INDUSTRIAL NETWORKS

AND CINEMAS OF INDIA

This volume points to the limits of models such as regional, national, and
transnational and develops ‘network’ as a conceptual category to study cinemas
of India. Through grounded and interdisciplinary research, it shows how film
industries located in disparate territories have not functioned as isolated units and
draws attention to the industrial traffic – of filmic material, actors, performers,
authors, technicians, genres, styles, sounds, expertise, languages, and capital, across
trans-regional contexts – since the inception of cinema. It excavates histories of film
production, distribution, and exhibition and their connections beyond regional and
national boundaries and between places, industrial practices, and multiple media.
The chapters in this volume address a range of themes such as transgressive
female figures; networks of authors and technicians; trans-regional production links
and changing technologies, and new media geographies. By tracking manifold
changes in the contexts of transforming media and inter-connections between
diverse industrial nodal points, this book expands the critical vocabulary in media
and production studies and foregrounds new methods for examining cinema.
A generative account of industrial networks, this volume will be useful for scholars
and researchers of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, production studies,
media sociology, gender studies, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.

Monika Mehta is Associate Professor of English at State University of New York,

Binghamton, USA. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema
(2011/2012) and has also co-edited Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows
of Korea and India (2019).

Madhuja Mukherjee is involved with art-practice, curatorial projects, and

filmmaking. She is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
Her research papers have been published in academic journals; she is the author
of New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, The Picture of Success (Pune: 2009), editor
of Aural Films, Oral Cultures: Essays on Cinema from the Early Sound Era (Kolkata:
2012), Voices of the Talking Stars: The Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond (Kolkata/
Delhi: 2017), and Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Cultures (London/
New York: 2020).
INDUSTRIAL NETWORKS
AND CINEMAS OF INDIA
Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies
and Multiplying Media

Edited by
Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Monika Mehta and Madhuja
Mukherjee; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee to be identified as
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To our parents
CONTENTS

List of figures x
List of contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv

Introduction: detouring networks 1

Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

PART I
The female star, traveling figures and transgressions 19

1 Fatma Begum, South Asia’s first female director:

resurrections from media and legal archives 21
Rashmi Sawhney

2 The ‘problem of respectable ladies joining films’: industrial

traffic, female stardom and the first talkies in Bombay
and Tehran 35
Claire Cooley

3 Sabita’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay: gender and

modernity in the circuits of cinemas in India 48
Sarah Rahman Niazi

4 Travels of the female star in the Indian cinemas of the

1940s and 50s: the career of Bhanumathi 61
Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda
viii Contents

5 Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema: mapping

Tamil-Hindi film industry traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s
dancing body 77
Usha Iyer

PART II
Networks of circulation, production, and imaginings 93

6 Film exhibition in Hyderabad in the 1930s: the case

of Moti Mahal cinema and film circulation 95
C. Yamini Krishna

7 Arriving at Bombay: Bimal Roy, transits, transitions,

and cinema of intersection 108
Madhuja Mukherjee

8 Circumambient geographies of cinema: the Shaw Brothers’

Malay film production studios in mid-century
Singapore 124
Peter J. Bloom

9 Filmfare, the Bombay industry, and internationalism

(1952–1962) 137
Anustup Basu

10 Traversing The Evil Within (1970): transnational

aspirations, stardom, and infrastructure in a cold-war Asia 151
Pujita Guha

PART III
Media geographies, agencies, and technologies 165

11 Habits and worlds: Malayalam cinema’s travels with the gulf 167
Ratheesh Radhakrishnan

12 Celluloid visions in a video frame: Bhojpuri cinema

between insurrections and catharsis 181
Akshaya Kumar

13 Mixing industrial elements, generating sexual agency in Aiyyaa 194

Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta
 Contents ix

14 Blurring the boundaries between Hollywood and

Bollywood: the production of dubbed films in Mumbai 208
Tejaswini Ganti

15 Making-of videos: of placeless studios and pioneering

music directors 222
Pavitra Sundar

16 Locating Mollywood: video industries, inter-regional

media networks and the “located mobility” of Malegaon films 238
Ramna Walia

Index 253
16
LOCATING MOLLYWOOD
Video industries, inter-regional media
networks and the “located mobility”
of Malegaon films

