Table Of ContentBolllft1Jood elnema
9780415930147
Bollywood Cinema
Size: 229 x 152mm Spine size: 20 mm Color pages: Binding: Hardback
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Bolll(J t'ood inema
TEMPLES OF DESIRE
VIJAY MISHRA
ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 2002 by
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
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New York, NY 10016
Published in Great Britain by
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Copyright © 2002 by Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
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photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mishra, Vijay.
Bollywood cinema: temples of desire / Vijay Mishra.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-4159-3014-6 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-4159-3015-4 (pbk.)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures-India.!. Title.
PN1993.5.lB M46 2001
791.43'0954-dc21 2001019672
For my daughter, Paras
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more
And all its dizzy raptures.
Wordsworth
It is hard to forget
Those once forgotten days,
Days not meant to return
Why does the heart recall them?
If days were doves,
I would have caged them,
Caressed and cradled them,
Fed them on pearls of love,
Clasped them to my breast.
Shailendra
For a thousand years unseen
The narcissus bemoans its fate;
Rarely is one born
With passion eternal, pain unending.
Hazrat Jaipuri (attr.)
Contents
Preface ix
A Note on Transliteration xxiv
Chapte7 One INVENTING BOMBAY CINEMA
Chapte7 ClNO MElODRAMATIC STAGING 35
Chapte7 Clhw THE TEXTS OF "MOTHER INDIA" 61
Chapte7 ;JOU7 AUTEURSHIP AND THE LURE OF ROMANCE 89
Chapte7 ;Jive THE ACTOR AS PARALLEl TEXT: AMITABH BACH CHAN 125
Chapte7 Six SEGMENTING/ANALYZING TWO FOUNDATIONAL
TEXTS 157
C hapte7 Seven AFTER AYODHYA: THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF
FUNDAMENTALISM 203
Chapte7 2i'jht BOMBAY CINEMA AND DIASPORIC DESIRE 235
Filmography 271
Bibliography 277
Index 287
Vll
I began writing this preface in the library of the National Film Archive of
India. The library is in fact no more than a reading room, solidly built with a
central pillar. Around the long reading tables a few students of Indian cinema
pore over old newspapers and examine photographs of films. The central cat
alogue of print material is perhaps more useful as a sign of the amount of
material that can no longer be retrieved. Although current issues of Indian
periodicals are readily available, back issues of journals, books, and many key
films are difficult to trace even when they do exist in the stacks. Despite these
shortcomings, it is the only reading room in the world that can take you back
to old Indian film periodicals and fanzines. Enthusiastic librarians bring copies
of magazines from the stacks if they can locate them. Without air-condition
ing, the midday heat, even in the month of December, can become unbear
able. Books as well as humans begin to discolor, and many of the old
magazines have deteriorated beyond repair. AB I brood over this preface I recall
something an Indologist (possibly Heinrich Zimmer) once wrote. During a
research trip to India he observed that very often we begin to understand our
selves only after we have examined another culture in some detail. I think he
elaborated this pithy observation through a parable about an old man who
went afar looking for gold only to discover, upon his return, that the gold lay
hidden under the floor of his own kitchen. The narrative of search and dis
covery hit me with uncanny force in this library as I rummaged for informa
tion on Bombay Cinema. Unlike Zimmer, I came to India not as a total
outsider. I grew up in the colonies, but belong, racially and as Hindu, to India.
I am a descendant of illiterate Indian indentured laborers who left the plains
IX
x PREFACE
of North India in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to work on the
sugar plantations of Fiji. Although they constituted a microcosm of India in
terms of linguistic, religious, and caste divisions, they were nevertheless basi
cally peasant in origin and working class in their social attitudes. In Fiji this
fragment society constructed a largely mythical-some would say illusory
India which had little basis in fact. My own India had grown through the
myths of these indentured laborers, and like all mythical relationships, mine
too had an implicit capacity to distort and magnifY. Yet these myths or, more
accurately, ideologies, since they were imaginary systems of belief, framed our
ambivalent relationship to Mother India. From around 1930 onward, how
ever, these myths of the mind began to be mediated through their projection
onto the visual. In an uncanny fashion, cinema reinforced the Fiji Indian
myths of an ancient land still basking in its epic glory. At the same time spec
tatorial fascination with the newfound power of the visual, what Fredric
Jameson has called the essentially pornographic fascination that the mind has
with cinema, triggered a desire for India in ways that radically transformed
what until then had existed only as the fantastic cliches of our forefathers.
I came to India to do archival research and to write about Bombay
Cinema as a scholarly object of knowledge. Trained as a literary critic at an
ancient English university, I felt that only scholarly detachment could lead to
a book that would have any respectability. But as I began to write my notes in
a friend's flat in Colaba, Bombay, I suddenly realized how correct the
Indologist and Fredric Jameson in fact were. I had come to India in search of
the pot of gold only to find that that pot had been buried deep in my uncon
scious. When I saw the old films again in the Pune Film Archive, I realized
that the joy of cinema was essentially sensual, stored up in the "bodily
synapses" and that what I was analyzing was not so much the films themselves
as repeating the original moment, the earlier gaze, of the subject, myself, view
ing films. The film history I had come to construct in Pune was already there
in the muscles and sinews of my body. In the end whatever I wrote will have
to be framed in the experience of diaspora. Imagine my surprise when among
the dun-colored and often decaying film journals in the archives I chanced
upon a very early essay titled "Indian Films in Fiji Islands" published in the
Indian Cinema Annual of1 933. The essay was written by a certain S. Pratap
of Suva, Fiji. I had suddenly found a way in which I could write a narrative
about myself in this preface. Like Marlow when he encountered Towser or
Towson's book on seamanship (a battered copy lovingly restitched by a
Russian captain), I was fascinated by this chance discovery and, more impor
tant, by the diaspora's intervention into the discourse of film criticism.
