapture and rupture were intertwined for apparently whole-
some social purposes, but with traces of interrogation of the frameworks of both
citizenship and gender. Amiya Chakrabarty’s Kathputli (“The Puppet”, 1957),
like its contemporary Mehboob Khan epic Mother India, was released soon after
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  77
the passage of the Hindu Code Bill that allowed so-called greater freedoms for
Hindu women, including the right to divorce, which is relevant to Kathputli’s
story of a street waif rescued from obscurity and an abusive marriage to a disa-
bled and dishonest man by a theatrical impresario.
The theme song “Bol re kathputli dori kaun sang bandhi/ sach batla tu nachey
kiske liye” (“Tell, O puppet, to whom you’ve tied your fate/ Tell truly for whom
you dance”) ties the fate of the professional actress to the fate of the devoted
Hindu wife and woman, for whom marriage and motherhood seem ontological,
prescriptive destinies and yet are actually, the song suggests, roles to be played.
The fate of woman as wife and mother ruptures the career and success of the
female performer, who finds that escape from domesticity and maternity is
elusive, even when social liberation seems tantalizingly possible. It is noteworthy
that a sharp line usually has divided the career of a successful young actress or
performer in Hindi cinema from any subsequent life as a wife or mother; she
is usually considered past her professional prime when it seems time for her to
marry and settle down. As Kathputli’s heroine’s theatrical career takes off, her
husband feels slighted and her marriage falls apart; the jealous husband decamps
with their child, whose “recovery” forms part of the story. The graphing of the
rupture in domestic felicity through the debatable rapture of female empower-
ment as an actress, and via newly acquired conjugal and gender rights as a female
citizen of modern India is troped in the film—through the repeated use of the
song, for instance—as a life of performances; however, this trope-ing occasions
scrutiny of the entire national and governmental “performance” of new rites of
secular and modern citizenship for and by women. Moreover, in the moment of
fixing her femininity, the emphasis falls heavily upon the regulation of her sexual
and reproductive history via her child, who must be “restored” to the mother’s
“proper” sphere by the spousal surrogate of nation-state governmentality, like
many other children at Partition. The woman’s emergent identity remained
regressively bound up with her belonging in her “proper state,” which signified
both “marriage” and “country of origin.”
What is troped as public performance in Kathputli is transformed into the
private penance of the new female citizen in Kathputli’s more famous contem-
porary, Mother India. Mother India demonstrates the concatenation of the major
themes of the Nehruvian era: development and modernity, fertility and femi-
ninity, and—once again—the incommensurability of women’s sexuality. A very
brief plot synopsis would be as follows: Radha is married to Shamu in a prototyp-
ical village in the timeless Indian landscape, and realizes that her mother-in-law
has mortgaged their land to the extortionist village moneylender Sukhilala, who
is known for doctoring accounts and incommensurate usury. The viewer is intro-
duced to a close-up of Radha’s face as she hears this as a new bride—her head
turning to the right to hear her mother-in-law’s muttering—and registering this
information with sorrow and inarticulate foreboding while beginning to remove
her bridal jewelry, symbols of both her personal fortune and her bridal status.6
From this the camera cuts abruptly to a spinning mortar at which Radha is shown
grinding wheat, her labor as the family’s woman and mother beginning immedi-
ately. The connection between land, woman, and family well-being thus firmly
78  Violence, gender, and citizenship
established, the story moves through Radha’s happy marriage and hard work
with her husband, the birth of children, a disastrous drought, the husband’s farm
accident and loss of his arms, his abandonment of the family, Radha’s struggles
against poverty and impending concubinage to Sukhilala, her surviving sons’
development into radically polar personalities, the delinquencies of her younger
and best-loved son Birju, and her eventual sacrifice for the village community in
shooting Birju to death when he turns lawless, kills Sukhilala, and abducts his
daughter in revenge.
Filmfare reviewed the film in the same issue as that of Kathputli, and is note-
worthy for its deft paring of the film’s strengths and weaknesses:

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)

Rajadhyaksha usefully contrasts “Bollywood” and “Indian Cinema” precisely

in terms of the latter’s lack of access to the markets and commodity nexuses of
the former (Rajadhyaksha 2003: 26, 29, 30). However, as I have been suggesting,
after noting the “Indian cinema’s”—as opposed to “Bollywood’s”—histor-
ical lack of finesse and dysfunctional access regarding market, financing, and
commercial networks, Rajadhyaksha finds that “cultural self-definitions” thus
resist “economic … resolution,” because of “a crucial set of conflicts bred into
Indian nationalism … a situation in the late 1940s” (2003: 31, 32). This is the situ-
ation, previously examined, of the post-independence Indian cinema “spectator”
also being the new “citizen,” the constitutive mechanisms of both identities—
citizen and spectator—being “identification.”15 With this coeval, kindred and
constituted citizen-spectator of the post-independence era Rajadhyaksha asso-
ciates a melodramatic nationalist Indian cinema narrative mode, which appar-
ently arose out of a cinematic re-visioning and reconstruction of non-Bollywood
Indian cinema as “representative,” “something that more authentically [but not
unambiguously, as he argues] represented the modernist aspirations of India’s
newly enfranchised civil society” (2003: 33).
The market failures of Indian cinema (as opposed to its supplemental and
smarter progeny, Bollywood), its fiscal indigence, and “strange” neglect by
postcolonial Indian governmentality, then reflect its troubling of representa-
tions of “national culture,” commensurable unicity, and familialization, and its
88  Violence, gender, and citizenship
privileging of public descriptions and enumerations of the citizen over untrou-
bled “private” scenarios of domesticated citizenship—what would later appear
as “family values” in nineties Bollywood (Rajadhyaksha 2003: 34–5; see chapter
four). Indeed, socially conformist films about “family” and “family values” were
welcomed in the chaotic fifties and fluffy sixties of Hindi cinema, while trou-
bling “socials” did less well in the new state of the nation. The edgy social was
precisely the kind of cinema that the state did not want to support in the fifties
(or in later decades), writes Rajadhyaksha (35). This is because in the edgy and
progressive “social” of the fifties, seemingly private existences, identities, and
cultural behavior became ambiguated as singularities within a wider normative
secular modernity.16 The fifties cinema mediated this suturing of the singular and
the normative, but not perfectly, not unlike the state itself, as we have seen in
the botched demographic project of the Abducted Persons Act. The familial was
never completely sutured without sexuality (especially female) as a remainder,
just as a simultaneous political commitment to normative communities and
to singular citizenship—separate and equal, both included and belonging, in
Badiou’s terms—has never quite been achieved in Indian secularism (Larson in
Baird 1993: 66).
Manmohan Desai’s Chhalia (1960) is a good example of this trouble of recon-
ciling normativity and singularity. The “realistic” story of a Hindu Partition
victim who is deserted by her husband and his family in Lahore during the
riots, it evokes gender trauma uncharacteristically overtly for a film made at
this time. However, Chhalia is remarkable for its refusal to categorize polari-
ties, though these polarities are tantalizingly encountered at every turn in the
plot and dialogue. What makes Chhalia possible is the diegetic impossibility of
the forensic and diagnostic. The narrative does not unearth a redemptive, immu-
table truth beneath the layers of ethnic and sexual trauma. Liminalities, while
abundant, are never diagnosed into definite sameness or difference. Since, as
we have seen, articulation of historic violence and trauma seem possible only
when retelling involves alterity—privileging difference in repetition—this film’s
systematic structure of iterations, that stubbornly resist differentiation or assimi-
lation and produce liminality and not identity, can narrate trauma: since nothing
is quite what it seems, neither the same nor different, neither triumphal nor cata-
strophic results of the tumultuous socio-historical crisis are expected or offered.
An example of the uncategorizable nature of polarities in the film may be
found in a classic scenario of failed “recovery.” After being renounced by her
own parents, the “recovered” abductee is about to be reunited with her husband
at a “women’s camp,” but he rejects her when she introduces to him “their” child,
who identifies himself as a Muslim son of a Muslim father. This mystery is later
explained as the agency of a Muslim man who had rescued and sheltered the
abandoned and already pregnant wife, but the explanation remains as unverifi-
able in the film as it might in life. Dressed in “Muslim” clothes, the child proudly
proclaims his Muslim father’s name to his (real?) father. Even as a bedtime story,
the heroic tale he wants to hear is that of his “father’s” rescue of his mother (made
more problematic for patriarchy by the fact that the husband, the “proper” rescuer
and protector, was absent from the scene). These juxtapositions keep alive the
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  89
miscibility of real and fake, or self and other. The Muslim surrogate acted as
the real rescuer, and indeed as the real father. The real father was absent when
rescue was needed. This makes the enemy who we would be—like us—and yet
unlike us in our ignoble failure to act when needed; who are we, therefore? The
child is thus the primary embodiment of liminality resulting from an unverifiable
iteration: he seems and sees himself as Muslim, yet is said to be Hindu, his pater-
nity being thus split and doubled. The film thus reiterates that it is impossible
to determine which polarities are sustainable, and that some polarities that are
also hybrid re-activations cannot be disentangled. Some other unresolved itera-
tions the film employs are as follows: the couple first meet during arrangements
for their marriage mutually castigating “Lahore boys” versus “Lahore girls”;
people during riots are humans or devils; the abductee is either a liar or innocent,
victim, or volunteer; she is the counterpart of a similarly unidentifiable Pakistani
Muslim woman left behind in Delhi; the woman’s natal family disavow her as
not their daughter; crooks are godly, etc. Polarity reveals itself as singularity, and
bypasses altogether the logic of commensuration.
Therefore, cohering around the vulnerable or violated gendered body, the
familial keeps unraveling as the politico-legal conundrum, as well as the cinematic
mise en scène. Rajadhyaksha cites as films snubbed by the state “socials from the
Bombay Talkies studios, reformist musicals such as some of Raj Kapoor’s work
or some of Dev Anand’s Navketan production house … and realist-internation-
alist films” (2003, 36)—that is, the cinema wherein non-normative and public
identities emerged as liminal in heteroglossic cinematic discourse—“a domain
of something in between, something that enabled the protagonists of national
culture … to negotiate with, the State” (2003: 34). Chhalia, I suggest, was able
to engage the scandals of Partition, abduction, and national reproduction only by
avowing this liminal and the indecipherably singular at every thematic and formal
opportunity, and thereby avowing itself as a cinematic liminal mise en abyme.
Indeed, except as a metatextual theatricalization of a national mise en abyme of
identity, its staging of embodiment as enactment would not have been possible
in its historic moment. The chasm between traditionalism and “modern” citi-
zenship, un-forded by post-independence cinema, is also instantiated in the rift
in the state’s unsuccessful mediation of family-centric traditional structures, a
modern, secular consciousness of gender rights, and the reality of endemic and
epidemic gender violence, as evident in Hindu code and Partition-related legisla-
tion, as well as in films like Chhalia.
Another apparently “normative” social film that might be usefully contrasted
with polythetic political epics like Mother India or Mughal-e-Azam, or with edgy
heteroglossic socials like Chhalia, is Mr. And Mrs. 55 (Guru Dutt, 1956), which
seems to be a hymeneal romance engaged in the reinvestment of tradition as
true modernity by the proper dispensation of the bodies of marriageable young
women. It is a “marriage comedy,” depicting the difficult choice of an ideal
life partner in a modern social context of fluid, indeterminate identities. It is,
however, crucially different in its representation of female identity choices, both
civic and spectatorial. The heroine Anita faces the double dilemma of a paternal
injunction to marry before she is 21 or forfeit her deceased father’s fortune,
90  Violence, gender, and citizenship
and a matriarchal injunction from her feminist aunt to divorce her husband of
convenience so she can maintain her independent “feminist” identity. Divorce
for a Hindu woman is conceivable only by the provisions of the new Hindu Code
Law, and the film’s intent, as Virdi has eloquently shown, is to undercut this legal
genesis of gender modernity (2003, 75–6). Charming and lyrical, Guru Dutt’s
romantic comedy recuperates “feminine tradition” via a pleasant detour through
the modern and its pleasures and discontents (for Indian husbands-to-be in this
instance; recall the lampoon at the beginning of this chapter). Anita is unable
to follow the “modern” script. She divorces the bachelor hustled up by her aunt
(Preetam, aptly named “the loved one”) after marriage, but returns to the path of
tradition led by the example of other modest Indian women and wives, defying
her aunt’s “feminist modernity” to reunite with Preetam (Virdi 2003: 77).
In a formal and visual contrast to the narrative message, however, this story
of stability and stasis is undercut by the film’s black and white camerawork and
tilted camera angles (Cooper 2006: 162, 164), which instead capture the stark-
ness of carnivalesque inversions gripping the nation through “modernity,” and
index the indeterminacy of new civic identities, including male ones. Preetam is
unemployed but talented, self-respecting but on the verge of despair, virile but
forced to perform (feminizing) neurasthenia, verging on homelessness, a good
man but a reckless employee, and so on. The marriage choice in 1955 is addition-
ally complicated for Anita by the undeniable indeterminacy of this new male
citizen, the denizen of India’s new modernity, in turns rogue and nobility; he
matches with his personal and social slipperiness her own, sliding between the
scales of the modern normativity of gender rights (the right to divorce, primarily,
which is seen as a Western plague) and traditional narratives of feminine norma-
tivity (wifeliness, meekness, devotion, dependence, etc.; Virdi 2003, 80–4). The
film achieves a “traditionalist” and gender conservative resolution, however,
and thus acts as a moderating and moderate cinematic mediation of urgent ques-
tions about gendered citizenship agitating pubic discourses of law, religion, and
national belonging.
The Hindu Code Bill was meant to be a hallmark of the secular principle in
the Indian constitutional imagination of gender. As Coward writes, the ‘this-
worldly” secular values of Nehru, Ambedkar, and Gajendragadkar, the chief
drafters of the bill, determined the crafting of the Hindu Code Bill from 1944
to ’56 (in Baird 1993: 31–3). What did the interpenetration of constitutional and
private discourses among the nation’s architects in the crucial years of 1944–56
spell for the cultural imaginary of the nation, i.e. Indian cinema and its meta-
discourses? Mr. And Mrs. 55, as we have seen, was viewed in its time as a potent
reflection on the distortion of historical tradition by this incommensurable legal
event. The anonymous Filmfare reviewer wrote in 1955: “the film unfolds a page
from life itself, throwing the spotlight on evils of today which strike at the roots
of our civilization and culture” (Filmfare, 27 May 1955: 21). As the Hindu Code
Bill’s effort to craft a revolutionary code for reforming and modernizing the
personal laws of Hindus proceeded, cinematic meta-discourse rubbed its hands
at the opportunity for lampooning, as two cartoons in FilmIndia’s November
1951 issue would suggest (see figures 3 and 4).
Figure 2.2 “Retired Hurt,” FilmIndia, November 1951: 15. Courtesy of National Film
Archive of India, Pune.

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:

an event is not simply a phenomenal happening, even though as a phenomenon

it has reasons and forces of its own, apart from any given symbolic scheme.
An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and
through the cultural scheme does it acquire an historical significance … The
event is a relation between a happening and a structure (or structures) …
(Ibid.: xiv)

The legislative imbroglio bears the marks of an emergent prescriptive, as well as

performative, unfolding of structural impulses that shifts attention away from
enduring and longstanding tradition to “events” functioning as structures of
conjuncture—legal, political, or violent—that are meant to be reinterpretations
of that past structure, yet bear the marks of the latter’s constraints, not unlike
Ambedkar’s marked body in the cartoon.
The discourse on tradition is incompletely retired in the quest for secular
modernity, and keeps interrupting the latter discourse. The cartoons and their
grumbling certainly lend credence to that postulate:

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

Patel’s “minority” anxiety on behalf of the majority Hindus in India is partic-

ularly resonant given that, while Hinduism was specifically undefined in the
Constitution, anyone who professed no other religion was therefore automati-
cally counted as Hindu (Coward in Baird 1993: 37; Baird, 1993: 41–58). As we
have seen in Mr. and Mrs. 55, this rupture in the discourse of tradition and the
ontology of the traditional man cinematically metamorphosed into the discourse
of romance and marriage in the “family values” social.
My third example of a “social” film, New Delhi (Mohan Segal, 1956), provides
a double prospect on the theme of ontic instability and indeterminacy being tied
to new nationhood and emergent citizenship. New Delhi stars Vyjayantimala and
Kishore Kumar, the dancing and singing star, and may be called the romance
of linguistic performance, providing resolution to rupture in an aesthetic
confluence. Vyjayantimala and Kishore Kumar play Janki and Anand, a south
Indian Tamil “girl” and a north Indian Punjabi “boy.” Though they both live in
New Delhi, they speak different vernacular languages, a significant interstate
problem of national cohesion in post-independence India. Anand masquerades
as a Tamil speaker in a predominantly Hindi-speaking city, where linguistic
and regional prejudice have become intense enough that rental lodging is condi-
tional upon being a co-regionalist or a co-linguist. In a wider sense, New Delhi
reflects a crisis faced by Hindi cinema itself since its earliest days: the problem
of linguistic plurality and the attempt to create a cinema with a national audi-
ence. This problem manifested itself from the days of the Indian Cinematograph
Committee report (1928) and its discovery that films had distinctly regional
affinities based on language that impeded the notion of a nation-wide cinema;
the Madras Presidency (comprising Tamil Nadu, parts of Karnataka, and Andhra
Pradesh) had fought off an effort by the interim Congress party in 1937 to make
Hindi the region’s official language.19 It is no coincidence that finding a “Lingua
Indica” is the film’s actual dilemma.
The nation as home is invoked here, strongly crosscut by ethnographic or heritage
tourism shots of the city in the film’s opening sequences, with architectural and
historic sites dominating the camera in an attempt to establish the modernity,
urbanity, yet worldly historical stature of independent India’s capital city. The
“tourism” angle never disappears as the romances in the film (Anand and Janki’s,
and Anand’s sister Nikki and a young Bengali-speaking painter’s) occur in heritage
settings such as the Red Fort and other architectural registers of historic and contem-
porary national importance. The domestic spaces seem claustrophobic, even pano-
ptical (as in the first song sequence set in the tavern, in which multiple rental units
sternly look in upon the central courtyard where the landlord resides and decides
who is to stay) by contrast, except when livened by Anand’s “anti-communal”
performance demanding national and linguistic pluralism. The indexicality of
94  Violence, gender, and citizenship
historic sites—sites serving as signs of heritage from which the new modern state
can take its aspirational cues, abiding structures within which new self-defining
events of modernity, such as inter-communal marriages, can occur—is repeatedly
alternated with cuts to sequences and tableaux of performance venues (Anand is
an aspiring show artist and Janki an accomplished dancer) to signal a nation of
performers—RDB’s “nautanki saale.” On another performative plane, “heritage”
sequences also induce a theme of ontological instability of the “common citizen”
once again, because the sites’ very publicness introduces questions about the verifi-
ability, enumerability versus “performativity,” of those one meets there when on a
sight-seeing tour. In an extended comic sequence, Anand struggles to maintain his
“Tamil” identity when caught by his sister and her admirer while romancing Janki
at a heritage site.
A wider national identity as a performative jouissance potentially tran-
scends the film’s more private conflicts of linguistic regionalism. An edito-
rial in FilmIndia (February 1956) acidly satirized the central government’s
proposed linguistic redistribution of state territories in Bombay, Maharashtra,
and Gujarat, a proposal based on linguistic regionalist demands of precisely
the sort seen as obstreperous and divisive in the film.20 The film’s achievement,
according to FilmIndia’s caustic review, is “to expose and emphasize the crass
and inherent stupidity of that widely prevalent attitude in India which is called
provincialism and which makes the people of one linguistic region deride
and distrust those of others” (ibid.: 73–4). Evoking the ubiquitous spectre of
murderous communalism, this review addresses the film’s conveyance of an
explicit national event through the metaphor of social romance. In a “tragic”
false climax, New Delhi figures death by drowning of Janki, discovered by her
Tamil father in her linguistically inappropriate romance with Anand (Kishore
Kumar), whose autocratic and bossy father21 also vetoes both his son Anand
and his daughter Nikki’s inter-linguistic romances. After a tumultuous scene
with her distraught father, who wishes her dead rather than married to a Punjabi
speaker, Janki is thought to have committed suicide by jumping into the river;
only her shawl is found by the riverside. The scandal of the fictitious “death”
or “suicide” of Janki as a result of her romantic transgression is, implicitly,
the scandal of abduction; her turning to a Punjabi for a romantic partner is
diegetically treated with the horror usually reserved until this point in Indian
cinema for the woman who has transgressed caste, untouchability, virtue, and,
of course, ascriptive ethnicity. Janki “dies”—figurally and fictively—the death
of a “victim” of communal conflict.
Her carefully contrived resurrection (she of course only “played” dead, or
rather, missing) is a rapturous ending to the story of abduction that would have
been mostly unavailable to the recently partitioned nation. Rescue comes, as in
Dekh Kabira Roya, through a socially lower-class surrogate father figure who is
“linguistically” neutral. While Janki comes out of hiding from the shelter of this
shopkeeper friend of her father, who is of no particular stated affiliation to any
language or regional community, the film’s second false climax depicts Anand’s
sister Nikki’s rejection by the Punjabi suitor chosen by her father for insufficient
dowry. The Punjabi father now feels the shameful pangs of the father whose
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  95
daughter is “dishonored” as the Tamil father previously did—not coincidentally,
in the Indian context this position is only habitable by the fathers of daughters,
not of sons. Desperately, he runs from friend to friend in his so-called “commu-
nity” or “Biradari”—literally “brotherhood”—to be told by each in turn that
there are limits, particularly monetary ones, to “community.”
The previously spurned Bengali painter now steps in and nobly offers to make
up Nikki’s dowry with his own family jewels. Tearfully, the father, re-humanized
into modern pluralism, welcomes the spurned Bengali suitor and launches into
a speech redefining “community”: community’s fictive and unstable contours
are realigned and reinforced in the image of a hymeneal rapture that transcends
regionalism and communalism. New Delhi’s linguisitic eclecticism thus leads to
communal integration and the rescue of “lost” women. Janki’s “death” is thus
doubly obliterated, by the refiguration of community and by her re-absorption
into the family where earlier she was an absolute outsider, as well as a “victim,”
of transgressive sexuality. The advertisement for New Delhi (see Figure 2.4)
declares that it is “A Film on the Emotional Integration of India,” and in smaller
type, “A Story of Babels [sic] about Labels.” Indeed, the tacking of “Emotional”
before “Integration” in the slogan is symptomatic: it suggests that other inte-
gration that was not possible, that of the two countries that used to be undi-
vided India and that fought literally to the death at Partition and sacrificed many
women in the process.

The seventies and the Muslim present: Garm Hava

Then, in the seventies, one gets an isolated film like Garm Hava (“Hot Winds”,
M.S. Sathyu, 1973), an intricate weaving of the “Muslim social” with an anti-
communalist message, the one “Islamicate” film wherein Muslim social life is
realized and contextualized in wider Indian society. The film is articulated in
the realist didactic mode rather than the romance didactic. Director M.S. Sathyu
described the nexus of communal, cultural, and national identity in Bombay
cinema of the late twentieth century as woven of recursive looping of experience,
memory, and representation regarding national trauma:

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)

Besides rightly indicating belatedness among directors who personally survived

Partition,22 which might suggest a necessarily lengthy gestational heuristic and
telos for Indian films on the topic of gender as an incommensurate liminality,
Sathyu revives charges familiar from Patel about the “national” film-makers’
opportunism and exploitation.
96  Violence, gender, and citizenship

Figure 2.4 Print advertisement for New Delhi, FilmIndia, April 1956. Courtesy of
National Film Archive of India, Pune.

