Table Of Content-.
Untimely , .
d
bollywoo
Globalization and
India's New Media
Assemblage
Amit 5. Rai
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There are two ways of considering events,
one being to follow the course of the event,
gathering how it comes about historically,
how it's prepared and then decomposes in
history; while the other way is to go back
into the event, to take one's place in it as in a
becoming, to grow both young and old in it at
once, going through all its components and
singularities. Becoming isn't part of history;
history amounts [to] only the set of precondi-
tions, however recent, that one leaves behind
in order to "become," that is, to create some-
thing new. This is precisely what Nietzsche
calls the Untimely.
GILLES DELEUZE, "Control and Becoming"
...............................
i i
CONTENTS
................................
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: India and the New Nonlinear
Media Assemblage I
PART i Cinema Becoming New Media
"First Day, First Show": Bollywood Cinemagoing
and the New Sensorium 23
-.. Contagious Multiplicities and the Nonlinear Life
of the New Media 55
PART 2 Toward an Ontology ofMedia Durations
- "The Best Quality Cinema Viewing. . . Everywhere,
Everytime": On the Malltlplex Mutagen in India 133
"With You Every Moment in Time": On the
Emergent Ittafaq (Chance) Assemblage 179
Conclusion: Clinamedia 211
Notes 221
Bibliography 275
Index 291
..................................................
i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i
e...................................................
I have been writing and rewriting this book for about a decade, so acknowl-
edging all those who have helped me to write it couldn't be anything other
than untimely. Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar have been my secret shar-
ers in this adventure of political thought for many years: thanks for all the
affects (no, really). My colleagues at the New School, Gary Lemons, I<ian
Tajbaksh, Ifeona Fulani, M. Jacqui Alexander, Greg Tewksbury, Steve Caton,
and Jan Clausen, were constant inspirations and keen critics. My colleagues
at Florida State University, Jerri McGregory, Chris Shinn, Virgil Suarez, and
Delia Poey, have provided me with many different intellectual and emotional
resources to negotiate my new institutional contexts and to reconceptualize
this project. The support of Ralph Berry, Robin Goodman, Leigh Edwards,
Barry Faulk, Bruce Boehrer, and Dan Vitkus has been a solid spur to action
these past few years. At different points in my career I have been lucky to find
students who have been infinitely patient and creatively engaged, including
Diane Roi, Taimur Khan, Louisa Solomon, Emily Sogn, Krishna Mali, Iskan-
dar Zulkarnain, Jonathan Dean, Krysten Davis, and Kathryn Wright. I thank
Saleh and Ginger Assadi for accepting me into their family. Much ofwhat I
have been able to write here would not have been possible without their gen-
erosity and affection. Sudeep Shrivastava always gave me his untiring help
through these many, many years. Dustin Anderson and Andrew McFeaters
provided productive points of intersection and contrast (as well as sculpted
tile and the philosophy of the Red Sox). To Tarun, Puppy, and Kenny I can
only say that without your friendship and ironic guidance this work would
not have come to fruition. To Sarah Fryett: thanks for the mutations!
The writing of this book was made possible by various grants and insti-
tutional support. The American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research
Fellowship, the New School research support for archival work, Florida
State's first-year professor grant and Committee on Faculty Research Sup-
port (COFRSg) rant have enabled this work to proceed apace.
I would like to thank Ken Wissoker for his rigorous engagement with
this project and for his encouragement, and I thank Courtney Berger for her
meticulous and timely attention to the details ofthe manuscript. I would like
to also thank the very helpful suggestions of the anonymous readers of the
........................................
manuscript. All errors that remain are of course my own.
i i
Chapter I appeared in a different form as "The Pleasure and Politics of INTRODUCTION
.........................................
