The Bollywood Turn in South Asian Cinema National, Transnational or [PDF]

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

The Bollywood Turn in South Asian Cinema National, Transnational or Global? CHUA Beng Huat Asia Research Institute & Dept of Sociology, National University of Singapore [email protected]

Bollywood is a term coined by the English language media to allude disparagingly to popular Hindi cinema. But Bollywood, considered by many as a misnomer for a number of reasons, has become a convenient label to describe films from the South Asian region including those that do not fit the label. Film makers, critics and scholars might voice strong objections to a term reinforcing Hollywood’s dominance to describe a cinema that they consider as evolving independent of and unperturbed by the American popular film but the label appears to have stuck and is used to refer to films produced by filmmakers from the Indian subcontinent concealing the hegemonizing hold of Hindi commercial cinema produced in Mumbai over those in other centers. It is the average filmgoer in global cities moving seamlessly between Deepa Mehta’s Earth 1947, Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Mira Nair’s The Namesake, Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali, S Shankar’s Shivaji or Shoaib Mansoor’s Khuda Ke Liye who Bollywoodizes, to borrow Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s term, South Asian cinema innocent of the aesthetic or financial contingencies through which Indian commercial cinema in Hindi and other Indian languages transmuted into Bollywood or its variations such as Kollywood, Tollywood or Lollywood. The strong reaction that Bollywood evokes in many accentuates the ambivalence that has marked Indian popular cinema’s relationship with the American popular film since its inception and to the dialectic of copy that binds Bollywood to Hollywood. The umbilical cord that connects Bollywood to Hollywood cannot be snapped notwithstanding the vehement denials or disinterest voiced by those working in the Bombay film industry. The shadow of Hollywood has loomed large over Bollywood as competition, benchmark or original. Yet, notwithstanding allegations of plagiarism and lack of originality, it is the denigrated popular Hindi film that has interrogated Hollywood’s planetary dominance and has emerged as the sole contender to Hollywood in its global reach. Historians of cinema have produced evidence to prove that Hollywood was not perceived as a threat by Indian filmmakers in the past and it is not likely to be now. However, whether Bollywood will dominate Hollywood in the future, as a euphoric Indian media prophesies, is another question for cinephilia is a product of cineliteracy and the world, raised on a staple diet of Hollywood, might not be ripe for the three hour long song and dance masala film. Has Bollywood really invaded the global popular space? Or is it still locked up in South Asian ghettos in global cities? Do its travels still follow the old trade and migration routes from South and South East Asia across the Middle East to Africa or does it circulate across new superhighways to Europe, North and South America, Canada, and Australia in addition in a few hours? Where does it originate and which directions does it flow in? How do its travels in the new global process differ from those in the past? Is Bollywood global, transnational, national or regional? Finally, what is global culture, if there be any, and can Bollywood be considered a culture of globalization?

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Bollywood as Alternative Modernity Bill ASHCROFT The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong [email protected]

While globalization is usually seen in terms of homogeneity and cultural imperialism, its most remarkable feature is its plurality– a plurality of global cultures characterising Modernity itself. Modernities are everywhere, it seems, and ‘Modernity’ itself is a plurality of alternative modernities. Globalization may now be characterized by the multiplicity of its modernities and post-colonial theory provides a way to understand why this is so. Like post-colonial literatures, the most characteristic alternative modernities are those we might call ‘hybridized’, ones that appropriate and transform global cultural forms to local needs, beliefs and conditions. This does not make them extensions of modernity, but new culturally situated forms of modernization. Modernity is not so much adopted, as adapted and re-created, and increasingly, modernities may adapt other alternative modernities. This paper will use the appropriation and transformation of the film industry in Bollywood as an example of the process by which alternative modernities come into being.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Cultural Flows, Travelling Shows: Bombay Talkies, Global Times Makarand PARANJAPE Jawaharlal Nehru University, India [email protected]

The transculturality of South Asian cinema has been increasing visible and obvious over the last two decades. What is less understood and explored is its increasing integration with Hollywood, which may be considered in keeping with the broader workings of globalization. This paper attempts to list out the patterns and types of flows of this cinema, with a special emphasis on Bombay cinema so as to come up with a preliminary taxonomy of such interpentration and interdependence. In the process, I would also like to touch upon some vexing issues such as the artistic difference between Bollywood and Hollywood and the (ir)relevance of the notion of national cinemas.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