Ramna Walia

The rhythmic rasping of textile loom machines intercuts the sound of the even-
ing azaan. Against the setting sun, a dusty room is lit up by a yellow lamp as the
diegetic sound of the machines grow louder. The camera cuts to a crowd of men
standing against the gated entrance of a cinema hall. Back in the textile mill, the
gyrating machines stop and the grating noise dissolves. The lights are turned off.
A bell bellows, and we see the crowd of men outside the cinema hall horde through
the gates, jumping up the barriers, pushing each other, and running to get the
seat in a dimly lit screening room. The day’s labor has come to an end, and now
it is time for an evening of leisure – unwinding with a film in a small theatre – to
experience a life starkly different from the exhausting work at the textile mills. The
projector lights up the screen in slow motion, and we see glimpses of the 1990s hit
film, Khalnayak (Subhash Ghai 1993). The flaming red neon on screen saturates the
screen. Local artist Shakeel Bharti’s voiceover interjects the surreal visual image as
he informs the viewer about the town of Malegaon and its love for film. Next, we
see a montage of popular film stars’ faces plastered across the everyday rhythms of
the town – from the signboards at the local juice shops, on kites on sale at the road-
side vendors, hair cut menus at the barber shops, calendars with magazine cutouts,
to film posters sold across pavements. These opening scenes of Faiza Ahmad Khan’s
Supermen of Malegaon (2012), a prominent documentary film, set up the origin
story of the Malegaon film industry through an elaborate juxtaposition of the tedi-
ous labor, cine-desires, and the visual sprawl of everyday life in small-town India.
In Khan’s film, nestled between this space of work and leisure, is Malegaon film.
The Malegaon film industry entered the popular press discourse with Khan’s
documentary. However, there are at least four other documentary films that have
narrated the story of Malegaon’s industry- a short film by Canadian Broadcast-
ing Corporation (2003), Nitin Sukhija’s PSBT film Malegaon ke Sholay (2005),
Ruchika Negi’s Malegaon Times (2010), Sudhir Kasabe’s Malegaon Talks (2012). In
 Locating Mollywood 239

