From the book's introduction by Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta: This chapter foregrounds the complex cultural geography of cinema in India by looking at the overlapping economy of cultural production in the Malegaon film industry and...
moreFrom the book's introduction by Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta: This chapter foregrounds the complex cultural geography of cinema in India by looking at the overlapping economy of cultural production in the Malegaon film industry and Bombay. Two key discourses shape and dominate the construction of the Malegaon industry. The first imagines Malegaon as pre- liberalized Bollywood where there are oral promises rather than contracts, hand-written scripts, unregulated markets, and unlicensed exhibitions. This discourse shores up Bombay cinema’s current corporate veneer. Alongside this vision of Malegaon as spoof and doppelganger of Bombay cinema, there is a romanticized view of Malegaon as an alternate industrial economy, thriving on piracy, informal networks, and cheap digital technologies. In this discourse, the Malegaon’s granular aesthetic is fetishized and read as a sign of participatory or download cultures. The first discourse constructs Malegaon as backward, and the second one assigns it to a peripheral realm. Puncturing these discourses, Walia uses Malegaon as a lens to jostle and rethink key tenets of media studies. The difficulty in locating Malegaon’s industry (is it local or regional? is it a film industry or video industry that lies outside of global-national-regional identities?) brings to the surface a “crisis of scale” that structures media industries and scholarship. She shows that Malegaon
film industry relies on older trade routes, river systems, performance cultures, and household economy of operations; a network of small entrepreneurs, video circuits sustains and nurtures both trade and performance. Malegaon viewers routinely watch pirated Hollywood and Bollywood films, dubbed versions of Tamil and Telugu films, Marathi films, Bhojpuri films, and low-grade Lamington Road and Grant Road films. While Malegaon is located in Maharashtra, it comprises of working-class Muslim immigrants who migrated from Northern Uttar Pradesh. Thus, Urdu is its language of literacy; local interactions occur in Khandeshi; Marathi is the language of the state; it has trading links and communal ties with Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. The multilingual film cultures in Malegaon, its video circuits, which are indebted to new technologies and older river routes and communal ties, pressure our critical vocabulary with respect to geography, media, and technologies. This study of Malegaon compels us to revisit fundamental questions: Where and how are films made? What ties and links do they rely upon? What are the itineraries of these films? What kind of audiences do they encounter, either imagined or unimagined?