National Bollywood vs. Globalizing Hollywood A Linguistic, Cultural, and Aesthetic Comparison Harish TRIVEDI University of Delhi, India [email protected]

There is a new perception to the effect that Hindi films are not what they used to be in the hey-day of (that almost mythological but actual enough small town at the back of the beyond of the Hindi heartland) Jhumritalaiya, i.e. in the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema from broadly the mid-1940s to the 1970s, when the main market of Hindi films was the so called illiterate masses, the rickshaw-wallahs who went to fill the six-anna front seats to watch their favourite films again and again. Correspondingly, Hindi cinema was during this period generally sneered at by the educated elite. However, in the age of Popular Culture and Media Studies now, Hindi cinema has become academically respectable and eminently theorizable, even though much of what is said about it in Anglophone discourse (often generated as Ph D dissertations in New York and other metropolitan centres in the West) is still derogatory and unconscionably patronizing. Meanwhile, Hindi cinema runs on pretty much as before. Notwithstanding an increasing number of films which are more “serious,” “socially relevant,” and “artistic” (i.e., half-way to the art-house), nearly all Hindi films still have several distinguishing features that Hollywood films do not: (a) melodrama, (b) several songs and dances, usually extraneous to and obstructive of the story-line, (c) a formulaic stereotypical (or archetypical) plot, (d) a distincty non-linear non-causal narrative mode, and last but not least, (e) the prohibition against kissing and bare sexuality. This is not to mention of course that Hindi cinema is not, unlike Hollywood, in an international and globalizing language but in Hindi, the language of a single nation. Altogether, Hindi cinema continues to represent the biggest national alternative, and thus also a mode of postcolonial resistance, to the long-standing and ever-increasing hegemony of Hollywood world-wide, challenging it not only on its extensive home turf but even outside India in terms of its parallel circuit of international circulation. In this paper, I explore this phenomenon in terms not only of the commercial dynamics of Hindi cinema but even more in terms of its underlying assumptions and function, both political and aesthetic. In the process, I engage with earlier (and often adverse) formulations on the “national” character of Hindi cinema by critics such as Sumita S. Chakravarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ravi Vasudevan, and some Hindi critics including Jabri Mall Parekh, while also tracing the aesthetic genealogy of Hindi cinema right back to the foundational treatise of Sanskrit poetics, the Natyashastra by Bharata (c. 2nd c. AD).

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Interrogating Whiteness in Hindi Nationalist Cinema Teresa HUBEL Huron University College in London, Ontario, Canada [email protected]

I would like to analyze the white characters and figures that dot Hindi cinema about the colonial period. My hunch is that whiteness carries a shifting significance: while earlier films tended to articulate whiteness as inevitably adversarial for the purposes of nationalist identity formation, from the 1990s onwards we begin to see emerging white characters who assist in that formation. But how does the binary opposition that creates both whiteness and Indianness be deployed in a non-oppositional fashion so that the racial/racist self can be made to consolidate the nationalist other? I think too that it can be argued that whiteness in mainstream films about imperial India is a category of race that disguises a class bias. White characters invariably are middle-class. Hindi film is not unusual in this representation of colonial whiteness, but, while the virtual invisibility of poor whites in British texts and films about the Raj can be related to its need to maintain the racist assumptions of the imperial enterprise, such assumptions are surely absent in nationalist films. So where are the ordinary British soldiers, the wives of these men (who themselves were often nursemaids or domestic servants in elite white homes), their children (frequently students in the charity schools and asylums), the subordinate officials of the railway and telegraph, the European prostitutes, the loafers, and the barmaids; why are they missing from these films about a period of history that they most certainly occupied? And what does the erasure of working-class whites from Hindi film about the colonial period suggest about the work that the trope of whiteness does? Is a working-class white character or figure somehow unsuited to the task of consolidating the nationalism of an Indian character?