the early 2000s, two other documentaries, produced by The Canadian Broadcast-
ing Corporation (CBC) and Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), were some
early to set the tone of popular discourse. In Nitin Sukhija’s film, Malegaon Ke
Sholay (trans. Malegaon’s Sholay:2005), Sukhija tells the story of Malegaon’s video
films that began with a local spoof of Bombay cinema’s magnum opus, Sholay.
(trans. Embers; Sippy 1975).1 Such is the status of the film that, according to director
Shekhar Kapoor, “Indian film industry can be divided into Sholay BC and Sholay
AD.” (Kapoor qtd. in Chopra 2000, 195) Shaikh Nasir’s Malegaon ke Sholay, is a low
budget, handicam shot, VHS to VHS edited spoof of the original, made on a mod-
est budget of $1,000 with hired local contractual textile workers, some of whom
also worked as artists (comedians, poets, stage actors) in their part-time. The film
ran for two months in Nasir’s video parlor2 and made a profit of $5000.3 The docu-
mentary also shows the make-shift economy of production and exhibition of Male-
gaon’s various spoofs of old and new films from Bombay cinema – from the 1980
hit, Shaan (Sippy 1980) to the more recent blockbuster, Lagaan (Gowariker 2001),
India’s official Oscar entry. Like Khan’s documentary, Sukhija’s documentary is an
important material document that became the source text for both documentary
film network as well as the popular media discourse on Malegaon films – particu-
larly in lending it the framing discourse on subaltern cinephilia.
A year after Sukhija’s documentary circulated in film festival circuits, India’s
national daily, The Times of India, ran a half-page-long feature piece, titled, “Once
Upon a Time in Malegaon,” (2006) which told the story of volatile social and
political life of a town where “young impoverished men (who) used to find hope
in a quaint film spoof industry” (Joseph:15). The article points to the second fram-
ing device that emerges in the Malegaon story, one of hope and escape in the face
of communal tension. It is critical to note that when documentary filmmaker, Faiza
Ahmad Khan, reaches Malegaon in 2008, to make a documentary film on Male-
gaon video film culture, it has been hit by another series of bomb blasts. Khan’s
film, Supermen of Malegaon, (2012) documents the making of Malegaon’s new aspi-
ration – a spoof of Hollywood’s classic superhero film, Superman (1978) called Ye
Hai Malegaon Ka Superman (Trans. This is Malegaon’s Superman 2008). The film uses
the escalating tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities along the two
sides of the river as a backdrop to set up Shaikh Nasir as the protagonist and his film
as a subaltern cinephile’s new escapist spoof.
While documenting the making of the Nasir’s spoof, Khan’s film navigates the
site of the video parlor, local shops, and family homes in Malegaon that come to
form “Mollywood,” an informal film industry based in Malegaon. The worker-
artists reiterate throughout the narrative of the documentary the desire for brand
Malegaon as Khan mobilizes a fascination for Bombay cinema in Malegaon’s eve-
ryday life. Khan’s film became a success in the film festival circuits. Bombay film
industry’s filmmakers and producers took note. In 2010, Indian comedy TV chan-
nel Sab TV created a silent comedy series called Malegaon ka Chintu (2010, trans.
Malegaon’s Chintu) and Chintu Ban Gaya Gentleman (2011, trans. Chintu has become
a Gentleman), directed by Sheikh Nasir and produced by Deepti Bhatnagar. On
240 Ramna Walia

the other hand, Ye Hai Malegaon Ka Superman got an official release with Bombay
filmmaker-producer and poster-boy of independent cinema Anurag Kashyap and
film producer Sunil Bohra repackaging the film for an official release. In a com-
memorative effort to support grassroots cinema of India, the Directorate of film
festivals of India 2009 with a special feature on Malegaon films under the category
of “Spoof Cinema” with Sheikh’s films, Gabarbhai MBBS and Ye hai Malegaon Ka
Superman. A local NGO organized a spectral double of Bollywood’s most prestig-
ious award show, Filmfare awards, in order to honor the local artists working in the
industry. While the mainstream press and Bombay cinema basked in the narrative
of Malegaon’s cinephilia, Khan’s documentary went on to get a multiplex release in
India’s largest multiplex chain corporation, PVR theatres.
The success of Supermen of Malegaon rechanneled Nasir’s first film Malegaon ke
Sholay back into circulation. At the time of its release in the early 2000s, the film
had a limited local market; it would be erroneous to assume the limits of its reach.
Besides neighboring towns in Nasik – like Dhule and Jalgaon, in 2011 Nasir’s film
was screened at the Festival of Emerging Cinemas in Mumbai. The official report
(2011) on the festival, organized by the International Association of Women in
Radio and Television, argued that the screening of the film, among other similar
selections of short fiction, music videos, and documentaries from regions like Leh,
Niyamgiri, Ranchi and Imphal was an “experiment.” The festival posited itself
as “a platform for dialogues between the different Indias that coexist, but usually
do not interact with each other.” (Ibid) This journey from a single video parlor
and locally produced VCD sales to national film festivals was primarily facilitated
through documentary film circuit with little engagement with the location of
Malegaon. Chastened “Mollywood,” the industry was purely constructed in rela-
tion to Bombay cinema. The explosive account that emerged in popular discourse
thus presented Malegaon as Bombay cinema’s cinephilia-driven spoof double.
In Bombay cinema’s rise as the globally circulating brand as Bollywood, the
socio-economic disparities within various other media industries, differentials of

