Bollywood (Anthropology)

After India's victory in the 1999 Kargil War, a blatant anti-Pakistan rhetoric started to infiltrate Bollywood dramas. The two films set directly against the backdrop of the Kargil War, J. P. Dutta's LOC: Kargil and Farhan Akhtar's Lakshya, both of which are analyzed here, were released in a climate of profound nationalistic fervor. Notwithstanding its strict adherence to realism, LOC: Kargil makes a serious compromise with reality at the very outset by eliding the cause of the Pakistani infiltration of Indian-controlled territories, which took the Indian Army by surprise. Unlike LOC: Kargil, which purports to be a commemorative homage to the war martyrs, Lakshya is a bildungsroman chronicling the transformation of the male protagonist from a meandering youth into an exemplary national subject through his heroic participation in the Kargil War.

A book that looks at the relationship between melodrama, gender, sexuality and nationalism per se, and with reference to Hindi cinema between 1970-2000.
Table of Contents:
1. Political History, Political Economy
2. Bombay Cinema and Questions of Form
3. Towards a Theory of the Sexual Economy
4. Femininity and the Regulation of Pleasure and Desire
5. The Changing Faces of Masculinity
6. Gender, Sexuality, Nation
7. Communities and Their Others
8. Wounded Identities

Women in India, for a long time, have existed in fear under a patriarchal and misogynistic authority. A woman's identity is appropriated based on her conventional gender roles of being a daughter, wife, mother or sister. Their inferior status in society is also reflected in the on-screen roles that displayed and further established women's submission to the prevailing socio-cultural positions. Their only purpose, both in life and as shown on screen, is to provide significance to patriarchy at the expense of their own self-actualization. Investigating the restrained traditional roles for female actors in Indian commercial cinema, it is discerned that early 20th century Bollywood films uphold the patriarchal social order, which despised and feared the sexuality of women, while subjugating their longings. This chapter studies the lives and stardom of Indian actresses of the early 20th century and how they influenced and were replicated on screen through Mehboob Khan's Aurat (1940) and its remake Mother India (1957). It specifically addresses the evolution of female protagonists in both films, their obedience, submissiveness, struggles with self-reliance and stance to defend another woman's honor. The films reveal every aspect of an idealized woman of the Indian society with the changing of times.

The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine 'attraction' in the popular cinema of the Indian subcontinent, has been extensively and rigorously theorised in the scholarship on this cinema. The preponderance of song-and-dance sequences across the many film cultures of South Asia has been deeply generative in challenging theories of narrative construction and cohesion, and resultant ideological analyses; postulations about cinematic genre and authorship; canons of realist and experimental cinema; and indeed any attempt to propose a singular ontology of film.

This paper is invested in exploring the sensory affect that is created through censorship. It is invested in unravelling the complex interaction between the films of Anurag Kashyap and the institution of censorship, the sensibilities of which are capitalized and appropriated into the aesthetic effect of the film. It also looks at how such a deployment constructs the cult of a transgressive auteur. I argue that the deafening ‘beep’ that screams of the otherwise silencing practices of censorship is what guides the way to unraveling the subversion of censorship in the filmic text. Taking cue from Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) which looks at cinema as the ultimate pervert art, telling us how to desire, this paper asserts that censorship doesn’t erase the profane, instead it points to its very utterance. I argue how Kashyap’s films’ profilmic text becomes the site of censorship standing out as material evidence to its very censoring. The ‘beeped’ or censored word becomes a provocation focusing attention onto itself by mobilizing its unspeakability through marketing the product as “controversial”. I posit that Anurag Kashyap capitalizes on this recognition. I look at the force of publicity that is created by censorship in Kashyap’s public discourse on censorship, in his negotiations with the CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification) from before the planned commercial release of his first directorial venture Paanch to his ongoing battle with the CBFC over refusing to use the court mandated no smoking warning in ‘Ugly’ (2014).