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Nation-building through Popular Hindi Film Coonoor KRIPALANI-THADANI Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong [email protected]

This paper provides an overview of the patriotism of popular Hindi film and how it promotes national pride, communal and religious tolerance, and secular values. It analyzes selective films in various categories: - films that address the freedom struggle and colonialism - the Shaheed (martyr) films - films on partition - films about cross-border love stories - films on terrorism - war films - bio-pics, especially films on Mahatma Gandhi - and demonstrates how these films help the nation-building process in the popular imagination. Through the discussion, the paper demonstrates what the meaning and symbolism of these films represent, and how this medium of popular culture voluntarily provides constructs that serve to build the spirit of the nation, creating both a national identity and a cultural nationalism. The paper also discusses the secularism of the film industry itself, the role of the industry in promoting friendly cross-border relations with Pakistan, and how the industry perceives its importance and significance in this process. In this context, the paper will also take a quick look at the film industry’s reaction to the recent 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and the significance of its condemnation of these acts. In all these ways, and through their universalism and popular appeal throughout the country, popular Hindi films contribute to the process of nation-building.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Cinema in Motion: Tracking Tamil Cinema’s Assemblage Vijay DEVADAS Department of Media, Film & Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand [email protected]

This paper seeks to develop the notion of cinema in motion through the example of Tamil cinema by shoring up the various travels, connections and disconnections, rhythms and codes, politics, predispositions and drives that this cinema has with other cinemas within India and internationally, with particular forms of representations and the ‘vital structuring principles in popular culture in India’ (Mankekar, 1999: 18), with practices of viewing, recent shifts in the domains of production, distribution and exhibition, and with audiences both within India and the larger Tamil diaspora. The list of connections and travels that I have alluded to is by no means exhaustive for there are various other linkages that inform Tamil cinema, such as the impact of digital technologies and other media platforms, the effect of multiplex developments in India, and various forms of popular culture (theatre, music) amongst others. In this paper I will focus on four specific travels: firstly, pre-independence Tamil cinema and the anti-colonial project, to argue that this cinema has always been historically intertwined with other locations of production in India while participating in the nationalist project; secondly, I examine ethno-nationalist Tamil cinema, to explore the blockages and boundary-crossing imperatives mediated across the structuring principles of nation and nationalism; thirdly, I discuss the relationship between Tamil cinema and other media platforms, and I conclude with an examination of what Amit Rai (2008) calls the ‘sensory experience of the exhibition space’ that fosters differentiated viewing experiences, to shore up the contingency of the viewing-experience. An examination of these selected travels of Tamil cinema allows us to see how Tamil cinema mixes, interrelates, to produce patterns, blockages, and potentials. Drawing from the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’ as the model for the complex clustering of technological, historical, and physical processes, I wish to argue for a study of Tamil cinema in these terms to elucidate the dynamism of Tamil cinema in motion. What I am attempting to do thus is draw up an ecology of Tamil cinema that moves from a representational and linear understanding of the effects of Tamil cinema that dominates discussions on Tamil cinema (Velayutham, 2008), to one that emphasises how it interacts with or carries out interactions with other media-systems, popular culture, bodies, institutions, forms of lives, communities (defined by class, caste, gender, for instance), and urban and industrial developments. In other words, a consideration of Tamil cinema ‘as a form of contagion, endlessly mutating and spreading’, connecting with other cinematic forms, ‘human bodies, organizational structures, and energies’ (Rai, 2008).

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Region, Language and Indian Cinema: Mysore and Kannada Cinema of the 1950s MK RAGHAVENDRA Film and Literary Critic, India [email protected]

‘Bollywood’ – or mainstream Hindi cinema from India – is now attracting global attention but cinema outside ‘Bollywood’, which constitutes nearly 70% of Indian cinema, has been less understood. While films from ‘Bollywood’ have traditionally addressed the national identity, other kinds of popular cinema in India address regional identities within India, identities largely determined by language after the linguistic reorganization of the Indian states in 1956. Kannada language cinema originates in the state of Karnataka and apparently addresses the identity determined by the Kannada language today but before the linguistic reorganization of the states, there were different Kannada speaking parts which later constituted Karnataka, viz. the former Princely state of Mysore which was under indirect British rule before 1947, the Hyderabad Karnataka area then ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad, the areas under the Bombay and Madras Presidencies then controlled directly by the British, and Kodagu, which was administered by British Chief Commissioners until 1947. Kannada language cinema was produced and consumed in the 1950s around Mysore and Bangalore cities, which were in Princely Mysore and this paper attempts to look at how the prospect of linguistic reorganization was registered in Kannada cinema in three films made shortly before 1956. Princely Mysore was an affluent state with a singular relationship both with the British and with the central leadership of the Congress Party. The three films, being mythological in their themes, do not explicitly address the issue of reorganization of the Kannada speaking areas but a deeper reading reveals much about how Kannada cinema’s constituency (roughly corresponding to the citizenry of former Princely Mysore) saw linguistic reorganization, which would not only append much poorer areas to their own prosperous region but also alter demographic patters significantly and determine the religious/ sectarian groups administering power in future Karnataka.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Beware of Bad Mammas: Matriliny, Modernity and Male Anxieties in Early Malayalam Cinema Meena T. PILLAI University of Kerala, India [email protected]