FIGURE 16.1 A shooting still (L) and River Mausam that divides Hindu merchants on
the left and Muslim weavers on the right (R)
Source: Personal photographs
 Locating Mollywood 241

infrastructure, and muddied networks of production, distribution and consump-

tion became organized by spaces of international film festivals, annual corporate-
funded conferences, elaborate national and international award ceremonies and the
expansion of the multiplex. The traditional methods of operation associated with
Bombay cinema – oral transactions, risky economics, on-the-fly style of shoot-
ing and a parochial structure of the industry – soon gave way to new principles
of organization around the official christening of the Indian film industry as an
industry.4 The industry status reduced customs and excise duty, thereby reduc-
ing the cost of the raw material. In October 2000, The Industrial Development
Bank Act of 2000 further drove in foreign investment and corporate funds. Foreign
media giants like Fox studios, Disney, Viacom, Endemol, etc. could collaborate
with Indian entertainment companies like Dharma Productions, Network 18, Red
Chillies Entertainment, etc. as Indian corporate titans like Reliance could invest in
media conglomerates outside its territories that eventually facilitated an easy flow
of organized capital. By 2008, for instance, Reliance Big Entertainment, a unit of
industrialist Anil Ambani’s ADA Group, signed a $1.2-billion deal with Dream-
Works SKG, besides seven similar deals with other Hollywood production houses.5
A part of maintaining this new financial clout and industrial backing meant a rig-
orous consolidation of its markets, both within the country as well as outside it.
In a similar vein, Indian corporates like Reliance Big Entertainment and Reliance
Industries acquired a number of domestic and international production and dis-
tribution companies. In October 2018, for instance, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance
Industries Limited (RIL) acquired controlling stakes in Hathway Cable and Data-
com to dominate India’s digital cable TV and Broadband services (Lagathe 2018).
In December 2018, RIL acquired the music company Saavn, which boasts of a
library of 45 million songs across the entertainment industries.6 With such acqui-
sitions and mergers, as Bombay cinema furiously restructured its entrepreneurial
assembly that was more organized and globally viable, a new industrial narrative of
professionalism emerged of out Bombay – written scripts, legal contracts, standard-
ized salaries, and so on. At close quarters, the Marathi-language film industry was
consolidating its market with expanded budgets and entry of corporate players.
The informality, leaky financial deals, and undocumented transactions didn’t fit this
new avatar of Indian media industries’ narrative of financial rectitude and industrial
order. This positioning of Bombay as the power center of Indian media industries
underplays the continuing role of informality in their day-to-day functioning and
the continued dominance of family run studios and companies like Dharma Pro-
ductions, T-series, Rajshree Productions, Yash Raj Films, and so on. Moreover,
the cascades of micro-histories and niche markets, including B- and C-grade cin-
ema produced in the peripheries of Bombay’s glittering A-film circuit, got further
diminished in Bombay cinema’s global ascent as the international face of Indian
cinema. In appropriating Malegaon film as a cinephilic fan practice, Bombay cin-
ema reveals a fear of miscegenation and a derivative status for an industry that devi-
ates from institutional conditions of a standardized media industry. If Malegaon lies
at the peripheries of the global-national categories, where does Mollywood fit?
242 Ramna Walia

