South Asian Cinemas: Widening the Lens

RSAP 501539—19/7/2010—RANANDAN—371676—Style 1 South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 8, No. 3, October 2010, 207–212 1 2 3 4 5 6 EDITORIAL Q1 South Asian cinemas 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 In 1985, when scholarship on South Asian cinema was still scant and most of the non-trade press was scathingly dismissive, Rosie Thomas made a claim for viewing Indian cinema on its own terms. Thomas argued that the pleasures and grammar of Indian films are internally determined, neither exclusively dependent on nor to be judged by the norms of an external referent such as Hollywood or Indian art cinema. Today, most of the growing and sizeable literature on South Asian cinemas takes these points for granted.1 Now, as a critical mass of such work has been achieved, it is time to take stock of the field and note that the field has developed a new norm, in which Hindi cinema (or ‘Bollywood’) provides the primary referent for South Asian cinema. In other words, Hindi film often functions as an unmarked centre to its marked and peripheral others. The most obvious illustration is its overwhelming predominance in South Asian cinema scholarship. A slightly more subtle instance is its appellation as the ‘national cinema’ of India, while other industries are marginalized and diminished as ‘regional cinemas.’ This preponderance is disproportionate to the industry’s place in the subcontinent’s film production, since even Hindilanguage films (of which we see Bollywood as a subset) comprise less than one third of India’s production, let alone that of South Asia as a whole. Such a focus can be unintentionally hegemonizing, creating the understanding that Bombay cinema stands synecdochally for Indian or South Asian cinema as a whole. Our aim in this ‘South Asian Cinemas’ issue is threefold: (1) to draw attention to the cinemas of other South Asian nations and of other Indian regions, (2) to mark the heterogeneity of Hindi cinema itself and even divisions within Bollywood, and (3) to consider what we can learn about patterns of cinematic content, production, and consumption by examining these different industries as analytically equivalent categories, both in and out of relation to each other. Thus we aim to counter the Bollywood-centric (Hindi-centric, North-centric, India-centric) focus of recent scholarship by expanding beyond it, but also to scrutinize that focus and delve within to examine the encompassing category of ‘Bollywood’ itself, therein complicating the concept beyond its standard usage as both a uniform and a comprehensive category. There are of course other significant patterns in the literature. Most obviously, the great majority of research continues to focus on the cinemas of India (within the nation or in the diaspora), though there is increasing work on Pakistani and Bangladeshi cinemas (see for example Gazdar; Hoek ‘Urdu;’ Khan and Ahmed; Qureshi). And within the field of Indian cinemas, the attention paid to ‘regional’ industries has not been evenly divided; Bengali and Tamil films and their associated products and consumption are covered most heavily, followed recently by Telugu cinema. But perhaps the most disproportionate pattern is the almost exclusive focus on ‘A’ films and their audiences, resulting in the scholarly marginalization of ‘B’ and ‘C’ grade films and their viewers, or ‘class’ versus ‘mass’ films 48 49 ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2010.501539 http://www.informaworld.com RSAP 501539—19/7/2010—RANANDAN—371676—Style 1 208 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 Editorial and audiences (categorizations associated with class and urban/suburban/rural divides). (Recent exceptions to this trend include Rao on non-elite audiences in the Punjab, Ram on Tamil goddess films, and Hoek (‘Cut-Pieces’) on stag film inserts in Bangladeshi cinema.) As with Bollywood-centrism, none of these patterns can be accounted for entirely by output, number of viewers, or circulation. Instead, they are more likely determined by political, economic and religious histories, and their lasting impacts on universities, libraries, and research funds, as well as consumer markets. Outside of India, area concentrations of language courses, endowed faculty positions, library holdings, and research monies are shaped significantly by the political interests of governments. In the US, for example, the primary funding source for certain foreign languages is the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program (FLAS), originally funded under the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and one of the three goals of which is ‘to develop a domestic pool of international experts to meet national needs.’2 Past colonial and missionary interests, which often (though not always) overlapped or complemented one another, account for a great deal of contemporary focus on certain regions and languages by scholars both inside and outside of India. The predominant focus today on Hindi-Urdu cinema and Bollywood has also to do with the ready availability of these films and related popular cultural texts, which were distributed, consumed, and watched en masse in the post-war