In present day India, there is an obvious preference for light skin as evidenced by matrimonial advertisements, media and cosmetics. Many scholars have attempted to attribute this phenomenon to a variety of sociological influences -- the theorized Aryan migration, the Islamic Conquest, or the British colonial rule of the subcontinent.  This paper does not seek to determine the precise cause of it, but rather, it shows a dramatic shift in the perception of skin color in Indian society through the examination of historical scriptures and art.

Women in India, for a long time, have existed in fear under a patriarchal and misogynistic authority. A woman's identity is appropriated based on her conventional gender roles of being a daughter, wife, mother or sister. Their inferior status in society is also reflected in the on-screen roles that displayed and further established women's submission to the prevailing socio-cultural positions. Their only purpose, both in life and as shown on screen, is to provide significance to patriarchy at the expense of their own self-actualization. Investigating the restrained traditional roles for female actors in Indian commercial cinema, it is discerned that early 20th century Bollywood films uphold the patriarchal social order, which despised and feared the sexuality of women, while subjugating their longings. This chapter studies the lives and stardom of Indian actresses of the early 20th century and how they influenced and were replicated on screen through Mehboob Khan's Aurat (1940) and its remake Mother India (1957). It specifically addresses the evolution of female protagonists in both films, their obedience, submissiveness, struggles with self-reliance and stance to defend another woman's honor. The films reveal every aspect of an idealized woman of the Indian society with the changing of times.

They were the women public performers who were repositories of Indian Performing Arts only to be marginalized as prostitutes in the making of Classical Dance and Music. Their identity and the world today an exotic commodity as the subject in the Bollywood, and for Dance theatres in a Capitalist Market. They were collectively called the Nautch girls. They were the Tawa'ifs of North India, the Maharis of Odisha and the Devadasis of the South. This article is based on a survey on Tawa'ifs in more than 10 towns of North India over a span of 8 years.-Navina Jafa

A discourse in Bombay cinema, that veers from the dominant reflection of Hindutva views in which Muslims are constructed as alien and dangerous Others, depicts a pluralist Indian society characterized by intersectionality between religions. Such portrayals resonate in particular ways with South Asian groups, like the Satpanth tradition of Khoja Ismailis, which have historically emerged from Vedic-Islamic interaction and occupy a liminal in-between space. Those Khojas who have migrated to East Africa and Canada over several generations have lost touch with elements of their South Asian cultural heritage due to pressures of cultural westernization and religious Arabization / Persianization. However, they have maintained their centuries-old ginan literature that articulates Shia concepts in Indic languages, culture and symbolism. They find an intertextuality between these hymns and Hindi film’s themes and music that draw from tropes of Indic scripture. Compared to the kinds of identifications favoured by Islamist and Hindutva forces, the religiously hybrid characteristics of the Khoja Ismaili community coincide with a more pluralist and less essentialist set of portrayals in Hindi cinema. They have responded well to the ways in which their co-religionists in Bollywood have creatively used Indic and Islamic religio-cultural resources in the face of religious nationalism. The examination of this group’s engagement with Bollywood affords insight into one of the several countervailing discourses that continue to flourish in complex national and global settings despite the heavy constraints imposed by nationalist power politics.

Peepli Live is a 2010 Indian satirical comedy film written and directed by Anusha Rizvi and produced by Aamir Khan Productions. The film stars Naya Theatre company member Omkar Das Manikpuri as well as Naseeruddin Shah, Raghubir Yadav, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Shalini Vatsa and Malaika Shenoy along with a number of newfaces. Peepli Live which is distributed by UTV Motion Pictures, was released on 13 August 2010.

ABSTRACT Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is a recently released Indian historical biopic of Rani Lakshmi Bai. Through historical re-imagining, the film renders several potential social and political issues, which are topical and timely in contemporary India. The present article attempts to examine the topicality of the film. First, it discusses how it rekindles the female heroic tradition of India, which has been overshadowed due to the patriarchal mindset and historiography. Secondly, it explores how, through cinematic liberties, issues like gauraksha, Hindutva, and patriotism have been propagated. Thirdly, it argues how by foregrounding Dalits and Muslims, the film attempts to neutralise extremist Hindu prejudices, dominant in the hyper-nationalist climate of India. The article concludes that by recreating a crucial historical epoch and a legend, the film attempts to reinstate a secular heritage of India’s heroic tradition to rekindle nationalistic and patriotic sensibility among the contemporary masses.