I suggest that the lag in cinematic representation of traumatic events is a func-

tion of national representation as repetition, as recursivity, and not merely one
of opportunistic exploitation. Govind Nihalani, the maker of Tamas (1988), an
acclaimed made-for-television film on the Partition and communal riots, explains
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  97
that survivors and witnesses needed distance from the immediacy of the event
(Joshi 2004: 9–10, 81, 83). It is repetition that this cinema relies on to get it right,
even though it activates unexpected outcomes each time it rephrases the liminal,
the singular, the excessive, etc. in order to get them right. Shyam Benegal,
director of another Partition-related film, Mammo (1994), points at the lengthy
filtering process of conscious-raising films: “It won’t happen with one film. It
is a process” (Joshi 2004: 101). P. K. Nair lists both “family dramas” and more
radical films, such as Chhinamool (“Uprooted”; Nimai Ghosh: 1951) and Ritwik
Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (“The Golden Line”, 1962), as prominent and excellent,
but early post-Partition films wherein the trauma of separation showed up fairly
quickly as embedded in family dramas of displacement (Joshi 2004: 11–4; Sarkar
2009). Such films, however, barely made it commercially, or, indeed, not at all,
however highly they were adulated as auteuristic and anti-communal master-
pieces. Chinnamool and Subarnarekha were quickly laid aside in their own time
(though they have made major critical comebacks); demotic memory seems to
have been overwhelmed and paralyzed by the direct tackling of Partition in
cinema so soon after the event; we have already observed the relatively total
oblivion of Lahore in the depths of popular and critical memory. The films them-
selves constituted a liminal zone of cinema, and joined other liminal zones and
narratives, such as the story of gender and sexuality as told cinematically.
By 1973, however, the displacement of the twinned topoi of communalized
rape and abduction and the birth of the new nation in India onto familial tales of
ruptured rapture found a somewhat more transparent narration. Garm Hava tells
the story of Salim Mirza and his family, Muslims of Agra, who stay behind in
India after Partition, though their relatives leave one by one for the promised land
across the border. Salim loses his shoemaking business because no one will give
him loans after his factory is burned down; his house becomes evacuee property
because it was in the name of his brother, now in Pakistan. The greatest blow falls
when his daughter Amina, after losing two suitors to Pakistan and migration,
and after being sexually involved with the last one in expectation of marriage,
commits suicide. Salim, now a broken man, arranges to leave for Pakistan, too,
but, at the last minute, he chooses to join the mobilizing masses of India out
protesting in the streets, and to remain in the only country he has ever known as
home, along with his younger son, Sikander.
Garm Hava found representational techniques that have been seen as strategic:

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)

Chatterjee finds this technique of familializing and privatizing the political

trauma “full of the gnarled poetry of everyday life” (68), as indeed it is. However,
98  Violence, gender, and citizenship
this focus on the family might yet be a matter of the slim repertoire of available
representational techniques for citizenship and spectatorship that Rajadhyaksha
has alerted us to, which returns us to the question of communal political identity
finally only gesturally presented in the film. The question of the lag in cinematic
representations of Partition might now need to be further linked to this privatiza-
tion of trauma, as well as to the question of the near-impossibility of the Muslim
in cinematic and political representation.
Ultimately, how to represent the Muslim and the woman again refocuses, as
with Mother India, on the question of who the normative citizen or spectator
of modern India might be. The question of representability, even within the
schema of repetition as subjectivation, finds a peculiar challenge in the case
of the Muslim and the woman—racial and sexual incommensurables—films
about whom might be made only after a certain lapse of time, and then with
certain necessary pessimism against presupposing a viable, cohesive commu-
nity of such singularities as part of a stable familial structure or narrative.
Contrary to Chatterjee’s reading of this film as realizing the poetry of indi-
vidual and family identities despite political chaos and crisis, such technique
appears not to have worked. The film could not finally rest on a depiction of
individual and family destinies, its protagonists being non-normatively raced
and gendered. Since identification as woman or Muslim is traumatic in Garm
Hava—witness the violence on Amina—the citizen-to-be is then forced to
make the choice of participating in a troubling political narrative of national
identity, a mass mobilization that reflects inconsistent sub-elements of the
nation-state: the film concludes with Salim and Sikander joining a proces-
sion of civic protesters. The identity of the citizen or spectator might well
be partially limned only through the dual indirections of temporal lags and
repressed liminality of such incommensurables in cinematic representation.
As has been noted:

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:

The biggest weakness, obviously brought to it by the writers is the subjec-

tive self-pity for the minority community … the film’s sympathy is for those
suffering indirect or direct opposition in North India, in the wake of Partition
and with several of their own kith and kin flying by night to the new land
of communally based opportunity. In that sense ‘Garm Hava’ is not exactly
a film to promote harmony, integration and all that … The film would have
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  99
been a marvel, if made in 1949 or so. But in 1974, it looks out of place, in the
sense of opening up old, healed wounds
(21; emphasis mine)

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.

The nineties: Gadar and Veer-Zaara

The border rather than the crossroads returned as the dominant concern in
Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (“Revolution: A Love Story”, Anil Sharma, 2001). It was
a big-budget film marked by “catchpenny sloganeering and noisy melodrama”
(Gahlot in Joshi, 2004: 110–1).25 As Gahlot writes:
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  101
It can’t be denied that it was the blatant jingoism of Gadar that made it
one of the biggest grossers of all time—though its anti-Pakistan rhetoric,
excessive violence and communal incendiarism made a lot of discerning
viewers uncomfortable. The ‘masses,’ however, loved the film. In India it
was a bigger hit than Lagaan which was released during the same week …
They [presumably the masses again] enjoyed the Pakistan-bashing on the
basis of a more contemporary issue of terrorism … the fact that Sunny Deol
beat the Pakistanis on their home turf, fuelled an armchair patriotism in
Indian viewers …
(2004: 111)

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.

This is followed by filmic re-enactments of violence during Partition: a Sikh

family leaves Pakistan, providing poison as a safeguard against abduction to
the daughters, their refugee train is attacked by armed Muslims, the daughters
are raped and murdered. The train, by now established as a symbol of human
suffering, chugs into Amritsar station in India, where an incredulous Indian
crowd watches the blood-streaked compartments rolling in. The camera pans to
disbelief in the extreme close-up shot of the eyes of the hero, who reads the Urdu
words written in blood on the compartment: “Hindustanis, learn from us how to
cut [i.e. divide or cut in half].”
This montage of ostensibly “historic” events is meant to establish the film’s
truth claims, which are enmeshed with the film’s anti-Pakistan rhetoric and
imagery thereafter. The Sikh hero’s disbelief transforms into rage, and a rampage
of killing Muslims in India begins. It is at this time that the hero meets the heroine,
Sakina, daughter of a fleeing Muslim aristocrat in Amritsar station. Despite the
small replica of the Taj Mahal—a monument of Indian Islamicate architecture
and a memorial to the enduring love of a Mughal emperor—that Sakina clutches
102  Violence, gender, and citizenship
as she flees, Tara Singh, the hero, is unable to bring his sword down upon the
Muslim Sakina as his compatriots urge him. She is then left behind in another
chaotic scene of trains and pell-mell refugees, and found by Tara Singh trampled
and bleeding on the station platform. The camera closes up on Tara Singh’s face
and eyes to show him as a humane figure after all, though a vigilante. He first
finds the bloodstained glass Taj Mahal replica and is shown clutching it sorrow-
fully: the highly obtrusive background music here switches from Hindustani
classical raga to a sufi-esque lament. Meanwhile, Sakina recovers from her faint
and finds herself pursued by a gang of Hindu would-be rapists and murderers. As
she flees, she finds herself on the tracks of the departed train where Tara Singh
now stands, and as she faces him, the story flashes back their less turbulent past.
As Tara Singh fends off the maddened mob, flashback reveals that he and
Sakina had felt attracted to each other, unsanctioned by class and ethnicity,
during pre-Partition days. He now saves her after more bloodshed, despite his
co-religionists’ taunts than she is a “Muslamani,” a hated other. Singh, whose
eyes never stop glaring and tearing in turns, declares Sakina a “Sikh” woman by
anointing her head with his blood (as the mark of the vermilion that Hindu and
Sikh wives wear). Sakina thus becomes Tara’s “wife” and the next shot shows
Tara and Sakina on the same side of the 180-degree line, as opposed to facing
each other; they now face the ravenous mob, who are soon dispatched by Tara
Singh. Sakina opts to remain in India, even though Tara wants to return her.
She declares her desire to be to him the wife he wants—which as the well-bred,
educated, and elite Muslim woman she is not—one who cooks, cleans, and even
occasionally gets slapped by her husband. The lines between assault, recovery,
abduction, rupture, and rapture are thus summarily blurred.
Sakina takes to the life of the Punjabi woman and wife with gusto, with much
cultural tourism by way of Punjabi folk rituals and dancing and singing, and a
child is born. She then discovers in a newspaper that her parents are alive and well
in Pakistan. Drawn by ties of kinship and family to Pakistan for a “visit,” she gets
trapped by her own family, that is, by Muslims; her father refuses to acknowl-
edge her marriage or child. The indomitable Tara Singh now forces his way into
Pakistan. Just in the nick of time, too, for Sakina is about to be remarried to a
Muslim man, and is just engaging a Qazi—a Muslim priest—in heated theological
debate about women’s rights and exogamy in Sharia law. By this time, her family
are urging poison on her, a not-too-subtle flashback to the opening scene and the
Punjabi girls fleeing Pakistan. In language reminiscent of Mother India’s Radha,
Sakina refuses death because she is certain her husband will come to take her
back to India. Tara Singh meanwhile rages through Pakistan, blowing up bridges,
trucks, and people, and finally boards a burning train and drives himself and his
wife and child across the border into India. The camera repeats shots of Pakistani
armored vehicles blowing up, as if the intended audience could not possibly get
enough of the carnage of the enemy other. The entire military might of Pakistan is
unable in the end to prevent Sakina’s re-abduction to India (see Figure 2.6).
While the similiarities with Lahore will be obvious, this is a repetition with
a difference. The difference, clearly, is that of the substitution of the Muslim
female body as the fractious locus for identification of citizenry, as opposed
 Violence, gender, and citizenship  103
to Leelo’s Hindu body. The alteration that this difference makes, however, is
realized in the deafening diegetic audio-visual track that fills the deep silence,
the impossibility of singularity and therefore of communication, that women’s
Partition experience engendered. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter,
singularity was forced into a false universality when South Asian Hindus and
Muslims recognized in the other side their own mirror image, despite attempts
to differentiate the other from the self as radically dissimilar. Re-enactments
of identical communal events and acts by both sides enforced and reinforced,
however tacitly, an acknowledgment of identity, which repressed enunciation.
Only by displacing the context or site of the event onto a doubled difference, an
initial incomplete otherness written over by performances of incomplete “natu-
ralization” (Sakina’s near perfect mimicry of Hindu-ness nonetheless leaves her
vulnerable to re-absorption by whatever patriarchal context she enters), can the
film revive the inalienable difference and singularity that warrants brutality and
massacre. This doubling or looping of sameness and difference in the female
other’s body is intensified by that gender embodiment in both a spatial and
temporal register. As I mentioned before, the synchronic spatial register of expe-
rience invokes a similarity—Sakina’s predicament unmistakably parallels that
of the Hindu women massacred in the film’s opening sequence—but the film
adroitly crosscuts that register with that of a diachrony, which insists upon insu-
perable difference, by evoking in the scenes of Muslim family life in Pakistan
a sense of archaic primordiality, achieved primarily through the representation
of Sakina’s father’s household as absurdly countermodern but also “behind the
times” within the chronometry of Muslim history itself. As mentioned before,

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)

Representing the structural violence of political discord as redemptive myths

of individual naturalizing events is one way in which Hindi cinema deals with
inevitable incommensurabilities that establish the excess, the void, the liminal,
the exception—the woman, the Muslim, the feminized male—as the rule of
the state.
3 The man formerly known as the
actor
When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as
himself

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.

The “ins” and “outs” of Chak de India

The opening gambit of Chak de India is one of mise en abyme, of the self-loss
of India’s Muslim hockey team captain, Kabir Khan.4 The “conflict” posed at
the outset is one of the casting “out” of an undesirable element—the treacherous
Muslim who betrays India—from the Indian body politic. At the white-knuckled
close of a critical hockey match between Indian and Pakistan, Kabir Khan misses
a penalty shot, losing India the cup of victory. As the Pakistani team captain helps
up a rueful Kabir Khan from the ground, the gesture of goodwill turning into the
customary sportsman’s handshake, a photojournalist catches their gesture and
disseminates it with an accompanying question about Khan’s true loyalty, inter-
preting the act of a “good sport” as a stereotype of Muslim perfidy against India,
a betrayal of the nation to which he belongs. The slander spreads like wildfire,
accompanied by “mockumentary” footage of street rioting and incendiary mobs
reminiscent of many mediations of communal violence in twentieth-century
India that will be familiar to a national audience.
Diegetic journalistic interviews portray public response as overwhelmingly
antagonistic to the erstwhile darling of the public, the animus focusing squarely
on his Muslim identity; one interviewee explicitly remarks that “these people”
should have been expelled from the country (India) at the time of Partition (1947)
itself. While effigies burn in the streets, the scene fades into a key turning in a
lock, zooming out to show Kabir Khan and his mother locking up their ances-
tral home and leaving their “mohalla” or neighborhood. As the weeping mother
expresses faith in the “mohalla,” Kabir’s gaze scans the assembled crowd of
hostile neighbors; the camera then cuts to a man writing “Gaddaar” or “traitor”
in Devnagari script upon the wall bordering Kabir’s home. As they leave, the
screen fades into a blackout; the intertitle “7 years later” appears within a few
seconds, but suggests the intervening time as a lost time, a blank space, a dark
tabula rasa of oblivion and disappearance—complete mise en abyme or self-loss.
The rest of the film is about the restoration of this man from the state of
expulsion from his “country,” “in” which he must be included again as a loyal
“citizen.” As a parallel textual theme, the weak and ill-trained Indian women’s
hockey team, which he will return to coach seven years later, faces a similar
predicament until the film’s close of being counted, of being “included” or not,
and of being “in” or “out” of the running as India’s representative team in the
World Hockey Championship contest. The next narrative segment opens onto
a board meeting of the Indian Hockey Association, where members openly
express contempt for women players. The association chair states, “These are
Indian women who are used to serving men at home; what will they do running
around wearing knickers-wickers?” The sole woman member sitting next to him
looks coyly reproving at this, but does not challenge him, while the other male
members leer and smirk. The quintessential corrupt bureaucrat and petty tyrant,
 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  117
the chair also derides ethnic minority players from economically less-developed
states, thus sealing his chauvinism as both misogynistic and majoritarian.
Finally, when Kabir Khan meets the association asking to coach the women’s
team, the chair bluntly asks him “You’ve already lost your own honor (izzat),
and now you want to regain it through this dishonored women’s team, this team
that in this country is a national team only in name, not in fact?”5 The alliance
of women and minorities as emergent identities, as those who “count” in modern
India, is clearly risible to this officialdom. As persona non grata for the nation-
state, as non-normative citizens who are not to be trusted to represent the state,
the two categories are definitely “out”; yet, ironically, as we shall see, the salva-
tion of the state lies in their hands. This salvific position is contingent upon their
singularity being erased, however; neither as self-realizing women nor as self-
identified Muslims, but as generic others, the two categories of outsiders to power
and privilege are allowed back into the body politic so that the body might be
healed, restored, dragged back from its own peculiar mise en abyme. Kabir Khan
and the women hockey players are established, at the very outset, as homologous
lumpen, “impure” heterogeneity (Bataille 1985), and therefore “compatriots.”
Kabir Khan himself has a special aversion to partial identifications sensitive
to singular inflections, such as identifying with one’s state rather than with the
Indian nation in its wholeness. Prior to the players’ arrival, he protests his Hindu
ex-teammate and friend’s remark that the players shall soon be arriving from their
“own” states, pulling the latter up short on his conceptualization of the team as a
heterogenous body assembled from various state units rather than “Team India,”
exclaiming “Nothing has changed!” Framed in medium-close silhouette against
the India Gate Memorial in Delhi in the distant background, this juxtaposition
of the Hindu and the Muslim debating contested belonging in the postcolonial
nation gains added significance from the initial dedication of the monument to
the memory of Indian soldiers who died fighting for the British empire’s various
wars (1931), and from a cenotaph within, dedicated to the memory of Indian
casualties in the Indo-Pak war (1971). Like the conversation it arches over, the
memorial testifies to the vexed national discourse marked by the metonymy and
partiality of all symbols of colonial and postcolonial integration and assimilation.
In this scene, however, Kabir Khan is both “in” the frame where “India” is para-
mount, on the inside of the imagined community marked spatially by heritage
architecture, and emotionally “inside,” by his refusal to recognize “differences.”
Resuming the thread of his earlier remark that nothing had changed (uttered in
a positive sense at that time, however), he continues, “There were (only) states
then and there are (only) states now; nothing has changed.” It is clear that this is
what he must change. Yet in that project, difference, including his own, must not
be allowed to “matter.”
Following this we cut immediately to several shots of the players’ arrival, a set
of dynamic cameos accompanied by customized soundtracks that do nothing but
assert the “regional” identities of these players in ways that individualize them
concretely for viewers, though perhaps this is a proleptic device meant to trigger
viewer recognition of their own parochialism. In the sequence of shots showing
players sign up for the Indian team, there are clear signposts of provincialism,
118  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
contemptuous indigenization, aggressive marginalization, and entrenched
regionalist hierarchies dominating the hockey scene: players are shown as
being treated differentially and discriminatorily according to class, appearance,
ethnicity, linguistic cosmopolitanism, and, above all, regional affiliation. Players
from “backward” or border states are ridiculed and misunderstood, treated effec-
tively as “outsiders,” much like Kabir Khan himself. Kabir Khan changes all this
when he imposes upon the team equal parts of disciplinary toughness and team
solidarity. When a star player arrives late for registration, she almost gets thrown
off the team for her presumption; Kabir Khan counters her arrogance as “captain
of the Chandigarh team” by saying, “I can neither hear nor see the names of
states, just the name of a nation (‘mulk’): I-N-D-I-A.” His assault upon players’
personal, singular, and regional identities in the name of I-N-D-I-A continues
throughout the training.
The team hits back with active marginalization of the new coach as a trai-
torous and crazy Muslim. The leader of the resistance against him, a seasoned
player named Bindiya Naik, calls him “Tughlak” after the infamous fourteenth-
century Turkic sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, notorious for his eccen-
tric and absolutist, but inspired (according to some), reformism and innovation.6
She also baldly states that “Kabir Khan was actually captain of the Pakistan team
in Indian uniform.” Having previously “sold” the country at the men’s World
Cup, she fears aloud that he might sell “the women” this time. Bindiya’s slander
campaign is successful; one by one the players revolt against Kabir Khan’s
“barbaric” regime, shocked and angered by his draconian discipline and training,
and petition for his dismissal as team coach. The diegetic reason works over-
time to show the athletes failing to understand their true condition and interests;
downgraded since inception, the team has internalized the false consciousness
of wider society that women are not worth taking seriously. Despite their love
for the game, they have been used to this judgment and are resigned to their
lesser status and privileges, and bicker to secure crumbs of power and status for
their particular identities. It becomes the fellow sufferer Kabir Khan’s mission
to re-educate them; to restore their self-esteem, he has to retrain them not to see
themselves as either “regional” players or as “women.”
When the team revolts, Bindiya revives the charge of treachery, calling Kabir
a “traitor” to the country to his face. An enraged Kabir lifts his arm to strike
Bindiya but controls himself just in time. The camera movements here are worth
noting: in one frame the players are on the right of the frame, deeper in space as
a group, while the female assistant coach Krishna-ji and Kabir Khan face them
standing to the left of frame, with their backs to the camera. The camera crosses
the 180-degree line back and forth during the ensuing exchange, zooming in
upon the figures in medium to close-up shots as the bitterness and tension esca-
late between the coaches and the team. When the team captain reluctantly hands
Kabir Khan the petition for his dismissal, the camera takes a close frontal shot
of Krishna-ji—standing behind Kabir Khan—who exclaims to the players, “I’ll
give each one of you a slap.” The undaunted Bindiya is now shown in reverse-
frontal shot, saying to Krishna-ji, over whose shoulder the camera now looks,
“Why Krishna-ji?” The camera rapidly crosses the line again to reveal Krishna-ji
 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  119
and Kabir Khan facing the players, as Bindiya (facing them) continues to say,
“Why would you hit us?” Cut again to Bindiya facing Krishna-ji, saying, as
her gaze lifts to Kabir Khan to the left and out of frame, “We have not sold
our country.” In two rapid successive shots, Kabir Khan shouts, “Quiet!” as the
camera switches over Bindiya’s shoulder, and swivels back to behind Krishna-
ji’s. As he lifts his arm to strike Bindiya, Bindiya’s face shown as partly averted
anticipating the slap.
In this shot, the camera’s view when facing the players always includes
Krishna-ji shown as standing squarely behind Kabir Khan, on his side, in his
space, back to the camera. However, when he raises his arm, Krishna-ji is heard
to say, “Sir,” and moves slightly forward, nearing both Khan and Bindiya, as if
about to step over the 180-degree line. Though she does not, the camera keeps
cutting back and forth, as if trying to take the decision for her, first showing
Kabir Khan’s upraised arm from Krishna-ji’s perspective, then back again from
Bindiya and the players’ perspective, again from over Krishna-ji’s shoulder as it
begins to descend, the players watching facing camera from right of frame, then
over the players’ shoulders in a close-up of Krishna-ji’s face registering shock
(and her gasp on the soundtrack) as she stares in dismay at Kabir Khan’s hand,
straddling the 180-degree line and back to the players’ gaze as Khan lowers his
hand in frustration and turns away from the players. When he turns back to them,
we see him from a slight high angle over the team’s heads, to cut again to the
view from behind Krishna-ji’s shoulder with Bindiya and Khan, the two prime
combatants, in profile. Again facing the camera and the players, Kabir Khan
speaks for a while on his reason for returning to hockey, which was to defeat
that which had defeated him. While Krishna-ji, now apparently restored to her
faith in Khan, watches from her place slightly behind and to left of him, Khan
declares that the team opposes not him but his efforts to unite them as Team
India. As the camera resumes crossing back and forth from Khan to the players,
we see Krishna-ji’s face once more aligned with his rhetorical and physical posi-
tion when the camera faces him, and when he finally declares that he resigns as
the coach of the team, the camera zooms into rack focus of Krishna-ji’s incredu-
lous and stunned expression.
This entire sequence of camera positions and the accompanying soundtrack
offer the exegetic viewer faces, looks, bodies, and hands reacting to threatened
violence. As the female assistant coach, Krishna-ji occupies the most liminal
position in the filmic and pro-filmic world. As a non-elite (Hindu) woman who
has very little power in a male-dominated world of Indian sports, and as someone
unable to speak so as to be heard, she still attempts to temper the excesses of
the players, as well as the coach. Not only does she take Khan’s side when the
players submit their petition, but she is included in Khan’s space within the
frame whenever the players are shown rebelling and insulting him, suggesting
a united point of view with Khan himself. However, in her liminality, she is
also potentially unstable and volatile. She mirrors all the conflicting emotions
the exchange generates: while Bindiya’s insolence elicits a shocked disciplinary
response from her, Kabir’s upraised arm elicits equally horrified disbelief that
he is about to hit Bindiya, as his restraint and resignation subsequently trigger
120  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
grief and dismay. Being the shifting emotional register of the conflict between
men, women, Muslims and non-Muslims in this scene, Krishna-ji’s face is both
screen and mirror here, in this shot of crucial and tortured configurations of the
gendering of power and the empowering of minorities like Khan himself in the
film, but in such a way as to preserve the line between gendered affects: men
attack and shout, women recoil and gasp.
What does her gendered affect, registered twice—once as Kabir Khan’s hand
rises, and once as he announces his resignation—signify about gender and power
in this narrative? Along with this, what do her loss of faith and her recovery thereof,
and her slight movement toward the team and then fixity in place by Khan’s side,
tell us about the most “traditional” figure of womanhood in the film—nurturing,
responsible, reconciliatory, supplicatory, passive, and therefore powerless?
Having been the initiator of the threat of violence against these women—“I’ll
give each one of you a slap”—she reacts sharply to Khan’s near-actualization of
that threat. However, in the end, she returns her loyalty to him. This tells us that,
while Krishna-ji’s face and look might be motile, shifting, her body must not move
too far from Khan’s space, as indeed it does not. Once her look is activated, she
is quickly positioned to be within his space and facing the hostile team with him,
and subsequent camera angles (shots including her in Khan’s space) identify hers
as a primary and originating—indeed controlling—point of view, for which her
bodily situation adjusts.
The circuit between her body and look, and Kabir Khan’s hand, is thus acti-
vated to check the scandal of violence against women that would necessarily
sink a Muslim man’s reputation once and for all, by showing that violence as
originating from a gesture of maternal reproof and held in check by the womanly
look and voice. The registering of Khan’s potential for violence in her face and
her look serves as a repetition of her outrage at the players’ insubordinate action.
Whenever the tension and the potential violence in the shot exceed allowable
limits, the focus on her face, voice, and body dissipates them. The slight move-
ment of her body towards Khan’s raised arm deters and diffuses his motion and
levels the conflict, as though upon a pro-prioceptively sensed hinge. Above all
else, her refusal to move past the line separating Khan and the players onto the
latter’s side is critical in underscoring Khan’s authority and ethicality.
Krishna-ji’s body and look are positioned, therefore, upon a boundary that
marks the normativity of her gender, of typical femininity in the diegetic context,
and marks also the function of that femininity as conciliatory of “differences.”
Her loyalty and reliability make her the companion that the active and energetic
male needs, but she also acts as surrogate mother and interceder for the players,
the womanly presence restraining the enraged patriarch. She is the still-tradi-
tional wife and mother of this team, where traditional gender norms and margin-
alized identities are being otherwise modernized, reconstituted, or resorbed. It
is therefore crucial that she be “in” Kabir Khan’s space and aligned with his
point of view; in her absence from the frame, his hand and his gesture could
be completely misconstrued as affirming every stereotypical bias against the
treacherous Muslim male, who literally has a gaggle of non-Muslim women7 in
his power. Every physically energetic gesture by him is framed and monitored by
 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  121
the look of Krishna-ji, which wraps around and controls him, but persuasively,
indirectly, and non-coercively.
The team’s attitude changes miraculously when they rescue themselves by
fighting for one another, as a “team,” against public sexual harassment at a local
McDonald’s, where Khan takes them for a farewell lunch. Violence is reintro-
duced here, as in the previous conflict, as a mise en scène whereby gender identi-
ties are modernized and resorbed, a salutary means of harmonizing “differences”
and not as a mise en abyme. The harassment begins, tellingly, with insults to
the two “border state” players from Mizoram and Manipur, who had made their
debut appearance in the film as victims of sexual harassment by loafers at a street
corner during the players’ registration. These two players, ethnically distinguish-
able by a markedly more Westernized style, lighter skin, and east Asiatic pheno-
type, are singled out each time as easy “sexy” prey by “roadside Romeos,” and it
is to “save” them that the entire team now forgets its despondence to unite against
the common enemy, oppressive masculinity. Again, a discourse of “in” and “out”
is forcibly activated in this representation of gender oppression as homologous
to ethnic oppression. To save the “marginal” members of their nation, the team
unites and defeats male oppression; they beat the harassing men into leaving
them alone. Once they do this, however, the potential for other kinds of unity
dawn upon them, and they now accept Kabir Khan as the coach they need for
their proper training, letting him back “in” as well.
The integration of the incommensurable minority thus follows the logic of
women’s liberatory movements, while public rioting and violence are reconfig-
ured as salvific acts of liberation. Tellingly, in this assimilation of difference
into an attitude of unity, it is the women who resort to violence; Kabir Khan
does not join the fight as the heroic male savior, despite diegetic and exegetic
expectations that the male coach or SRK the star will do so. The postcolo-
nial nation’s promise of equal justice for all is extended here to its race-d and
gender-ed constituents without differentiation, and violence is reconfigured
as physical prowess or strength. While Khan’s masculinity is surprisingly not
staged during the fight scene, a deeper reason for this is revealed in Khan’s
shaping of this incident into a logic of self-reliance and integration, one that
serves both women and minorities in the disturbingly hierarchical postcolonial
nation-state. The look by Krishna-ji that had disabled the potential for violence
between Khan and Bindiya from exploding into destruction is now ours, the
look of the exegetic spectator, also looking on from Khan’s side and only inter-
vening in the scene of impending violence with a silent prayer for reconcilia-
tion initiated by a violent prelude.
The team has to give another test of their mettle by playing a deciding match
against the men’s hockey team that leads to them being sent abroad for the World
Cup in Australia, which they win after many more reversals and many more
lessons in unity and dedication to the national cause. While they lose their first
match against the Aussies, another post-colony, they tellingly defeat England,
the ex-colonizers, and go on to victory after victory. A great deal is made of
the Indian flag and other insignia of national pride along the way, especially by
way of throwaway comments about forcing “whites” to pay tribute to the flag,
122  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
recalling the scene of Khan’s conversation with his friend against the backdrop
of the historically palimpsestic India Gate in Delhi. Finally, when the victorious
team returns to India, the players, as well as the coach, are greeted with frenzied
jubilation. Several diegetic “commentaries” superimposed on the image track
declare that Kabir Khan is the epitome of the true “Indian.” Khan and his mother
are shown returning to their ancestral home, their erstwhile hostile neighbors
gathering before their house, looking in wonder and awe. The re-assembling of
the neighbors suggests the re-absorption of the Muslim into the community or
mohalla, the breach hereby closing, the “outsider” suspected of violence against
the national body being “in”-cluded, and the inside/outside dichotomy being
reordered.
When Kabir Khan notices a young Sikh boy industriously scratching out the
word “Gaddar” or traitor carved into the boundary wall of the Khan home, he
offers the boy his own hockey stick, holding it up first as though flourishing a
sword of victory (still an ambivalent image, of course), before handing it over
to the boy, who holds it high and shouts “Chak de!” while the neighborhood
bursts into spontaneous applause, signaling the Muslim Khans’ absolution and
re-integration. In the end, getting the girls back into sports, into the game, gets
Khan back into India. However, this still does not bear out Vinay Lal’s thesis
that there is no true outsider in Indian cinema (1998). This film, as we have seen,
works extremely hard to make Khan an insider. Still, the very last shot of the film
involving Khan shows him re-entering his ancestral home, in black silhouette
cut-out, and shutting the door behind him so that we the viewers are plunged into
absolute darkness, a darkness recalling the one that followed his departure from
home seven years earlier, but that also reminds us that, in the end, we will not
have access to his privacy or to his interiority, that he will remain inaccessible
in his particularity, in his private, intimate context, besides and beyond the fact
that he has been seemingly re-assimilated into the fabric of national political life.
In contrast, after this we see individual players returning to friends, families,
and other private contexts that individualize, particularize, and embody them as
celebrated “women of India” in their singularity and specificity, both reconfig-
uring and re-establishing women as national “ players.”
Who’s in, and who’s out, one asks.

