Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations

308 Pages·2016·2.336 MB·English

by  Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra

Salaam Bollywood
This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when
Bollywood has evolved as a part of India’s cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear,
developmental(ist) narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in
the course of cinematic history. The chapters in the volume critically consider transformations
of the Hindi film industry from its early days to its present self-referential mode, issues of
gender, dance and choreography, Bombay cinema’s negotiations with the changing cityscape
and urbanisms, and concentrate on its multifarious regional, national and transnational
implications in the 21st century.
One of the most comprehensive volumes on Bollywood, this work presents an analytical
overview of the multiple histories of popular cinema in India and will be useful to scholars and
researchers interested in film and media studies, South Asian popular culture and modern
India, as well as to cinephiles and general readers alike.
Vikrant Kishore is an academic, film-maker, journalist, photographer and currently Lecturer
in Media at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Amit Sarwal is Honorary Associate Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and
Founding Convenor of the Australia–India Interdisciplinary Research Network.
Parichay Patra is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Film and Screen Studies, School
of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Salaam Bollywood
Representations and interpretations
Edited by Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra
The right of Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra to be identified as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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 known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing 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
A catalog record has been requested for this book.
ISBN: 978-1-138-64962-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-62572-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Contributors
Foreword
LALEEN JAYAMANNE
   Salaam Bollywood: introduction
VIKRANT KISHORE, AMIT SARWAL AND PARICHAY PATRA
Part I
Histories: mainstream and alternative
 1 Myths, markets and panics: Bombay cinema and the historical significance of the
popularity of two Gujarati stage plays at the turn of the 20th century
KAUSHIK BHAUMIK
 2 The left encounter: progressive voices of nationalism and Indian cinema to the 1950s
BINAYAK BHATTACHARYA
 3 Genre mixing as creative fabrication
M. MADHAVA PRASAD
 4 What do the villains have? Indian cinema’s villains in the 1970s
HARIPRASAD ATHANICKAL
 5 Inward bound: self-referentiality in Bombay cinema
PRATEEK
Part II
Bollywood dance: rereading history
 6 Dancing to the songs: history of dance in popular Hindi films
SHRUTI GHOSH
7 Designing the song and dance sequences: Exploring Bollywood’s cinematic
creativity
VIKRANT KISHORE AND SUSAN KERRIGAN
 8 The item girl: tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing
AMITA NIJHAWAN
Part III
Changes in the cityscape, changes in cinema
 9 Regionalist disjuncture in Bollywood: Dabangg and the consumerist cinema
HRISHIKESH INGLE
10 Mourning and blood-ties: Macbeth in Mumbai
MOINAK BISWAS
11 Black Friday: a screen history of the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts
RAJDEEP ROY
12 The re-mapped dialectics of contemporary Indian cinema: Kahaani and That Girl in
Yellow Boots
SHAHEEN S. AHMED
Part IV
Other regions, other nations
13 Marking out the ‘South’ in/of Hindi cinema: an approach via remakes
NIKHILA H.
14 Between solidarity and the stereotype: Chandni Chowk to China
S. V. SRINIVAS
15 The Khan Mania: universal appeal of superstar Shahrukh Khan in a post-globalised
Bollywood era
SONY JALARAJAN RAJ, ROHINI SREEKUMAR AND FIKRI JERMADI
16 Old wine in a new bottle: Bollywood films shot in Australia after 9/11
SANCHARI DE AND AMIT SARWAL
17 The way cinema was banished: the intervention of cinema studies in India
PARICHAY PATRA
Index
Contributors
Shaheen S. Ahmed is currently pursuing her MPhil in Visual Arts from Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU), India. She has a Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from JNU and a
postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism,
Chennai, India. She has made presentations at international seminars (IACS Conference,
National University of Singapore, 2013) and at national-level seminars (Karavan-e-Fikr,
Jamia Milia Islamia, 2011 and 2012). Her core interests are popular culture and
anthropology as well as the politics of the body. She is also experimenting as an arts
practitioner.
Hariprasad Athanickal teaches at the Department of Film Studies at the English and Foreign
Languages University, India. Apart from researching on South Indian cinemas and its
origins in Madras, he is interested in colonial interventions in film regulation, film theory
and philosophy of cinema. He organised an international conference on film cultures of
South India in 2012 and is in the process of editing papers for a forthcoming collection.
Binayak Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor at Amity School of Communication, Amity
University, India. He has recently submitted his doctoral dissertation at the Department of
Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India. His research
concentrates on various aspects of the progressive nationalist politics and Indian cinema of
the 1950s. He has published on Hindi and Bengali cinema, historical tendencies of the left
politics in India and popular culture and resistance. He has served as a visiting faculty in
the University of Hyderabad, Osmania University (Hyderabad) and the Symbiosis School
of Liberal Arts (Pune), India.
Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and
Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His doctoral work was on the emergence of
the Bombay film industry between 1896 and 1936. His recent publications include a guest-
