Popular Hindi Cinema

"The aim of this paper is to explore Hindu–Muslim relations through the cinematic register of on-screen inter-faith marriages, and critique the under-currents of ‘Otherness’ that undergirds most of these narratives in the post-Hindutva milieu. Since the Hindu female embodies the (Hindu) nation in popular imagination, Muslim males gain access to Hindu females only within narrations of perfidy and ‘inappropriate appropriation’, signifying their perceived ‘Otherness’. The cohabitation of the Muslim female with a Hindu male, on the other hand, is framed within quotidian love narratives and marks her homecoming or gharwaapsi. Even as it offers national integration as its central motif, Jodhaa Akbar (JA) offers a narrative in which Akbar must be sufficiently indigenized and homogenized to merit absorption into the nation. JA both participates in and responds to the construction of this ‘Otherness’,as I shall demonstrate. While charting a new cartography of cinematic terrain where the
faith of a minority group occupies the centre stage, JA nevertheless presents a Hindutva polemic aware of accusations of self-aggrandizement and thus amenable to hegemonic concerns."

Bombay cinema has remained largely aloof from the science-fiction genre. The indigenous Indian space program in the 1970s did not spark the invasion/mutation sub-genre in Hindi cinema the way it had done for Hollywood in the 1950s. Pakistan's scientific endeavors did not prompt national anxieties in India. Yet Hindi cinema has presented viewers with monstrosities begotten by science. This article reconnoiters the Monster/Creature narrative in Hindi cinema and contextualizes the historically specific monstrous visions in two pioneering monster narratives of the 1980s. The horror-inflected Hindi science-fiction genre with its “moral tales of scientific excesses” remains essentially an anti-science discourse.

This paper analyses discussions about Indian film genres taking place in the trade press, and in film critical discourse, taking the periodical filmindia and left-wing film critic KA Abbas as a reference point. In counterpoint to a wider field of fantasy films drawing upon Arabian nights. dastaan and legendary romance stories, such as Laila Majnu and Shireen Farhad, and historicals such as Pukar and Humayun and arguably engaging audiences across ethnic-religious groups, there emerged a Muslim Social genre, projecting contemporary Muslim life. The article looks at the politics of its emergence in relationship to inter-communal dynamics, including the Pakistan demand of 1940, and Hindu cultural criticism and mobilization.

While the monstrous feminine of Hollywood is available transhistorically over much of cinema across the world, the female monster of Hindi horror cinema remains ignored and merits serious academic exploration. Much of the widely accepted modern art-horror theory as applied to the horror genre is predicated upon Julia Kristeva’s notion of the
‘abject’ and the Freudian notion of the ‘return of the repressed’. While Creed (1993, 2002) exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the ‘Monstrous “Other” Feminine’ narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual
desire and gaze as the abject ‘other’. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. Exorcism becomes the means
not only of expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining the female body for unrestrained desire and look.

Sanjay Srivastava’s rational, scientific hero, who emerged in the immediate post-colonial Hindi cinema of the 1950s, was strongly linked to the Indian government’s Soviet-style Five-Year Plans. Rigorous town planning and large-scale socio-urban experiments created the conditions for the cosmopolitan, Westernised filmic hero to acquire a hegemonic position within the discursive practices of the Nehruvian state. However, he was by no means the only embodiment of masculinity on offer. Employing narrative analyses of two key Hindi films of the period, I posit that there were competing visions of masculinity, not aligned with, but rather opposed to, the hegemonic discourse of metropolitan culture and cosmopolitan outlook of Nehruvianism.

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Cinetopia : Leftist Street Theatre and the Musical Production of the City in 1950s Bombay Cinema. / Dass, Manishita.
In: positions: asia critique, Vol. 25, No. 1, 01.02.2017, p. 101-124.

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    Manishita Dass

    Department of Media Arts

Abstract
The city of Bombay emerged as an emblematic space of India's postcolonial modernity in Hindi cinema during the 1950s, India's first decade of independence. This article focuses on the mise-en-scène of musical sequences—from popular Hindi films such as C.I.D. (dir. Raj Khosla, 1956), Awara (The Vagabond, dir. Raj Kapoor, 1951), Shree 420 (The Gentleman Cheat, dir. Raj Kapoor, 1955), Aar paar (This Way or That, dir. Guru Dutt, 1954), and Pocket maar (Pickpocket, dir. H. S. Rawail, 1956), as well as less commercially successful films such as Phir subah hogi (Dawn Will Come Again, dir. Ramesh Saigal, 1958)—that featured Bombay in a prominent role and delivered it to the Indian public as an iconic space oscillating between exuberance and disenchantment. The author analyzes how these musical sequences use performance, music, and set design to reimagine the metropolis as a site of social critique and utopian fantasy. The urban landscape created through these musical performances and the often highly stylized studio sets is not meant to be read as an authentic representation of real-life locales. Instead, the set as artifice insistently draws attention to its constructed nature and, in fact, relies, for its legibility and evocative power, on this “unreality effect.” The author's aim is to show how this unreal city emerges, in part, out of popular cinema's encounter with the Indian left cultural movement and leftist street theater of the 1940s, and how it functions as a “cinetopia,” a heterogeneous space of utopian longings and dystopian disenchantment.

First book to study the horror genre of Hindi cinema in all its forms and expressions Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies bridges the gap that currently exists in the field of genre studies in Hindi cinema. Analyzing more than 80 horror films from Mahal (1949) to Ragini MMS 2 (2014), the book uncovers narrative strategies, frames unique approaches of investigation, and reviews the revolutions taking place within this genre. The book argues that Hindi horror cinema, which lies at the intersection of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, reveals three major strands of narrative constructs, each corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in post-colonial India. Moving beyond establishing the theoretical framework of horror cinema, the book intends to demonstrate how this genre, along with its subsets, provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.