Beleaf magazine made in Rome. January-March 2019
My article is on page 64.
My report is about cinema and cannabis. All the films that were shot on this theme from the 1930s to the present day.  The Bollywood film industry has also talked about it.

This study aims to examine and analyze role of motion pictures as an agent of socialization. It focuses the contribution of Indian movies to the increase of violent crimes and criminals in Pakistani society across the four decades (i.e. 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s) through favorable rather glamorized depiction of violence and perpetrators of violence. It is arbitrarily assumed that violence is often projected on silver screen as a quick and easy solution to social injustice and class discrimination in the blockbusters of Bollywood and Lollywood. Five top grossing Indian films selected through popularity charts and youth polls are thus content analyzed from the four decades under study for the census and portrayal of both perpetrators and subjects of violence, following sampling techniques of Shipley and Cavendar, 2001. Subsequently, four samples of one month issues of the largest circulated Daily Jang __ from each decade (1976-2006) __ were carefully content analyzed to identify the population, age, gender, class and depiction of criminals and victims as a representative day-to-day record of social crime scene.

A detailed analysis of the 'Kashmir films' produced in Bollywood in the 1960s, including 'Junglee', 'Jaanwar', and 'Kashmir ki Kali', that set the stage for the consumption of the Valley of Kashmir as postcolonial India's playground. I also pick up the hidden clues within the films that tell us more about the troubled politics of the time, during which the relationship of Kashmir to postcolonial India was being defined through federal arrangements.
A useful read for those trying to gauge an earlier phase of Indian responses to Article 370.
The arguments made here are recapitulated into more complex discussions of visual pleasure, resistance, and the Kashmir conflict in my book, 'Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir'.

Discussions of mainstream Hindi cinema as a form of public address have largely ignored how political content may be incorporated into the popular idiom behind and before the film text. The primary objective of screenwriting studies has been to isolate the writing process of a film as a significant media practice, which accommodates rich ethnographic perspectives on script development across film industries. Using my interviews with two prominent Bollywood creators, Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali, this chapter aims to initiate a discussion on the political economy of scripting mainstream cinema. A close study of their collaborative script development work will provide rich insights into a wide range of creative, cultural and industrial strategies that allowed them to broach controversial subjects for mass audiences during the UPA-II regime in India.

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.

This article offers introductory remarks on the position of the Dalit in Indian cinema. It starts with the observation that the Indian film industry is an inherently caste-based, biased, mechanised product of technological industrialisation in which Dalit inclusion is not a moral concern. The mainstream film industry in India delivers the desires and principles of market and society by excluding a Dalit framework outright—a problem now being addressed by the entry of an explicitly Dalit cinema. By briefly looking at two films, Fandry (2013) and Sairat (2016), both written and directed by Dalit film- maker Nagraj Manjule, I offer a critical reading of ‘Dalit Cinema’. Taking the work of Manjule, a maverick film-maker who is establishing a new discourse of Dalit-centred socio-culturism, I demonstrate the extent to which caste narratives are absent in the Indian film industry.