Hindi Film Culture," in Samar: South Asian Magazinefor Action and Reflection,
no. 15 (summerlfall 2002): 44-49. A portion of chapter 2 appeared in a India and the New Nonlinear Media Assemblage
different form as "On Purple Pleasures: Digitally Assembling Bollywood,"
in South Asian Technospaces, edited by Radhika and Venkataramana Gajjala
(New York: Peter Lang, zoo8),71-95.
In the DVD version of Farah Khan's intertextual masterpiece Main Hoon Na,
the first chapter, a "secured" promotional video, presents the general busi-
ness model used by the film's global distributors Eros Entertainment In-
ternational (Kishore Lulla, chair and CEO). A deep, quasi-British-accented
voiceover suffuses meaning through a rapid machine-gun movement be-
tween orchestral crescendos and pounding dance beats, digitally massaged
star images, logos, and intertitles (as the viewer looks through a lens and
takes aim). The comforting voice tells us of Eros's production of "spell-
binding spectacles," "magnificence beyond belief" (a twirling Aishwarya
Rai-Durga in Devdas), and "irresistible charm" (Sharukh as Devdas-babu).
The voice continues:
It's the magical trance of Bollywood. For the past twenty-five years one
name has cast a spell across the globe. It's Eros Entertainment Inter-
national. [Western urbanscapes, multicolored bowling balls, and the
Statue of Liberty flow by in a quick montage.] As the largest Bollywood
content provider. ..E ros will continue to bring you the best of Bollywood
in times to come. At Eros it's a vision to create, enhance, and distribute
content across technological platforms. As a pioneer in international
home video markets, for Bollywood Eros provides a catalog of over two
thousand film titles and song compilations on DVD, VCD, and VHS. Eros
launched the world's first Bollywood pay-per-view service. [Icareena
Kapoor in powder blue gyrates at the center of the crosshairs.] To repur-
pose its content for the broadband environment, Eros ventured into
xii Acknowledgments
"domain of validity" and the disciplinary fields with which they are corre-
video on demand. To delight~vviewerasl l over, Eros launched the hugely
lated.' The overall aim of this book is to shift the analysis of audiovisual
popular satellite channels B ~ aUnd B~U-MusicF.o r millions of netizens
media from a representational frame where the image, discourse, narra-
across the world erosentertainment.com is the sought-after Bollywood
tive, signifier, and ideal are all in various ways master tropes that produce
website. For those flying high, Eros offers enthralling in-flight enter-
a linear causal relation to consciousness and identity. In observing media
tainment on all prestigious international airlines. The state-of-the-art
events whose effects are multiple, contradictory, implicative, and evolving,
Eros postproduction studio is breaking new ground in creative ideation
the necessity of making this shift came to me as an intuitive shock. When
and design. Now [pause in music, a slow reedy lilt builds as we follow
confronted with the protean embodiment of sensation through the time of
Aishwarya's gaze to mark the pixels ofa digital butterfly flitter across the
these events, it seemed that all of my previous conceptual frames rendered
screen and into the heavens] the extraordinary odyssey of Eros takes a big
the media event as the reproduction of the same or the similar. It was this
leap-film production and finance adds another splendid chapter in the
shock that led me to a method of diagramming nonlinear processes of an
dazzling saga of its pathbreaking success. Eros International is a fully
assemblage that implicates bodies through their potential or capacity to mu-
integrated media company that's taking Bollywood places.'
