- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Studies in South Asian Film & Media
- Previous Issues
- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009
Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2009
-
-
Nautanki and Hindi Cinema: Changing Representations
By Nandi BhatiaThis essay examines the changing representations of Nautanki in Hindi cinema through an analysis of Teesri Kasam (1966) and Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (2003), and addresses the role and function of such representations in engaging intersecting questions of theatre, gender, modernity and nationalism. Produced at a distance of more than three decades, the films focus on Nautanki dancer-actresses, give them space to express their voices, and expose the difficulties and power-relations involved in negotiating their public and private lives. Yet the cinematic frames and aesthetics of these films, derived in part from Nautanki, function as technologies that both mark and participate in the shifting ideological perspectives on the place of theatre and its actresses in the cultural life of the nation, and in relation to Bollywood. While Teesri Kasam functions as a film that intends to produce for its audience a political consciousness about folk theatre at a time when the post-independence nation sought an autonomous identity through the revival and recuperation of its traditional cultural forms, Main Madhuri Dixit, produced in the post-1990s milieu of a globally growing Bollywood industry, suggests that cinema is the appropriate cultural medium for fulfilling the Nautanki actress's desire for greater social success and acknowledgement across national and transnational sites.
-
-
-
Between the Godfather and the Mafia: Situating Right-Wing Interventions in the Bombay Film Industry (19922002)
By Nandana BoseDrawing primarily on trade press discourse, this article interrogates right-wing interventions in the Bombay film industry in the 1990s. It argues that there were unprecedented levels of investment by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena, both material and ideological, in Hindi cinema. It examines the changing dynamics between the State and Hindi cinema leading to industry status in 1998 and its implications: the influential role of Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray as mediator of industrial disputes; the nexus between stars and politicians; underworld film financing; the use of the cinematic apparatus and exhibition sites for right-wing propaganda and electoral campaigning, and controversies over growing instances of partisan tax exemptions and national film awards. What is also suggested is that there were industrial shifts towards corporatisation in order to reinvent the Bombay film industry as a global player for diasporic consumption and investment, assisted by BJP-led State fiscal policies, incentives and conventions.
-
-
-
Melbourne, Indian Popular Cinema and the Marketing of An Enviable Cosmopolitan Lifestyle
More LessMelbourne, like other cities that aspire to a global status, has attempted to enlist Indian popular film as a means of attracting Indian investment, business migration, tourism and international students. Key to understanding the representation of the global city in Indian popular cinema is the much-marketed concept of the cosmopolitan lifestyle, and Melbourne's distinctive trams are used strategically to link consumerism with an urban lifestyle. Nonetheless, we need to look beyond the shopping malls to the other corporate spaces of what Saskia Sassen terms the glamour zone, to the offices, hotels and apartment blocks, if we are to understand how multinational corporations not only use Indian popular cinema to promote their corporate brand but also work with government agencies to promote city brands which aspire to resemble New York or London. By viewing Indian popular cinema through its representation of Melbourne as a global city, contradictions within the apparent embrace of globalization by Indian popular cinema are thrown into relief.
-
-
-
Looking for Love in All the White Places: A Study of Skin Color Preferences on Indian Matrimonial and Mate-Seeking Websites
Authors: Sonora Jha and Mara AdelmanA preference for light skinned females is a global bias that affects all areas of human relationships, especially in marital mate selection. Further intensified by the meteoric rise in Internet dating and mate selection, this bias often serves an invalidating function for darker-skinned women. This study (1) analyzed profiles and preferences of brides and grooms (N=200), and (2) coded success story wedding photos (N=200) posted on four Indian matrimonial websites. Results showed an overwhelming bias among males for brides lighter-skinned than themselves. Males were also more likely than females to state a preference for skin color in their prospective brides, and to use qualitative words like beautiful and lovely to describe their preferred match. Most significantly, the success story wedding photos consistently had lighter-skinned brides than grooms. Dark-skinned women were almost non-existent in these success stories. This research points to a technology-abetted intensification of colorism. That is to say that the powerful profile menu options and the visual imagery of predominantly light-skinned, successful brides illustrated on current websites visually reinforce the invalidation of dark skinned women.