Kerala, with its erstwhile tradition of matrilineal forms of kinship pattern, has evolved into one of the most advanced states of India in terms of social development indicators. Yet in 1933, its unique form of matrilineal kinship became the first kinship system in the world to be legally abolished. In 1928, the first Malayalam silent movie Vigathakumaran was produced. Since then to the first talkies Balan (1938) and Jnanambika (1940) Malayalam cinema shows a curious fascination with the erasure of the mother and the trope of the step-mother. Even when cinemas from all over India sought to install ‘motherhood’ as the epitome of the ‘Indian woman’, early Malayalam cinema is permeated with negative stereotypes of the mother, based on formulaic misogynist myths like those of ‘Parasurama’ and ‘Poothana’. This served to situate the sign ‘Malayali woman’ in a liminal narrative and cinematographic space and thus laid the cornerstone for the future tokenization and marginalization of images of women on the celluloid in Kerala. This paper seeks to study the emergent discourse of cinema in Kerala in the nineteen thirties and forties and explicate how it has sought in varying degrees, to consolidate and reinforce the ‘patrifocal’ ideologies of a society that was continually struggling to efface a matrilineal past by pegging down with vigour, infused by colonial modernity, the contours of a normative, ‘native’ femininity.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

The Goddess and Feminine Empowerment: A Study of South Indian Goddess films Chitra SANKARAN Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore [email protected]

In recent years, many of the discourses propounded by scholars from disparate disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, feminist studies and theology suggest attempts to revitalize the ancient concept of the Goddess as a means to end several of the current ills brought about by an over-emphasis on certain narrow interpretations of reality. An increasing disenchantment with the surfeit of scientific materialism, and rationalism has led to the erection of a new mythologem demanding to be integrated into the modern frame of reference: namely, the myth of the Goddess. This new mythologem is seen to be challenging, in certain fundamental ways, traditional perceptions of the male and the female, and their relations to power. It is in this context that I present a study of the Goddess cult within Hindu popular culture (a cult that is centrally established in the Hindu tradition and also deeply ensconced in the Hindu psyche) by an examination of the depiction of the Goddess in South Indian Cinema. The study will attempt to show how, despite the purported aim of the film, i.e. to portray the glories of Devi in an adulatory way, selective representations of the religious tradition that transact between the creative and destructive aspects of the Prakrithi/Kali aspects of the Goddess, work insidiously to undermine and disempower the feminine principle. These strategies of disabling the feminine can take many forms. For instance, at the level of the plot, an overt contestation would be set up, between a rational positivistic (usually male) protagonist (who belittles the ‘intuitive’) and the mystical and abstract feminine principle or Shakthi, with the latter finally triumphing. This opposition ostensibly designed to show up the inadequacies of this ‘rational’/ empiricist perspective and re-establish the glories of the Goddess invariably however, works to relegate the feminine to the realm of the irrational and the chaotic, thus perpetuating certain pervasive female stereotypes in society.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Beyond Bollywood: Sub-cultures, Sub-cinemas and The Sub-terrains of the City Madhuja MUKHERJEE Jadavpur University Kolkata, India [email protected]