Fact, fiction, and postmodern histories

The viewer might not remember this, but the question of Kabir Khan’s guilt in
betraying his national team to the adversarial Muslim nation Pakistan’s hockey
team is never resolved in the film. We see Khan resent the allegations, and of
course we, as viewers, implicitly align ourselves with him, but we do not see
the allegations investigated, dismissed, or revoked. In other words, the film does
not provide a final answer to the question, “Did Kabir Khan betray the Indian
hockey team on the basis of primordial religious affiliation with an inimical
foreign state?” When Kabir is re-incorporated into the Indian body politic, it is
because he rescues and revives the women’s team, not because he is absolved of
guilt for the previous event.
 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  123
What is the status, then, of that event, the initial charge of betrayal? In
many senses the status of this event would appear to fit the Freudian descrip-
tion of “nachtraglichkeit,” or the deferred action or retrospectivity that traces a
secondary event to a primary, original one, without making the secondary one
ephemeral or unreal, but tying its interpretation, its “meaning” decidedly to the
indeterminacy, the ambiguity of the first primal experience, the first event; this is
the foundation of trauma and analysis. Neither event can ever be fully explained
or understood, but neither can be waved away, or understood in isolation from
the other.
In the historian’s parlance, this relationship of events within the framework
of “nachtraglichkeit” structures the contemporary meanings of historical
“events” that hold at a distance, in abeyance, the distinct, foundational differ-
ence between fact and fiction, or experience and narration or interpretation.
Chak de India’s metafiction of a contemporary Muslim re-experiencing, under-
going the fate of Indian Muslims at Partition all over again, attacked and cast
out of the national body politic, ends with a redemptive “a-historical” conclu-
sion—Khan is accepted back into the nation as a re-embodied entity, a “camp”
version of masculinity and Muslimness—but this avoidance of the “real,” of
the “fact” question, underpins the possibility of such a resolution. The avoid-
ance of “fact” works redemptively in the other direction as well: if India can
forego exact accounting of Kabir Khan’s transgression, Khan can also forego
an exact accounting of India’s offence against him; he never holds the nation
to account for what was done to him, but patiently awaits his re-incorporation
as a result of his service to the nation. In this sense, then, the question of the
original accusation of betrayal as an evental site that leads to the explosion of
doubt, accusation, trauma, and rejection of a citizen of India from the national
scene and public is entirely subsumed, bypassed, and foregone for a version of
history that is “postmodern” in its treatment of a quasi-historical metafiction—
the story of Muslim plight in modern India—as one where fact and fiction do
not need to be thoroughly assessed and demarcated, but in fact inform each
other’s content and structure.8
I categorize Chak de India as such a “historical metafiction” or a “fictional
history,” because its entirely made-up story hinges upon the linked enactment
of two historical events: Partition ethnocide in the forties and communal ethno-
cide in the nineties (with a long history of similar events strung between these
two chronological points). It is a fictional account of history that then demands
a re-reading of history’s “original” trauma in the syntax of future generations
remembering, re-narrativizing and re-enacting that trauma both antagonistically
and empathetically in order to exorcise it. The point of such fictional histories
and historical metafictions, as Hayden White has demonstrated in a reading of
Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, is not to establish the facticity or fictionality of histor-
ical events, but to trace the evolving narrativization and memorializing of such
events as history, or to follow the narrative’s process of determining what the
very distinction between fact and fiction means and whether it holds.
The primacy of fact over narration or interpretation—on which so-called
“authentic” history was thought to be based in previous definitions of the
124  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself
“historical”—is superfluous in this “fictional history” of the event of Muslim
trouncing and denunciation that is an endemic, embedded feature now of the
national historical oeuvre, and must be repeatedly re-engaged and exorcised in
order for a coherent self-narrative of the socio-historical situation to exist.
However, this kind of “postmodern” public historiography, wherein the distinc-
tion between fact and fiction matters neither in terms of structure nor content
of narrative, is conditional upon the homogeneity of the constituent public that
receives such histories. Any heterogeneity within such constituent publics would
mean a greater focus on the “truth” question. This is analogous to the way that
Janet Staiger, in response to White, has argued for a shift in emphasis from anal-
ysis of representational modes to analysis of audiences and their heterogeneity
(Staiger 1996). As Staiger argues, postmodernism notwithstanding, people do
still want to get at the “truth” or the “facts,” and if the people or the audience are
differentiated, heterogeneous, segmented, etc., the truth question and conflict
over it become more palpable. Hence, the abjuration of the demand for “facticity”
is only enabled by the fact that Kabir Khan is not reincorporated as a (heteroge-
neous) Muslim, but homogenized as an Indian, and a feminized one at that. Had
his Muslimness, and particularly his Muslim maleness, actually been “in play,”
the issue of “[just] the facts” of the first communal incident surrounding him
would have also been rather more in play, ambiguating his seeming assimilation
with threats of terror, violence, or even simply lingering resentment. Had he been
more overtly “Islamicized” as an Indian Muslim facing a tribunal of those not
like him, it would have been more important to get at the “whodunit” question of
the “fact” of his culpability or innocence. However, since his “difference” from
another Indian is remembered only in order to be forgotten—evoked only to
be completely suppressed—the facticity of the charge against him is allowed to
become irrelevant in this sort of fictional historiography. As chapter five will make
clearer, Kabir Khan, aka SRK’s “embodiment” in Chak de India, is a “represen-
tation” rather than “presentation,” in that his “story” as well as his “history” are
given to the viewer as fully transmissible, abstracted, coherent, and viewable in
entirety—in the sense that representation claims full power of hermeneutic and
narrativization of its object, whereas presentation gives us, again, “just the facts,”
and is silent about their meaning. In White’s terms, this “treatment of the event
is a representation (Vorstellung) of a thought about it, rather than a ‘presentation’
(Darstellung) of the event itself” (1996: 27).
This kind of “embodiment” or characterization recalls the insight offered by
White that:

Modernist literary practice effectively explodes the notion of those ‘charac-

ters’ who had formerly served as the subjects of stories or at least as repre-
sentatives of possible perspectives on the events of the story; and it resists
the temptation to ‘emplot’ events and the ‘actions’ of the ‘characters’ so as
to produce the meaning-effect derived by demonstrating how one’s end may
be contained in one’s beginning …
(1996: 24; emphasis mine)
 When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  125
In other words, an insider never can be an outsider, and vice versa; a hermetic seal
separates the two positions that would be breached only at the cost of a complete
demolition of the category of identity itself.9 Thus Kabir Khan, despite the layers
of Muslimness that shore him up, is shown as a perfectly secular Indian and also,
of course, politically re-naturalized only through gender camp. Throughout the
film, we never see him enact (an alienating) Muslimness in any way, such as by
acts of worship, affiliation with a community or kin circle, a family, Muslim
friends, etc. His existence is completely monadic, circumscribed entirely by the
exigency of winning a trophy for a “dishonored” team, and thereby regaining his
own honor and that of his female protégés-cum-alter-egos.
Gyan Pandey has argued that, in the context of ethnic and gender violence at
Partition, violated communities took refuge in the notion of the absolute outsider,
the perpetrator of unspeakable violence who could not have at any time and in
any way have been an insider. As Pandey has argued, the distinction between
spatial insiders and outsiders in postcolonial narratives about violence and
community has to be tenacious precisely because it is tenuous. The space of
community was fragile; the constitutive outside had to be reinforced in order to
demarcate communal space. Boundaries are porous and dangerously indetermi-
nate. To shore itself up, the threatened community had to conjure up an outsider
who was solely responsible for the violence done to the community, despite the
“fact” that at times of communal turbulence neighbors became killers, and the
crucial outside/inside spatial distinction impossible to sustain (Pandey 1990).
Nevertheless, and indeed because of this, the “fiction” prevailed that one is either
an outsider or an insider, a violent perpetrator or a refugee victim, never both and
neither. Khan’s fictional history cannot be told, for this reason, as the story of
an Indian “Muslim,” but has to be told as the story of a mis-recognized Muslim
“Indian.” The blurring of the categories of fact and fiction, literal and literary,
event and historiography—necessary for a “modern” or “postmodern” telling
of the story of national identity—is conditional upon the petrifaction of norma-
tive and liminal categories, of those who are counted and those who are not,
insiders and outsiders, secular patriots and unreconstructed minorities, Indians
and Muslims.
4 Romancing religion
Bollywood’s painless globalization

Market places here carried the invisible imprimatur of ruling Authorities …

Further, markets were aligned to a landscape dotted with sacred sites, often
sharing the same space with established religious edifices: the mosque, the
temple, and the saintly tomb.
(Sen 1998: 8–9)

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)

Hindutva is political Hinduism or religious nationalism; its ideologue Savarkar

defined a Hindu as “a person who regards this land … from the Indus to the Seas
as his fatherland (pitribhumi) as well as his Holyland (punyabhumi)” (Varshney
 Bollywood’s painless globalization  127
2002: 65; Chakraborty 2003; Van der Veer 1994: 106). By focusing on gender
ideology as an axial modality, in which ethnic and religious nationalisms and
violence were becoming lived within the rash of recent Hindi films—which I will
henceforth call “Bollywood” (Rajadhyaksha 2003)—I began to probe the neolib-
eral refashioning of these new films in neoliberal yet Hindutva-saturated India
(Hovden and Keene 2002: 1–6, 59, 76–7, 183). As Van der Veer and others have
suggested, the local, regional, and market-oriented affiliations fundamental to
religious nationalism have been too easily missed in delineations and analyses of
the postcolonial nation-state, and I began to suspect that a related and contingent
elision of the polythetic gendering inseparable from such communal affiliations
required reversing.
At its inception, my research seemed to suggest a specific and unilateral
connection between Bollywood’s redistilled scenarios of communalized and
gendered violence and its complement—gendered religious nationalisms—as
singularly BJP/Hindutva-specific phenomena. After October 2004, with the
toppling of the BJP government from central power, I feared I was an author
in search of an argument. Sadly however, in real terms, this state of rhetorical
homelessness was short-lived. The party was ousted, but the films kept coming,
and they retained the liminalities of gender identities and performances that
characterized BJP-era communalist and neo-nationalist yet neoliberal devel-
opmentalism. A set of connections had long existed between Indian politico-
religious and economic nationalisms and Indian film-making—possibly since
the late 1980s—as linked structures within a national imaginary of contests
over hegemony, whose very basis was the performance of gender and debates
over embodiment, including changing representations of the male heroic body
(Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: ix, xi, xxi; Sangari and Vaid in Jayawardena
and de Alwis 1996: 260–6, 283).
Falk writes of global neoliberalism:

our future is being primarily shaped by numerous interactions among the

many varieties of technocratic globalist, social reactionary and mean-spirit-
ed traditionalists, a strange interplay between advanced sectors of electronic
capital (for example, Bill Gates’ Microsoft) and various backlash phenomena
associated with a variety of nationalist, ethnic and religious extremisms …
(Falk in Hovden and Keene 2002: 93)

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:

These madcap action adventures, aimed primarily at proletarian audi-

ences, update the beloved ‘stunt films’ of earlier decades with tales of
avenging superheroes (generally played by Amitabh Bachchan) who are
often the lost sons of princes or magnates, happily relocated among the
People. Working on a limited budget (much of which necessarily goes
for tanks, explosives, and Bacchan’s salary) and making marvelously
inventive use of everyday Indian objects (such as cycle stands, tongas,
whips, and Karnataka State), Desai here crafts a non-stop action fable …
in kickass dishoom-dishoom form.6

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:

Indians in the US tend to seek a religio-cultural definition of their identity,

partly because of a desire to side-step this issue of their racial marginality,
and partly because of a well-established pattern of reformulating cultural
difference through religious affiliation … the social practices associated
with Hindu religion become progressively less important in relation to their
utility as a marker of their cultural or civilizational distinction, and as a set
of privately-held beliefs
(Rajagopal 2000: 489–90; emphasis mine; see also Raj 2000;
Ong 1999: 1–3, 5–6)

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)

To understand the directives upon familialism and civilizationism emanating

from the RSS, it is instructive to examine the familial organizational framework
within which the RSS and its offshoots operate. Narula writes:

The RSS also reportedly runs upwards of 300,000 shakhas—local cells

organized on the principle that only a militant and powerful Hindu move-
ment can counter threats from so-called outsiders. Shakhas recruit young
boys and men, fifty to one hundred for each cell, providing them with exten-
sive physical training and indoctrinating them with the Hindutva ideology.10
(2003: 5)

Again, in the transnational diasporic context, the VHP forges a “politicized

Hindutva community … [whose] ‘familiar-familial’ space occupied by religious
preachers draws large numbers of believers into the Hindutva fold” (Mukta 2000:
442; also Rajagopal 2000: 473).
Another aspect of the reframing of the Hindu nation as the RSS family is the
story of what uses are found for women in this ideology. Amrita Basu writes,
“The forces that are most committed to politicizing gender have treated women
as the repositories of religious beliefs and the keepers of the purity and integrity
of the community” (1998: 3). In this matter, as Sarkar has shown, RSS women
do not lag behind:

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:

an immense stimulation of purchasing and the promotion of commodity

distribution through aggressive advertising campaigns and media techniques
… relates … to … a specifically feminine consumerism [that] increased
dramatically after India was launched on the new career of liberalizing its
economy under World Bank and IMF guidelines … Older forms of gender
ideology are merged with new offers of self-fashioning and a relative politi-
cal equality in the field of anti-Muslim and antisecular violence. Patriarchal
discipline is reinforced by anticipating and accommodating [women’s]
consumerist aspirations …
(1998: 103–4; see also Feldman in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 35; Menon and
Bhasin 1996; Kannabiran in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 32–41)

As Basu has written, “Behind the semblance of ‘fundamentalists’ traditionalism’

there lurks a modern political project” (1998: 13, 177–82; Feldman in Jeffery and
Basu 1998: 34; Hasan 1998: 73).
My own argument in this essay is that Hindutva cultural politics as imagined
by Bollywood fixes upon the threat of women’s changing agency as “all that is
wrong” (Feldman 1998: 37, 46; Rouse in Jefferey and Basu 1998: 54–65, 69).
Hence women cannot but become, indeed must become, spectral non-agents,
non-subjects except in the consumerist sense within the core economic processes
of identity-loss or affirmation. Sangari and Vaid make this very explicit indeed
in their exploration of women’s spectralization in the social resurgence of sati in
India, which entrenches the practice ideologically by:

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):

through this virtualization that in truth ‘actualizes’ the process of spiritu-

alization-spectralization, the essence of the religious reproduces itself …
these mediatic manifestations of religion, Christian or other, are always tied,
142  Bollywood’s painless globalization
in their production and their organization, to national phenomena. They are
always national … we are heir to religions that are designed precisely to
cooperate with science and technology …
(2001: 61–2)

Moreover, modernity as ethnicity-driven civilizationalism is also a kind of perform-

ativity, hence its clear affinity with the cinema. What or who one is—the diaspora
would argue in the UK or the US—is a matter of not only a religious essence, but of
cultural performativity heavily inflected, indeed masterminded, by a religion that
is also, once again, heavily and spectacularly performative (Rajagopal 2000: 468;
Raj 2000: 538, 542). To this, also add the perception that, in the case of the diaspora,
the so-called “pure” religious identity is a response not only to perceived fluxes of
economic identity and experience, but to perceived racism from the postcolonial
metropolitan state. In that latter case, the Hindu nationalist covertly acknowledges
the centrality of official economy and state, the metropolitan racists, as major
players in the genesis of diaspora primordial Hindu identity. The diasporic Hindu
nationalist is interpellated into being by this non-religious identity, in response
to non-religious threats to personhood, livelihood, security, etc. Hence diaspora
performativity is crucial to the concept of diaspora nationalism, and gendered reli-
gious performativity in filmic representations and in transnational communities
alike create and reify these high patriarchal and “familiar-familial” images of iden-
tity-in-community, as reflected particularly in the Virat Hindu Sammelan (Great
Hindu Gathering) held in Milton Keynes in 1989 (Mukta 2000: 453–5; Kumar
2005: 184–5; Rajagopal 2000: 471, 474–6, 480–4).
Religion especially interpellates diaspora identity in ways that encompass
disturbing affective responses and behaviors, such as “Hindu hurt” and “Hindu
denigration” (Mukta 2000: 447; see also Rajagopal 2000: 468). These are terms
used to mobilize diaspora Hindutva nationalism in the face of what is seen as the
racisms and imperialisms of adoptive Western homelands, such as Britain and the
US (Mukta 2000: 444, 446, 450). Hindutva’s own practiced culturalism—as defined
and masterminded by the VHP—also makes its connections with globalized
Bollywood’s imagistic of the nation profitable and intuitive, as the VHP’s own
articulation “does not arise simply out of the field of religiosity” (ibid.: 446).
Unspoken but dominant patriarchal mandates now stage and run poojas (ibid.:
463). Indeed, the telltale sign of the collectivist masculinization of the familial reli-
gious moment has been the prominent resurgence of the cult of the god Ram, the
mythical Aryan ruler of Ayodhya, India, who defeated the indigenous demon-king
Ravana and rescued his abducted wife, Sita, from Ravana’s kingdom, Lanka.17
The Aryan god Ram’s imagistic hegemony is symbolic of paternalistic Hindutva’s
power to dominate lower-caste, non-Hindu groups. Equally disturbingly, the mili-
tarization of Ram’s potential is captured in images from the 1990s (see Figure 4.1).18
Ram in the 1970s was a milder, more pacific deity, but since the ’80s he has
become a glorified Hindutva warrior. The protection and rescue of the family’s
women from unclean and ethnically impure outsiders, a central interpretation of
the Ram story (the Ramayana) since its inception, lends additional fillip to the
story that Bollywood tells of the patriarchal familialization of Hindutva worship
 Bollywood’s painless globalization  143
Figure 4.1
Ram in the 1990s
(http://www.patwardhan.com/
films). Courtesy of Anand
Patwardhan.

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 liberal stress on [economic] institution building is not based on naiveté

about harmony among people, but rather on agreement with realists about
what a world without rules or institutions would look like: a jungle in which
governments seek to weaken one another economically and militarily,
leading to continual strife and frequent warfare …
(Hovden and Keene 2002: 25)

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:

liberalism focuses on … privately organized social groups and firms …

[whose] transnational as well as domestic activities are important for liberal
analysis … liberalism … seeks to discover ways in which separate actors,
with distinct interests, can organize themselves to promote economic effi-
ciency and avoid destructive physical conflict …
(Hovden and Keene 2002: 16)

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)

As happened in this case of global virtualization of Hindutva triggered by a deity’s

improbable active interventions in reviving everyday faith, HAHK!’s deity is
instrumental in restoring the flow of communication and in reuniting the family
in the paterfamilial pleasures of piety and pathos. Sentimental consumerism
blends seamlessly with a new sentimentalized masculinity to simulate traditional
romance. Even though the pooja scene of Mard shows a direct interlocking of the
devotee’s gaze with the deity, Mard’s scene differs from that in HAHK! on two
crucial counts: first, the intensity of Mard’s scene is not in faith alone but in a
challenging defiance expressed as a lonely sadomasochism, and second, because
the unification anticipated is individual yet framed within community values, not
yet defined by brand-name publicity offered as ideal domesticity.
In comparing and contrasting the scene from Mard with neoliberal Bollywood’s
staging of the “sacred” and the object-cathected familial tableaux structuring
them, my object has been to propose a genealogy of the new diasporic and
Hindutva-identified family, constructed through the pleasures of piety as a pain-
less political, pietistic, consumerist, and gendered experience (Gill 2002: 144).
The narcotic piling of transnational consumerist effects was conspicuously
absent in Hindi cinema of the 1970s and ’80s. Citations of Western modernity
were crude and stereotypical, drawing imagery primarily from an anti-colonialist
past and consciousness. No cokes or computers in Mard, only wonderdogs and
carthorses. The deus ex machina is a traditional community goddess, no slick,
well-groomed Aryanized family altarpiece. The lading on of pain as an affect
in the worship scene from Mard signals the pre-liberalization Hindi cinema’s
low-budget negotiations and notations of social and political power, as well as
the constitutive value of trauma in its filmic and social production of gender and
subalternity. The contrastive absence of pain in neoliberal Bollywood’s mise en
scène of the “religious” and its attendant cathexes of familial and political power
is notable. Also remarkable is the absence of violence and the political as modes
of negotiation in the neoliberal diasporic Bollywood imagistic. In contrast, the
real Hindutva movement’s political engagement is significantly characterized by
its recourse to violence and bodily pain, real or ritualized.22 How intriguing then
is the comment of an IMDB user from London, that “this was the turning point
for the Indian Cinema, not Sholay, since this movie is for the family where as
[sic] Sholay was for the Community” (IMDB, 18 March 2004, user comments
for HAHK!).
The realization that filmic mise en scène of the “religious”—a moment of
renegotiation or wresting of social and political power as cathected through kin
and familial ideologies represented by tableaux or by strategic discursive place-
ment of gendered individuals—differs notably in pre- and post-liberalizaton
Hindi films; that the lone individual’s crisis is portrayed in the former and a
familial crisis of gendered authority is portrayed in the latter reconfirms that the
two eras of film-making and their attendant reproductions of gender and family
152  Bollywood’s painless globalization
mirror a spatial, as well as temporal, lag. The formula film Mard was made at a
time when the “globalized” diaspora or non-resident entity did not significantly
figure in the Indian national imaginary. Box office returns being predicted to be
modest, film financing did not count on NRI funding or ethnocentric business
empires that Bollywood sometimes does. Mard’s sadomasochistic construction
of masculinity within the religious mise en scène of sundered family and renego-
tiated social power therefore reflects an earlier and more territorialized national
construct of civic crisis and political action. Here, the actor and the character—
and perhaps the film industry—are essentially alone, pitted and framed against
a non-dominant choral backdrop that does not intervene in the reconstitution of
the family as a patriarchal institution.23
In HAHK! and in Yaadein, however, the negotiation of power and the constitu-
tion of gendered identity emphasizes the familial tableau, the kinship ties that
bind even in absence, which has been the mantra of transnational Hindutva-based
Indian nationalism. The presence or absence of on-screen sadomasochistic pain
in mise en scènes of piety mark the differential aesthetics and politics of sacrality
and liminality in pre-liberal and neoliberal Hindi films. Male trauma as signifier
of liminal publics and their negotiations of neoliberal system worlds—the state
and the official economy—disappears from the repertoire of Bollywood after
economic liberalization. This is probably related to the VHP’s curing of male
“weakness” (Van der Veer 1994: 134). In the neoliberal imagistic of Bollywood,
nation and family constellate around a religious moment and modality, whose
aspirations and gestures are civilizational, painless, as well as ethnocidal. The
cathartic and radicalizing mobilizations of pain and pathos in earlier Hindi films
are re-imagined as pleasure and mobility in neoliberal Bollywood. The gender
and religious politics of the evolving images and models are, however, deeply
disturbing in plotting the future of nationalism.
Gender is the borderland, and borders are gendered. The structure of repeti-
tions, deeply loved and ardently enshrined in the Bollywood formula, has ceased
to yield the political potential outlined by Walter Benjamin’s mass art or the
postcolonial aesthetic suggested by Fredric Jameson; I believe it once did so
(Benjamin 1999: 731–51; Jameson 1986). Bollywood has lost the polysemic,
polythetic character of a piety diversely, inter-ethnically lived, and offers instead
consumerist extravaganza as genealogical multiplicity, hierarchical diktat as
common ground, and liminal gender and subaltern identity as the mediated
globalized consumer of the happy diaspora family, ruled by the law of the patri-
arch (Desai 2004: 47).
5 Love triangles at home and
abroad
Male embodiment as queer enactment