Media scholarship on video circuits (Liang 2009; Tiwary 2015; Neves and
Bhaskar 2017) has presented Malegaon outside this global-national framework
as the romanticized narrative of piracy, local practice, and the cinema of the
subaltern. Lawrence Liang in his article, “Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure:
Rethinking Access to Culture,” (2009) begins with a prologue on the Malegaon
film and shows that desire and subjectivity shape the relationship between local
film piracy and infrastructure. Liang argues that the question of access in the Asian
context needs to go beyond developmentalism and rather see the poor as produc-
ing subjects. (Liang: 26). Like Jacques Ranciere’s (1989) subaltern subjects of the
nineteenth-century factory workers in France who toil during the day in the fac-
tory and at night write poetry, philosophy and other intellectual pleasures reserved
for the upper-class intellectuals, Liang argues that the aspirations of Malegaon film
are an act of disobedience of their socio-economic position. In their discussion
on the circulation and regulation of Mewati videos through MicroSD cards in a
region southwest of Delhi, Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh look at “tech-
nological networks” that emerge out of marginalized regions. They argue that the
“subaltern-popular” media networks, like the informally produced Mewati vid-
eos, assert “identity and political claims of a marginalized community. (Mukherjee
and Singh 2018, 134). In a similar vein, Ishita Tiwary’s work on the intersection
of Malegaon film with formal industries of TV and film in Bombay again draws
on Ranciere’s construction of worker-intellectual as a political subject. Tiwary
uses this framework to show how Malegaon retains its locality while it gets co-
opted into formal media industries. Both Liang and Tiwary make critical contri-
butions to redressing subjectivities that lie outside formal media industries. And
while this scholarship has facilitated debates around informality, amateur video
film cultures that lay outside the media capital framework inadvertently put Male-
gaon in another center/periphery relation. Moreover, they draw on the existing
documentary films as their primary source material to understand the Malegaon
phenomenon, and these films, as I demonstrated earlier, constructed Malegaon’s
practice as cinephilic and aspirational. Other works on video cultures have focused
on the global emergence of “alternative” practices and have focused on the “digi-
tal turn”7 or “technomodernity” (Neves and Sarkar 2017, 6) as the starting point.
This seems to offset the material conditions, socio-economic frameworks, and
specificity of cultural-linguistic considerations that their located-ness engenders
and nurtures.
For documentary filmmakers, thus, the Malegaon story virilized a periph-
eral practitioners’ tale of marginality, much like the documentary film circuit in
India. For the Mumbai film fraternity and TV industry, Malegaon was the epit-
ome of their mounting influence, emblematized in the heady mix of fandom and
cinephilia of Malegaon films. Its informality, one can argue, mimics the phantom
past of pre-globalization, pre-liberalization Bombay cinema’s tryst with oral con-
tracts, hand-written scripts, make-shift production practices, unregulated markets,
unlicensed exhibition spaces and low aesthetics.8 In labeling Malegaon as a spoof
industry, industries in Mumbai could reiterate their new “formalized” avatar in
 Locating Mollywood 243

a post-corporatization phase of film Industries in India. For media scholars like

Liang and Tiwary, Malegaon represented Jacques Ranciere’s subaltern subjects, a
Marxist construction of industrial imprisonment of the urban poor and their intel-
lectual labor. While the documentary films have lent visibility to alternative media
practices that lie outside the formal legal channels, it would be rather myopic to
link this visibility to legibility. What emerged in this fascination was Malegaon’s
incongruous place in Indian media ecology. The discourse on Malegaon within
industry (documentary, TV industry, Bombay cinema), press and scholarship seems
to either fetishize its granular aesthetic, coopt its narrative to consolidate the status
of mainstream industries or read it as a symptom of participatory and download
culture at the digital turn. So, on the one hand, it is a symptom of global condi-
tion, amorphously linked to the rise of video revolutions in Africa, Latin America
and Asia, while on the other hand it is too small, plebian and local to be studied in
its totality. The crisis of scale and reticulate structure of media industries in India
thus warrantees an inquiry into omnifarious media networks that defy the scaler
framework. Is Malegaon a local or regional film industry? Moreover, is Malegaon
an industry or a video film network that lies outside the global-national-regional
identity?
Malegaon’s incongruous position calls for an exigency for new spatial frame-
work that can facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship
between media practices and region. In this chapter, I argue that the digital tracks
of these video circuits sustain and nurture networks of trade and performance
that narrate an enduring tale of networks of sociality and interlinked grids. While
video and digital proliferation has revealed discernable alternative economies of
production, distribution, and exhibition, industries like Malegaon have histori-
cally relied on old trade routes, river systems, performance cultures, the household
economy of operations, and a network of small entrepreneurs. During my four-
year long inquiry, the Malegaon’s story that I encountered is far more complicated
and reveals lapses in our writing of media history through deductive models of
binaries – industry/practice, formal/informal, corporate/bazaar and so on. Male-
gaon is more than a kitschy doppelganger of Bombay cinema, and it is far more
complex than a subaltern subject of history. The problem with these narratives is
that, while questioning and displacing past models (like national cinemas, third
cinema, post-colonial film, and so on), we try to provide a new center. Instead,
Malegaon industry points to a complex industrial cluster with different spatial
patterns – from inter-city relationship within Maharashtra, between Nasik district
and Mumbai and Pune and neighboring states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, as
well as multiple transnational connections with Pakistan and Dubai. These are par-
allel constellations that are at once transregional, translocal and transnational, media
cultures that are at once film, performance and trade. Malegaon film industry thus
reveals itself as a mongrel media culture that is intertwined in multiple networks
that warrant a study of its local conditions and place in India’s media ecology that
disrupts the perceived categories of media industries and the notion of boundary-
keeping within the category of “region.”9
244 Ramna Walia

