Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic

273 Pages·2010·1.97 MB·English

by  Anustup Basu

ANUSTUP BASU B
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BOLLYWOOD
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IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA O
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The Geo-televisual Aesthetic D

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This study of popular Indian cinema in the age of globalization, new N
media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period
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from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn H
from the early nineties as a signature ‘Bollywood style’ evolved in E
the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media
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ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies,
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fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in
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non-linear, ‘window-shopping’ ways, without any primary obligation to
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the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed
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the bounds of stories and determined milieus: Haqeeqatfeatured poor
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working-class protagonists, but romantic musical sequences transported
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them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer
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suits. Basu theorizes this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an
informational geo-televisual aesthetic. M
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This book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story
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of the uneven globalizing process in India. Basu argues that ‘Bollywood’
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is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernitycoming into its
own; rather it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernization
that comes without a political modernity. Bollywood in the Age of New
Media therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new
can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of A
class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological N
approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, U ANUSTUP BASU
post-colonialism, and film and media studies, this book presents
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a complex account of an India of the present caught between brave new
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silicon valleys and farmer suicides.
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Anustup Basu is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at BOLLYWOOD

Urbana-Champaign. B
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Jacket design: River Design, Edinburgh
IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA
Jacket image: : © DHARMA PRODUCTIONS /
THE KOBAL COLLECTION
barcode E
Edinburgh University Press
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22 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LF i The Geo-televisual Aesthetic
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www.euppublishing.com u
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ISBN 978 0 7486 4102 4 h
Bollywood in the Age of New Media
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For Dr Subrata Basu and Dr Bimalendu Basu
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Bollywood in the Age of
New Media
The Geo-televisual Aesthetic
Anustup Basu
Edinburgh University Press
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© Anustup Basu, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4102 4 (hardback)
The right of Anustup Basu
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments viii
Part I: Introduction
1. Cinematic “Assemblages”: The 1990s and Earlier 3
The Realism Debate 8
What is an Assemblage? 11
Assemblages of Totality 13
Assemblages of Temporality 16
Postulated Resolutions 17
The Thing- in- the- Assemblage 20
The Body- in- the- Assemblage: The Dalit 22
The Body- in- the- Assemblage: The Woman 26
Conclusion 33
2. The Geo- televisual and Hindi Film in the Age of Information 42
Introduction 42
The Geo- televisual in the Age of the All-India Film
(1947–88) 54
The Geo- televisual as Informatic (1991–2004) 71
Informatic Modernization 92
Part II: Informatics, Sovereignty, and the Cinematic City
3. Allegories of Power/Information 123
The First Story of the Nation: The Metropolis Comes to
the Village 125
The Second Story of the Nation: How Mumbai can
become a Metropolis 134
The Traffi c Jam 134
Cleaning up the Cinematic City 138
The State of Information 139
Iconic Genealogies 142
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vi bollywood in the age of new media
Sovereignty as Melodrama: The “Lalloo Assemblage” 147
Nayak as Allegory 149
4. The Music of Intolerable Love: Indian Film Music,
Globalization, and the Sound of Partitioned Selves 156
Toward a Lyric History of India 156
The Song Sequence 158
The Music of Intolerable Love 162
Part III: Myth and Repetition
5. Technopolis and the Ramayana: New Temporalities 181
Introduction 181
Epic Melodrama 182
Digital Inscription and the Mythic Depths of Time 183
Temporality 185
The Sacralization of Special Effects 190
The Aryan Brahmin 191
Translation 192
Hodology 193
Vedic Computation 195
Global Terror and the Vedic Sublime 196
Conclusion 197
6. Repetitions with Difference: Mother India and her Thousand
Sons 201
Introduction 201
Mother India: Repetitions of a National Monotheme 203
Mother India 207
Deewar (The Wall) 210
Aatish (The Mirror) 215
Vaastav (Reality) 224
Encounters of the State and the Twilight of the Mythic
Natality 228
Epilogue 233
Bibliography 237
Index 251
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List of Figures
1.1: The psychotic orphan “gets” the girl in Darr. 14
1.2: Signatures of socialist- realism in Mother India. 30
2.1: Helen in the hotel: a shot from Shakti Samanta’s Chinatown. 61