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)

One such category of representation is, needless to say, male sexualized

embodiment.6
Heroes now represented increasingly more peregrinatory or diasporic char-
acters, as well as characters more at ease with the “new” woman, who is often a
160  Love triangles at home and abroad
social and economic equal and well able to hold her own. I will return to this last
point further on; suffice it to say, these heroes also represent men more openly
playful and experimental in their behavior and relations with other men—more
focused on plural male “friendships,” on buddy culture—and only partly as a
result of the pressures of negotiating and transacting femininity as a value cum
obligation of heterosexual identity within hetero-patriarchy. While this move-
ment began in the late eighties with Salman Khan and Aamir Khan vehicles
jostling with a parallel “underworld” noir, as well as Bachchan’s tiring epics
of magnified heroism, revenge, salvation, and—as Mazumdar says—subjecti-
vation,7 once again SRK was the prime vehicle of this lateral transversal of the
Hindi male actor, re-inventing the motif of the “son of India” as diasporic and
sometimes polymorphously or ambiguously gendered and embodied, sojourner
or man of the people (far more than Bachchan, who himself played such roles very
rarely and not at all in his earlier films). After SRK’s DDLJ (Dilwaale Dulhaniya
Le Jayenge, 1995, Aditya Chopra), others followed suit.
Bachchan did not fall by the wayside with this new lateralization of the hero;
he adapted and fitted himself into the lateral schema of stardom. Story has it
that after a streak of playing his old self in increasingly failing productions such
as Mrityudaata (“Executioner,” 1997, Mehul Kumar) and Sooryavansham (“Sun
Dynasty,” 1999, Satyanarayn Rao), he walked across to director Yash Chopra’s
house and asked him for work, saying he needed a job. Chopra offered him
Mohabbatein (2000, Aditya Chopra) which launched his transition into the world
of rhizomatic heroes as the intransigent and uncompromising towering patriarch
who eventually bends to measure his success by the happiness of these little
folk in the films. The latter’s bubblegum romances were rescued from tragedy
by his characters’ re-humanization from patriarch to generation-jumper, who
learns to adapt to the lives and loves of contemporary youth, as he has in fact
also been jumping generations by acting for film-makers with whose fathers
he started his own career (Somayya 2009: 208–9). In fact, the publicity mate-
rials of the films since Mohabbatein, along with their overall shot compositions,
marked a transition to a differential spatial embodiment of the Bachchan hero
(Mohabbatein; Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, 2001, Karan Johar). Rather than the
older vertical composition built along the towering liminality of Bachchan’s body
itself as their axial orientation, posters of his newer films began to cast him more
as a point on a lateral spectrum of family and kin, still taller than the rest but
visibly more assimilated, integrated, and conceding a lateral mode of identity
and identification.
This is not to argue that Bachchan does not retain and carry with him a “high”
aura as a nostalgic tribute or even a commodifiable “signature” of what contextu-
alized his identity in Hindi films. Here we can recall the jagged eye-line matches
and points of view in the tumultuous scene of the invisible but tall star signing
his excrement-spattered photo for slum-dweller Jamal in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog
Millionaire (2008). The photo, retrieved from a communal pit by the boy, is held
up to the unseen star for signing; Boyle’s diegetic fans and exegetic spectator
accompany this unseen figure who is so tall he must look down from a seemingly
great height upon the photo being held out. Besides the exegetic spectator’s prior
 Love triangles at home and abroad  161
knowledge that this is Bachchan’s image, simply by the catachrestic evocation of
star as height we can tell that it is the Big B himself who autographs Jamal’s copy
of his image. The joke is, as always, about height and elevation, about towering
above a pell-mell and undifferentiated crowd of fans, and relative eye-line asym-
metry metonymizes the actor’s body itself, as well as the actor’s impossible—
carrying the traces of excrement from a public outhouse, the photo connecting
star and fan comes with connotations of extreme contagion but is converted into
extreme fetish—connection to the fan, his signature instantly transforming the
unspeakable into the auratic.
Along with the lateralization of the hero, however, gender identities and roles
in Hindi cinema level out, become more interactive, rhizomatic, and co-impli-
cated performances or co-constitutive representations. By “co-implicated” and
“co-constitutive” I mean that screen men and women and off-screen fans more
frequently inhabit the same worlds and same spaces, for example via modern
romance that is “naturalistic” in scenarios and settings, such as “realistic”
song-dance sequences set in nightclubs, parties or North Indian wedding cele-
brations—locations where their spectators might more conveniently imagine
themselves romancing—rather than upon a Swiss mountainside. Heroes since
Salman Khan and SRK have also become performatively and kinesthetically
“leveled,” with on-screen female bodies that previously used to be primarily
charged with dancing, dressing up or down, and simpering. Even Bachchan now
occupies an evocative, iconic, and sometimes citational hotspot in largely lateral
publicity images and diegetic collective song-dance sequences, which depict
family as a linked chain of people waltzing away at festivities and gatherings; his
transformation from verticality is particularly evident nowhere in such musical
sequences where he is, quite literally, “down with the people.” Even in “nega-
tive” anti-hero roles such as the back-to-back films Aankhen (“Eyes,” 2001, Vipul
Shah) and Kaante (“Thorns,” 2002, Sanjay Gupta) that rework the Sholay plot8
of ex-con heroes, the principle of portraiture is what one might call “con lateral”;
Kante’s publicity (see Figure 5.1) depicts six tall men, Bachchan in the middle,
striding into the heart of danger a la Ocean’s Eleven (2001, Stephen Soderbergh).
This lateralization, “shortening,” and apparent emasculation of the actor’s
body and gestures becomes indexical of the potential to locate the unheroic
hero finally in the masses, to “normalize” him, so to speak, as finally repre-
sentational and not a purely stylized presentation of the presented. This has
culminated in what is today as seen as a wave of films about the not-extraor-
dinary ordinary man—exemplified mostly by actors such as Irrfan Khan (BB,
Mumbai Meri Jaan), Saif Ali Khan (Omkara, 2006, Vishal Bhardwaj), Shahid
Kapoor (Kaminey, “The Scoundrels,” 2009, Vishal Bhardwaj), etc.—and not
about his non-representative, syntagmatic relationship with the towering figure
of the singular star. A lowering and lateralization of star movements and bodies
now enables fantasies of a paradigmatic, metaphoric relationship between star
and fan as inhabitants of the same “commons,” i.e. of representation, a repre-
sentation that promises not singular outcomes of repetition, but sameness and
identification, and returns the funhouse of simulacra as the doorway to a new
aspirational identity.
162  Love triangles at home and abroad

Figure 5.1 Kaante, offset lobby card. Image courtesy of Pritish Nandy Communications
(www.pritishnandycom.com).

Dispersal: a new Hindi cinematic romance

As opposed to what might have been called Bachchan’s “mobilization” of the
masses in his seventies and eighties films—a mobilization whose momentum
remained confined within the territorial borders of the Indian nation-state—a
new “mobility” appears in Hindi cinema of the late nineties and the early twenty-
first century. I will now look at two of these films—Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and
Jaan-E-Mann (2006)—to trace the arc between an earlier Hindi cinema of “mobi-
lization” and the later cinema of South Asian diasporic “mobility.” I will read this
arc as evidence of a continuing discursive and imagistic formation of space and
national subjecthood as co-constitutive of the Hindi cinematic geo-body.
I have argued elsewhere that a politics and poetics of space and spatial contain-
ment of the aspirational Indian body are central to the imagination of a national
chronotope, as well as the narrative logic of Indian cinema. In a sense, migratory
and displaced characters are nothing new in Hindi cinema, as a slew of films
about migrations between country and city will suggest.9 However, the fraught
idea of the migrant Indian, of the Indian geo-body suspended between nation
and diaspora, occurs in films much earlier than the nineties; migration to the
West becomes articulated from the sixties onward, usually in terms of despera-
tion and mourning as a path of no return. In Ritwik Ghatak’s 1961 film Komal
Gandhar (“A Soft Note On a Sharp Scale”), already displaced refugee lovers
discuss the emerging reality of migration to the West, which affects the woman
especially because she is engaged to be married to a man who is abroad while
trying to decide between that and her commitment to theatre and indigeneity.
The stage and the state are set here in a mutually antagonistic relationship, with
the absent diaspora forming a beckoning temptation threatening to depopulate
the nation of its promising young talent. As we have seen, in M. S. Sathyu’s 1975
film Garm Hava, a younger son of a struggling Indian Muslim family faces the
 Love triangles at home and abroad  163
possibility of migration to the West because of the dire conditions and prospects
for its Muslim minority citizens (Sarkar 2009: 196, 223). In neither film are these
threats to rooted citizen-subjecthood realized. The matrix of such discussions in
both films is, however, a prior South Asian experience of displacement—that of
the traumatic South Asian Partition of 1947.
The two films cited above present migration abroad as a self-liminalizing,
spectralizing gesture that triggers a demand for extra-cinematic, as well as cine-
matic, justification. If one migrates abroad, one becomes a refugee, dead to the
nation, counted as among its lost members. If this earlier cinematic discourse on
transnational migration had to do with intolerable conditions created by cata-
strophic genocide or tragic decolonization, and the inevitable and desired cine-
matic and extra-cinematic response to it was that of mourning and melancholy,
in films of the nineties the “loss” of members of the national body is refigured as
a second birth or a joyous doubling of the national geo-body. A body appearing
in the diaspora is an extension of the body back home; indeed, diasporic prolif-
eration, instead of being mourned as a hemorrhaging of the national body politic
becomes a national doubling, flexible accumulation, a second life of the nation.
This new staging of the nation’s geophysical health and fecundity rejuvenates the
moribund postcolonial nation-state, an argument that has become commonplace
in the national economic arena. Whatever the real dynamic of the nation-dias-
pora dialectic, the diaspora has come to be culturally represented within certain
Indian cinematic and official national discourses as a repeat performance of
national greatness (the non-resident Indian is sometimes hailed as more nation-
alistic than the non-mobile Indian who stays home). The lateral and rhizomatic
tendencies of the new Hindi cinematic heroic male body rather conveniently
serve this new configuration of the national geo-body as spatially extended and
proliferated by the diaspora. Now, when the Indian travels or lives abroad, it is a
corner of a foreign field that is forever India. NRI re-embodiment, like new male
heroic embodiment, is merely globalizing, updating, and lateralizing the nation
itself, not diminishing it.
Repetition of the nation in this sense is, however, extending it as foreclosed,
as previously mentioned in Deleuze’s sense. The lateralized repetition of
national essence within diasporic re-enactment in these new Hindi films and
their outstretched heroic bodies aspires to the production of sameness and not
difference. Such production of sameness in repetition is what Deleuze char-
acterizes as “representation,” a foreclosed narrative without the possibility of
transformation, shock, or rupture (1994). This is nowhere more evident than in
the treatment of sexualities in diasporic romance plots of new Hindi films. The
diaspora is penetrated and interpellated by hetero-normative sexual politics and
discourses; cinematic narratives playing with presenting diasporic young men as
homosocial or homosexual beings soon capitulate to a narrato-logic pressure to
restore hetero-normativity as the representational norm. Geo-political extension
cannot transform the sexual epistemes of geo-bodies in the end, and true differ-
ence remains webbed in the nexus of heteronormative representation with its
ossifying foreclosure of the sinthomic real. In contrast, the presentational mode
of Bachchan’s pre-globalization narratives was always productive of some kind
164  Love triangles at home and abroad
of difference, because repetition in that case did not produce representation of the
star as the “same as” the fan; representation always fell short of completion as I
have discussed, leaving the question of the persistence of the irreducible real as
both liminal and excessive perennially open.
National doubling in an abstracted transnational space for global geo-bodies
occurs through a reaffirmation of male-male love as deep friendship, or of a more
traditionally licensed homosociality (as in ambiguously homoerotic relationships
in Kal Ho Naa Ho and Jaan-E-Mann). A pervasive and persistent South Asian
problematic of civic liminalities is referenced but not “mobilized” through spatial
“mobility,” demonstrating the continuing purchase of representation and same-
ness over presentation/difference in seamless diasporic repetitions/doubling of
the nation. This reverses the scenarios of mainstream Hindi films of the 1970s
and ’80s critical of Western modernity, wherein nationalistic South Asian charac-
ters—especially those exposing corrupt “Western” values and mongrel national
subjects—were a staple. Here one thinks of Manoj “Bharat” Kumar’s Purab Aur
Pachhim (“East and West,” 1970), or Dev Anand’s Hare Raam Hare Krishna
(1971), deriding Westernized Indians and their dissolute and profligate “hippie”
children, or the representations of corruption and immorality as “Westernized”
in the angry young man films of Amitabh Bachchan: ganglords, corrupt dons,
and co-opted politicians who manifest their moral rot via iconic references to
occidentality and colonial pasts. These iconic references included unnatural dyed
or “done” hair, affected “foreign” speech patterns, wobbly vernacular usage,
drinking, smoking, and sexual promiscuity.
I bypass this spate of films antagonistic to Western and/or diasporic values and
lives, however, because the return to India or true Indian values was not merely a
possibility, but frequently inevitable. Indianness is locationally specific; it can be
realized on Indian soil alone. In the nineties and afterwards though, Hindi films
eschew this territorial juridicality of national belonging, and present national
belonging morphing into a spatial laterality, whereby Indianness not only travels,
but travels well (Punathambekar 2005: 162). Whereas the nation-bound diasporic
simulacra represented by the re-“naturalizable” “unnatural” Indians and hippie
wannabes of the seventies and the eighties were also undergirded by heteronorma-
tive and heteropatriarchal resolutions erupting under psycho-sexual crisis, recent
diaspora films no longer require territorial naturalization for such resolutions.
The sexualities they represent are, indeed, still critical to presenting Indian-ness,
but transnational spatial amorphousness dovetails with sexual polymorphous-
ness, and accommodates a wide spectrum of sexual behaviors: heteronormative,
anti-patriarchal romantic, diasporic filial with intergenerational familial values,
homeland filial with intergenerational familial values, homosocial, homoerotic,
and homosocial servicing heteronormative.

Fathers and sons

Critics have of course already drawn attention to “the last decade’s ferment
within the sexual and gender discourses of Indian cinemas, and the shifting
sexual alignments within the framework of masculinity that this ferment reflects”
 Love triangles at home and abroad  165
(Waugh 2001: 281). I want to examine something more, though, than just the fact
that new representations of diaspora in Hindi cinema depicting liminalities of
sexuality are now (accurately or not) articulated within national discourse as new
manifestations of “Western-ness.” I would stress that this emergence of strong
homosocial affect is indicative of a discursive shift from ethno-political iden-
tity to not-so-new gay and other non-normative sexual identities, performances
and practices—including gender masquerading, cross-dressing, and drag—and
calls attention to their performativity both as plot devices and as on-screen shock
values. After all, sightings of male-male affect, if not desire, are not entirely
novel phenomena in South Asian social spaces or in popular representations
including cinema.
I would add, moreover, that this “new” transcendent and phatic perfo-
mance and affect of male-male love, mostly occurring in diasporic spaces, is
also another imaginarium and overlapping space for the longstanding affective
history of South Asian nationalism, whereby the nineteenth-century anticolo-
nial nationalist man imagined himself as member of a brotherhood constellated
around preserving (actually bringing into being) an iconic figuration of the Indian
woman undergirding the formation of an ideal patriarchy (Chatterjee 1993, 1997;
Sinha 1995; Sangari and Vaid 1996). Whatever the constellations of sexuality
in that nineteenth-century anticolonial discourse, in films today it has become
common to see a spectral male-male affect mediating and ventriloquising a
heterosexual romance, before disbanding into the constituent elements of the
heterosexual family and its constitutive outside. Thus we see homosociality still
being formulated in the guise of plots that appear to be about constituting ideal
heteropatriarchy and its idealized female love object. It is important, therefore,
to understand that this supposedly “new” ferment of representation and politics
of same-sex love in Hindi cinema is not merely a manner and matter of repeating
the West or reproducing Western homosexual political discourse; rather, even in
the age of new masculinities bound Westward and stylistically fashioned upon
liberal Western lifestyles and expressive attitudes, these masculinities serve to
reinforce an autochthonous indigeneity in so far as the very wide repertoire of
homoerotic affect is concerned.
Some film scholars contend that very few films about this sort of distillation
of heterosexual romantic effect as residual or displaced affect from homosocial
to heterosexual relationships have been “situated” in India. It is true that a vast
majority of the recent ones are set in Western diasporic locations. Yet, ironi-
cally, such homosocial affects, behaviors, and identities are indeed examples
of a South Asian pre-colonial (or at least pre-1857) “countermodern” and poly-
morphous sexual spectrum, wherein, as Vanita and others have pointed out,
male-male affect was regulated less by gender than by social status criteria
(free/slave; agent/object; active/passive; etc.) and allowed greater exercise and
expression (Vanita 2002: 7). The necessity for spatial displacement when it
comes to ambiguous and liminal South Asian sexualities and national discourses
suggests that diasporic location facilitates the re-enactment of queer acts and
identities, harking back to polymorphous countermodern historical articula-
tions of national(-ist) manhood familiar from South Asian pre-, anti-colonial,
166  Love triangles at home and abroad
and even postcolonial contexts. Indeed, not only have second-tier films like
Dosti, Tamanna, and Main Khiladi Tu Anari signaled the existence of homo-
social sexualities and gender identities in earlier decades of pre-global Hindi
cinema (Vanita 2002; Waugh 2001), but blockbuster Bachchan hits themselves
have been remarkable for elaborate tracings of the power and pleasure of male-
male intimacies and relationships.
A few examples must suffice out of a wide range of instances. Sholay (1975)
famously depicts the loyalty and love of two hired guns, Jai (Bachchan) and
Veeru (Dharmendra), casting into decided shadow their heterosexual attach-
ments to women. Indeed, the famous “Yeh Dosti” (“This Friendship”) song
sequence in the film, depicting the two men riding a motorcycle while celebrating
their friendship in song, is fraught with contact, intimate gestures, and one shot
in which Veeru rides on Jai’s shoulders as Jai rides the motorcycle, an image
of phallic camaraderie that matches the lyrical accompaniment proclaiming the
bodily fusion of the two “partners” in life and in death.
In Yaarana (“Friendship,” 1981, Rakesh Kumar) the friendship of Bishan
(Amjad Khan) and Kishan (Bachchan), childhood friends, is coded visually
and narratively as easily displacing heteronormative conjugal bonds. Not only
do Bishan and Kishan frequently invoke their love and their inability to live
without one another, but they perform these affects in a narrative of Bishan mort-
gaging his family fortune to support Kishan’s singing career and exciting his
wife’s jealous rage upon the discovery. Gesturally, the film deepens its portrayal
of the primacy of male-male affect in scenes such as Kishan singing before a
Shiva lingam (phallic image) of his desire to regain his friend’s love after Bishan
threatens to leave the village unless Kishan accompanies him to the city to begin
a singing career. Jovial as the scene is, such appeals to Shiva the phallic god are
traditional for Hindu women praying for good husbands, and the comic presence
of Johnny the driver (Kader Khan), as the long-suffering mediator of the subtex-
tual affect between Bishan and Kishan, “normalizes” such affect by creating the
“third space” that serves as true “difference” embodied as class and status and
not sexuality or gender.10
The repetition of the coded text of homoerotic sociality is far from coinci-
dental or accidental in Bachchan’s era of verticality, yet it remains strictly
distinguishable from the new breed of homosocially embodied masculinities in
Jaan-E-Mann, Kal Ho Naa Ho, etc. by a clear visual and structural coding of
masculinity (primarily Bachchan’s) as heteropatriarchal and hierarchical. Thus,
while both Bachchan and the newer heroes’ vehicles share the hetero-norma-
tive cure of the prototypical female love object who displaces and reverses the
germinal sinthome of homosexuality, both Bachchan’s towering embodiment of
masculinity and the conspicuous textual logic of powerful fathers standing in
the way of the realization of homoerotic desires are significant elements of his
films, toying with homosociality and conspicuously missing elements in SRK,
Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan vehicles. Nowhere is this filial entanglement and
jeopardy of a homosocial impulse more evident than in the little-discussed film,
Hera-Pheri (“Crooks,” 1976, Prakash Mehra), starring Amitabh Bachchan and
his then-frequent co-star, Vinod Khanna.
 Love triangles at home and abroad  167
In Hera-Pheri, Bachchan and Khanna pair as the familiar multi- and ambiva-
lent male friends who hold their friendship dearer than all other ties, certainly
at first above heterosexual love interests. Vijay (Bachchan) has saved Ajay’s
(Khanna) life and the two vow to live and die for each other while making a
living as small-time crooks through heists involving many masquerades and
disguises. One scene of attachment and intimacy shows Vijay careening into
their shared apartment dead drunk and insulting a praying Ajay for his devo-
tion to the household god, Hanuman (or Bajrangbali, as is the film’s preferred
moniker), saying that instead of being rescued Ajay will be “bamboo-ed,” a
popular slang for anal penetration. Ajay’s “piety” in this scene is secularized
by his remarkable attire: he wears a tight and high pair of blue shorts, and a red
print shirt knotted at the waist that reveals much beefcake chest, torso, and arm.
Vijay’s eye-line as he stands behind Ajay insulting his piety to Hanuman—who
is often seen as the subordinate of the mythic Lord Ram, as well as his partner in
action—matches both the deity’s placement and the posterior half of Ajay’s body.
As Vijay rumbles, “You’ll be bamboo-ed,” a smile appears on his face that might
either be cynical or leering.
After Ajay puts Vijay to bed for the night, he prays again to Hanuman to
transfer all of Vijay’s secret sorrows to him, a distinctly consort-like gesture. We
next see Vijay being woken from drunken sleep by Ajay bringing Vijay a cup of
hot tea, seemingly a ritual between friends, but strongly suggestive of an enact-
ment of the role of the wife or woman, who so wakes up a husband or partner in
the morning. Still clad in blue shorts and red shirt, Ajay nudges Vijay with a bare
knee, rolls him over with his leg upon the bed in a posture of easy intimacy, and
then slides into bed beside him while deftly holding the tea-cup with practiced
ease. They banter about the previous night while Ajay returns to standing over
Vijay in bed, legs apart, pelvic area level with Vijay’s face, and his back reflected
in a mirror on the adjoining wall as he moves and gesticulates.
We learn eventually that Vijay’s father was killed by the latter’s best friend,
who is actually a criminal and was threatened with exposure by Vijay’s father.
Vijay has concealed his maddened mother and is engaged in a relentless search
for his father’s killer, though the man remains under his very nose, still disguised
as his father’s best friend and an honorable businessman. When Ajay discovers
this, he reproaches Vijay with keeping secrets from him and asks if he would
be accepted by Vijay’s family. Ajay, on the other hand, mourns the loss of his
parents: his father “sold” him in childhood to save his dying mother, but Ajay still
reveres his parents and seeks them. Meanwhile, the killer is informed that Ajay
is his son, and has Ajay and Vijay’s setup infiltrated in order to separate the two
men, by employing a female gangster Kiran (Saira Banu), who does the crime
boss’s bidding until she falls in love with Vijay herself.
Vijay spurns Ajay’s friendship after realizing that, even though Ajay’s father
would appear to be his father’s killer, a disbelieving Ajay is not willing to disavow
father and patrilineage. After they clash in a bar over patrilineage versus loyalty,
a very drunk Vijay, followed by a concerned Kiran, totters along a road lined
with posters of contemporary Indian and Western films. This scene begins with
Vijay meandering, bottle in hand, onto the brightly neon-lit and rain-slicked night
168  Love triangles at home and abroad
street from frame right. To his right and frame left are posters of movies on a tall
wall and on lamp post billboards. After taking a few faltering steps he stumbles,
turning to the wall on his right for support. While singing of broken vows and
drowned hope, he looks up at the wall to face two posters at eye level. The one to
his right is for the film Dost (“Friend,” 1974, Dulal Guha), showing the male actors
Dharmendra and Shatrughan Sinha clasping hands. This poster is also reproduced
in a lamp post billboard above Vijay’s head and to his further right, but facing the
exegetic spectator. The camera has switched angle, meanwhile, from medium-
distance crane shot to medium-distance low angle shot on Vijay, capturing his
visible anguish. The second poster, nearest the left frame border and to Vijay’s
further right, advertises the film Dushmun (“Enemy,” 1971, Dulal Guha), showing
actor Rajesh Khanna and actress Mumtaz in a romantic embrace.
Dost is about the friendship of two men, one of whom has a criminal past,
while Dushmun is a traditional heterosexual romance about a reformed criminal.
As he looks up at the poster of Dost, Vijay turns around and back to gaze up
at another copy the same poster on the lamppost billboard, then in a gesture
of despair he swivels back onto the road while his right hand tears off the title
from the bottom of the wall poster of Dost. We see it floating away in rain water,
mimicking the lyrics then being sung about flotsam drifting away in water. The
camera cuts back to Vijay walking away from the wall, but placing his hand
to support himself on another poster of Dost pasted to the left of the poster of
Dushmun. The posters, we now see, are repeated in a series as well as palimp-
sestically. While they are located both within a spatial and a temporal series (on
a wall horizontally, as well as within the same decade of the seventies), they are
also in asymmetrical and temporal conjuncture with posters of other films about
triangulated friendship and hetero-normative romance from previous decades.
The next sequence of shots reveals Vijay slowly detaching from the wall with
the two sets of paired posters of Dost and Dushmun on it, but also with two
overlapped posters of Aah (“The Cry,” 1953, Raja Nawathe) and Sangam (“The
Confluence,” 1964, Raj Kapoor) at the top right corner of the frame, and partly
out of it. Aah and Sangam are both films about hetero-normative romances inter-
rupted by and recuperated from same sex attachments.
The wall is a cinematic palimpsest of the coding of same-sex attachments and
their conflicts with dominant hetero-normative plots in at least three decades
of Hindi cinema (the fifties, sixties, and seventies). Bachchan’s tall form is seen
ambivalently engaging and detaching with it symptomatically and allegorically,
as he part leans on and part propels himself away from this historical cinematic
repertoire. At the end of the take, Bachchan moves closer up to the camera to
loom up to near eye-level with the spectator and exits out of left frame, while
the camera moves right to capture Kiran (Saira Banu), now in medium distance
and watching him, then zooms in on her shocked and concerned face. The next
take returns us to a looming and tilted Bachchan left of frame, cuts back to Kiran
in frame center, then back again to a still tilted and swaying Bachchan, inviting
the viewer to follow his gaze, with an eye-line match following, which frames a
large billboard poster in half darkness and out of frame but with its title Dushmun
frame center and illuminated.
 Love triangles at home and abroad  169
The suture of enemy and woman is thus well under way and the camera cuts
back again to Kiran in medium close-up slowly approaching. It cuts again to
a wide angle zoom out from a billboard poster of Dost with one half missing,
showing one actor gone, to Bachchan re-entering frame left, swaying as he
looks back at this other torn poster of Dost, and turning and staggering on while
glancing at the wall with more posters horizontally arranged, swigging from his
bottle and singing of his loss. Finally, after he exits the frame at left again, we
cut to a deep space sequence showing him walking out on to a large illuminated
square with two more pairs of Dost and Dushman posters on billboards, framing
him within the frame so that the alignment of posters, neon street lamps, and
Bachchan’s moving body are angled diagonally and upward across the frame in a
line of exit toward the left of frame and the palimpsestic wall.
At this point, as Bachchan continues to remain the center of this configuration
and walks toward the viewer, Kiran emerges after him from right of frame and
walks after him, beginning to join Bachchan’s centered figure, though keeping
a distance, until Bachchan finally begins veering to his left and to the right of
our frame. The camera zooms back and dollies up, a leafy tree branch begins to
protrude on our view of the square, erases the posters, and offers a new high-
angle shot of Kiran and Vijay as two small figures now together and alone,
without the posters and their homosocial coding of gender relations, occupying
the center of the square and the frame. The next cut shows Vijay and Kiran in
medium close-up, she bending over him seated at street- and eye-level, touching
him with her left hand. As he looks up, he asks, “Who (is it)?” She replies, “ A
friend, whom you probably consider to be your foe.” In this take, however, two
posters of Dushmun and Dost, the first closer up and the second much deeper in
space, has reappeared behind the two on two lamppost billboards, in case one
missed them before. The suture of woman and foe is now both completed and
questioned.
Unquestionably, by the film’s end, the hetero-normative scenario is recuper-
ated: Vijay and Ajay are matched up with female love interests, the powerful and
independent Kiran noticeably domesticated by her longing to become Vijay’s
wife. The friends are reconciled upon conclusive proof that Ajay was not the
son of the murderous crime boss after all, as Vijay had all along supposed,
and that his shocking seeming-identification with his putative father had been
purely strategic and meant to expose the latter. However, the sexual camp in
Hera-Pheri outstrips most other mise en scènes of (mis-)recognition of queer
scenarios in later Bollywood. The film plays daringly with men’s bodies being
intimately compromised, as in a scene that can only be called a comic striptease
effect, wherein Ajay and Vijay elude a series of goons and cops, chasing them
by emerging from under their pursuers’ posteriors and between their legs, and
by stripping down to their underwear, which they display conspicuously in their
fugitive antics.
After the seventies, Bachchan still demonstrates vigorous camp in the occa-
sional scene in almost every film, but the queer is gone from it (Farmer 2000:
111–2). The supple flexibility of his physical clowning is also gradually replaced
by a more erect and rigid bearing in later films, where he predominantly plays
170  Love triangles at home and abroad
darker and darker tortured protagonists whose primary identification, cathexion,
as well as antagonism, is with the Oedipal heteropatriarch, who was easily
surmountable in the fraternal queer camp romance of Hera-Pheri and a few other
Bachchan films. Before and after Hera-Pheri, his films predominantly portray
Oedipal triangulations and struggles, as in Zanjeer (“Chains,” 1973, Prakash
Mehra), Deewar (“The Wall,” 1975, Yash Chopra), Sholay (1975), Don (1978,
Chandra Barot), Trishul (“The Trident,” 1978, Yash Chopra), and Muqaddar ka
Sikandar (“King of Destiny,” 1978, Prakash Mehra); Yaarana (discussed above)
is a stark and sole exception to this norm. The passionate fraternizing of Hera-
Pheri morphs in other films into the dyad of brothers at odds with each other,
sometimes fatally for Bachchan.