Crisis of scale: from the location of Malegaon

to its located mobility
Media scholars working on India have for long struggled with fuzzy categories,
informal source material, and incommensurable theoretical and methodological
frameworks in the complex terrain of film cultures in India. Given these chal-
lenges of the field and a global profile for Bombay film industry as national cin-
ema, decolonizing the field of inquiry regarding region is urgent. The categories of
national, regional, and local have been one of the dominant frameworks in the study
of India’s many media industries. However, an understanding of Malegaon at the
far end of a fixed global-national-regional-local paradigm, as the popular, industrial
and scholarly discourses have done so far, does not capture the constant border-
crossings of the scaler imagination that Malegaon embodies. Cinema in India has
its origins in multiple centers across the country. Often these centers were com-
partmentalized along state lines. For instance, Marathi language films cater to the
Marathi-speaking audience in the state of Maharashtra, Bengali cinema from the
state of West Bengal, Malayalam in Kerala, and so on. Early film scholars like Yves
Thorval and S. Chatterjee writing on cinemas of India often followed this state-wise
categorization and saw linguistic and geographical boundaries running parallel to
this organization of film industries. In the writing of industrial histories, much of
the scholarship focused on popular Bombay cinema, the Indian New Wave, indie
film, and the diaspora. While the framework of nation-state (Chakravarty 1993;
Prasad 1998 et al.), was probed and expanded to accommodate linguistically and
geographically diverse media industries in India (Vasudevan 2010; Gooptu 2010;
Srinivas 2003; Hughes 2007; et al), the term “industry” continues to be studied
along the frontiers of capital intensive, broadly urban media centers like Kolkata,
Hyderabad, and Chennai. The mechanics of media capitals and a geo-national lens
thus lingers within the pre-conceived ontologies of “region” in regional cinemas.
Recent scholarship on regional cinemas has questioned the homogeneity
between regional borders and linguistic and ethnic identities (Ratheesh 2016;
Hughes 2007). While on the one hand regional cinema in urban centers like Pune
and Hyderabad has been lauded for its dynamism and as aspirational sister-industrial
center to Bombay, regional industries in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have
often been stomped by narratives of stagnation and marginalized as a vulgar ren-
dition of B-grade aesthetics of Bombay cinema. In his discussion on Bhojpuri
cinema, Akshaya Kumar (2014) for instance argues that in Bhojpuri cinema one
witnesses direct and indirect “mixing of imaginaries, refracting the sense of one’s
location, through several discursive regimes of subject positioning . . . [at once]
regional, national as well as international belonging.” (Kumar: 185) This position-
ing of Bhojpuri cinema at once at multiple locales emerges as a vernacular voice to
regions far beyond its geographical center. Kathryn Hardy (2015) places Bhojpuri
cinema thus in “cartographies of mobility and belonging,” with the region that is
constantly on the move. (Hardy: 147) One can understand cinema outside of tradi-
tional national and regional boundaries to that of social imaginaries, ties of kinship
 Locating Mollywood 245