2.2: Smuggling and vice in International Crook. 68
2.3: Preeti in Purab Aur Paschim. 71
2.4: Tradition as richness in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. 85
2.5: Outskirts of the family mansion in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi
Gham. Rahul Jaichand returns home by helicopter. 86
2.6: Vande Mataram in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. 86
3.1, 3.2, and 3.3: The many incarnations of Nayak. 145
3.4: Historical Mumbai being rescripted as the metropolis. 151
4.1, 4. 2, and 4.3: Utopian conjugality in the age of terror: a series
of stills from the “Satrangi Re” number. 169
5.1: Bhuria and Varun in battle. 194
5.2: The Adhipati of Trishakti Pith with his gananyantra. 196
6.1: Sumitra and Ravi confront Vijay in Deewar. 212
6.2: The outlaw gets the gun in Aatish. 221
6.3: Raghu’s fi nal deliverance in Vaastav. 230
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Acknowledgments
This book has been long in gestation. The idea started in my head
during those heady years in the mid-1 990s when I was a fi lm critic for
The Telegraph in the city then known as Calcutta. It was then, when one
was compelled to go beyond the staple Bollywood quota and watch up
to four fi lms a day in order to fi ll columns, that I got a glimpse of a new
cinematic idiom. Coming in the wake of mighty barbarisms and equally
mighty transformations, it was a different opulence altogether. The
rumbles of the new were fi rst adjusted to, engaged with, and theorized in
the company of remarkable minds in the political and intellectual scene
of Calcutta. Friends and peers like Jayeeta Bagchi, Nandinee Banerjee,
Pallavi Banerjee, Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, Saswata Bhattacharya,
Gautam Basu- Thakur, Prasanta Chakravarty, Swapan Chakravarty,
Suchetana Chattopadhyay, Supriya Chaudhuri, Anirban Das, Amlan
Dasgupta, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Mallika Jalan, Bodhisattwa Kar, Udaya
Kumar, Bodhisattwa Maity, Amitava Malakar, Aniruddha Mitra, Reshmi
Mukherjee, Sajni Mukherjee, Urvee Mukhopadhyay, Kavita Panjabi,
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Abhijit Roy, Airindrajit Saha, Amitrajit Saha,
Pratim Sengupta, and Ravi Vasudevan have played crucial roles in my
development as a scholar during these years. Madhava Prasad has been an
inspiring presence and an unerring but gentle guide. Moinak Biswas was
the fi rst to teach me how to think about cinema and develop an abiding
scholarly love for it; Suman Mukhopadhyay did the same while making
exquisite fi lms. For the last two decades, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay has been
the single most important infl uence in my life of the mind. It would be
presumptuous to gauge how much I owe him in terms of my thinking and
my being.
My doctoral years at the University of Pittsburgh were spent in
a vigorous intellectual climate fostered especially by Jonathan Arac,
David Bartholomae, Elizabeth Bledsoe, Amy Borden, Malkiel Choseed,
Nancy Condee, Petra Dierkus- Thrun, Lucy Fischer, Brenda Glascott,
Jeffrey Hole, Melissa Lenos, Ignacio Lopez-V icuna, Adam Lowenstein,
Neepa Majumdar, Amy Mueller-H urwitz, Dana Och, Vladimir Padunov,
Stanley Shoshtak, Anja Ulanowicz, Sergio Villalobos, Chris Warnick,
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acknowledgments ix
and Stefan Wheelock. Kirsten Strayer has extended a friendship very
rarely found and an invaluable intellectual camaraderie. J. Paul Narkunas,
Richard Purcell, and Henry Veggian have been special partners in schol-
arly crime. During the initial consolidation of this project, Eric Clarke
taught me how exactly one can, with rigor and innovation, bring to bear
classical legacies of the Enlightenment into new horizons of thought like
Queer Studies. Colin MacCabe was a sharp interlocutor, whose profound
knowledge of world cinema was invaluable. Ronald A. T. Judy’s admirable
powers of generative thinking aided me immensely in better understand-
ing a post- 9/11 world. Paul Bové’s seminars and numerous addas in his
offi ce opened up intellectual horizons I did not know existed, especially
in relation to understanding the United States as an historical formation.
He is the one who truly taught me how to think in exile. It is impossible
to account for the profound infl uence Marcia Landy’s presence and intel-
lect has had on my life and on my mind. This project was conceived in
its present form during countless hours of stimulating conversations with
her, especially about Karl Marx and Gilles Deleuze. Whatever merit this
book has, I owe her. The faults though are entirely mine.
I am indeed blessed to have a wonderful set of supportive colleagues at
the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. I am especially grateful
to Rob Barrett, Dale Bauer, Sandy Camargo, Martin Camargo, José B.
Capino, David Desser, Jed Esty, Peter Garrett, Behroze Ghamari, Jim
Hansen, Debra Hawhee, Trish Loughran, Feisal Mohammad, Becky
Moss, Hina Nazar, Cary Nelson, Susan Koshy, Tim Newcomb, Curtis
Perry, Sarah Projansky, Siobhan Somerville, Zohreh Sullivan, Deb
Stauffer, Renee Trilling, Ted Underwood, and Joe Valente for living,
thinking, and in some cases facebooking in the twin towns such wonder-
ful affairs. Ramona Curry, from the very outset, has been a wonderful
mentor, whose wisdom and selfl essness are rare commodities. Bob Parker,
Bill Maxwell, and Bob Merkley, apart from being wonderful colleagues,
have provided useful feedback, as has Matt Hart, despite being a supporter
of the English cricket team. Michael Rothberg and Lauren Goodlad have
been formidable intellectual interlocutors; as past and present directors
of the Unit for Criticism, they have also organized timely reading groups
and colloquia, which have vastly infl uenced this project and contributed
to my growth as an intellectual. I thank these fantastic colleagues, along
with the Department of English and the Research Board of the University
of Illinois, for the logistical support they have given me. In the extended
world of the North American academy, I am especially grateful to
Bishnupriya Ghosh, Sangita Gopal, Nitin Govil, Priya Jaikumar, Suvir
Kaul, Ania Loomba, Amit Rai, Bhaskar Sarkar, and Amy Villarejo for
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