Brothers and lovers

Jaan-E-Mann and Kal Ho Naa Ho promise an energetic return to the story of
homosocial frisson jostling the hetero-linear norm as the very crux of the plot,
as well as the engine of the heroes’ styles of embodiment. The male charac-
ters in these films have no fathers, nor do they need or miss them. Indeed, the
conspicuous abjuration of the father’s presence and power mark these films just
as much as their complicated ambiguity regarding the heterosexist norm, which
the films rather insufficiently and incompletely resolve, and that largely only by
routing homosociality through the iconic repertoires of metrosexuality rather
than hegemonic heterosexuality. A clear visual and structural coding of mascu-
linity (primarily Bachchan’s) as heteropatriarchal and hierarchical is missing
from the later films, however avidly both eras of films deploy the technique of
hetero-normative romance to avert catastrophic queer endings. Still, the later
films’ mise en abyme of the queer (mis-)recognition scene is far more guarded
and coded than that in earlier Hindi films like Hera-Pheri, despite their diasporic
metrosexual affiliations and affect. I suggest that this is because the sleight of
hand of geographic translocation serves as a dislocation of the hetero-linear norm
by queer masquerade only up to a point. Indeed, the translocation and displace-
ment create not so much a “reversal” of the hetero-normal as an “in-version,”
by which punning term I mean both a greater closing of ranks and homogeni-
zation of diasporic identity as adamantly hetero-normative, and a more coded
and guarded masquerade of homosexuality as “inversion/perversion” that is
the inside story, which troubles the very assumptions of fraternal bonding upon
which the nation or diaspora dyad hinges.
The lateralization of emergent heroic masculinities in Hindi cinema rides
parallel axes that I will show as convergent in actuality: they are the axes of
spatial and narrative displacement or repetition of the heteronormative familial
structure, premised upon a lateralization and leveling of film settings, plots, and
heroic embodiment as diasporic, familial, and rhizomatic; and that of heteronor-
malization and strenuous citation of femininity as permitted presentational and
representational sites articulating homosociality, whereby the countermodern
pre-national can continue to belong in the teleological narrative of the transna-
tional nation-state. By the “strenuous citation of femininity” I mean primarily the
 Love triangles at home and abroad  171
habit women have—however old this observation now appears in critical femi-
nist theory—of ending up as the “speculum,” vehicle, or currency transforming
suspect male bonding into transactional prowess, into “good trades.” Ontological
women and hetero-normal family are props for hetero-masculinity, but such
hetero-masculinity is not the norm or necessity for countermodern gender iden-
tities predating the age of the sovereign territorial nation-state. After the time
of Bachchan, when such countermodern and liminal identities were glimpsed
but not fully expressed, presented but not really represented, a rhizomatic era
of diasporic migration, as well as lateralized heroes, produced the right incu-
bating conditions for these liminal and countermodern teleologies of gender and
confraternal homoeroticism to re-emerge (Chatterjee in Vanita 2002: 73). I will
look first at their partial articulation, bringing us to the year 2003, which saw the
release of two films: Bachchan’s Baghban (“The Gardener,” Ravi Chopra) and
the SRK-starrer Kal Ho Naa Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Come,” Nikhil Advani;
hereafter KHNH).
On the surface, the two films have nothing in common. Baghban was another
venture in the new Bachchan experimental series of billeting the superman hero
of yesteryears as an old-timer in contemporary youth culture and cross-genera-
tional family sagas; in Bachchan’s words, it was a film that “proved that the audi-
ence is ready for subjects on senior citizens” (Somayya 2009: 220). It depicted a
devoted husband and father clinging to his hetero-normative identity as “family
man” in defiance of the role of peregrinatory post-retirement bachelor, imposed
on him by the new order of the dispersed family, by sons who want their elderly
parents to separate and spread themselves geographically thin in order not to be
a double burden on any one son. The hetero-normative family is thus threatened
with rupture and dissolution by the leveling and lateralizing tendencies of the
new family order, but redeemed by Bachchan the father’s renewed consolidation
of traditional family values—his tending of the home garden—over nucleariza-
tion and virtual exile as a new ethos of family induced by new aspirational econ-
omies. On the other hand, in KHNH, SRK as Aman unites two Indian “desis” in
marriage on his visit to New York to be treated for an incurable heart condition.
Though Aman loves the young woman Naina, who yearns for a “normal” family,
lost due to her father’s suicide, his failing health and his “friendship” with the
other man leave him with a graceful and stylish demise as the only viable means
for reinforcing the familial narrative.
KHNH, however, is best known for the scene where Aman and Naina’s even-
tual husband, Rohit (played by Saif Ali Khan), are mistaken as gay lovers by the
traditional Indian maid of the diasporic Indian man (Gehlawat 2010). According
to Somayya, this film “started the recent trend in Bollywood to litter its film with
gay culture innuendos” (2009: 220). Indeed, as Hu tells us, the film was opened
up to the possibilities of camp and queer spectatorship and contexts throughout
its runs in the USA, especially in New York City and San Francisco (Hu 2006:
97, 99). This particular scene’s comic possibility is exploited to the extent that
its homoerotic suggestion starts operating as the film’s subtext, only to be totally
suppressed in the film’s irreproachably aseptic heteronormative denouement—
the marriage of Naina and Rohit following Aman’s untimely but inevitable death.
172  Love triangles at home and abroad
However, the possibilities launched by the film’s public discotheque song-dance
sequences of reading against the grain of coherent ethnic and national identities
(Hu 2006) parallel the possibilities opened up of queer readings of the film’s
precariously hetero-normative text by scenarios of private homosocial intimacies.
As Hu argues persuasively, if from a diasporic desi spectator’s perspective
the disco number (“It’s the Time to Disco”), where a very drunk Naina abruptly
displaces a white crowd from the floor and takes it over to be joined by Aman
and Rohit in a spectacle of ethnic triumphalism, bolstered by anti-racist prem-
ises, is hollow; from the same desi perspective the queer suggestion that emerges
the next day when Aman and Rohit wake up in the same bed to the horror and
consternation of Rohit’s maid (with Naina out of the picture) is telling. The true
energies of the film reside in the risqué play with camp and queer that pervades
the film’s narrative and performative codes, and defies disavowal, at least in
terms of the film’s reception by diasporic spectators (Hu 2006; Gehlawat 2010).
While these plot synopses may proffer no comparison between Baghban and
KHNH, the link between them begins to emerge once their treatments of spatial
extension, agonistic embodiment, and gender normativities are all considered
together. To take space first, while KHNH narrates the “angelic” resolution by an
Indian man of high dramas of diasporic middle-class Indians in New York city
(with liberal sprinklings of mundane “desi” references), Baghban’s Bachchan is
reunited with his beloved wife (the familial narrative thereby restored) through
the “angelic” offices of an adopted son who lives abroad (played by an ever
bemused-yet-with-it Salman Khan) and returns home to find his adoptive parents
immiserated and proceeds to “re-marry” them. Diasporic traversals, in both
cases, resolve hetero-familial crises both in the nation and beyond it. Upon the
surface, the adopted son is the inverse of Aman: he is the diasporic returnee,
whereas Aman is the Indian abroad. However, the two characters do in fact
mirror each other, reinforcing the symbiotic function of NRI and traveling Indian
as two ends of the scale upholding “family” as the ultimate value in the national
imaginarium extended across and between nation and diaspora. Spatial exten-
sions and mobility are, therefore, crucial to the denouement of the plots of both
Baghban and KHNH.
The issue of agonistic embodiment surfaces in the reliance both Baghban and
KHNH place upon tropes of displacement that favor a rhizomatic, lateralized
conception of the heroic male who loves and loses his woman only to regain
respect and love in the end, but without resorting to the towering fury or high
jinks of the Big B. The heroic male in these films is insistently, if unconvinc-
ingly, an “ordinary” man. The draw of such heroes, their rhetorical last resort and
flourish, is upon reserves of hetero-normative familial discourse and ideologies,
upon “real life.” There is little or no rescuing of maidens in distress, gang fights,
or other kinds of muscle flexing, though there is plenty of well-toned muscle.11
The body, instead of towering over its vanquished foes, is extended out into the
world conceived as family, community, nation, and diaspora.
The third and final issue of gender normativity subtends those of spatial exten-
sion and male embodiment; the plots of both films resort to restoring women
within heterosexual marriage to discipline and domesticate “illicit” libidinous
 Love triangles at home and abroad  173
drives that encroach upon the traditional hetero-normative structure of the Indian
family both in India and abroad. Bachchan’s wife in Baghban arrests the possi-
bility of his dissent into a late-in-life rakishness and bachelor sexuality barely
contained in their sons’ nuclear families, the sons’ nuclear sexualities being the
ironic engine of the parents being denied a right to a traditional emotional and
sexual life as a couple. The attempted exiling and displacement of the elderly
couple’s “family” values leads to a redistribution and replacement of such
values within an “extended” rubric of family by an extended set of community
and diasporic actants. Attempts to break up the family lead to its rejuvenation
and reinvigoration. However, when spatial remembering and spatial extension
threaten to result in new configurations of affect and affiliation, as in a rede-
signing of male embodiment as queer or libidinous, such embodiment is also
disciplined back into the confines of heteronormative “family” values through
marriage and biological reproduction of patrilineage.
The implication of such undergirding of space and masculinity by women’s
role in heterosexual romance is that women can obviously both make and break
families, but women’s entire disappearance from the sexual romance would end
narrativity itself. While homosexuality is not explicitly referenced in KHNH,
its heroine is such a crucial prop in the sense that the camp “faux” queer scenes
in the film inevitably accelerate the heterosexual “marriage” plot. While the
“marriage” plot does not supplant the “romance” plot, it mobilizes discovery of
another hitherto undisclosed marriage, namely that of the cardiologist friend of
Aman, whom the lovelorn Naina had imagined to be Aman’s love interest; all
sexual mysteries therefore end in straight marriage. The heterosexual marriage
plot works in repeat mode and overtime to diffuse the ambiguity of gay romance
subtext, though the cultic charm and spectatorial synergy of KHNH inheres in its
“mistaken for gay” elements.
I have argued thus far that the lateral and rhizomatic hero, the diasporic male
protagonist, the gay or proto-gay hailer of hetero-normativity and the tirelessly
normative feminine antidote thereto are critically interlinked variables contrib-
uting to both star and fan subjectivation and/or cross-sectional audience iden-
tification in Hindi cinema post Bachchan’s era of the megalithic vertical hero.
I now turn to an elaboration, indeed a perfecting, of such variables constitu-
tive of new cinematic masculinities, subjectivities, and spectatorships in Jaan-
E-Mann (2006), starring Salman Khan, perhaps the most “man of the streets”
hero among the new generation of rhizomatic star embodiments. Jaan-E-Mann
is a slightly less tongue-in-cheek precursor to the slapstick farce Partner (David
Dhawan) released only a year after Jaan-E-Mann, where Salman Khan’s man of
the people identity is perfected in the persona of “big brother” or “love guru,”
who advises men in matters of heterosexual love, i.e. in matters relating to
women. Jaan-E-Mann is a campier warm-up to this subject, set in Bombay and
New York, with Salman Khan as Suhaan Kapoor, mentoring a young Indian
astronaut, Agasyta Rai (played by Akshay Kumar), who has returned to Bombay
from working at NASA, seeking his lost love who happens to be Salman Khan’s
own ex-wife, Piya Goel (played by Preity Zinta, also Naina Kapoor in KHNH).
Agastya appears at Suhaan’s door in search of Piya, whom he had hopelessly
174  Love triangles at home and abroad
adored during his extreme-nerd college days, while she was happily dating the
college “bad boy,” rockstar Suhaan Kapoor, hoping to make it big as a “super-
star” in films. Flashback tells the tale of Piya the dizzy young fan, exploiting
Agastya unscrupulously to further her forbidden romance with Suhaan. Suhaan
and Piya eventually married, but Suhaan temporarily separated from a pregnant
Piya when his film producer told him told that marriage was a problem for his
lover-boy film star image. Due to a series of misunderstandings, Piya thought
herself abandoned by the temporarily absent Suhaan and migrated to be with her
family in the United States. Suhaan’s acting career, however, tanked soon after.
Agastya is the “nice boy” and true romantic lover who, despite his rough
experience, hears of Piya’s misfortunes and comes back years later to rescue her
from the terrible fate of her marriage to the “bad boy.” He meets Suhaan without
recognizing him as his past rival. Suhaan hides the fact that he is himself that
“bad boy,” and, in order to avoid paying the divorce settlement that Piya is now
demanding of him, decides to broker Agastya’s marriage to Piya, since, once
remarried, Piya will no longer be entitled to his support. Tellingly, Jann-E-Mann
also reprises the “angelic” incarnation of the sacrificing lover Aman in KHNH
as a fantasy spectacle. If one were to seek evidence of intertextual referentiality
between KHNH (2003) and Jaan-E-Mann (2006), one could not do better than
to consider two parallel scenes of “prayer” in the films. In an almost identical
mise en scène, in KHNH and in Jaan-E-Mann there are two scenes of praying
for miracles or supplication of angelic powers. In KHNH, we see Naina’s mother
and siblings kneeling before a window in prayer to a hoped-for angel to improve
their dire financial and familial circumstances as US Indian diaspora, caught
between the American dream and rude economic reality; in Jaan-E-Mann, we
see an identical framing of Suhaan and his sidekick lawyer and friend, Chachu
(meaning “father’s brother,” played by Anupam Kher digitally manipulated into
a dwarf embodiment), praying for deliverance from Piya’s demand for a one-time
settlement of unpaid alimony.
The mise en scène of the two shots make it hard not to surmise an intentional
duplication in Jaan-E-Mann of the trope of prayer for a miracle in KHNH. In both
films, moreover, the answer to the prayer is an embodied angel who will eventu-
ally return to a spectrality (in Aman’s case) and an astrality (in Agastya’s case).
In KHNH, the family’s prayer scene cuts to a newly landed Aman marveling at
snow falling on Brooklyn across the street from where Naina and her praying
family live. In Jaan-E-Mann, Suhaan and Chachu’s prayer leads to the advent of
Agastya at Suhaan’s doorstep in answer to the former’s prayer for deliverance.
Jaan-E-Mann, in its inimitable spirit of camp frolic and reactivation, literalizes
the angelic trope, however, by digitally adding a halo over Agastya’s head as he
faces Suhaan and Chachu at the door.
The theme of homosocial bonding charges Jaan-E-Mann as it does KHNH,
and an early instance of this occurs when Chachu calls Suhaan into the kitchen
to plot foisting Piya off onto the miraculously materialized Agastya. The scene
unfolds as Chachu reads to Suhaan out of a manual for divorce and marriage
that, according to the Hindu Marriage Act (1956), a man is only responsible for
financially supporting his ex-wife until she remarries. After this pronouncement,
 Love triangles at home and abroad  175
a physically proximate Suhaan and Chachu enact a scene of paterfamilial inti-
macy: Suhaan enacts a traditional Indian wife coyly suggesting to a husband,
here instantiated by Chachu, that perhaps one should ascertain the “daughter’s”
(here Piya’s) feelings in the matter as well, pretending to pull a sari over his face
and subsequently bursting into laughter with Chachu. The scene, however, seems
to establish Chachu as a paterfamilial authority over the plot progression and
stratagems that follow.12
Indeed, Chachu slides back and forth between portraying a legalistic,
conjugal, and paterfamilial entity, the last especially when he offers Suhaan his
“life’s savings” in order to go abroad, a portrayal with which many middle-class
Indian parents might identify and one which further fixes Chachu in the space
of paterfamilial facilitation of the conjugal “family” plot. Moroever, Chachu and
his paterfamilial faciliation of heteronormativity hatched from a homosocial
plot is re-enacted in New York, when Suhaan and Agastya arrive there later, in
the figure of a restaurateur who advises Suhaan to direct Agastya in his court-
ship of Piya by communicating to him via a nearly-invisible earphone walkie-
talkie, a device that ensures Agastya doubling Suhaan in channeling Suhaan’s
essence as his script with Piya.13 Also played by Anupam Kher, but in his normal
embodiment, this character is promptly christened “Mamu” (mother’s brother)
by Suhaan.
But Chachu is most of all a “little man,” a man embodied as “little” or a dwarf,
at the most palpable level of apprehension. The “mock conjugal” kitchen scene is
followed by an unexpected “mob” of “short men,” here dwarves, bursting out of a
closet in Suhaan’s apartment and performing a ditty that “enables” the stratagem
to draw Agastya into Suhaan and Chachu’s plot to disencumber Suhaan of his
obligations to Piya. Though this may be entirely coincidental, persons exhibiting
symptoms of dwarfism sometimes prefer to be called “little people,” and one
of the disorders that causes dwarfism is termed “rhizomelia.” Rhizomelic little
people merging out of closets, needless to say, suggest some entanglement of the
trope of dwarfism with the stereotype of the “different/hybrid” man who may be
coming out of the closet. The import of these identificatory tropes or stereotypes
is deepened when one considers that this scene of the frolicking song-dance of
the dwarves who emerge out of a closet is determinant of “getting” Piya. First,
Chachu joins in with the group of singing “little men,” his hair done like the
college girl Piya’s, wearing a t-shirt with a “princess” logo; then, a cardboard
cutout of Piya wearing the same t-shirt emerges from the same closet supported
by singing and dancing dwarves who literally hand this image over to Agastya.
Indeed, in the end, after much handling by the dwarf troupe of Piya’s cardboard
cutout—which in this process is reduced entirely to the status of a simulacrum
and to a transactional entity—this scene overpopulated with dwarves spilling
out of closets succeeds in “encouraging” Agastya to believe in his “destiny” with
Piya. Little people who fall out of closets, aka Chachu as a rhizomatic contender
for the hero’s affections as well as paterfamilias, however unlikely this concatena-
tion might be, thus call the shot in establishing the trajectory of hetero-normative
romance and transactions in women in Jaan-E-Mann. In the spirit of camp frolic
that is characteristic of the Salman Khan oeuvre, the transactional redistribution
176  Love triangles at home and abroad
that had to be enacted in KHNH by a conjugal transfer of the female love object is
effected in Jaan-E-Mann by simulation first, and then by replication (not duplica-
tion) of the woman in question, which is achieved by Piya’s later “re-incarnation”
as a female Russian astronaut with whom Agastya will successfully replace his
first hopeless love. This startling repetition of the female body in racial drag
according to the demands of a male desiring economy directed by confraternal
pacts is another re-embodiment parallel to Chachu’s sexual drag as “little man,”
who is also a co-conspirator in male designs to share women. I will return later
to this parallel logic and technique.
Meanwhile, Agastya and Suhaan travel to New York together; the first to find
Piya, the second to solve his financial problems. Still a complete greenhorn in
matters of love despite years of living abroad and professional success, Agastya
is awed by Suhaan’s ability to charm women and appoints him the guide in his
own desperate romancing of Piya. The two begin life in New York sharing an
apartment that happens to be right across the street from Piya’s. Though Suhaan
is ostensibly in the apartment to coach Agastya in the art of successfully courting
Piya, we see the two men intimately sharing living space, including a bed. Indeed,
at one point, Agastya explains his gender politics to Piya by declaring himself
to be a homosexual (prompted by Suhaan’s walkie-talkie coaching), quickly
correcting himself to say, “I mean metrosexual,” upon seeing the confused look
on Piya’s face. The Cyrano de Bergerac scenario is poised precariously with the
queer diasporic enactment of male-male intimacies in ways that the film finally
resolves via Suhaan’s eventual discovery that Piya is the mother of his own child
and his subsequent recovery of her affections (she, of course, never stopped
loving Suhaan, and considered marrying Agastya mainly because of conveni-
ence), as well as of her person and the child.
Even in the crucial scene of discovery of paternity and recovery, one might
say of hetero-normativity, there are many returns to the closet. After realizing
that Piya lives across the street with their daughter, Suhaan manages to get
into Piya’s apartment while she is away by locking out the nanny, and bonds
with his daughter. To hide from Piya when she returns home while he is still
in her bedroom with their daughter, Suhaan is shown first moving away from
the shadowy bottom right corner of the frame of a large reproduction of Diego
Velazquez’s (1599–1660) “Feast of Bacchus” (1629), an eroticized scene of all-
male revelry into which he had blended in as though balancing a figure in the
bottom left corner of the painting, and then entering the closet in her bedroom. We
next see him leaning against Piya’s closed bedroom door from within, listening
as she tells Agastya of her marriage and divorce in the living room. When she
comes back into the bedroom with the child, he retreats to the closet wherein he
is found seated in a corner, photographed from the interior of the closet, waiting
until Piya falls asleep. Thereupon, he re-emerges from the closet and tells the
child in the crib that he will reunite with her as well as with her mother, who he
says is “not so bad after all.” The plot’s twists and turns are, clearly, inseparable
from stepping in and out of closets in Bombay as well as in New York.
Later, upon learning that Suhaan is in fact Piya’s true love and ex-husband,
Agastya tearfully but gracefully steps aside, but at the film’s end is rewarded for
 Love triangles at home and abroad  177
his “angelic” behavior with a place among the stars in a literal sense, as well as
with the Russian female astronaut as mentioned. However, until this doubling of
the singular woman is actually literalized by the cloning of the heroine, the two
men share her in a sexual conquest plot that completely excludes and disenfran-
chises her, but also, more literally, through a pornographic voyeurism: Agastya
sets up a high-power telescope that allows him and Suhaan to snoop on Piya
throughout her apartment at will, a version of “star-gazing” that passes as an
extreme version of the Hindi cinematic and exegetic male’s unquestioned right to
“look,” to be the ultimate spectator and consumer of the female body and image.
Like the cinema itself, audio-visual technology such as telescopes and two-way
transmitters stand in for male needs to share and see women in this film. Yet, so
powerful is this spectatorial action as a companionate masculine consensus and
compact that it threatens to tip over into a relocation of desire: while watching
a large-screen projection of Piya in her apartment watching television, the two
men settle down comfortably on their bed with popcorn, apparently absorbed in
their mutual heterosexual scopophilia. However, the next frame shows the two
sleeping next to each other on the same bed in satin sheets, the popcorn sprinkled
on the bed resembling white rose petals.
This scene is fairly obviously a borrowing from the similar and famous scene
in the earlier KHNH, where Aman and Rohit wake up in bed with each other
after a night of drunken revelry with Naina at the disco. However, should the
two men’s intimate proximities at times threaten to overshadow the main sexual
conquest drive, leading the audience to question that latter text, Jaan-E-Mann’s
plot supplies a third man to receive and bear the aggression that would have
been conventionally expected between the roommates, but that mysteriously
fails to materialize. Instead, this aggression manifests itself in scenarios of serial
distractions, involving physical chastisement upon a third comic contender for
Piya’s affections, a clearly hopeless desi who is working on Piya’s dissolute
brother’s weaknesses in order to marry Piya. Some of the rough physical comedy
of the film derives from the besting of this urban lout, whom Suhaan and Agastya
conspire to discredit and torment repeatedly, flexing muscle in this joint enmity
toward the male outsider who is also clearly a negative portrayal of the American
desi or “ABCD.” The routing and shaming of this hapless suitor cements the
foundation for Agastya and Suhaan’s bond, and provides a common outlet for
aggression and hostility typical of men competing for the same woman, their
scapegoat-in-common protecting their own camaraderie from this outcome.
In this pre-incarnation as an unofficial “love guru,” Salman Khan plays with
unmatched sangfroid the man of many disguises, strategems, moods, and skills—
including his drag appearance as Piya’s savior when Agasyta fails to protect her
from sexual harassment at a nightclub—yet patrilineage proves too potent to
allow what appeared to be a prospect of vicarious self-fulfillment in the buddy’s
romantic happiness, an attitude necessary when two men cannot literally both
have the same woman, one that Aman in KHNH experienced and resolved by
dying. Knowing Agastya and Piya are engaged, Suhaan tries to steal his child
and take her back to India, but is caught. When he is discovered, however, Piya
and her diasporic kin quickly come around to recognizing and conceding the
178  Love triangles at home and abroad
prior claims of “family”—a unit that Piya, Suhaan, and their daughter clearly and
singularly represent—and the narrative not so subtly veers towards a displace-
ment (albeit voluntary) of “nice boy” Agastya beyond the familial pale, and his
eventual dispatch to outer space, an “astral” stratum not unlike Aman’s “spectral”
stratum. Agastya remains deeply attached to Suhaan and Piya, but re-embodied
for an astronautical realm, the film’s opening and final shots have him phoning
them from his spaceship and introducing them to his Russian counterpart and
girlfriend, Piya re-embodied.

