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- Volume 9, Issue 2, 2017
Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2017
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Soch Aur Shauch: Reading Brahminism and patriarchy in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha
By Pallavi RaoAbstractThis article locates how the recent resurgence of cinema from the Hindi heartland valourizes Brahminical notions of modernity. Closely reading the film Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017), it argues that the film aligns with the simplistic rationale of the state’s ‘Swachch Bharat Abhiyan’, which blames basic ignorance and lack of access to latrines for open defecation in rural Uttar Pradesh, not, as sociological evidence argues, ideologies of caste purity. This article examines the depiction of the film’s Brahmin male lead as an agent of modernity through the logic of Brahminical scriptures rather than institutionalized emphasis on health, sanitation and hygiene. This public staging of a Hindu heroic will propelling the nation into an age of progress utilizes the formal characteristics of realist melodrama that echoes the authoritarian impulses of the state, I argue, reinforcing nation-building as tied to patriarchal caste dharma through its spatial representations and imagined citizen-subjects.
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The gaze of the raping Muslim man: Love Jihad and Hindu right-wing rhetoric in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat
More LessAbstractThis article draws a connection between the Hindu right-wing protests against Love Jihad and the film Padmaavat (2018), arguing that the controversy surrounding the film is animated by the same discourse used to discuss the Hindu rightwing image of the Muslim man as a seducer and rapist of Hindu women. I argue that the entire film pivots around the deferred scene of desire between the Muslim Khilji and the Hindu Padmavati. Cinematically, the fetishistic scopophilic male gaze is itself a representation of desire, that is, to see is to desire. Thus, although the film refuses to show the scene of desire, it is haunted by the fear of the Muslim man as the spectator (and thereby) desirer of Hindu women. This anxiety is exemplified by the many ways in which the film represents Khilji’s desire (and by extension the desire of all Muslim men) as always already aberrant: the Muslim man as a bisexual, violent rapist. Thus, the film mirrors the rhetoric of contemporary Hindu right-wing politics.
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‘Chariot of Fire’: Genre slippages, iconographic agitation and ideological subversion in SRK’s Raees
By Omar AhmedAbstractGenres have often been a safe space for ideological containment, reworking popular conventions and fulfilling audience expectations. But many popular genres including science fiction, horror and the gangster film are also vehicles for subversion. This article will use Raees (Dholakia, 2017), a big budget Bollywood film starring Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), to demonstrate how the Indian gangster film acts as a rejoinder to Hindutva cultural politics, challenging the notion that popular Hindi cinema is merely in the bind of normalizing a nationalist agenda. Using the yatra (procession/journey) sequence as a focal point for textual analysis, I will cover three key areas. This includes the use of political iconography, the violent resistance that emerges to stop the yatra and that is instigated by Raees, a liminal figure of proletarian and secularist ideals, and finally, how the imagining of the Muslim harbours a punitive refrain.
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Reading double: Queer girls and Hindutva politics in The World Before Her
By Anandi RaoAbstractThis article examines the representation of Prachi, one of the chief subjects of the Indo-Canadian documentary The World Before Her, as a queer girl who finds the space to articulate her non-heteronormativity in a right-wing Hindu training camp for girls, the Durga Vahini. While made in 2012, this Canadian documentary, written and directed by Indo-Canadian film-maker Nisha Pahuja, was released in India in 2014, soon after Narendra Modi’s election, and was criticized by some as being a form of Hindutva propaganda. Drawing on the work of Antke Engel, Nikita Dhawan, Maria do Mar Castro Varela, Akhil Katyal and Kara Keeling, this article looks at the film-maker’s role in shaping the narrative and moments of linguistic, translational and affective excess to argue that queer politics, especially in postcolonial states, is not merely subversive but is also complicit in reinforcing hegemonic ideologies.
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‘PK Hamara Hai’: Hindi cinema and the defense of dharm in media counterpublics
More LessAbstractThis article problematizes notions in the current landscape of debates over Hindi cinema as one of polarized opposition between violent Hindutva cultural politics and liberal civil society. While acknowledging the centrality of both of these urban Indian publics to recent controversies, my article seeks to illumine an important demographic group in between the two: middle-class supporters of Hindu religious principles in India’s political and social landscape who eschew violent protests but work through media production to counter what they see as the affronts to Hindu dharm posed by recent popular Hindi films. I examine this group’s voice in larger culture debates through a discussion of the plays and other media productions of India’s International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) communities, produced in response to the films OMG (Shukla, 2012), PK (Hirani, 2014) and Padmaavat (Bhansali, 2018) in Mumbai and Pune. I analyse this as a third voice in contemporary debates over the representation and critique of Hindu traditions in India’s public spheres.
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Triumph of the Rajput: Sanjay Leela Bhansali and the fascist aesthetics of Padmaavat
More LessAbstractSanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat (2018) re-tells the legendary tale of the Rajput queen Padmavati. In recounting this tale, Bhansali hews to the historic, Manichaean dichotomization of Hindu and Muslim, presenting Rajputs as entirely noble figures and Muslim invaders as essentially barbaric. Employing Susan Sontag’s and Frank Tomasulo’s theorizations of the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, this article examines how Bhansali glorifies the Rajputs’ purported history via his fascist aesthetics. Such an approach rearticulates history as myth and presents it as a form of theatre. This article analyses Bhansali’s use of such aesthetics to reenact the Manichaean framing of Hindu–Muslim relations, which reaffirm contemporary chauvinistic formulations of the (Hindu) nation. In the process, Bhansali’s film can be seen as lending support to the ideology of contemporary fundamentalist Hindu forces.
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Interview with Lalit Vachani
By Leela KhannaAbstractThis interview with filmmaker Lalit Vachani explores the unique relationship between filmmaker and radical political subject. Vachani has made two documentary films on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). His first film, The Boy in the Branch (1993) was filmed mere months before the December 1992 Babri Masjid demolition. The documentary captures the unassuming ways local RSS shakha (branch) members recruit young boys in Nagpur into their right-wing milieu. Eight years later, Vachani’s film, The Men in the Tree (2002) revisits the same RSS members and presents their narratives of the demolition and how the Sangh has shaped their lives. This interview asks Vachani to reflect on the constantly changing power dynamics that a filmmaker must negotiate with his interlocutors. As the politics of representation are now changing with far right political groups actively producing their own media content, Vachani is invited to reflect on his past films alongside the present concerns of the growing visibility of Hindu right politics.
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