edited Marg special issue on ‘100 Years of Bombay Cinema’ and the co-edited Project
Cinema/City (with Madhusree Dutta and Rohan Shivkumar). He has contributed articles
on the history of early Indian and world cinema to various journals and anthologies.
Recently, he has started writing about the art practices of leading contemporary Indian
artists. He was part of the collaborative art show The Rise of the BROWNationals (with
Vishal K. Dar and Siddhartha Chatterjee) held at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, India, in
December 2012. He is co-editor (with Elizabeth Edwards) of Visual Sense: A Cultural
Reader (2009).
Moinak Biswas is Professor, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, India. He edits
the departmental publication Journal of the Moving Image (JMI) annually, co-edits the
journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and is the coordinator of the Media Lab in
the university. He has published a monograph on Chaplin in Bengali and edited two
volumes of Hemango Biswas’s writings and a collection of essays entitled Apu and After:
Revisiting Ray’s Cinema (2006).
Sanchari De is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University,
India, and a recipient of the prestigious CSDS–ICSSR fellowship for her research. Her
research interests include digital media, political mobilisation and information aesthetics.
Apart from that, she keenly studies films, specifically New Iranian Cinema. Selected by the
Erasmus Mundus India to Europe (EMINTE) scholarship programme, she has recently
undertaken research as an exchange student at Lund University, Sweden.
Shruti Ghosh is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at the Department of MMCCS,
Macquarie University, Australia. She completed her Masters in Film Studies from Jadavpur
University, India. She also has a Masters in Kathak dance from Prayag Sangit Samiti
(Allahabad) to her credit and is trained in the Jaipur gharana style of Kathak, with
experience of teaching Kathak for six years. Her articles have recently appeared in the
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Dance House Diary.
Hrishikesh Ingle is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages
University (EFLU), India. He has published on the cinema of the Indian diaspora and
popular Hindi cinema, and is currently working on the experimental films in India and
contemporary Marathi cinema. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on new media in
India. His research focuses on articulations of cinema and film cultures in Latin America
and India, for a cultural mapping of their alignment to the transnational turn of cinema. He
has also presented his research at various international conferences.
Laleen Jayamanne is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Art History and Film
Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Previously, she taught cinema studies at the
University of Sydney. She has published Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural
Mimesis (2001) and The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (2015).
Fikri Jermadi is an award-winning Malaysian film-maker and academic. He completed his
Masters in Fine Arts in Filmmaking (Film Directing) at the Korea National University of
Arts. He has been involved in over 20 productions as writer, director, producer and editor.
Having served as the Filmmaker in Residence at Monash University, Sunway Campus,
Malaysia, he is currently attached to the Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation at
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, as lecturer, where he is also pursuing his PhD in
contemporary Malaysian cinema.
Susan Kerrigan is Senior Lecturer at the School of Design, Communication and IT, University
of Newcastle, Australia. A screen production scholar who specialises in creative screen
practice research techniques, her current interests also include aspects of Bollywood film
production and cinematic creativity. During 2012–13, she was President of the Australian
Screen Production, Education and Research Association (ASPERA) and in 2014 convened
the annual ASPERA Conference ‘Screen Explosion’.
Vikrant Kishore is Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and has been active in
the fields of film/television, journalism and academia, with over 25 documentaries and
corporate films to his credit. He has been working towards the preservation of folk and
tribal music and dance cultures of East India, under the aegis of the National Institute for
Chhau and Folk Dances. His documentaries have been screened at various international
film festivals and he has led dance groups in folklore festivals. A recipient of the IPRS
Scholarship (Australia), he was a short-term fellow at the KJC Cluster of Excellence,
Heidelberg University, Germany. He has been a jury member at several film festivals. His
research interests are Bollywood cinema, Indian folk and popular culture, reality television
programmes and caste politics in India. He has co-edited (with Amit Sarwal and Parichay
Patra) Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations (2014) and authored From
Real to Reel: Folk Dances of India in Bollywood Cinema (2014).
Amita Nijhawan completed her PhD at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She
teaches Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, UK, and practical dance and writing.
She has worked with the Royal Academy of Dance, Oslo Council, Bollywood Brass Band,
Eastside Arts and others. She has received funding from the Gluck Fellowship, University
of California, East London University, Roehampton University and others. She is a trained
Kathak practitioner.
Nikhila H. is Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies and Visual
Communication, the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India. She teaches
and researches in the areas of gender studies, film and visual studies, and her doctoral
dissertation was on gender and partition. Her recent and forthcoming publications are
survey studies on literary translations from Kannada to English, and on filmic and
multimodal translations or remakes between different Indian languages.