Representation and presentation redivivus

Having thus far discussed the repetitions in representations of masculinity
Bachchan- and post-Bachchan-era films generate, contrasting vertical and rhizo-
matic representations of masculinity, it is now time to return to social, cultural,
and political formations and discourses generating the repetitions whose diver-
gences demonstrate the process whereby the hero assumes representational rather
than presentational functions and obligations. The critical divide between the
two eras of cinematic masculinity that re-enact embodiments linking them to the
same mass audience to come up with very different subject formations—with the
perennial exception of immutable recursions to hetero-normativity when female-
ness obtrudes—reflect the emergence of non-heteronormative cultural repre-
sentations of masculinity and accompanying social transformations. Indeed,
intellectual critical debate in India on normative and non-normative sexualities
has itself shifted from a scenario of non-availability of syntax or vocabulary—
i.e. a representation—for configuring alternative, parallel, and non-normative
masculinities to one of far greater “representability” of such linguistic, social,
and embodied entities and identities. As Vanita writes in discussion of Deepa
Mehta’s Fire, there was once “no word in our language,” according to Mehta’s
lesbian characters, to describe what they felt for each other (2002: 1). As Vanita
proceeds to demonstrate with historicist acumen, a sense of being that might
once have been mired in such an inability to find words for what one felt as a non-
heterosexual is now largely more “self-representing,” because of queer activism
and consciousness-raising in India and in the diaspora.
This might also be the condition of a new Hindi cinematic engagement,
however catachrestic or allegorical, with hitherto repressed words and images
for non-heteronormativity. Vanita’s focus on the rubric of “representation” is
highly relevant for my argument in this essay about successive cinematic figura-
tions of heroic masculinity as towering versus rhizomatic, and presentational
versus representational (Vanita 2005: 4). As homosexuality becomes represent-
able in popular and political discourse, its representation refuels and triggers
the rhizomaticity of the popular cinematic hero, who vividly represents many
such demotic and “multivocal” masculinities, including deep male friendship
and male bonding, and the hero’s resemblance to the common denominator (the
“little” people, the man on the street). One might say Hindi cinema has now found
the syntax and vocabulary needed to talk about the potential “other” mascu-
linities that the hero can embody. While Vanita focuses on the validity of the
 Love triangles at home and abroad  179
charges of “ahistoricism” leveled at the newly found representational language
in India for othered sexualities (2005: 4–5), my emphasis is on the fact such a
language has now been found as would allow cinematic recovery of embodiment
as (superman) effect tempered by (rhizomatic) affect, of alternative and counter-
modern male subject formations, crosscutting the hitherto presentational screen
to throw up the very figure of representation, of the hero’s inclusion, however
fantasmatic, among those to whom he belongs, to the “common man.”
Again, however, these “sexual commons” prefigured in the new heroes’ nego-
tiations of embodiments and space are nothing new, nor are they past: they are
yet another ideal node of convergence for the wide-ranging spatial and temporal
phenomena known as the countermodern, which take their life not from differen-
tiation from tradition, but from indifference to tradition’s essential logic. It follows
from this intrinsic heterogeneity of the countermodern that, in arguing this view
of how to take the changing embodiment and sexualization of the male hero in the
last 40-odd years of Hindi cinema, I am not proposing an essentialist ontology
of identity as embodiment. Far from that, I am reading embodiment—height/
verticality/presentationality versus height/laterality/representationality—as a
symbolic and constructed category, manifested as much in what the hero looks
like as in what the look means. Bachchan’s somewhat freakish height apart, of
course not all of the popular male stars of later Bollywood have been of a certain
uniform “average” height and build, but that is beside the point.
What is crucial is the uses “average” and “non-average” embodiment have
been put to. As Chute writes, “no one in the current crop of younger actors has
anything like Amitabh Bachchan’s moral authority, which is the grown-up distil-
lation of his youthful anger” (2005: 56). Indeed, Chute suggests a vertical axis for
Bachchan’s image crystallizing into a metaphor for time itself, as in playing the
cruel patriarchs that in his earlier films he defied and resisted for directors with
whose fathers he started his career, the older Bachchan seems to sweep transgen-
erational rebellious angst upward into the solitary anguish of the dark lord, who
towers over challenges from his own cinematic offspring, new copies of his own
earlier prototype (ibid.: 55); ontogeny repeats phylogeny as Bachchan’s trans-
mogrification crystallizes the passage of cine-historical and personal-historical
time into a teleology of masculinity, which morphs to repeat difference on prin-
ciple to produce a new kind of his/-hysterical new man (ibid.: 55).
The younger actors’ embodiment as emblematic and not empirical anatomy
has been used here to frame a wider exegetic transformation of cinematic and
spectatorial consciousness about the “average” man, the regular guy. This guy
cries more often, feels more flamboyantly, acts more roguishly, has more buddies,
girlfriends, girl friends, and “girlie” friends, forms part of ensembles and perfor-
mance troupes more often, is more often a part of multiple plots and parallel and
overlapping affective realms, travels and moves around outside of the heartland
of the Hindi film industrial mise en scène more easily, and is perhaps, in the
end, more like his putative new Indian spectator or the latter’s aspirational self-
image. However, this newness is, in a sense, only a repetition of differences;
while certainly “new” in terms of difference from the earlier vertical hero, this
language of the male body resuscitates the difference of older, pre-colonial, and
180  Love triangles at home and abroad
pre-national practices and rhetorics of sexuality (Vanita 2005: 2–3). To quote
Waugh again, this hero is “not so much the new man (since Indian male stars have
always had permission to weep and recite poetry) as the revival of more tradi-
tional romantic conceptions of gender roles” (2001: 286; emphasis mine). Along
with this, following the logic of such heterogenizing representational possibili-
ties, he also sometimes acts gay, looks gay, plays gay, and even is a little gay.14 In
other words, he is an icon of the countermodern appearing as the ultra-modern.
In this present incarnation, both such embodiments and such representations are
symbolic constructs gesturing at the liminal and the countermodern, and their
coeval formation (that at first appears to be yet another Hindi cinematic episode
of repeating first a popular/heroic subject and second a popular joke) is actually
very likely co-constitutive, topical, and not accidental.
The formal and thematic code of repetition in Hindi cinema thus generates
subjunctive and liminal countermodern male-sexed subjects in a few ways. As
far as repetition is concerned, we have seen the reincarnation of male heroic
embodiment in an altered and rhizomatic manner, in order to create what might
be considered an affinity with the countermodern and almost non-cinematic
spectator, a spectator who exceeds and replaces the high theoretical filmic para-
digm of spectatorship as imaginary signification with spectatorship as physical
co-embodiment. Such identification is, of course, in most ways, highly fantas-
matic. In Jaan-E-Mann, the two heroes retain astral stature—Suhaan as an actor
in Bhojpuri film, and Agastya as an astronaut—neither position easily within
the reach of the average cine-going fan. In KHNH, SRK’s character remains
“angelic” and spectral until the very end, making it impossible for any spectator
to truly catch up; we see a materialist version of this in BB.
Still, however fantasmatic or illusory such identification and affinity might be,
a suspicion that BB wryly suggests, while appearing to disprove it, is that this
repeating as difference shifts the grounds of identification with the hero or star to
representation rather than presentation; it carries a powerful surge of spectatorial
and cinephilic identificatory charge. This is repetition in the service of cementing
or hardwiring a new relationship of cinematic and cinephilic spectation, whose
concurrent result might be a new subjectivity-effect as a new spectatorial-effect,
the very theme, in a sense, of BB, a crucial film within this oeuvre of the recon-
figured and re-embodied rhizomatic man-of-the-people hero.
Besides this repetition as differential embodiment producing new liminal
and countermodern subjects, a second kind of repetition is also generated in the
coalescing and commensuration of heroic verticality and rhizomatic non-linear
sexuality upon the figure of traditional femininity in hetero-romantic plots; the
two figurations of masculinity here iterate each other to produce femininity as
the (only) real difference. As has been noted above, both figurations of vertical
and lateral heroes converge upon the ground of sexuality to distillate traditional
“woman” as remainder of experiments with both models of maleness.
Third, the objectification of women within sexual subjectivation stories, as
well as the maleness of the spectator in fables of spectatorial subjectification via
identification, cannot but alert one to the enduring maleness of the spectator.
Even in the era of renewed affirmations of the liminal and the countermodern
 Love triangles at home and abroad  181
in sexuality and gender discourses, and in the age of national “(post)modernity,”
female identity remains the one with no adequate “representation,” neither as
star nor as spectator; it remains an inert repeating difference. In fact, as we have
seen, women are actually “repeated” to meet the needs of the new love triangle
stories, wherein the lack of a fourth person threatens the dissolution or erasure
of the third person in the love triangle. To take just one version of such erasure,
in earlier Hindi films such as Andaz (1949, Mehbood Khan), Sangam (1964,
Raj Kapoor), or Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978, Prakash Mehra), as Deshpande
reminds us, the problem of the love triangle was the paucity of women: two men
loved a woman while also, in certain cases, “loving” one another as best friends
or “partners” (2005: 199). In such a case, “the love triangle is premised on the
assumption that one of the three has to lose out in the end” (ibid.: 200).
In the new movies, however, this problem of triangulation has tended to be
solved by the “doubling” of women between two men in ways that do not involve
contradictions in the attainment of desire, which would seriously jeopardize
filial or confraternal bonds. Indeed, Deshpande characterizes this tongue-in-
cheek as a “bigamous” solution, but, in any case, the solution seems to be one
of cloning more women for consumption where needed: “The consumerism of
the new globalised hero, then, extends as much to the sexual realm as it does to
the economic” (Deshpande 2005: 201). When not enough women are available to
go around among the men, the woman is essentially split or doubled to make do
without breaking men’s hearts. Men’s feelings are thus never permanently hurt,
and men do not die of lost love. And when women are not “cloned” into enough
versions to satisfy all competing male desires, sometimes men console them-
selves with each other’s companionship, as in Dostana (2009), offering another
happy permutation of the imbrication of the male queer subtext in the hetero-
normative text. Spectatorship and stardom remain bound up within vectors of
confraternity and relations of homosociality. In this cinema, the spectator as the
subject desiring the image on screen, as Mulvey had suggested in her early, much-
discussed and much-challenged work, usually has been, and remains, male. So
does the image, however, contrary to Mulvey’s position, and, in this sense, the
only subject position available in Hindi cinema’s spectatorial and scopic complex
is that of the male.

The variable and the constant: or repetition redivivus

We have seen the changing face of cinematic subjectivation in the last few decades
of reconstitutions of the Hindi film hero, from the heights of stardom to lateral
moves into fan territory. What remains constant in this field of changing suscep-
tibilities, sensibilities, and perceptions? The answer must come back as follows:
what remains constant is the role that performance and embodiment of traditional
gender ideology plays. It is a repeat performance that, no matter how much other
things change—spatial extension, star bodies, sexual risky business—re-enacts
the subservience of all realignments of people, affects, places, and intimacies to
the imperial discourse of “traditional family values,” and the “great Indian tradi-
tion.” Women’s traditional role in the gender ideologies in which Hindi cinema
182  Love triangles at home and abroad
has invested remains, in a sense, the end of the road for producing the liminal or
indeed the countermodern. The greater transactional flexibility and finesse of the
newer films, KHNH, Jaan-E-Mann, and Dostana, yields the same role and the
same value for women in re-stabilizing the teleological narrative of the transna-
tional hetero-patriarchal romance, as it did when the heroines were raising them-
selves up on stools and beds to serve the hero. If men in the past individualized
women for private emotional and familial needs, snatched them away from other
predatory men, or robbed the gene pools of rich and recalcitrant fathers, now
men gift each other the gift of the girlfriend, and new homosocial sanctimonies
are forged in acts of renouncing female lovers for buddies. The hetero-normative
gender relationship remains both axial and transactional.
It is finally evident that queer enactment in Hindi cinema, like other re-enact-
ments, is nothing new. There have been many enactments, many versions of
queer performance and queer masquerade in different times and at different
places. Comparing two high points in such queer masquerades with their axial
gendered transactions, as I have done above, leads one to surmise that queer
performance is not about queerness, but about the embodiment of masculinity.
Just as the spectator is finally male, the queer is ultimately only a man.
Notes

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.

1 Structure, event, and liminal practices in recent Hindi films

  1 See the introduction.
  2 Nietzsche wrote: “the eyes of the gods still looked down on moral struggles, on the
heroism and self-inflicted torture of the virtuous … unwitnessed virtue was some-
thing inconceivable for this nation of actors” (1997: 45; emphasis mine).
  3 In what Lata Mani called “an effect of a colonial discourse” in her well-known
work on the British abolition of sati in nineteenth-century India (1987), the abolition
 Notes  185
of sati by the British was an event that influenced modern discourses on women’s
rights in India, and marked the beginning of internalization of British official
insistence upon “reform” by emerging “nationalists” like Ram Mohun Roy, who
began importing statist rhetoric and demands into the hitherto non-official private
and “mytho-religious” sphere of Indian/Bengali indigenous elites. Chakrabarty
describes these as having previously been oblique to, and oblivious of, a conscious-
ness of “nation-state” formations (Mani 1987: 122–3). Gender and women’s rights
became the normative fulcrum of this new constitution of the “nationalist” private
in this moment of nationalism. The fact that this gendered normativization was not
immutable as either a gender rights phenomenon or as proof of “modernity” is testi-
fied by the resurgence of mytho-religious non-official support for, and re-enactments
of, sati by countermodern publics in twentieth-century independent India, as well
as by Partition gender violence over women’s citizenship and patriarchal disgruntle-
ment over their personal law reform in the forties and the fifties, as discussed in the
second chapter.
4 Charles Heimsath has made the case that Indian nationalism and Indian cultural
nationalisms were two separate, though related, movements in the late nineteenth
century. Cultural nationalisms, especially as emerging out of nineteenth-century
social reform movements, did indeed demarcate a special, separate sphere of the
national private. Political nationalism, on the other hand, had undertaken the deploy-
ment of political rationalist ideas of liberalism and democracy in the service of
national liberation from colonization. The agendas of these two nationalisms did not
always overlap. This view extends to Chakrabarty’s articulation of plural national
publics and privates that were neither co-existent, polar, nor constituted by relation-
ship with the official state. However, Heimsath reinscribes Chakrabarty’s trajectory
of the later constitutive compartmentalization and inter-dependence of nation and
state in his example of gender-related social reform controversies and their impact on
interpellating and articulating the nineteenth-century political leadership’s negotia-
tion of autonomous identity vis-à-vis colonial rule: the Age of Consent (for Marriage)
Bill (1891) controversy precipitated the alignment of pro- or anti-reform nationalist
ideologies as pro- or anti-Western, i.e. responsive in one way or another to the official
state. Clearly, the necessary feminization of the private in this instance is an act of
mutual translation of the public and private spheres as both possible and necessary,
making the spheres equally continuous and contiguous, the “other other” of each
with respect to the official colonial state. As Chakrabarty argues, the conversion of
pre-national private space into a nationalist political laboratory for ideas of public
rationality propels gender into the foreground of nationalist thought, pressuring the
private and the national to assemble, thereby generating countermodernity, which
thrives on spatial (and temporal) disjunctural, disarticulating assemblages.
5 On Ramanujan’s views on repetition in Indian social and narrative contexts, one
would do well to consult Corey Creekmur’s insightful essay (2007) discussing the
uses and nature of repetition in the so-called “Devdas phenomenon.”
6 Another understanding of event and context can be found in Diana Taylor’s distinc-
tion between a “narrative” or textual structure of historic re-enactment (she calls this
performatics) and a structure of “scenarios” (2003: 28). Substituting the performed
“scenario” for the social script or standardized historical text, Taylor’s analysis of
social dramas of everyday life sees “scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that
structure social environments, behaviors … allows [sic] for many possible ‘endings’
… resuscitates and reactivates [sic] old dramas … [that] have localized meanings …
But are ultimately flexible and open to change” (28–9).
7 “Rang de Basanti,” Film Information 28 January 2006: 1.
8 This is a far cry from agitprop, of course.
9 Some obvious examples would be E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Paul
Scott’s Raj Quartet (1966–75), Aamir Khan’s earlier Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker,
2001), as well as historic figures such as Margaret Noble (sister Nivedita, 1867–1911)
186  Notes
and Annie Besant (1847–1933), who dedicated their lives to causes led by charismatic
Indian men.
10 Vivian Sobchak defines this as a spectatorship that “looks less to the cinema as a
phenomenal object than as a phenomenological experience” (2004: 260) of the histor-
ically and culturally competent and “knowing” viewer.
11 Fiza (2000; about an Indian Muslim turned Pakistani terrorist); Dil Se (1998; about
a hill woman turned anti-national terrorist); Dil Chahta Hai (2001; about sophisti-
cated metrosexuals pushing the boundaries of traditional love and marriage); Kal Ho
Naa Ho (2003; about diasporic Indians reinventing India in the city of New York);
Ek Chalis ki Last Local (2007; about contemporary urban crises and “aspirational”
identities, new middle-class angst as evacuation of middle class ethics and turn to
“criminality”), and Dostana (2008; about two men enacting queerness as a means of
getting close to a woman who desires neither) are all examples of such diverse new
cinema.
12 Carl Schmitt 1987 is quoted in Ong 2006: 4–5.
13 Rajadhyaskha and Prasad et al.
14 The song goes, “Ay dil, hai mushkil, jeena yehan; zara hathke, zara bachke, yeh hai
Bombay meri jaan” (“Dear heart, it is hard living here; be careful, be fearful, this is
Bombay, my life). The address of “meri jaan” is both the listener and the city itself,
but the mood of the song is one of light-hearted joshing.
15 For instance, Wallerstein claims “in almost every case statehood preceded nation-
hood,” which means that ideas about race necessitated by the necessary division
of labor in interstate systems underlie much of the ideology of nationalism, a point
also made by Balibar (Wallerstein, Race, Class, Nation, 80–1; Balibar, Race, Class,
Nation, 53, 59).
16 See also Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2003) and the crime and police dramas
starring Amitabh Bachchan in the seventies and eighties—Sholay (“Embers”,
Ramesh Sippy, 1975), Deewar (“The Wall”, Yash Chopra, 1975), and Shakti (“The
Power”, Ramesh Sippy, 1982)—for earlier representations of the police as familiar
foes in this sense. The state is further embodied and endowed with affect in Deewar
in the figure of the policeman, who is the brother of the criminal Amitabh and who
weeps as he hunts down his brother.
17 Tukaram’s name is an obvious echo of Sant Tukaram, patron saint of Maharashtra,
the state in which Bombay is located, and cause celebre of my traffic-related prox-
emic experience in Pune, June 2009 (see introduction), on whose life an acclaimed
Marathi film was made in 1936.
18 This was also shown in the forties and fifties, when the citizen was not the one who
was found in place, but the one who was either found or rescued, that is, performed or
witnessed a dramatic act, to become a citizen (see chapter two).
19 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in Complete Psychological Works
(18: 57).
20 Brooks calls them “the deepest relations of life, as in the celebrated voix du sang”
(1994: 19).
21 Metz 1982: 63–4. Metz’s scenario helps substitute the poetics and metaphysics of
theatre criticism that for so long dominated Indian cinema theory for one of meta-
physical absence or indeterminacy and postmodern play that is more properly the
domain of film criticism, as Ajay Gehlawat has pointed out (Gehlawat 2010: xvii–
xvii). In my argument, I am not finding or advocating a re-emergence of a theat-
rical suppression of absence, but a mechanism of iteration as a subjectival device
that ambiguates the very binary of absence versus presence, the very metaphysics of
embodiment, in favor of a metaphysics of presentation of the represented.
22 While Sobchak herself differentiates her theory of the “cinesthetic subjet” (68) as
embodied and literal and experiencing cinema cross-sensorially from “anorexic theo-
ries of identification that have no flesh on them” (71), by which she means Metzian and
psycho-linguistic theories of spectatorship, I choose to abjure this strict separation
 Notes  187
and to synthesize instead these two theories of cinematic subjectivation as in many
ways parallel and organically related, promising a richer debate on spectatorship
together rather than separately.
23 The original Metzian model of spectatorship and the signifying apparatus is by
some counts outdated and modified, including by Metz himself (Sandro 1985), but
according to other accounts it still serves to anchor the antecedents of much contem-
porary film theory to primarily psycho-linguistic models of spectatorship and cine-
matic signification where Metz’s early work on the “imaginary signifier” and the
screen as mirror is still foundational (Altman 1985: 523). I am, of course, tracing the
textual and meta-textual modeling of just such a narrative in recent Hindi films via
BB, where “mirroring,” which Altman identifies as the definitive metaphor of both
the signifying apparatus and of spectatorial identification, is significant both as an
intra-textual gloss upon cinematic signification per se, and as a trope of spectato-
rial or “fan” subjectivation. BB therefore is the paradigmatic new Hindi cinematic
“reflexive text, which derives its identity from a portrayed disparity between reality
and its representation” (Altman 1985: 523–4).
24 Here I diverge from critics like Vijay Mishra (2002), and to a lesser extent, Sunny
Singh (2008; see chapter three), who draw upon Indian myths such as the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana as the “grand syntagmatiques” of Hindi cinema, explaining plot,
theme, and above all, characterization. In contrast, I suggest that the continuous
breakdown and assault of these mythic syntagms and structures are what mark Hindi
cinema as liminal, especially when its implicit but dominant technique and theme
of repetition is systematically examined in the contexts of spectatorship, political
subjectivation, ideology, plot, visual style, and so forth.
25 Much as the “real” viewer themselves might be doing in what Boris Eikhenbaum
called “inner speech” (cited in Ray 2001: 23), much as fans in the auditorium might be
repeating favorite or notorious lines of dialogue, thrusting themselves thereby deep
and far into the “cinematic” mise en scène.
26 The literature on filmic darsan is extensive; I will refer here to some of the most well-
known examples such as Prasad 1998, Vasudevan 2000, Rajadhyaksha 2000, Mishra
2002, Dwyer and Patel 2002, Pinney 2004, Eck 1981, Lutgendorf 2006: 227–256, etc.
27 This will be covered in more depth in chapter three.
28 Descartes’ separation of the spirit and the body—“Cogito, ergo sum”—is a parallel
epistemology of the dissociated subject, consisting of a dematerialized consciousness
and a collapse of time-space categories and limits of identity.