Even when ‘Bollywood’ is a ‘strange name’ that the term has become popular and crucial within the academics is an interesting case in point. While the Post World War II period charted migration from South Asian countries to the West and the North, this in due course produced a new kind of public, spaces and cultures. Rajadhyaksha (2005) suggests that though ‘Bollywood’ ‘occupies a space analogous to the film industry, but might best be seen as a more diffuse cultural conglomeration….’ As ‘Bollywood’ produced new notions of consumptions, the films also recreate the aesthetics of the cities. If Baudrillard (1988) argues that American cities grow out of Hollywood films, there is this impression that some of our cities may have re-emerged through films like Dil Chahata Hai. Majumdar (2007) has divided the representation of Mumbai into two broad categories that is, ‘panoramic interiors’ and ‘gangland Bombay ’. Recently it has been argued that another category of films function from the ‘edge’. These films largely succeed through distribution and exhibition systems of multiplexes. However, certain B-movies working within comic as well as grim Noir mode seem to also succeed ‘locally’ despite the fact that Bollywood is now a ‘global’ product that has remapped issues of ‘home, belonging and community’. While this paper will analyze the meaning of ‘Bollywood’ it will also locate a trajectory of the emerging trends through what Prasad (1998) described as feudal-family romances, middle-class cinema and Amitabh Bachchan movies. However, this paper will primarily focus on the tendency referred to as ‘B-movies,’ which are in fact ‘hits’. I will look into the small and dingy theatres located in a city like Calcutta , where houses like ‘Park Show House’ or ‘Noor Mahal’ exist on the fringes of the city (in the Muslim ghettos) as well as the cinematic institution. This paper problematises the global-local dichotomy and examines questions of transnationalism-regionalism through the study of contemporary B-thrillers (like Gangster), comedies (like Priyadarshan films) and certain single theatres in Calcutta. It will interrogate notions of the city, issues of aesthesis, leisure and cultures.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Migrant, Diaspora, NRI: Bhojpuri Cinema and the “Local in the Global” D. PARTHASARATHY Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, India [email protected]

This paper charts the rise and global spread of Bhojpuri cinema and links the phenomenon to changes in Bollywood cinema which has undergone transformation in response to changes in audiences and screening spaces. The emergence of an urban professional, cosmopolitan, and metropolitan multiplex audience in Indian cities and among the diaspora (especially the non-resident Indian) has resulted in significant shifts in Bollywood films their themes, formulas, locales, language, and aesthetics. This has created a gap in audience needs among the very large Bhojpuri speaking population in India and among the diaspora especially in Asia-Oceania and Caribbean countries. Through a discussion of the major reasons for the rise of the Bhojpuri film industry in Mumbai, this paper argues that this can be better understood through an application and extension of the approaches current in the literature on transnational urbanism. Analyzing various forms of linkages between different strands of the diaspora and migrants within and outside India, the paper generates an understanding of diverse forms of “local in the global” as a significant outcome of transnational urbanism. The ‘naming’ of three distinct groups in the discourse on migration within / from India – migrants, diaspora, and NRIs – their relation to India, their recognition and status accorded by the Indian state, their skill levels and professional accomplishments, and their location within transnational spaces – all these are seen to be implicated in the creation of new transnational cultural spaces within which Bollywood and Bhojpuri cinema find and create their audiences.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Rethinking Hindi Cinema and Theatre Nandi BHATIA University of Western Ontario London, Canada [email protected]

In the last two years, at least three films - Khosla ka Ghosla (2006), Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008) and Halla Bol (2008) - have represented theatre as an agent of social change, activism, andpolitical intervention. While some critics see Hindi cinema and theatre as separate and dichotomous, a threat to the popularity of theatre, and the cause of dwindling audiences (Sheila Bhatia, J.C. Mathur), others view the presence of theatre and its influences such as melodrama, songs and stage layout “as evidence of the unbroken continuity of Indian culture and its tenacity in the face of the onset of modernity” (Prasad 15). Yet Hindi cinema’s current attention to theatrical forms demands a reconsideration of the relationship between cinema and theatre. What does such attention to a form that is local, ephemeral, and marginalized from the global circuits of production, consumption, and circulation enjoyed by print and cinema, signal? In this paper, I seek to examine this and the following related questions. How does cinema’s reliance on the aesthetics of theatre to mobilize the war on corruption and terror in these films enable their political themes? What kinds of shifts do theatrical forms encounter when represented in cinema? How do such representations frame audiences? Do they have the potential to create community-involvement as does live theatre? And how do cinematic representations of theatre perpetuate or undercut dominant ideologies? In addressing these questions within the contextual framework of the production of these films, my paper will also consider the historic relationship between cinema and theatre. Kaushal, J.N. Sheila Bhatia. Nai Dilli: RashtriyaNatya Vidyalay (New Delhi: National School of Drama). 2000. Mathur, J.C. “Encounter of the Performing Arts and Modern Mass Media.” Sangeet Natak 46 (October-December 1977): 5-13. Prasad, M. Madhav. Ideology of the Hindi Film. A Historical Reconstruction. Delh: Oxford University Press, (1998), 2008.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