This article utilize the films of “Yash Raj Films” a prominent production house of Bollywood to analyse the use of “rain” song and dance sequences to depict, sensuality, sexuality and eroticism. There has been a certain taboo on overt sexual contents in Indian films due to strict censorship code; there is also an implicit taboo amongst Bollywood filmmakers against nudity or overt physical intimacy due to cultural conventions. Therefore, since 1940s, “rain” song and dance sequences in Hindi/Bollywood cinema has been an important motif to depict sensuality, sexuality and eroticism. Rain song and dance situations provide Bollywood filmmakers with the liberty to exploit the female and male sexuality (it is the female sexuality that Bollywood is more concerned and focused on) without any censor interference. In particular, “rain” song and dance situations have been successfully exploited in terms of showcasing rain soaked, eroticized and sexualized imagery of the Bollywood heroines. Mostly, the rain song and dance sequences are designed in such a way that is full of suggestive and erotic dance movements. Prominent Bollywood filmmakers and film producers such as Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Subhash Ghai and Prakash Mehra have utilized rain songs in most of their films. Yash Chopra agrees that in his films he tries to bring out the sensuality of the heroines through rain song and dance, but he asserts that he in no way tries to exploit their sexuality (Dwyer, 2002). In this article, I will analyse how “rain” song and dance sequences are utilised to display the elements of sensuality, sexuality and eroticism while maintaining an Indian flavour and observing conservative strictures against nudity.

Rasa, meaning gist, is the essence that one feels when experience an art piece, be it performance or static art.  Rasa, in Indian context, applied to both the performer and the audience is considered an alaukika (other worldly) experience.  An integral part of aesthetics both Indian and Greek (although European performing arts moved away from the original concept of Greek aesthetics) is improvisation on the rules that are suggested for a clear structure, which by definition is fluid and allows room for ‘newness. Using Bharat Gupt’s study of the poetics and Natyashastra, this paper will focus on similarities in both Indian and Greek aesthetics, also highlighting when and why contemporary notion of aesthetics in European theatre moved away from the Greek, which was more similar to the Indian sensibility.  There will also be a focus on the concept of hieropraxis (art as worship, pleasing both people and Gods), which was common, both to Indian and Greek art forms.  Finally, the paper will illustrate through examples of Bollywood and interviews with BharatNatyam teachers (in Sweden) how improvisation, and newness is brought into various aspects of performance arts, thereby challenging Sheldon Pollock’s reading of the Natyashastra, as being rigid and frozen in time and devoid of bringing novelty, making them irrelevant to our times.

This article focuses on three dimensions of the political economy of the Hindi film industry. First, it outlines the Indian state's attitudes toward cinema and its historically ambivalent relationship with the Hindi film industry, which is important for understanding the broader context of film production. Then, it describes the production, distribution, and exhibition structures of the Hindi film industry, highlighting the changes that have been occurring since the mid- 2000's. Finally, it discusses the growing presence of Hollywood in India and its relationship to the Hindi film industry. Some broad lessons can be learned from this discussion: there is not a straightforward correspondence between state policy and the success or commercial viability of a film industry; the commercial nature of a film industry does not render its structure or organization transparent; and nation-bounded analyses of film industries may not account for the complexity of contemporary filmmaking.

This special issue of 'Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies' offers an original and provocative contribution to debates around adaptation and appropriation in film, television and new media.

The issue is organised in four sections, each dealing with a different form of cultural borrowing. Part I examines 'Hollywood Cinema and Artistic Imitation' and provides three complimentary historical accounts of the development of adaptation within US cinema. Part II looks to the future and examines the contemporary practice of 'Found Footage and Remix Culture'. Shifting focus onto more imitative forms of appropriation, Part III focuses on 'Modes of Parody and Pastiche.' Finally, in Part IV, the focus shifts away from the predominant focus on US media to consider the contribution that 'Transnational Screen Cultures' can make to our understandings of the adaptive act.

Contributors are: I. Q. Hunter, Jason Scott, Stijn Joye, Eli Horwatt, Emma Cocker, Sérgio Dias Branco, Brigid Cherry, Darren Elliott, Jordan Lavender-Smith, Austin Fisher, Neelam Sidhar Wright, and Pamela Atzori.