2 Imagining the past in the present: violence, gender, and citizenship

in Hindi films
  1 Cited in index, but not discussed in Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994.
  2 Watan review in FilmIndia, February 1938: 40–2.
  3 I thank Charu Gupta, Ketu Katrak, Pritika Chowdhury and others present at the
feminist pre-conference panel of the Annual South Asia conference at Wisconsin,
Madison, 2008, for first raising the issue of “silence” surrounding Partition’s
gendered violence. I argue that, while these discourses are not always “silent” on
Partition violence, what they register is the difficulty or the impossibility of the
“communication” of the particular or singular experience as singular or particular.
These discourses resort instead to a collective narrative or a collective silence about
these experiences. My debt here to Butler’s work on gender performance as “itera-
tion” is obvious.
  4 See Khory’s “The Shah Bano Case: Some Political Implications,” Baird 1993: 134–5.
Khory details how, under Nehru and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi, prime ministers
respectively in the fifties and the nineties, the state faced and defaulted on this
identical question: “how does the state reconcile group interests with the demands
of common citizenship” (135). On religion in the Indian context see Bhagwati in
188  Notes
Baird 1993: 17; Van der Veer 1996; Hansen 2001; Cohn 1988; Lloyd and Lloyd 1987;
Varshney 2002.
  5 An earlier draft was proposed in 1944, but was shelved temporarily (Virdi 2003:
68–9).
  6 Also see Mishra 2002: 63.
  7 Rajadhyaksha 2003: 35. Identifying the film’s address constitutes filmic spectator-
ship for Metz; identifying the state’s address constitutes political citizenship for
Rajadhyaksha, Menon, and the constitutionalists and critics represented in Baird
1993. The link between citizen and spectator was discussed in chapter one as an
ongoing dynamic of subjectivation in the cinematic universe.
  8 A salacious scandal arose from the “incestuous” mating of the “mother-son” pair in
real life: the Muslim actress Nargis (Radha, or “Mother India”) and the Hindu actor
Sunil Dutt (her intransigent son Birju) married after Mother India was filmed, and
their engagement was apparently suppressed before the film’s release for fear that it
would muddy the film’s reception (Movie August 1984: 90). I draw upon this when
I discuss the film Lahore (1949) below, to elaborate on the shadowy issues of legiti-
macy, sexuality, female chastity, and contamination.
  9 While the villain of the brochure is the Muslim, the villain in Mother India was a
Hindu moneylender; yet both were protégés and pawns of the British according to
nationalist discourse.
10 The other film where Nargis plays a very similar role is Aag (1948), but the story of
the gendered victim of Partition is there alluded to only covertly, while in Lahore this
forms the very overt theme of the film, the very narrative of the gender discourse of
Partition.
11 See Mishra 2002: 68–71, 79, 84–7; Thomas 1989: 16–8, 20, 25, 27.
12 Tamas or “darkness” is the sanskritized title of Indian parallel film-maker Govind
Nihalani’s well-known eighties television serial on the Partition. Nargis uses the
vernacular word “andhera.”
13 See Kabir, “Introduction,” x. I do not discuss Mughal-e-Azam in detail in this essay,
as it strictly evades, to some extent, the question of defining the new citizen alto-
gether. However, it is not free from the impulse to draw the terrain of India, and
to appeal for the “cultural syncretism” remarked upon by Mishra. Thus, in its very
opening scenes, the spectator is hailed by the film speaking as “India” itself: “I am
India.” Later in this essay I will discuss its crucial re-emergence in the wake of late
twentieth-century films (discussed below) as the ambassador of Indian goodwill
to Pakistan. The migrations of films are sometimes as politically fraught as that of
bodies in twentieth-century South Asia.
14 See also Roy 1998: 152–3; the nineties saw a renewed spate of legal battles on various
issues of sexual minority rights, actors’ rights, industry regulations, and self-regula-
tion, as well as anxious industry responses to the increasingly threatening interven-
tions of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, claiming to fish out terrorist and pro-Pakistan
elements in the industry supporting those who perpetrated the 1993 Mumbai bomb
blasts (“Thackeray Softens Stand,” 1993; “Film producers clash over star rules,”
1995; “Film bodies deny Pak star ban,” 1993; Mohamed and Sardesai 1993; and “No
guidelines on films: Pharande,” 1993). Re-enactments and reactivations of the liminal
and the subjunctive, as well as the countermodern, in the nineties are no surprise.
15 As he writes, Metz’s apparatus theory “developed a distinctly political meaning in the
India of the 1940s and early 1950s” (35); see also 2003: 34–5; Vasudevan 2000: 113.
16 Vasudevan 2000: 105, 109. Vasudevan, however, keeps the family in focus as one level
or layer of that wider “social” space. To him, it is characters’ movements between
extra-familial and familial spaces that constitute their publicly melodramatic history,
a perception significant for my analysis of post-independence films and their ambiva-
lent suture of national and familial subjects.
17 My translation. As we know, Muslim personal law was left untouched by the Hindu
Code bill reformers, particularly the Congress for fear of further alienating the
 Notes  189
Muslim minorities, to the chagrin of Hindus who opposed reform of their traditional
family law (itself a residue of colonial legal interventions).
18 Patel’s editorial piece, “Is Nehru Trembling?” in the May 1956 issue of FilmIndia
quite surpasses his other rants in the fictional minoritization of Hindus (a numerical
majority in India) and the fear of Muslim sexual battery on Hindus (3–7). With regard
to the notion of the land belonging to Hindus, one must examine the early twentieth-
century Hindu fundamentalist or Hindutva theories of Savarkar and Golwalkar incar-
nated in the contemporary political approaches of the RSS, the BJP, and the VHP,
today’s cultural and political Hindu fundamentalists in India. See Chakraborty 2000;
Jaffrelot 1996; Gupta 2001; Hansen 2001; Van der Veer 1997; Brass 1974; Varshney
2002; among others.
19 For this and for information about the ICC report’s findings on the issue of inter-
regional linguistic divides and their consequences for Indian cinema see Jaikumar
2006: 98–100, 266.
20 FilmIndia, February 1956: 4. See also editorial April 1956: 11.
21 Literally, the Punjabi father is the Tamil father’s boss at work.
22 Director Yash Chopra tries his hand at a spuriously “documentary” turn in fictional
histories of borders, partitions, and abductions past and present, refracted through the
lens of romantic ruptures, only in Veer-Zaara (2004). See Sarkar (2009) on the alle-
gorization of trauma in Chopra’s films. Chopra made Dharmputra (Godson) as early
as 1961, but its overt themes were intra-state Hindu-Muslim antagonism and violence
in India, and did not explicitly relate those to the Partition.
23 Indian Express review, 19 January 1991.
24 Chakravarty 1993: 165.
25 The story derives from a brief episode in Lapierre and Collins’ Freedom at Midnight
(Gahlot 2004: 110).

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.

4 Romancing religion: Bollywood’s painless globalization

  1 Rao, “Globalisation and Bollywood”, http://imagineasia.bfi.org.uk/guide/surveys/
globalization/index.html. See also Van der Veer 1994: 107; Hansen 2000, 2001.
Commentators on South Asia no longer exclaim at the co-constitutive or simulta-
neous relationship of fissiparous neo-nativism and hegemonic economic develop-
mentalism or globalization.
  2 A fan on sulekha.com writes about the film Ek Rishtaa (“The Bond of Love”, 2001,
Sunil Darshan): “Amitabh’s deep voiced dialog [sic] delivery remains as impressive
as ever and would be a reason alone to watch any Bollywood movie twice. Many
people don’t know he is half a Sardarji, his mother was a Sikh. Another great thing in
Bollywood movies is the increasing use of Punjabi as a deference to the biggest NRI
group outside India and whenever it is said the Punjabis always laugh in apprecia-
tion for eg [sic] when the policeman says to Monish ‘Yaar tu aadmi hai ki pajama?’”
(http://www.sulekha.com/movies/moviereview.aspx?cid=119629&rvid=132072&p
ageno=22). Indeed, the Big B—the once-angry young man of Hindi cinema—has
begun to pontificate and posture extensively since the nineties, as though he were
a covert cultural ambassador of Punjabi nationalism: “Mahiya o Mahiya,” “Ek
Punjabun, Kudi Punjabun,” etc.
  3 An excellent purview of Bombay and the film industry is to be found in Suketu
Mehta’s Maximum City.
  4 Once the breakaway icon of radical popular dissent and mass political disaffec-
tion, he changed with the times and now continues to cast his long shadow over
neoliberal Bollywood in such mega-starrers as Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G or
“Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sorrow” [my translation], 2001, Karan Johar).
This film’s now (in)famous motto, incidentally, is “It’s all about the family.”
  5 Doubtless this textuality of the Bachchan child’s body is a motif redeployed from
Yash Chopra’s Deewar (1975), where the inscription—“My father is a thief”—is,
however, a matter for filial shame, not pride.
  6 Lutgendorf’s review in http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/Mard.html is irrepressibly
entertaining; a must-read.
  7 See Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 412 and Chakraborty 2003 on Savarkar and the RSS; see
Varshney 2002: 55–68 on the BJP.
  8 On the crucial function of the tableau form as a site for rearticulation of tradition and
modernity in fifties Hindi films see Vasudevan 1989 and 2000b.
  9 For instance, as Arvind Rajagopal has written: “In India, the invocation of religion
summons up the unresolved debates between nationalism and social reform, and
presents Hinduism as an implicitly conservative force. By contrast, in the US, Hindu
religion is more self-consciously a medium of cultural reproduction” (Rajagopal
2000: 467). He also writes, “The mainly cultural emphasis exhibited by Hindutva in
the US represents, perhaps, the fruition of Hindu nationalists’ ecumenical assertions,
in many ways difficult to achieve in the context of highly politicized divisions of caste
and community in India” (ibid.: 489).
10 See also Sengupta 2002; Thapar 2004.
11 In a similar vein, Ong has written of the Chinese that their “[seemingly] parallel
[East-West] narratives … disguise common civilizational references in a world where
the market is absolutely transcendental” (1999: 7).
 Notes  191
12 One reviewer on the diaspora website sulekha.com responded to this with “Basically
one big coke commercial … I’ve never seen such blatant product placement!” (http://
sulekha.com/movies/moviereview.aspx?cid=77696&rvid=307524&pageno=3).
13 Pranil, Singapore, 16 August 2001, writes, “the blatant product placements is very
insulting, imagine [sic] watching a commercial for Coke … in the movie itself!”
Manfrommatunga, Mumbai, 11 August 2001, writes, “the use of brand placement
for advertising is a joke. Coke as cokemohabbat.com and Pass-Pass (a mouth-fresh-
ener) are blatantly thrust upon the audience … Subhash Ghai has gone on record
saying that his target market is the foreign market where people pay $7–10 for a ticket
and he does not really care for the guy paying 10 rupees in a small town in Bihar.”
Gussifinknottle of Sydney writes, “The movie can be described as one big adver-
tising arena—for products ranging from Coke to Hero bicycles.” Skfazil in Yorba
Linda and Kamran–3 in Toronto protest “product placements” (IMBD, Yaadein user
comments, 2001).
14 All of the film-specific data are taken from the International Business Overview
Standard (http://ibosnetwork.com).
15 Dwyer and Patel describe these films as follows: “These films revive a form of the
feudal family romance in a new, stylish, yet unmistakably Hindu, patriarchal struc-
ture, which is connected to the (largely indirect) part they play in the resurgence of
Hindutva politics in the 1980s and ’90s” (2002: 22).
16 The common slang term for things related to film across India is “filmi,” as in “filmi
bol (speech),” “filmi chaal (fashion),” “filmi ishtyle (style)” (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 8).
17 See Mukta 2000: 460 on the Aryanist cult of Ram in the diaspora.
18 See also Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 428, 429; Kumar 2005: 236–8.
19 Varshney writes that “ethnic groups often fight over economic resources … ethnic
conflicts are not always about identities … Essentialism makes it hard to explain why,
if animosities are so historically deep and so rooted in cultural differences, tensions
and violence between groups tend to ebb and flow at different times, or why the same
groups live peacefully in some places but fight violently in others” (2002: 26–8).
20 Kamat et al. 2004: 7, 13–7. The colonial doctrine of “we want your labour, not your
bodies” (ibid.: 17) has reached hyperreal fulfillment in the phenomenon of outsourced
services in global production, telecommunications, and finance, and has maximized
the neoliberal separation of economies (labor) from politics (bodies).
21 The International Business Overview Standard records in its trade note section that
the film did “2,341 shows in 847 days of its run at Mumbai’s Liberty cinema. It ran
105 weeks in regular shows and 16 weeks in noon shows” (http://ibosnetwork.com/
filmbodetaisl.asp?id=Hum+Aapke+Hain+Kaun).
22 The Ramjanambhoomi movement in Ayodhya, a case of intense anti-Muslim violence
in recent Indian history has been well described in Gupta and Sharma 1996. Anand
Patwardhan’s documentary, Father Son and Holy War (1994), recent nuclear testing
in India, the Godhra anti-Muslim massacre case (2002), and Rajagopal’s summer
camp experiences are all accounts of the coded or unmasked violence of this political
engagement in India and abroad. In response, sadly, the Indian state has amassed a
retaliatory level of unrestrained violence against “perpetrators” (Narain 2005). The
cycle of violence continues unabated between state, individuals, and law enforce-
ment, without sufficient or real attempts to draw on existing inter-ethnic or communal
structures for upholding peace and accountability.
23 See Rajagopal 2000: 475.

5 Love triangles at home and abroad: male embodiment as queer

enactment
  1 I use the term “representation” in this sentence as a somewhat less than fortuitous
phenomenon, as an abstraction rather than a reality of being, in the sense that Deleuze
discusses the difference between representation and repetition in his influential book,
192  Notes
Difference and Repetition (1994). Deleuze argues that repetition actually produces
difference, whereas representation produces foreclosed sameness. The term repre-
sentation, as used by Deleueze, in this context can also be paradigmatically mapped
onto Badiou’s use of the same term to suggest the “normative” or “normal,” and
onto Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which predicts the interminable nature of anal-
ysis. The duo of repetition-representation informs and troubles poststructuralist and
postmodern theory in ways that I have suggested throughout this book; my founda-
tional formulations of these concepts are laid out particularly in the introduction and
chapter one.
  2 In some ways, it was an Amitabh vehicle that began this trend; in Deewar (1975, Yash
Chopra) he is said to have portrayed Haji Mastan, a then-famed and feared Muslim
gangster. However, film aesthetic and ideology were both updated, transformed,
and re-interpreted in the series of noir films of the digitally enhanced nineties and
later, including Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998) and Company (2002), Mahesh
Manjrekar’s Vaastav (“The Reality,” 1999), Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2004),
Ek Chalis ki Last Local (“Last Local at 1:40,” 2007, Sanjay Khanduri), and Shootout
at Lokhandwala (2007, Apoorva Lakhia), all of which depict a rather more subter-
ranean and rhizomatic world in a much more surreal and fast-paced visual idiom.
  3 Muslim heroes of the Hindi film industry have been much written about and ques-
tioned regarding their connections with the (significantly Muslim) underworld.
Beginning with actor Sanjay Dutt’s well-known troubles with the state on account of
his so-called terrorist and Muslim sympathies (his mother, Nargis, was a Muslim),
press outpourings regarding the “dubious” characters of the Muslim stars SRK,
Aamir Khan, and especially “bad boy” Salman Khan have been numerous. See
“Shakeel May be My Fan, says Salman,” 2003; Mohamed and Sardesai 1993.
  4 This interlude of political ambition was, however, brief and stormy. Bachchan himself
reportedly said of his political career: “it’s a closed chapter now. I have no regrets”
(Bhardwaj 1989: 14).
  5 The queer camp that I will elaborate upon in this essay is, especially in the content of
popular Hindi films, rather more in the nature of David Miller’s “open secret” than an
acutely actualized socio-psychological representation (Miller 1991: 125). As opposed
to an explicit text or context of cinematic depiction, these portrayals of queerness
are the sort of “twilight” visions that are “something known but unspoken” (Farmer
2000: 7, 249; Miller 1991: 125; Russo 1987; Rose 1986; Hanson 1999).
  6 While I think Vitali’s emphatic assertion that “It is the task of film historians to iden-
tify as accurately as possible which socio-economic pressures work themselves out
in any given film, and to show how they do so” (2011: 241) is salutary in reminding
one of the embeddedness of cultural commodities within commodity cultures, her
analytic is somewhat astygmatic and rubs out altogether the importance of creative
synergies and immaterial ideological forces at work in the making of films.
  7 Parallel subjectivations were also occurring not only in the noir underworld films
already mentioned, but also in the emergence of powerful documentaries by Anand
Patwardhan (Raam ke Naam, “In the Name of Ram,” 1991), who chronicles grass-
roots activisms, both fundamentalist and secularist.
  8 Sholay (“Embers,” 1975, Ramesh Sippy) depicted Bachchan and Dharmendra as two
petty convicts hired by an ex-police inspector to avenge his family’s decimation by
the feared bandit Gabbar Singh (played by Amjad Khan).
  9 Early examples of such films are Do Bigha Zamin (“Two Acres of Land,” 1953, Bimal
Roy) and Jagte Raho (“Be Awake!” 1965, Amit and Sambhu Mitra), as well as Shree
420 (“Mr 420,” 1955, Raj Kapoor) and Pyaasa (“Thirst,” 1957, Guru Dutt).
10 Readers are referred to the discussion of status and not gender as the determinant
logic of pre-colonial and indigenous same-sex relations in South Asia according to
Chatterjee and others in Vanita and Kidwai 2002.
11 There is a single fight scene in Jaane-E-Mann where Salman Khan takes on
American thugs (black and white) who are harassing heroine Preity Zinta at a New
 Notes  193
York nightclub, but the scene is conceived as both racial and gender drag, with Khan
appearing as a Western transvestite in the scene
12 In keeping with later Hindi films’ disavowal of fathers, as I have argued above,
Chachu is eventually discredited—acknowledging his failure to guide Suhaan ethi-
cally and responsibly—and finally disappears completely from the finale where
Suhaan and Piya are found reunited.
13 This syntagm appears clearly derived from KHNH (2003), but with significant
“assimilation” even as relating to the transmission of homosexual tropes from home-
land to diaspora; in a similar scene in the earlier film, Aman gives Rohit a transmitter
device enabling him to guide Rohit in courtship with Naina. He tells Rohit, “Put this
in your kaan [Hindi for ‘ear’].” Rohit asks him, seeming perplexed, “Put it where?”
The joke apparent to the knowing viewer of this will be the homophony of “kaan”
and “gaand,” the latter the north Indian gay slang moniker for “asshole.” However,
this deployment of the slang moniker is more pervasive in the subcontinent than in
America, thereby increasing the present exegetic shock value of its blurry iteration,
as well as the urgency of the pendant demand for its future normalization and diur-
nalized mythopoesis as the romance of technology and the technology of heteronor-
mative romance in similar diasporic diegetic contexts, as in Jaane-E-Mann (2006).
Once the onomatopoeia sinks in, Aman and Rohit laugh about this as Aman incon-
clusively returns, “I see what you mean.” Jaane-E-Mann’s repetition of this technical
device and its reiterative possibilities is an instance of the idiomatization and main-
streaming of the trope of homosexuality in Jaane-E-Mann compared to KHNH, the
former a “cooked” avatar compared to KHNH’s very much more “raw” deployment
of homosocial “deviance” or “device.”
14 Repercussions of this for female sexualities—alternative, parallel, performative,
camp—are critical, burgeoning, and thought-provoking, but that will have to await
another inquiry as the parameters of this chapter do not permit that study.
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Index