period, and not just by diasporic South Asians but by others too. Finally, the marginalization of non-elite cinema can be accounted for by the class biases of scholars and critics, transnational aesthetic and production standards, and scholars’ relatively limited access to such cinema both in theatres and in reproduction. ‘Bollywood’ in this context came to mean something more than just a simple variation of the appellation of ‘Hollywood’ – a simultaneous, and at times an alternative media and cultural phenomenon with brown bodies as its central protagonists who were encoded and doing sociocultural work through cinematic audiovisual signifiers (Dudrah). At this point, we must ask, what can and does ‘Bollywood’ mean? 77 78 79 ‘Bollywood’ 80 In recent years, productive discussions about the meanings of ‘Bollywood’ have developed, sparked in part by Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s incisive essay ‘The “Bollywoodization” of Indian Cinema.’ Vijay Mishra describes Bollywood as ‘at once a fad, a taste, an Indian exotica, and a global phenomenon growing out of the cultural and political economy of a film industry based primarily in Mumbai,’ and he argues that ‘the specific inflection given to Bollywood now reflects new kinds of global migration and links to homeland’ (Mishra 3). Mishra, building on both Rajadhyaksha and Prasad, asks, ‘Is Bollywood truly global? Does it mean more than a film industry? Is it a style that transcends its cultural origins, making cultural specificity inconsequential?’ (3). Rajadhyaksha, Prasad and Mishra are self conscious and sometimes ironic in their recognition of Bollywood as one among many South Asian cinemas, and in their queries about its global nature. We contend that it is fruitful to consider the many local audiences of Bollywood in their specific consumption and interpretive practices as well. To explore this point, and the problematic dichotomization of Bollywood and ‘other’ cinemas more broadly, consider the following quote from M.K. Raghavendra’s recent essay on Kannada cinema: 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 While Hindi cinema may be said to be pan-Indian, articulating ‘national’ concerns and addressing the ‘Indian’ identity, popular films made in the regional languages appear to articulate vastly different concerns and address local identities within India. That the different regional cinemas narrativize visibly different experiences from those narrativized by the RSAP 501539—19/7/2010—RANANDAN—371676—Style 1 South Asian Popular Culture 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 209 Hindi film suggests that the regional cinemas have access to levels of local experience not available to mainstream Bollywood cinema. (15) Here Raghavendra represents Hindi cinema as pan-Indian, though the ambiguity of the phrase ‘may be said to be’ is elaborated later in his work when he specifies a much more precise audience for Bollywood films especially. Despite that qualification, however, he contrasts regional language films as dealing with the ‘local.’ One of our goals in this issue is to raise just this question of how the content, aims and popular usages of other cinemas are indeed distinct from those of Hindi and Bollywood cinema. On the other hand, we wish to raise precisely the same question for Bollywood that is here addressed to other cinemas: what/who would be the ‘local’ for Bollywood? Surely there are multiple local identities addressed directly by Hindi films, both inside and outside India. As a whole, that industry may more intentionally represent characters as ‘Indian’ (rather than as Assamese or Malayali, for example) than other Indian cinemas do, but in recent years many of its films’ characters have been conspicuously marked by region, caste and residence, identities that moreover frequently intersect with class. Our general point, then, is that the national/regional dichotomy is simplistic – some of the issues Hindi cinema deals with could actually be considered regional (or other fractional) concerns, while regional cinemas also deal with pan-Indian/national concerns – and also counterfactual, in that while Hindi films have the widest reach in India (and outside of it), they can hardly be represented as having a truly national reach since they are rarely screened outside of northern and western India except in the largest metropolitan areas. We contend that most if not all South Asian cinemas need to be considered and analyzed both as film and as entertainment and cultural industry (Dudrah 30 –36; Dudrah and Desai 1 –17). Bollywood itself has also been depicted as a media assemblage – which draws attention to not only text based representational analyses, but more so, to the Deluezian idea of cinema and its audiences as body, technology and socio-cultural temporality, all interacting simultaneously in the context of globalization (Dudrah and Rai; Rai). These observations clearly apply to some other South Asian cinemas as well, but the extent to which they apply more broadly needs to be investigated. We suggest that it is useful to consider these questions and issues from the viewpoint of a de-centred Bollywood in the South Asian network of cinemas. As we work to produce and apprehend a useful definition of Bollywood cinema, it is important also to attempt this in Bollywood’s relationship to other South Asian cinemas and cultural industries and in theirs to one another and to Bollywood, as well as in attempting to describe and analyze the specific workings of Bollywood cinema itself. The essays here, in varying and related ways, advance us in that direction. 