ABSTRACT Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is a recently released Indian historical biopic of Rani Lakshmi Bai. Through historical re-imagining, the film renders several potential social and political issues, which are topical and timely in contemporary India. The present article attempts to examine the topicality of the film. First, it discusses how it rekindles the female heroic tradition of India, which has been overshadowed due to the patriarchal mindset and historiography. Secondly, it explores how, through cinematic liberties, issues like gauraksha, Hindutva, and patriotism have been propagated. Thirdly, it argues how by foregrounding Dalits and Muslims, the film attempts to neutralise extremist Hindu prejudices, dominant in the hyper-nationalist climate of India. The article concludes that by recreating a crucial historical epoch and a legend, the film attempts to reinstate a secular heritage of India’s heroic tradition to rekindle nationalistic and patriotic sensibility among the contemporary masses.

Queer analyses of Bollywood have, for the most part, attended to homosocial scenes and LGBT representation; this essay takes a different approach by tracing the mimicry of screen divas Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi by gay South Asian boys and men. Madhuri and Sridevi are important dance pedagogues in Hindi cinema and have established intimate and embodied relationships with their audiences. Many gay men interviewed for this project in both India and the South Asian diaspora cite these two women as dance inspiration, and the men explain how when they were young they mimicked these actresses. For some of these men, the effeminate gestures they drew from the Bollywood screen were met with praise, but for others they resulted in discipline. The essay imagines the efficacy of returning to these nostalgic film
gestures in adulthood, especially in the eroticized space of the nightclub. Combining film and dance analysis, interview and ethnography, this study maps the gestural language transferred between screen and body and the affective and embodied
politics of dancing like a diva.

This paper looks at the genre of soft pornography in the Malayalam-speaking south Indian state of Kerala and the precarious stardom of its female stars through a close look at the career of Shakeela, an actress who became the emblematic soft-porn star of the 1990s. It interrogates how Shakeela’s outsider status and her heavyset body type fore- grounded her as the locus of Malayali society’s conflicted relationship with sex and desire while also creating a set of parallel film practices that challenged the hierarchies of the main- stream film industry. By 2001 more than 70 percent of the total films produced in Malayalam were soft porn, and a good number of them featured Shakeela. The mainstay of soft-porn productions was the strategic positioning of the female lead as a cultural outsider— a transient figure who is both a threat and a source of exoticized desire. Shakeela’s emergence as a “liberated” woman who flaunts her sexuality despite social norms was so strong that it destabilized Kerala’s hero-centric mainstream industry for a time, leading to what was popularly called Shakeela tharangam, the “wave of Shakeela.” KEYWORDS film labor, India, precarity, Shakeela, soft pornography

Balan, despite her prodigious acting talent, is in a position where she has had to be constantly answerable for her body, in a way her male colleagues have never been. Scrutiny from the industry has yielded both praise and scorn. She has been derided for her lack of fashion sense off-screen and praised for the physical com- mitment she brings to her roles on-screen.9 In this essay I argue that Balan’s star image is coded by the shifting aesthetic regimes governing the bodies of women at the turn of the twenty-first century. From representing the counterpoint to the size 0 craze of the early aughts to becoming the poster girl of the anti-body-shaming discourse, Balan embodies the tensions between the beauty ideals of the film industry—and the exacting standards it prescribes for its female celebrities—and the real bodies of women.

An exploratory content analysis was conducted to examine portrayals of sexual violence in popular Hindi films. Nine films were randomly selected from box office hits (1997–99). The findings suggest that moderate sexual violence is depicted as fun, enjoyable, and a normal expression of romantic love. Victims were more likely to be women rather than men, and sexual violence committed by heroes was a common portrayal, particularly moderate violence such as harassment of women with whom the heroes ultimately became romantically involved. Severe sexual violence was portrayed as criminal and serious, whereas moderate sexual violence was treated as fun and romantic. Results are discussed in terms of script theory and social learning perspectives.