tate. By intervening in postcolonial media studies, film studies, new media
In a review of the top Oscar contenders for 2006, Manohla Dargis la-
studies, and eco-criticism, this study focuses on media as a contested pro-
ments the kind ofshifts that Eros hails as their crowningachievements: "To
duction of sensation. In that regard, one dimension of this domain ofvalid-
judge by how executives at major studios often talk about their business,
ity is the cultural critique of identity (in terms of sexuality, gender, caste,
in their discussions about closing windows, new platforms and emergent
class, religion, and transnationality) as an effect of discourse. For too long,
technologies, the movies themselves barely count. What counts is when you
representation has been thought in terms of an actualized product of given
can watch a film on your cellphone, not if there is something worth los-
hierarchies of power. But what if representation is an event that performs
ing your eyesight over. In the age of the incredible shrinking movie, con-
anew with each repetition and with each new scene of circulation being an
tent equals quantity. not quality . . . A nation of iPod-people, each staring
unpredictable but patterned trajectory of present conforming to past but
at his or her individually downloaded film on the delivery system of his or
open to future mutations?' If so then what needs prior elaboration is not
her choice, seems a poor substitute for the oceanic feeling that comes with
the production of representation but the viability of its event: How does an
watching a film with a crowd, finding communion in the dark."' For Dargis
audiovisual stream contagiously "catch on"? How does audiovisual technol-
an era of cinema exhibition is coming to the end of its particular duration,
ogy circulate regimes ofsigns and sounds such that they seem to "catch on"
and the shape of things felt in cinema is reforming. In the pages to come,
to the very bodies of newly globalized consumers?
this duration and its untold mutations will form the basis ofwhat I wager is
Pleasures circulate across populations and sensations proliferate para-
a stochastic or nonlinear experience of Bollywood. Something untimely un-
doxes. The most banal media stream becomes a resource for a passionate
folds through the changing conditions of media consumption in globaliz-
attachment, and so Shahrukh ''Icing" Khan reigns for over a decade as the
ing India today. Something untimely, as when one is witness to a patterned
premiere Bollywood attraction. Sensations resonate "at the point where
dissolution of moviegoing practices in the dynamic topology or emergent
body and population meet."' This is also precisely how Michel Foucau!t
forms of the new media. And this, for critics such as Dargis, signals the end
defined sexual~ty,a nd in pursuing this preindividual sense of sexuality as
of a certain anonymous community of viewing, the quantification of cin-
a question of the very movements of media events I argue for a notion of
ema art, and the technological individuation of media consumption. In tak- I sexualization as a historical ecology of sensation. Sexuality emerges first as
ing the cinephile's lament as seriously as Eros's global ambition, I argue for
intuited sensation through the interactive capacities of the various elements
a media assemblage approach to the evolving problem of media and its
of the assemblage, and then as codified contents, signs, or narratives. Rut
habituations.
the preindividual ecology of sensation is the very condition of the evolution
'There is a set of terms that will come to resonate throughout this text,
of sexual identity itself, and that evolution is about the refunctioned bios
and I will introduce them in their place, but here I would like to map their
in media technologies, the body in habituated populations, and the body
Introduction 3
2 Introduction
mutating through these repetitive processes. Thus, I suggest that the key diences and the global restructuring of the financial, labor, aesthetic, and
question of sexuality needs to be situated in a broader field of dynamic pro- creative infrastructures of a variety of transnational media.' The production
cesses that take those very processes as objects to be tinkered with. (This of bodily affect is a continuous multiplicity, a multiplicity that is continu-
notion of evolution as natural tinkering has been decisive in rethinking the ously varying with itself because of its intensive self-organizing activity and
various effects of biolpower, for instance through feedback loop relations.) its open interfaces with outside forces, dynamics, and materialities. Also,
A closely related aspect of this domain ofvalidity is the conceptualization given that the creation of surplus value within the affect economy fixates on
of the body as an assembling whole that is open to change through its own the accumulation and revaluing of the affective capacities of life itself, this
indeterminations. The feminist and queer multiplication of the gendered, emergent affectivity implies that in the media assemblage there can be no
raced, and sexed body's resistant desires, pleasures, and intensities would privileging of cinema as original apparatus or industry. Second, the body
mark this domain's disciplinary intervention. Drawing on anti-racist, post-
under the conditions of the analog versus digital assemblage is a body that
colonial, and queer feminist theory, this argument highlights how the hu-
must be thought ofas the site of creative indetermination b$re actual expe-
man body has evolved its capacities to change and be changed (affectivity)
rience and before consciousness, at the level ofwhat is called proprioception,
by developing specific kinds of connections between technology, energy,
which is the continuous monitoring of internal changes in the body by sen-
memory, neuronal activity, and the flesh. And these connections cannot
sory nerve endings brought about by movement and muscular activity (i.e.,
be adequately grasped as the body adding to its powers through prosthetic
the preindividual). As Susan Buck Morss, Mark Hansen, and Brian Massumi
coupling. This would be the body as an amalgam of prostheses on a unified
(in their different ways) have shown in their explorations of the nervous sys-
body as in some forms ofcyborg theory.