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 Overview of articles Stephen Hughes highlights the porosity of the boundaries that delimit South Asian film industries. Focusing on the period when talkies first overlapped with silent films, he demonstrates the unstable and constructed nature of film categories we now view as natural. What Hughes establishes so compellingly for early Tamil cinema must also have been true for other emerging cinemas, including Hindi cinema and, perhaps in recent years, Bollywood. Katy Hardy demonstrates that in fact such contestation remains today, as she examines rhetoric about ‘true’ Bhojpuri cinema. Both Hughes and Hardy scrutinize debates over the linguistic, ethnic, and regional ‘authenticity’ of these films, and the claims that non-native others are exploiting a local economy by producing inauthentic and poor quality films. Clearly it is not simply language that defines an industry. RSAP 501539—19/7/2010—RANANDAN—371676—Style 1 210 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 Editorial On the other hand it is interesting to note that language, region and ethnic identity are less distinctive of how both Bollywood and Hindi cinema are defined, a point that is probably tied to the location of their industrial centre in a Marathi speaking region, and the large and highly multi-ethnic area across which Hindi (or film Hindi) is understood. Perhaps here we have a legitimate difference between Hindi cinema and most other cinemas of South Asia. On the other hand, the absence of ‘real’ experience or ‘authentic’ culture in Bollywood films (these terms being defined by whatever criteria are applied by the viewers in question) is precisely what researchers have argued alienates, for example, certain Panjabi or Bhojpuri viewers (Rao; Hardy in this issue). We should also note that the features used to define an industry can change over time. While early critics of Tamil films eventually demanded that they be made in the Madras Presidency with native Tamil speaking directors and actors and include only Tamil in dialog and lyrics – and moreover, in some cases, that the music adhere to a non-Brahman ‘Dravidian’ style – today the industry seems to be defined primarily by the language of the dialogue, and actors (actresses in particular) may hail from many parts of India. Priya Joshi takes up divisions within Bollywood itself by examining a de facto film type that she names ‘Bollylite.’ She differentiates among audiences as well as films, exploring one fault line within what is often taken to be a unitary cinema type, thereby helping to clarify the frequently nebulous category of Bollywood. She also critiques the idea that Bollywood is a national cinema. Indeed, she explores the success of a certain version of Bollywood in the US. She locates Bollylite’s success – and its distinction – in its celebration of the material (including technology and branded luxury) in both content and form. Erin O’Donnell and Pavitra Sundar focus respectively on Bengali and Pakistani films about Partition, making fascinatingly parallel observations about the use of sound (or its absence) in the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Sabiha Sumar. Both authors highlight viewer identities and film voices that are sometimes drawn explicitly in contrast with Bombay audiences/Bollywood representations, but both reveal that other contrasts are also at stake for both filmmakers and audiences. In exploring the Punjabi-language film Khamosh Pani, which uses many of the narrative and aesthetic elements of popular Indian cinema, Sundar foregrounds views of Partition that have not received representation in Hindi cinema. O’Donnell considers Ghatak’s alternating use of aural and visual elements in scrutinizing history and stimulating memory. Both essays invoke the use of trains as symbols – an image familiar from fictional writing on Partition, but here serving as symbols of loss and sadness, and of violence, but a violence of a different kind than often appears in literature. Their focus on distanciation through sound/track points to new directions for popular cinema analysis as well. In one of the first ethnographic analyses of audience decision-making, Lakshmi Srinivas focuses on the field of choices available to filmgoers in Bangalore, and the numerous unexplored criteria by which films are chosen. For middle class viewers, Srinivas reveals, this field refers not just to the films (which are distinguished by language and by class niche) but to the section of the city where they appear, the theatre in which they play and the seats available in that theatre at any particular showing. On the larger level, this analysis creates an intriguing social geography of the city. At the individual level, Srinivas explores how theatre and seat selection, ticket buying and viewing practices are utilized