How do dancing bodies influence the music composed for them? Does the gestural repertoire of the on-screen performer impact the musical performance of the playback singer? How might a focus on dance provide new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence? Through a focus on the dancing body, this article calls for a reconsideration of the process of ‘song picturization,’ a term commonly used in the Bombay film industry to reference the practice of recording the song first and then “adding” visuals to it. Using the example of the dancer-actress, Vyjayanthimala, it argues that in the case of certain dancer-actors, a reverse process of ‘dance musicalization’ may be at work, where the performer’s dance vocabulary and bodily comportment precede and influence the song. A choreomusicological analysis accords equal importance to the ‘sounding body’ of the dancer-actor as to the bodies that produce the film’s music, leading to the conceptualization of film music as produced through a multi-bodied ‘choreomusicking body.’

Locating my study around a recent set of issues in India’s mediascape, this article tracks the emergence of ‘sonic publics’ that are conditioned by the figure of the listener, her imaged aurality, and the aural tactics that are developed in response to censorship and a culture of redaction. In exploring the affective and embodied relationships forged through ‘sonic publics’, I trace the emergence of ‘pornosonic’ media that are held in a supplementary relationship with the pornographic, and their efficacy as a transactional medium where the work of sound is affective (working at the level of the body), social (working to create arrangements of public order around sonic artifacts) and cultural (filtered through cultural norms). Using the Hindi film Lipstick Under My Burkha (Dir. Alankita Srivastava, 2017), a phone-sex scandal in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, and the use of voiceover dubbing in the soft-porn industry as case studies, I argue that while these objects arguably exist as different ‘genres’ and operate at varying levels of ‘offensiveness’, they offer us ways of locating how sound becomes a site and object of contestation in the public sphere. This article is the winner of the 2018 Claudia Gorbman Writing prize awarded jointly by the SCMS Sound Studies SIG and the Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about Partition, at the ostensible Raj's end. The controversy over Gurinder Chadha's 2017 film Viceroy's House is taken as an opportunity to consider the new South Asian film and television studies and the emergent scholars that are challenging conventional media studies models. The co-constitution of here and there is given as an analytic lens through which to comprehend representation and stereotyping in films "about" politics in South Asia, and the view taken is that a debilitating divide and rule, via mechanisms of representation, remains strongly in place, despite the fighting efforts of the new South Asian media scholarship. This essay addresses a flurry of recent commercial film and television on British colonial rule and the partition of India. Films like Viceroys's House (2017) and television serials like Taboo (2017) seem to return in only slightly reconstructed ways to the Raj nostalgia of the mid-1980s, as then exemplified in Merchant Ivory romances and television serial dramatisations: Heat and Dust (1983) and Jewel in the Crown (1984). Yet at a wider level, the essay will also be necessarily less about new partition films as such and much more framed by the critique of division and divisiveness in media and politics and the need to renew contextual reception. However speculative my argument about differing films, genres and formats, the larger task of making an analysis across multiple divides raises questions that must hold the co-constitution of here and there, now and then, together. Forced into continuing historical reas-sessments of capital, exploitation, and war-as an unavoidable ever-present backstory-what imposes itself is an originary violence, so that even those films on partition that are not violent have avoidance of violence as their mission. While it would not do to think of South Asia only in terms of violence, or even violence brought from Europe to crush the romantic idyll of pre-colonial times, or the non-violent resistance to that civilisational attack, or even the promises of a successful and shining future beyond violence, all are just too handy not to be understood and examined as enabling fictions. Nevertheless, a second set of questions revolves around the issue of who makes films and with what intent-the colonial project perhaps continues even as a new South Asian film and television scholarship is largely overlooked in the old metropolitan centres. It is, this paper agues at the end, a new scholarship that could suggest new and better renderings of film as history and understand the history of "over there"

In this article, I extend the analysis of Kashmir films in the 1960s made in my earlier essay, 'Nipped in the Bud' (also uploaded), to reveal how shifting politics of global Islamophobia and rising Hindutva in India impact and reshape an established discourse of othering Kashmiris through the apparatus of Bollywood. Certain films that were being produced even as my book, 'Territory of Desire' was in production, are thus subjected here to analysis in order to understand shifts, changes, and continuities with older trends within a popular South Asian politics of pleasure.