Aag (1948) 188 Anand, Dev 31, 89, 164

Aah (“The Cry,” 1953) 168 Anand, M. L. 71, 84
Aankhen (“Eyes,” 2001) 161 Andaaz (1949) 181
Abducted Persons (Recovery and Andaz (1949) 133
Restoration) Act, 1949 74, 75–76, 108 Anderson, Benedict 25, 39–40
abduction anti-communal performances 93, 97
Chhalia (1960) 88–89 anti-essentialist theories 3
failed recovery 88, 104, 108–109 anticolonial nationalism 27, 36–37, 38–39,
Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (“Revolution: 131, 165
A Love Story,” 2001) 101–102, Appadurai, Arjun 29, 141
105–106, 108–109 Arendt Hannah 184
Garm Hava (“Hot Winds,” 1973) 97 Arya Samaj 136
Lahore (1949) 84, 86–87 Asif, K. 71, 86
‘lost and found’ 82
Mother India (1957) 78, 81, 83 Baazigar (“Gambler,” 1993) 156
New Delhi (1965) 94 Babenco, Hector 61
prevention of through infanticide Bacchetta, Paola 133
138–139 Bachchan, Amitabh 16–17, 22–23, 108,
Veer-Zaara (“Veer and Zaara,” 2004) 110, 128, 129, 133, 145, 153–154, 155,
108 156–157, 158, 160–161, 164, 166–167,
Achhut Kanya (1936) 52 168, 169–170, 179, 184, 190, 192
Adajania, Homi 31 Bachchan, Jaya 158
adoption, laws relating to 74, 75, 132 Bachchanalia 153
Advani, Nikhil 171 Badiou, Alain 7–8, 9–10, 11, 34, 39, 40,
advertisements in films 137 49, 88, 183, 192
Agamben, Giorgio 49, 51, 65 Bagchi, J 133
Agnes, Flavia 76, 132 Baghban (“The Gardener,” 2003) 171–173
Aiyar, Swarna 75, 101 Bainu, Saira 167
Akayla (“Alone,” 1991) 156 Baird, R 74, 75, 76, 83, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93,
Alessandrini, A. C. 136 187–188, 196
Ali, Muzaffar 60 Bajpai, Manoj 104
Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) 145, 184 Bali, Geeta 31
Ambedkar, Dr. 74, 92 Balibar and Wallerstein 52, 53
ambiguity Balibar, Etienne 51
in characters and plot 1, 7, 24 Banerjee, Dibakar 22
of gender 104, 107, 160 Bano, Shah 132, 187–188
of identity 62 Banu, Saira 168, 169
sexual 165, 170, 173 bare life 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 62, 63, 107
social 25, 107 Barjatiya, Sooraj 17, 139, 155
Amin, Shahid 25, 40 Barthes, Roland 25, 39, 183, 184
212  Index
Basu, Monmoyee 74, 133, 135 caste 19–20, 52
Bed, Narendra 158 censorship 98
Being Cyrus (2005) 31 Chak de India (“Three Cheers India,”
Benaam (“Nameless,” 1973) 158 2007) 16, 51, 104, 106, 111–115,
Benegal, Shyam 60, 97 116–125, 190
Benjamin, Walter 39, 48, 152 Chakrabarty, Amiya 71, 76–78
Besant, Annie 186 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 5–6, 27, 35
Bhabha, Homi 50–51 Chakraborty, Bidyut 127, 189, 190
Bhagwati, P. N. 74, 187 Chakravarty, Sumita S. 99, 189
Bhandarkar, Madhur 21–22 Chakravorty, Pramod 157
Bharatiya Janata Party see BJP (Bharatiya Chatterjee, Gayatri 171, 192
Janata Party) Chatterjee, Moushumi 158
Bhardwaj, Vishal 161, 192 Chatterjee, Partha 27, 97–98, 132, 165
Bhasin, Kamla 72 Chhalia (1960) 88–89
Bhatt and Mukta (2000) 126, 127, 136, Chhinamool (“Uprooted,” 1951) 97
190, 191 Chopra, Aditya 31, 156, 160
Bhatt, Vikram 156 Chopra, Anupama 23
Bhumikaa (“The Role,” 1977) 60 Chopra, Ravi 171
Big B see Bachchan, Amitabh Chopra, Vidhu Vinod 26, 155
Billu Barber (2009) 24, 33, 40, 56–65, Chopra, Yash 20, 28, 71, 104, 109, 160,
104, 161 170, 189
Birju 188 Chowdhury, Pritika 187
BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 126, 132 Chute, David 158, 179
Black Friday (2004) 50, 51, 186, 192 CID (1956) 51, 56
body language of stars 153 citizenship
Bollywood flexible 136
consumerism 136, 140, 141 gendered 76, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 107,
darshan 130–131 185
definition 127 liminality of 55
family values 133, 147 minority 189
gender ideology 127–128, 135, 136, naturalization 32
140 nomadic 62, 65
globalization of 127–128, 132, 137 postcolonial 31, 44
iconicity 132, 158 and secularism 74–76
market access 87–88 and spectatorship/actors 54–55
and masculinity 17 and violence/terrorism 50–51, 55
national identity 127–128 class identity 53
piety 132, 133–134, 138, 139, 152 Cohn (1988) 188
pooja 134, 137, 138, 139–140 comedies 90
and sexuality 171 Company (2002) 31, 192
suppression of social categories 132 consumerist culture 17, 24, 46, 68, 129,
Bombay (1995) 145 136, 139–141, 148
Bose, Derek 50 Coolie (1983) 157
Boyle, Danny 22, 160 Cooper, Darius 90
brand-name films 148 Coward, Harold G. 75, 87, 90, 92, 93
Brass, Paul 189 CPC (Criminal Procedure Code) 132
Brooks, Peter 78, 186 Creekmur, Corey 185
buddy culture 160 Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) 132
Butalia, Urvashi 72, 75 cultural nationalisms 185
Butler, Judith 65, 113–114, 144, 187
Dalit (untouchability) 52, 74, 92
Calcutta Lady, The 69 dance performances, and body shape 159
calendar art 17–18 Darr (“Fear,” 1993) 106, 156
camp enactment 62, 113–115, 169–170, darshan 130–131, 133, 137–138, 150, 183
173 Darshan, Sunil 190
 Index  213
Das, Veena 72 Eisenstein, Sergei 45
DDLJ see Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge Ek Chalis ki Last Local (2007) 22, 186,
Deewar (“The Wall,” 1975) 108, 131, 170, 192
184, 186, 190, 192 Ek Rishtaa (“The Bond of Love,” 2001)
Dekh Kabira Roya (1957) 71, 94 128, 148, 190
Deleuze and Guattari (2004) 153 embodiment
Deleuze, Gilles 2, 3, 56, 163, 191 agonistic 172
Delhi VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) gender 81, 103–104, 106, 107, 115
Mahila Mandal 135 heroic 170, 179–180
demystification, of stars 154 and liminality 7
Derrida, Jacques 16, 40–41, 49, 50, 71, masculine 17, 61, 127, 153–159, 163,
72, 141–142, 183, 184 166, 173, 178
Desai, Manmohan 88, 129, 131, 134, 135, Muslim 65, 89, 111–112, 115
136, 137, 145, 147, 152, 156, 157 and spectatorship 57, 59
Descarte, René 187 of state 54
Desh Premee (“Patriot,” 1982) 157 empowerment 62, 77, 81
Deshpande, Sudhanva 154, 159, 181 enactment, and liminality 7
Dev D (2009) 21 epic narratives 3–4, 31, 43, 74, 80, 86, 110
Devji, Faisal Fatehali 83 ethnicity-driven civilizationalism 142
Dewan, Karan 84, 85 event-ness 26–27
Dhagamwar, Vasudha 74, 75, 92 evental sites 7–9, 11, 39, 49, 54, 55, 123
Dharma 4 exaggeration 2
Dharmendra 155, 168, 192 exoctic locations 67
Dharmputra (“Godson,” 1961) 189 exogamy 139
Dholakia, Rahul 184
Dhoom series 28, 31 face, presence of 183
Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994) Falk, Richard 127, 132
192 family
Dil Chahta Hai (2001) 186 dramas 78, 97
Dil Se (1998) 106, 186 romances 11, 17, 129, 150
Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) values 93, 133, 148–149, 171–173, 190
31, 106, 147, 150, 156, 160 Fanaa (“Storm of Love,” 2006) 111
displacement dramas 97 Farmer, Brett 61, 113–114
divorce, laws relating to 75, 77, 132 Fashion (2008) 21–22
Dixit, Madhuri 149 Father Son and Holy War (1994) 191
Do Bigha Zamin (“Two Acres of Land,” Feast of Bacchus (Velazquez, 1629) 176
1953) 192 female
Don I (2006) 21, 154, 184 empowerment 77
Don 2 (2011) 106 identity 139–141, 180–181, 182
Dost (“Friend,” 1974) 168, 169 infanticide 138–139
Dostana (2009) 181, 182, 186 fidelity 27
Dosti 166 Film and Television Institute 19
dramatic realism 83 Film Finance Committee, 1969 reforms
Dushmun (“Enemy,” 1971) 168, 169 153
Dutt, Guru 28, 31, 90, 192 Film Finance Corporation 19
Dutt, Sanjay 188, 192 Film Information 45, 185
Dutt, Sunil 86, 155 film posters, and body language 153, 154
dwarfism, symbolism of 175 Filmfare 18–19, 78, 82, 90
Dwyer and Patel 129, 130–131, 134, 136, FilmIndia 70, 71, 83, 91, 92, 94, 187, 189
137, 187, 191 Fiza (2000) 26, 186
2002 141, 148 foreign hand, concept of 50, 51, 84
Dyer, Richard 114 Forster, E. M. 185
Foucault, Michel 1–2, 5, 12
Eck, Diana 187 Freedom at Midnight (Lapierre and
Eikhenbaum, Boris 187 Collins) 189
214  Index
Freud, Sigmund 6, 7, 186 heterosexuality 17, 158–159, 160,
165–166, 168, 172–173
Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (“Revolution: A Hindu Code Bill 74, 75, 76, 90–91,
Love Story,” 2001) 71, 74, 100–104, 188–189
105–106, 108–109 Hindustan Photo Films 19
Gadhvi, Sanjay 31 Hindutva 126–129, 135–144, 150–152
Gahlot, Deepa 100–101, 189 Hollywood cinema 4, 9, 12, 19, 62
Garm Hava (“Hot Winds,” 1973) 16, 71, homo economicus, identity 49, 51
74, 95–100, 104, 162–163 homoerotic interpretations 61–62, 164,
gay cultural inuendos 167, 170, 171 166–167, 171 see also homosociality
Gehlawat, Ajay 64, 171, 172, 186 homosexuality 61, 66, 170, 178, 180,
gender 193
Abducted Persons Act (1949) 74, homosociality 17, 128, 164, 165, 166, 170
75–76, 108 see also homoerotic interpretations
ambiguity of 104, 106–107, 160 Hovden and Keene (2002) 127, 132, 134,
embodiment 81, 103–104, 106, 107, 115 146–147
fundamentalist doctrines 138 Hu, Brian 172
iconicity 132, 165 Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (“Who Are We
religious nationalisms 127 to You?” 1994) 17, 129, 136, 137, 138,
violence 16, 70, 71–74, 76, 127, 135 139, 148–152, 156
genocide, gendered 72–74, 76, 135 hyperreality 21, 28, 49
Ghai, Subhash 25, 129
Ghandi family 157 iconicity 21, 23–24, 26, 64, 127–128, 129,
Ghatak, Ritwik 97, 162 154, 157–158, 165
Ghosh, Nimai 97 IMDB (Internet Movie Database) 137,
Ghulam (1998) 156 151
Gill (2002) 134, 146, 151 Indian cinema, market access 87–88
Gilloch, Graeme 48 Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1928
godhead figures 59, 79, 157 report 93
Golwalkar, M. S. 135, 189 Indian communities, gender violence 73
Gopal and Moorti et al 32 Indian Criminal Procedure Code 76
Govil, Nitin 159, 183 Indian cultural nationalism 185
Gowariker, Ashutosh 185 Indian Express 189
Guha, Dulal 168 Indian International Film Festival 19
Gupta and Sharma (1996) 191 Indian Motion Pictures Export
Gupta, Charu 187, 189 Corporation 19
Gupta, Sanjay 161 Indian Muslim identity 110
Indian nationalism 185
HAHK! see Hum Aapke Hain Koun! indigenous personal customs 74–75
(“Who Are We to You?” 1994) infidel fidelity 27
Hali, Altaf Husayn 61 instability, of plot and character 1, 3
Hansen, Thomas Blom 188, 189, 190 intelligent cinema 9
Hanson, Ellis 192 International Business Overview Standard
Hare Raam Hare Krishna (1971) 164 137, 191
Hasan (1998) 140 Internet Movie Database see IMDB
Hastings, Warren 75 (Internet Movie Database)
Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (“A Thousand Irani, Faredoon 82
Such Desires,” 2003) 15, 33, 41–44 Islamic Shariat laws 76
Hegdewar, Keshav Baliram 135
Heimsath, Charles 185 Jaadugar (“The Magician,” 1989) 156
Hera-Pheri (“Crooks,” 1976) 166–168, Jaan-E-Mann (“Beloved,” 2006) 17, 162,
170 163–164, 166, 170, 173–178, 182, 193
heroes 153–155, 160, 178, 179–180 Jaffrelot, Christophe 189
hetero-normative gender relationships Jagte Raho (“Be Awake,” 1965) 192
163, 168, 170–172, 178, 182 Jaikumar, Priya 189
 Index  215
Jain, Kajri 17, 64, 138, 184 Komal Gandhar (“A Soft Note On a Sharp
Jameson, Fredric 44, 152, 189 Scale,” 1961) 162
Jayawardena and de Alwis (1996) 127, Kugle, Scott 61
133, 135, 140, 141 Kuhn, Annette 114
Jeffrey and Basu (1998) 132, 133, 135, Kumar, Akshay 173
136, 140 Kumar, Amitava 135, 141, 142, 191
JFK 123 Kumar, Dilip 23, 110
Johar, Karan 158, 190 Kumar, Kishore 93
Joseph, May 30–31, 54, 65 Kumar, Manoj “Bharat” 164
Joshi, Pratik 97, 109 Kumar, Mehul 160
juridico-political discourse 75 Kumar, Rakesh 166

Kaante (“Thorns,” 2002) 161, 162 labor identity 53

Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (“Happiness LaCapra, Dominic 37
and Sadness,” 2001) 139, 158, 160, 190 Lagaan (2001) 101, 185
Kabir, Nasreen Munni 86 Lahore (1949) 71, 84, 85, 97, 102, 104,
Kabir, Saint 189 188
Kal Ho Na Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Lakhia, Apoorva 192
Come,” 2003) 17, 106, 162, 163–164, Lal (1998) 190
166, 170, 171–173, 174, 177, 182, 186 Lateef, Shahida 74, 76
Kamat et al. 136, 147, 191 layering 3
Kamat, Mir and Mathew (2004) 136 Levinas, Emmanuel 56, 183
Kambakht Ishq (2009) 31 liminality, definition 5, 7
Kaminey (“The Scoundrels,” 2009) 161 linguistic plurality 93–95
Kannabiran, Kalpana 135, 140 Lipner (2001) 150
Kapoor, Raj 20, 86, 89, 168, 181, 192 Lloyd and Lloyd (1987) 188
Kapoor, Shahid 161 lost identities 87
Kashyap, Anurag 50, 186, 192 love triangles 181
Kathputli (“The Puppet,” 1957) 71, 76–78 Lutgendorf, Philip 1, 3–4, 130, 187, 190
Katrak, Ketu 187
Kazmi, Nikhat 65 Madan, T. N. 189
Keohane, Robert 146–147 Madhubala 93
Khan, Aamir 20, 26, 44, 46, 154, 156, Mahaan (1982) 153
160, 185, 192 Mahbharata 3
Khan, Amjad 166, 192 Main Hoon Na (2004) 26
Khan, Farah 26 Main Khiladi Tu Anar 166
Khan, Irrfan 62, 161 Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) 154
Khan, Kabir 31, 189, 190 maintenance, laws relating to 74
Khan, Kader 166 Majeed, Javed 184
Khan, Mansoor 154, 156 Majumdar, Neepa 23, 24
Khan, Mehboob 20, 71, 76, 84, 133, 181 male sexualized embodiment 159–160
Khan, Sabir 31 males, iconicity 132
Khan, Saif Ali 161, 171 Malik, Ashok 126, 127, 135, 136
Khan, Salman 154, 156, 160, 161, 172, Malik, Ashwini 189
173, 192 Mammo (1994) 97
Khan, Shahnaz 111 Mani, Lata 184–185
Khan, Shak Rukh 1, 16, 23, 51, 62, 65, Manjrekar, Mahesh 192
104, 106–108, 110–125, 128, 153, 154, Mankekar, Purnima 147
156, 157–158, 160, 161, 171, 189, 192 Manto, Saadat Hasan 73
Khanduri, Sanjay M. 22, 192 Mard (1985) 129–132, 133, 137, 143, 145,
Khanna, Vinod 166–167 151–152
Kher, Anupam 175 market access 87–88
Khory, Kavita R. 75, 76, 83, 187 marriage, laws relating to 74, 75, 77
Kiss of the Spider Woman 61 masculinity
Kohli, Kunal 111 camp 123
216  Index
feminization of 106–107, 111, 151, representability of 98
159 violence towards 72, 73, 99, 135
heroic 170, 178–180 Muslim Women (protection of Rights on
hetero 170–171 Divorce) Bill 132
homosocial 166, 170 mythic approach 74, 78
hyper 130 mytho-religious practices 35, 36, 37
Muslim 111, 123
national 17, 107 Nandy, Ashis 189
Mastan, Abbas 156 Narain, Siddharth 191
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found Nargis 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 188, 192
(Mehta, 2005) 190 Narula, S. 126, 134–135
Mazumdar, Ranjani 28 Nastik (“Atheist,” 1983) 157
Mehra, Prakash 156, 166, 170, 181 National Film Archives 19, 29
Mehta, Suketu 190 national womanhood 69–70
melodrama 83 “Nationalism Refigured” (Niranjana) 19
Menon and Bhasin (1996) 75, 136, 140 nationalist hymns 36
Menon, Ritu 72, 75, 101, 108, 136, 188 naturalization of history 39
metastructures 8 Nawathe, Raja 168
Metz, Christian 57, 58, 59–61, 63, 110, Nehruvian era 77
148, 153, 186, 187, 188 neo-patriotism 44
Miller, D. A. 192 neocoloniality 13, 44
minority citizenship 188, 189 New Delhi (1965) 71, 93–94, 95, 96
mirroring 57, 58, 59–61 New York (2009) 31
Mishra, Vijay 78, 81, 82, 110, 141, 187, Nietzsche, Friedrich 35, 184
188 Nihalani, Govind 96–97, 188
Mission Kashmir (2000) 26 Niranjana, Tejaswini 19–20
Mitra, Amit and Sambhu 192 Nirnajana (2000) 145
MMJ see Mumbai Meri Jaan (“Mumbai Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Noble) 185
My Life,” 2008) Noble, Margaret (Sister Nivedita) 185
Mohabbatein (2000) 160
Mohamed and Sardesai (1993) 192 Ocean’s Eleven (2001) 161
moralizing, through epics 3 Olalquiaga, Celeste 184
Mother India (1957) 16, 71, 74, 76, 77–79, Omkara (2006) 161
86–87, 98, 102, 104 One 2 Ka 4 106
mother, role of 77 Ong, Aihwa 31, 134, 136, 184, 190–191
Mr and Mrs 55 (1955) 71, 89–90, 104 Osten, Franz 52
Mrityudaata (“Executioner,” 1997) 160 Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (2008) 22
Mufti, Aamir 83
Mughal-e-Azam (1960) 71, 74, 86, 188 Pakistani communities 51, 72, 73, 101
Mukta Arts 4 Pandey, Gyan 65, 83, 125
Mukta, Parita 126, 135, 136, 138, 141, Pardes 128, 129, 147, 148, 150
142, 191 Parinda (“Birds,” 1989) 155
2000 143 partition 16, 20–21, 67, 72–74, 84, 95–97,
Mulvey, Laura 181 188
Mumbai Meri Jaan (“Mumbai My Life,” Passage to India, A (Forster, 1924) 185
2008) 15, 21, 24, 27, 33, 40, 49–56, 161 Patel, Baburao 70, 83–84, 93
Muqaddar ka Sikandar (“King of paterfamilial structure 134, 139, 174–175
Destiny,” 1978) 170, 181, 184 Patil, Smita 60
Muslim identities Patwardhan, Anand 139, 191, 192
embodiment 62, 65, 87, 89, 111–112, penance 77–79
115, 123 performance, and representation 2
laws relating to 74–75, 76, 132, Persian culture 61
188–189 Perso-Arabic literature 61
liminality of 88–89, 107–108 Phalke, D. G. 20
perceived threat from 51, 83, 111 piety 132, 133, 138, 152, 167
 Index  217
Pinney, Christopher 187 Raj Quartet (Scott, 1966-75) 185
place 21 Rajabli, Anjum 184
plot development 1, 7, 24 Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1994) 187
polarity in cinema 88–89 Rajadhyaksha, Radha 78, 87, 89, 98, 187,
political Hinduism 126–127 188
political nationalisms 185 Bollywood 127
political traumas, and plot 1 Rajadhyaskha and Prasad et al. 186
pooja 134, 137, 138, 139–140 Rajagopal, Arvind 134, 135, 136, 138,
post-globalization viewing 137 190, 191
post-independence 25, 36–37, 74, 76 2000 142, 143
post-partiion era 97 Ram, cinematic depiction of 142–143
postcoloniality 13, 25 see also Ram Gopal Varma and Company 4
post-independence Ramakrishnan, A. K. 128, 147
poststructuralism 33 Ramanathan, S. 153
POTA see Prevention of Terrorism Act Ramanujan, A, K. 15, 38–39, 40–41, 48
(POTA) Ramayana 3, 110
Prabhat Film Compay 30 Ramjanambhoomi movement 191
Prasad, Madhava 153–154, 187 Rang de Basanti (“Paint It Saffron,” 2006)
pre-globalization viewing 137 15, 21, 24, 33, 40, 44–49
pre-individual identities 11 Rangeela (1995) 156
pre-modern nationalism 38–39 Rao and Sarkar (1998) 136
pre-nationalism 35–36 Rao, Satyanarayn 160, 190
presentation 8–9 rape 79, 81–82, 83, 84, 135, 139
President’s Silver Medal 98 Rashtra Sevika Samiti 133
Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) 75 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
private space 27, 36, 37 126, 132–133
Priyadarshan 33 Ratnam, Mani 145
product endorsement 23–24, 136–137, Rawal, Paresh 184
148, 191 Ray, Robert 12, 21, 62–63, 183, 187
production models 4 RDB see Rang de Basanti (“Paint It
public nationalism 37 Saffron,” 2006)
public space 27, 35, 36, 37 realism 95
Puig, Manuel 61 recovery
Punathambekar, Aswin 164 failed 88, 104
Punjabi nationalism 190 of faith 78, 80
Purab aur Pachhim (“East and West,” of persons 74, 75, 77, 81, 102, 107–109,
1970) 164 176
Puri, Amrish 134, 137 self 75, 81
Pyaasa (“Thirst,” 1957) 28, 192 Rehman, Waheeda 31
Rekha 60
Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (“From One religio-philosophical discourse 75
Success to Another,” 1988) 154, 156 Religion and Law in Independent India
queer enactment 17, 159, 169–173, 182, (Baird, 1993) 74
192 religious identity 32, 72
Quran, Suras 113 107–108 repatriation, of abducted women 75
repetition 1–2, 5, 6, 7, 57, 97, 185
Raajneeti (2010) 21 representation 8–9, 10
Raam ke Naam (“In the Name of Ram,” rescue, and gender 16
1991) 192 rhizomatic embodiments of masculinity
race 53, 126 17, 154, 155, 156, 172, 175
Radhakrishnan, R. 135, 143, 144 romance, family 11, 17, 129, 150
Rai, Aishwarya 137 romantic melodramas 108–109
Rai, Amit S. 11 Rose, Jacqueline 192
Raj (2000) 141, 142, 143 Roshan, Hrithik 138
Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi 134 Rouse (1996) 148
218  Index
Roy, Bimal 192 160–161, 184
Roy, Parama 98, 188 Smith, Robert 6, 7, 57
Roy, Ram Mohun 185 Sobchak, Vivien 48, 57, 59, 186–187
RSS 134–135, 136 social ambiguity 25, 107
Russo, Vito 192 social films 88, 89, 93
Soderbergh, Stephen 161
S. K. Patil Film Inquiry Committee 19 Soja, Edward 184
Sahlins, Marshall 15, 37–38, 40–41 Somayya, Bhawana 153, 157, 160, 171
Sahni, Balraj 99 Sooryavansham (“Sun Dynasty,” 1999)
Saint Kabir 189 160
Sangam (“The Confluence,” 1964) 168, space 21, 36–37, 67
181 spatio-temporal instability 30, 35, 68
Sangari and Vaid (1996) 165 spectatorship 47–48, 54, 57–58, 61, 82,
Sant Tukaram (1936) 30, 186 98, 171, 181
Sarkar, Bhaskar 20–21, 67, 133, 135, 140, speed, of reaction 68
163, 189 Spivak and Butler 65
Sathyu, M. S. 71, 95, 100, 162 Spivak, Gayatri 136
sati, practice of 139, 140 Srinivas, M. N. 64, 75
Satya (1998) 192 SRK see Khan, Shak Rukh
Savarkar 126, 189, 190 Staiger, Janet 124
Schmitt, Carl 50, 186 Stanford Friedman, Susan 31, 184
Searle-Chatterjee (2000) 127, 143, 144 Star & Style 98–99
secular modernity 78 Star Wars 57, 63, 64
secularism 74–76, 78, 189 Stavrakakis, Yannis 26–27
Segal, Mohan 71, 93 Stokes, Geoffrey 136
Sen, Sudipta 126 Stone, Oliver 123
Sengupta, Somini 190 street culture 27
Sethi, R. P. 74 structural absence 37
sexual ambiguity 165, 170, 173 structural narratives 42
sexuality 70–71, 88, 165, 170, 180–181 studio production model 4
see also homosexuality Subarnarekha (“The Golden Line,” 1962)
Shah, Vipul 161 97
Shak Rukh Khan see Khan, Shak Rukh subject formation 37, 39, 45, 47, 50–51
shakti (female power) 143 succession, laws relating to 74, 75
Shakti (“The Power,” 1982) 184, 186 superheroes, character development 155
Shanenshah (1988) 157
Shantaram, V. 20 Taal 136–137
Sharma, Anil 71, 100 TADA see Terrorist Activities Disruption
Sharma, Krishna 135 Act (TADA)
Shiekh, Mushtaq 189 Tamanna 166
Shohat, Ella 13, 14 Tamas (1988) 96–97, 188
Sholay (“Embers,” 1975) 151, 161, 166, Taqdeer (1944) 84
186, 192 Tarlo, Emma 48–49
Shootout at Lokhandwala (2007) 192 Taylor, Diana 2, 50, 111, 185
Shree 420 (“Mr 420,” 1955) 192 televangelism 141
Sikh communities, gender violence 72 temples 149
Singh, Boota 108 terrorism, identity of 50, 51
Singh, Dara 131 Terrorist Activities Disruption Act
Singh, Sunny 110, 187 (TADA) 75
Sinha, Mrinalini 165 Thapar, Romila 190
Sinha, Shatrughan 168 theatrical spectatorship 57
Sippy, Ramesh 156, 186 thematic codes 1
Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble) 185 Thomas, Rosie 78, 83, 84, 188
slang terms, in film 191 Thompson, Kristin 183
Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 22–23, Thorns (2002) 161
 Index  219
Toba Tek Singh (Manto) 73 violence
Toofan (“The Storm,” 1989) 156 depictions of 50
trauma, and perceived speed 68 and gender 16, 70, 71–74, 76, 127, 135
triangulation in relationships 59, 168, 181 liminality of 43, 55–56, 68
Trishul 184 repetition of 46–47, 72
Turner, Victor 5, 66, 70, 183 Virat Hindu Sammelan (Great Hindu
Gathering), Milton Keynes, 1989 142
Umrao Jaan (1981) 60 Virdi, Jyotika 74, 75, 76, 92, 188
Uniform Civil Code 75, 76, 132 Virilio, Paul 67
untouchability (Dalit) 52, 74, 92 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (“World Hindu
ur-stories 3, 4, 11, 43, 45, 63, 81 Forum,” VHP) 126
vision, as a historical process 67
Vaastav (“The Reality,” 1999) 192 visual modernity 65
Van de Veer, Peter 126, 127, 141, 143, visual structure 56–57
152, 188, 189, 190 Vitali, Valentina 153, 159, 192
“Vande Mataram” 36
Vanita and Kidwai (2002) 192 Wallerstein, Immanuel 186
Vanita, Ruth 165, 171, 178–179 Watan (1938) 71, 187
Varma, Ram Gopal 21, 31, 156, 192 Waugh, Thomas 164–165, 166, 180
Varshney, Ashutosh 126–127, 128, 132, White (1996) 123–124, 189–190
134, 141, 144, 188, 189, 190, 191 wife, role of 77
2002 143, 145, 146, 148 womanhood 69–70, 77, 78, 86, 98
Vasudevan, Ravi 14, 78, 187, 188, 190 women’s rights 75, 82
Veer-Zaara (“Veer and Zaara,” 2004) 16,
71, 74, 104–109, 189 Yaadein (“Memories,” 2001) 128, 129,
Venice International Film Festival, 1937 136, 137, 138, 139, 147, 148
30 Yaarana (“Friendship,” 1981) 166, 170
verticality, of heroes 153, 154–155, 160, Yash Raj 4, 26
178
VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) 135, 136 Zanjeer (“Chains,” 1973) 170
villains 1, 188 Zinta, Preity 173, 193