The Lahore Film Industry: A Historical Sketch Ishtiaq AHMED Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore [email protected]

In pre-partition India, the Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi film industry was based in three major cities: Bombay, Calcutta and Lahore. While Bombay and Calcutta gained most attention in the early years the Lahore film industry continued to grow steadily and film stars freely worked in all three. At Lahore, besides films being made in Hindustani (Urdu/Hindi), which were meant for audiences all over India, Punjabi-language films also thrived. However, the partition of India in 1947 dealt severe blows to the Lahore film industry. It was growing very fast and people like B. R. Chopra and others who later distinguished themselves in Bombay had big plans in mind to make Lahore the most important film centre in India. Those plans were a shambles as communal rioting forced the non-Muslims out of Lahore. Almost all Hindus and Sikhs connected to the production in Lahore left for India. Over the years many made their mark and Punjabi music and lyrics began to be included in Hindi films too. On the other hand, most Punjabi Muslims who had established themselves in the Bombay film industry migrated to Pakistan. On the whole, more people left than returned to Lahore. The Lahore film industry gradually recovered and in the 1960s again prospered, but from the 1980s onwards it went into sharp decline as Islamism began to be cultivated by the state as its ideology. Production continued but mainly of action-filled Punjabi films but by and large nothing significant came out of Lahore. This paper will trace the various stages that mark the history of the Lahore film industry and account for the role of politics and ideology in affecting cultural expression and creative endeavour.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Across the Barbed Fence: Cinema in the India-Pakistan Divide Gyanesh KUDAISYA National University of Singapore [email protected]

This discussion looks at cross-border cultural consumption in South Asia by focusing on cinema in the context of the India-Pakistan divide. The discussion examines the ways in which the Partition impacted upon the film industry in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of movement of artistic talent, the production and distribution of films and in the shaping of genres. It highlights the complexities of imposing territorial boundaries upon shared patterns of cultural consumption which do not recognize such divisions. It also emphasizes the influence which cinema wields in shaping images of Partition within the public sphere in present-day South Asia.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

The Bollywood Portrayal of the Indo-Pak Relationship in the Post 1990’s Tridivesh Singh MAINI Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore [email protected]

The Hindi film industry is not only a source of entertainment but is also a good prism for understanding the social and political issues of the time as well. This paper seeks to understand Bollywood’s tackling of the Indo-Pak relationship from the 90’s to date. The primary questions it deals with are whether: (1)

(2)

Bollywood movies made on the Indo-Pak relationship are in anyway affected by the relationship between the governments of India and Pakistan and public opinion? In the process, it will examine whether Bollywood pushed ahead the country’s diplomatic agenda as was done to some degree by Hollywood in the 1980’s. The portrayal of Muslims and Sikhs vis-à-vis Pakistan changes according to the situation?

While examining these questions, the paper will give a brief historical background to the types of movies made on the Indo-Pak relationship and explain why for some time it became fashionable to make jingoistic movies especially in the late 1990’s until 2003-2004. The paper also uses examples to show that with an improvement in the Indo-Pak relationship, jingoistic movies gave way to movies which promote peace -- in some cases scripts were even changed. Similarly, there is a definite link between the depiction of Muslims with the relationship between the two countries. So there is a definite link between politics, public opinion and the sorts of movies made in Bollywood. However, there are some Bollywood directors like Mahesh Bhatt who have gone against the tide by being pro-active in pushing for a good relationship with Pakistan and also avoiding vilification of Muslims, which was resorted to in certain movies.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Two Bengals, One Conscience: A Study of Cross-border Cultural Flows in the Context of Globalization Anuradha GHOSH Jamia Millia Islamia, India [email protected]