-
-
-
Nationalism and Hindi Cinema: Narrative Strategies in Fanaa
By Shahnaz KhanThis discussion draws upon the narrative strategies of the Bombay cinema blockbuster Fanaa and examines larger questions of culture, nation and citizenship in contemporary India including: What kinds of gender, class and nationalist politics does it reinforce? What kinds of imagined communities does it give rise to? How does it regulate the borders of those communities? On what terms are Muslims offered citizenship in contemporary India? How might Bombay Cinema films function as a transnational cultural product?
-
-
-
Animation in South Asia
By John A LentUntil recently, South Asian animation has lagged far behind that of other parts of Asia for lack of the technological, financial, and personnel infrastructure. This is still the situation in most of the region, with India an exception. What has happened in the development of Indian animation since the mid- 1990s is phenomenal. By 2007, India had about 300 animation studios, and by 2010, the country's animation industry was expected to hover around US$ one billion. Increasingly, Bollywood has taken a keen interest in Indian animation, as have foreign studios, including Disney. Based on interviews and a thorough review of secondary sources, this article traces the history of Indian filmic cartoons from 1915 to the present, discussing reasons for the lag in development previously and the tremendous surge in the 21st Century. The limited amount of animation production in Nepal and Sri Lanka is also discussed.
-
-
-
A Certification Anomaly: The Self-Sacrificial Female Body in Bombay Cinema
By Monika MehtaReleased in 1989 after a long court battle, Pati Parmeshwar/My Husband, My God is an anomaly in the history of Indian censorship because the debates in which it was enmeshed sought to define what kinds of cinematic representations constituted woman's servility. For decades, committees constituted by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) had consistently overlooked such representations and focused on censoring sexually explicit images such as closeups of women's bosoms, thighs and gyrating hips. However, in the case of Pati Parmeshwar, the CBFC banned a film which employed a ubiquitous Hindi film trope, namely, the self-sacrificial wife. This article examines this anomalous act and its subsequent consequences, revealing competing visions of the Indian state. These visions underscore that the state is not a monolithic entity.
-
-
-
Bollywood, Tibet, and the spatial and temporal dimensions of global modernity
By Anna MorcomWhile Bollywood is established as global popular culture, its journey into Tibet has been an idiosyncratic and complex one. Unlike the well-known manifestations of transnational Bollywood, in Tibet, Bollywood is not underpinned by an Indian diaspora or indeed Islamicate-based crossovers in the cultural and linguistic expression of romance. Furthermore, there is no legal import of Bollywood films or music into China's still protectionist cultural market, and zero attempts by Bombay producers to target China as yet.
This ethnographically-based article describes Bollywood in Tibet in live and recorded performing arts, analyzing in historical perspective the legal and illegal flows of people and goods, as well as other ties between Tibet and India and South Asia that drive this fashionable corner of Tibetan popular culture. This article also explores how Bollywood (and India) slot into the context of Chinese multiculturalism as an exotic and also erotic other.
The article as a whole highlights the historical as well as the modern forces of globalization, seeing the roots of Bollywood in Tibet as lying in ancient ties between Tibet and India and also Nepal, as well as in modern tourism and trade. This points to the fluidity of cultural topographies and trajectories in the pre-modern world. The article also emphasizes how far the globalization of Bollywood is due to specific regional and national issues, most notably, the nationalist project of the PRC which brought into being exile Tibet in India and Nepal as a kind of collateral damage.
-
-
-
Caricaturizing Freedom: Islam, Offence, and The Danish Cartoon Controversy
More LessI argue in this paper that the publication of cartoons caricaturing Islam by Jyllands- Posten is problematic for a number of reasons. First, within liberal political theory itself, there are reasonable arguments that the depictions (at least two) perpetuate prejudice and verge on hate speech. Second, such depictions weaken the social conditions that make possible a thriving democracy (i.e., participation) by marginalizing the already marginalized. Moreover, the caricatures perpetuate an Orientalist discourse about the nature of Islam and the non-West, and hinder global intercultural dialogue and understanding between nations.
-
-
-
Book Reviews
More LessBhangra: Birmingham and Beyond, Rajinder Dudrah, with contributions from Boy Chana and Ammo Talwar, (2007) Birmingham City Council Library and Archive Service, (81 pp.), ISBN 0-7093-0256-8, 16.99
-
-
-
Book Reviews
By Suvir KaulFilming the Line of Control: The Indo-Pak Relationship through the Cinematic Lens, Meenakshi Bharat and Nirmal Kumar, eds. (2008) New Delhi: Routledge, 256 pp., 978-0415460941, Hardback.
-