to create control over, and to domesticate, public space that can both reproduce and threaten class distinction. Using the lens of contemporary dance in Nepal, Sangita Shresthova explores the incorporation of Bollywood into a different national context, where it represents an ambivalently desirable modernity but also the political hegemony of India. Bollywood has RSAP 501539—19/7/2010—RANANDAN—371676—Style 1 South Asian Popular Culture 211 radically altered the dominant form of dance in Nepal, but the films – and the performance of dance shaped by those films – is interpreted and consumed through Nepali views on gender, sexuality and the stigmas of dance. In the ‘Working Notes’ section, Abby Robinson combines photography, on-site research, and personal reflection to provide a rare view of filmmaking in Sri Lanka. She captures a production scenario in conditions quite different from those of the major Indian industries: even scarcer financing, small audiences, decimated theatres, competition from both Tamil and Hindi cinema, and significant crossover of actors, directors, and cinematographers between Sri Lanka and India. She documents everyday differences in filming, including sets, crew relations, and production facilities. At the same time she reveals both subtle and visible influences of Bollywood, and speculates about the future of the Sri Lankan industry in this milieu. 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 Conclusions and further suggestions 212 We hope that this issue of SAPC provokes additional thought as a precursor for further and future research. The case studies that have been offered in this issue are select analyses of the many possibilities that exist as South Asian cinemas. Nonetheless they do help us to posit some further fruitful questions: what are the relationships among the different South Asian film industries? How do they overlap in personnel, production facilities, methods, ideas? In what ways are these shared; and in what ways do they differ in content, aesthetics, production processes, and ideologies? As scholars, teachers, activists and students of this area we should also examine how much Hindi cinema has been influenced by other cinemas at different times – and more to the point, how all South Asian cinemas may interact with each other. Bengali cinema was a competitor in the past; Bhojpuri films provide competition now. Filmmakers who began in Tamil cinema have been making films in Hindi as well. Similarly, there is a long history of back-and-forth between Tamil and Telugu. Asking how the various industries influence one another returns us to the idea that the cinemas of the subcontinent work as a network rather than in a centre-periphery mode. What do we learn by thus broadening our scope, and by scrutinizing the history of that scope? We are reminded that Hindi cinema itself can be seen as a regional form, although its language is not that of the region in which it is actually produced. We should be prepared to critique the idea that the other so-called Indian ‘regional’ cinemas speak to local experience while Hindi cinema is a national cinema (although many of our articles show that regional cinemas do raise different issues than Bollywood films – thus underlining the value of expanding our scholarly scope – even as they share aesthetics, narrative style, and some personnel). What does it mean to think of and work in ‘South Asian cinemas,’ in between them, and beyond? 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 Sara Dickey and Rajinder Dudrah Q1 240 241 242 243 244 245 Q2 Acknowledgements We would like to thank our colleague Moti Gokulsing, who offered us unwavering co-editorial support in shaping the themes of the issue, soliciting essays, marshalling peer reviews, and reading and editing articles. His intellectual and collegial guidance have indelibly marked this issue. RSAP 501539—19/7/2010—RANANDAN—371676—Style 1 212 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 Editorial Notes 1. The distance covered can be measured by introductory lines in our two monographs. In 1993, Sara Dickey contrasted her research aims with those of ‘most previous critiques of Tamil and other Indian film, which tend to dismiss popular cinema as mindless, immoral, and divorced from reality’ (Dickey 5). In 2006, Rajinder Dudrah wrote: ‘in researching and writing about Bollywood cinema in 2005 . . . it appears to have arrived on the international stage, that it is almost recognized as a prolific and important world cinema’ (Dudrah 16). 2. See the US Department of Education International Education Programs Service (IEPS) Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program’s brochure, “Access to the World and Its Languages.” Web. 11 June 2010. , www2.ed.gov/programs/iegpsflasf/brochure-flas.doc. Q3 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 References Dickey, Sara. Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print. Dudrah, Rajinder, and Amit Rai. “The Haptic Codes of Bollywood Cinema in New York City.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 3.3 (2005): 143– 58. Print. Dudrah, Rajinder. Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies. 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