While the pivotal role of Bollywood within India and South Asia has received some academic attention in the past decade, the tottering stability of Tollywood and Dollywood has not yet provoked much discussion. In the context of globalization, transnationalization of production, marketing, circulation and reception of products of the culture industry has created a unique situation in the Bangla cinema industry on both sides of the border. Since the nature of cross border flows (post 1971) between West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh has had a history different from the tensions and conflicts that characterize the relation of India and Pakistan, there has been a considerable amount of open cultural exchange fostering the spirit of syncretic unity whereby the particular and the universal share a relational dialectic defining identity in terms of human consciousness on purely existential lines. The objective of this paper is to study the role of cinema as an axis of cultural resistance and the ways in which it tries to address/negotiate the political crisis of globalization through the trajectory of ‘two Bengals, one conscience’ leading to the construction of a national identity on linguistic lines. Consequently, the thrust areas of the paper would be as follows: 1) 2) 3)

4) 5)

Tracing the contours of alternative cinema practice in contemporary Bangladesh by a study of the works of Tareque and Catherine Masud, Kawsar Chowdhury, Subhash Datta, Saidul Anam Tutul and others; Examine why the historical context of the ‘70s provide the inspiration to contemporary Bangladeshi film-makers in order to address the political crisis of globalization; Examine how the alternative cinema practice of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen mapped the context of the turbulent ‘70s when West Bengal was the hot bed of the Food Movement, the agrarian labour movement and finally the Naxalite uprising; Examine the juxtaposition of the concept of liberation in the Bengali Indian cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s with the contemporary documenting of the Bangladeshi ‘mukti andolan’ (freedom movement) as an unfinished legacy; Examine why the thematic engagements of present day Bengali Indian cinema has enmeshed itself within the urban landscape into the micro-politics of the home and family while Bangladeshi film-makers are continuously pushing the margins of a life beyond…

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

‘From Dhaka to Calcutta’: The Cross-border Migration of Bengali Films in Contemporary South Asia Zakir Hossain Raju Monash University, Sunway Campus, Malaysia [email protected] ; [email protected]

South Asia in the 1990s-2000s experienced the liberalization of the economy, the proliferation of consumerist lifestyles and rapid changes in its mediascape. The transformations fostered the reformulation of individual and community identities as well as transformations in/of public spheres. Especially the national public sphere has at once got widened and segmented. This led the scholars to question the idea of nation and national culture (Anderson, 1991; Bhabha, 1990; Ashcroft, 1989). Scholars like Appadurai (1994), Hall (1995, 1996) and Featherstone (1995) argued that globalization of market and media transformed old categories of nation and culture and made way to the intercourse of the local and the global, especially if one looks at the flow of cultural products. These debates over how to locate nation and culture, especially when the visual media are flowing through easily-permeable national borders in South Asia prompted me to initiate this research paper. At a time when the study of South Asian cinema has almost been ‘Bollywoodized’, I locate the exchange between two other South Asian national/regional cinemas such as Bangladeshi cinema and West-Bengali (Indian) cinema. These film industries, both producing films in Bengali, are based in two of the lesser known South Asian ‘media capitals’: Dhaka and Calcutta. I term these two Bengali cinemas as ‘Bangal’ and ‘Ghoti’ as these are the names called by West and East Bengalis to each other to designate the love-hate relationship between the divided parts of Bengal. This research is then an inter-Asia study, an attempt to locate the cultural flow between the two regions of once undivided Bengal and its role in the creation of identities within today’s transnational frame of popular culture. Here, going beyond the usual trips taken in South Asian film studies, I analyse how globalization affected and transformed the older transactions between the two Bengali-language popular film industries South Asia. I outline the new relationship between the two national/regional film industries by examining the remakes of Bangladeshi film melodramas produced in Calcutta in the 1990s and 2000s. Despite being much older than Dhaka film industry and the base for some renowned Indian art cinema filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, contemporary Bengali cinema of Calcutta is now a somewhat small regional film industry serving only a part of the Bengali-speaking audiences of West Bengal and neighbouring states in Eastern India. In the 1990s-2000s, both Dhaka and Calcutta-based Bengali-language film industries, as popular-cultural institutions are negotiating their roles and functions with globalizing forces and nationalist discourses amid rapid migrations of the media, capital and human labour. Within such global/local interface, the process of remaking Bangladeshi films began in Calcutta. I analyze this unlikely media migration from Dhaka to Calcutta as Calcutta was seen as the cultural capital of Bengal since the ‘Bengali Renaissance’ of the nineteenth century. I contextualize these Calcutta-(re)made films by locating the nature of cultural travel and translation that inherently govern these texts. By the way of my analysis, I point out that even the Asian ‘national’ film industries based on a vernacular language and with a large ‘captive’ audience (as it is the case in the case of Dhaka and Calcutta cinemas) need to be reconsidered as ‘transnational’ discourses, not only the Hindi-language Indian cinema or Bollywood films. However, the transnational dimension of these cinemas received little attention from Asian media scholars so far. For