tem, the affectivity of the body is a way of dynamically connecting with the
Instead, I focus on the body fluctuating across key thresholds, times,
world in all its profusion of sensation.Vt follows then that the media phe-
and technologies of digital control. This is the biopolitical domain of my
nomenon as a set of events assembled together through feedback loop rela-
study, and its disciplinary correlates are political philosophy and new media
tions is never fully experienced at the level ofconsciousness, representation,
studies. Dargis suggests in the quote above that part of what is happening
or identity. And so it is precisely the body as preindividual (that is, individual
to film is its integration in portable computing interfaces that increasingly
and populational at once), self-organizing (a mutating multiplicity far from
are shrinking in size and speeding up intensive consumption. But this gets
equilibrium and intuitively open to its own becomings), and dynamic (si-
at one of the important differences between Eros as business model and
multaneously stochastic and patterned) that now comes to be situated at the
Dargis as film critic: the privileged position of film as master organizer of
center ofa given media assemblage.
media effects. What happens to the consuming body when cinema is refunc-
Finally, the domain ofvalidity of this study is characterized by a thought
tioned, or repurposed in new media, as Eros hopes and Dargis despairs?
of ontology as duration.' This suggests a shift away from thinking of media
One of the most important responses to this question of the body in media
effects as products legible on a passive body and toward the intensive pro-
is Vivian Sobchack's film-based phenomenology, which reframes the ques-
cesses of consumption that give a media assemblage its particular durations.
tion of the "cinesthetic" subject as follows: "What have we, as contempo-
Duration here is understood in terms of both the nested temporalities that
rary media theorists, to do with such tactile, kinetic, redolent, resonant, and
are lived through the assemblage, and the duration it has as an entity in its
sometimes even taste-full descriptions of the film e~perience?"S~o bchack
own right. Like a sugar cube on fire, when audio-visual media catch on there
shifts the terrain of film toward a broader mediascape and then moors that
is a specific duration and intensity to its forms that comes from the "internal
shift by privileging cinema as the origin of its governing sensations. I have
resonance" of its various capacities and its singular affordances vis-A-vis its
two arguments against this approach. First, my focus on the body's affects
ecology.'" How do new forms of media come to dominance, and how can
modulated across these cultural and technological thresholds is commit-
we best grasp their emergence in the preindividual, self-organizing and dy-
ted to furthering ongoing explorations of the specific modes of address of
namic bodies of its globalizing consumers? To account for this emergence
Indian film genres as they articulate infeedback loop relations with active au-
we need a kind of analysis (the biogram, in Brian Massumi's terms) that
4 Introduction
Introduction 5
my own work this missed opportunity took the form ofan analytical method
unlocks the part of the media event that exceeds its actualization. As will
that deployed film as the "metaphoric" ground from which political forms
become clear in subsequent chapters, the concept that to my mind enables
such counteractualization is affect. would be read.