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

example, cinema in Bangladesh has been seen as a ‘national’ culture/industry both by Bangladeshi and non-Bangladeshi film historians; it has not even be compared with the only other Bengali-language film industry based in Calcutta. This paper, by analyzing cinematic movements from Dhaka to Calcutta is one of the first attempts to look at the transnational dimensions of these two cinemas and the recent cultural translations taking place in Calcutta film industry in order to make Bangladeshi films palatable to a West-Bengali audience.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Hindi Cinema and Indian Diaspora in Guyana and Trinidad Suresh Kumar PILLAI Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, India [email protected]

The objective of the presentation is to critically appreciate and examine the Hindi cinema influenced cultural expressions of Indian Diaspora in South American countries of Guyana and Trinidad in the larger context of Diasporic influences in Indian film industry. In both Guyana and Trinidad civil societies are racially stratified along dominant cultural groups of Indians and Africans. The Indians, descendents of indentured labourers, love Hindi films which play a significant role in preserving the “Indian culture”. They enjoy Hindi films without understanding the language and create tunes, words and expressions from Hindi films. Its extended products occupy a significant physical space in the Indian enclaves of Caribbean culture. The presentation would like to attempt the historicity of film viewing experiences from silent era to now. It would also attempt to survey the cultural products created in these former plantations societies because of the communication. The presentation would attempt to look at the extension of this Hindi Cinema culture among Caribbean Diaspora in UK, USA and Canada. Finally the presentation would attempt to understand what role this cultural exclusiveness play in multi cultural societies.

From Bombay to LA: The Travels of South Asian Cinema 9-10 February 2009, organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Troubling Visibilities: Indian Cinema as Transnational Representation Irene J. NEXICA UC Berkeley, USA [email protected]

From its inception, Indian cinema has incorporated international elements into its narratives and imagery, while also featuring stories drawn from and influenced by India’s historical past, religious landscapes, and aspirations for the future. The resultant works are specifically Indian, while also containing visible and masked traces of “outside” sources of creative inspiration. This multimedia presentation traces images from mass-marketed Hindi films of the last 15 years as they represent various cultural identities that seem to have origins, if obliquely, from mainstream American cinema and popular culture as routed through commercial Indian film sensibilities. These depictions, often consisting of brief interludes, dwell in ambivalent contexts that to an American viewer can appear both foreign, and hauntingly familiar. The presentation will discuss this convoluted circuit, with emphasis on some of the specific American histories of the portrayals as interpreted through the eyes of a postcolonial North American media critic. From this perspective, the Indian context of these images presents a chance to reveal information that can be obscured in the context of North Americans watching similar pictures in mainstream Hollywood-style films. What meanings do these images have as they refract through the mirrors of different cultural views and what can they reveal and mask as they transform? How do these films reflect and construct mainstream “Indian” sensibilities and in the process leak mainstream “American” ones as well? How do ways some “non-mainstream” American audiences respond to these images provide information about what can be troubling resonances just below the surface of these offhand scenes? Far from its location within India as a self-consciously Indian product (and sometimes complicated by the film’s geographic setting), what surprises does Indian film show North American viewers? And what do depictions of non-Indian groups show “outsiders” about perceptions of different cultural groups that reside within India? Combining my own analysis and interpretation of sequences with participant research among film viewers in America and India, this presentation seeks to explore, explain, unravel, confuse, and complicate genealogies of representations found in recent Indian cinema.