The terms that I will develop in my definition of media assemblages are For me a decisive shift has occurred in the thought of media over the
drawn from a variety of sources in feminist and queer philosophy, the physi- years since 9/11. The memoryofthe suspended ashes ofhuman flesh on the
cal and biological sciences, and biopolitical cultural criticism. For instance, streets ofchinatown and Tribeca forcefully suggest thatwe return to the mi-
one way of modeling the assembling body-in-media is to trace out a con- noritized histories of globalizing and contested spaces through what Brian
tinuous movement (or qualitative multiplicity) of audiovi:ual information I Massumi and Manuel Delanda call an "incorporeal materialism"; indeed,
across a population as a contagion. The notion of contagion seems par- that event and the subsequent biopolitical settlement of the Bush adrninis-
ticularly apt for my purposes since a diagram of contagious multiplicities tration caused me to reconceptualize a set of researches on communal riots
distributed across technological platforms through dynamic thresholds is and film exhibition practices that I had conducted for over a year in Bhopal,
a way of keeping in mind a postcolonial feminist resonance of contagion India (in 2000-2001, my first extended trip since rgg~)."Myi mmediate aim
as racial miscegenation and sexual degeneracy," while also moving away in my Bhopal research initiatives was to understand the life of Lily Talkies,
from its analysis as metaphor (and resemblance) toward consideration of a brilliant movie hall built in 1971. I fell in love with pictures at Lily. And for
ontic durations of media pleasures that change in kind (i.e., qualitatively)." the first time I began attending to the body and its sensations (situating the
In such a view, the capitalist circulation of sound movements in the proac- problem of sexuality in an assemblage context) in the social processes of
tion of consumerist affect becomes an element in an overall resegmenta- viewing film, just as a certain analysis of the biopolitical state of exception
tion of audience populations, all with a view for new sites, strategies, and was making itself felt throughout academia. A changing domain ofvalidity
possibilities for value creation and accumulation. But media contagions are started to take shape, and I began asking how to live an untimely love, a kind
like parasites that draw energy and information into a dissipative cascade of complicit extraction, of India's media assemblage as a diasporic Indian.
of events whose causes are multiple and whose effects are nonlinear.13T he I What emerged was a cinephilia becoming tele-info-philia. But the love here
notion ofcontagion, thus, draws attention to processes that unfold through also hnctions to open thought to the specific shock of bearing witness to
turbulent events that exceed their actualization. the death of exactly that which you love: What does media pleasure have to
do with the bare life ofthe state ofexception? In what way are contemporary
media assemblages and contemporary processes of biopolitical control cre-
Flashback
ating new bodily modes of a potentializing power? These initial questions
I began this book project twelve years ago through a consideration of how, had to be themselves reformulated in light of the specificity of India's post-
in the context of Indian nationalism after independence, the iconography Hindutva globalizing economy, where forms ofdigital-binary control in fact
and discourse of Elvis Presley was deliriously re-created (as hybrid identity hnction through caste, communal, privatizing, and patriarchal lines of be-
in representation) by the popular Hindi-Urdu film actor Shammi Kapoor. coming whose history cannot be enclosed by either the rupture or the unity
The connection, and its at least partial celebration, was of a piece with a of discipline and biopower.15 This led me to pose how at the level of every-
politics of (reading) resistance rooted in discursive strategies, the perfor- day experience new habituations regarding the hture and its management
mativity of gender, the political economy of the sign, and the disparate nar- were entering the nested spatiotemporal scales of my analysis: How had
ratives of postcolonial subjectivation and desubjectivation as a shuttling of global risk management become folded into the media assemblage in India?
the gendered subaltern. Decisive here was the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Part of what is at stake in this study, then, is a reconsideration of the criti-
Spivak. In some sense, the most challenging cultural studies work done in cal hnction of (Indian, Hindu, secular, Bollywood, diasporic) "culture" in
the fields ofrepresentational analysis in the 1990s was an ongoing conversa- postcolonial media assemblages. (In this regard the nation will be both key
tion that began with the circulation of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" But per- placeholder and site of displacement in elaborating the media assemblage
haps we have yet to catch the hll force of that brilliant question? Certainly in ofglobalization; no national frame can exhaust the contagious dynamism of
6 Introduction Introduction 7
Description:This book argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema signify the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. It discusses how cinema and other popular media manage power and sensation and reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.