and cultural forms such as the bazaar, which includes a more hybrid and complex
socio-linguistic structure.
Madhuja Mukherjee (2016) in her study of Manbhum videos in marginal-
ized sections of Purulia and Bankura districts in West Bengal and its circulation
across Indian and Bangladeshi borders argues for a new understanding of “regional
cinema” in India. Mukherjee argues that such video circuits speak to the larger
political conflicts and a long history of marginalization. Mukherjee’s unraveling of
cross-regional circulation from the states of Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha points
to similar networks that primarily congeal around regional and linguistic identities.
Hasan’s (2011) work shows how art filmmakers in Manipur, North-East India, used
cheap digital technology while local music videos populate the commercial mar-
kets in Manipur. In a similar vein, Neikolie Kuotsu (2010) has studied the role of
digital technologies in shaping media culture in the north east of India by looking
at the popularity of South Korean films and their travels to the region. This body
of work is critical within Indian media studies as it points to different clusters of
media constellations, each informed by its location, mobile in its reach, cross-bred
and hybrid in identity.
Then how does one study a slippery media object that is constantly mobile,
multiple, and dispersed across borders of a geographical location? Michel Foucault
(1967) in his influential lecture on heterotopias deals with a similar conundrum.
In the lecture, Foucault argues the importance of the site and its emergence as the
key problem in a time of spatial disruptions. He argues that these disruptions have
infinitely opened up location to a set of relations that intersect at multiple sites.
Foucault surmises that we need to de-sanctify our understanding of space as invio-
lable oppositions (public/private, formal/informal, etc.) He proposes, instead, the
concept of heterotopia, where “a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point
in its movement. . . . The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place
several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1967,
2–6). Foucault’s conceptualization of heterotopias is a useful framework to under-
stand incommensurability of territoriality within cultural geography and offers a
way to study fragmentation and spatial disruptions, media clusters, and migrating
media that are fraught with complexities (O’Regan 2011; Creswell 2014; Falicov
2012). Malegaon’s grand narratives as seen in the documentaries and popular dis-
course oversimplify such complexities and instead focus on the incompatibility of
its place in relation to the power center – Mumbai.
In Malegaon, we are faced with a very complex landscape. It’s a place with a
labyrinthine street map, low-rise horizontal buildings, dense economy of com-
mercial activity, and small manufacturing units with rail connectivity linked to the
highway that connects it to neighboring regions. Divided by a river, Mausam, the
town is split between the middle-class Hindu Marathi merchant class on the one
side and the poor Muslim migrant population on the other side of the river. The
underlying communal tension seethes below everyday trade links between the two
sides. Multiple riots during the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as two bomb blasts in
Malegaon in 2006 and 2008, have made Malegaon a battlefield of India’s fractured
246 Ramna Walia

nationalistic image (Ali 2001). Malegaon has witnessed multiple surges of immi-
grants from Hyderabad (Telangana), Surat (Gujarat), Varanasi, Meerut, Awadh
(Uttar Pradesh) and Mumbai (Maharashtra) over decades.10 Working-class migrant
settlers with a vast number of settlers’ linguistic and cultural roots in the North
Indian state of Uttar Pradesh allows penetration of a variety of languages to coexist
in Malegaon. Urdu is predominantly the language of literacy for the weavers and
small-business owners and is widely used in popular press including its local daily,
Diwan-e-Aam (trans. Hall of People) and Tarjuman-e-Urdu (trans. Urdu Spokesman).
Among the Marathi-speaking side, the regional newspaper, Lokmat (trans. People’s
Opinion) circulates widely. In Malegaon, a mix of Hindi, Urdu, and Ahirani dia-
lect of Khandeshi language is spoken. Khandeshi language is widely spoken in the
town’s neighboring districts of Jalgaon, Dhule, Nandubar, Shirpur and Pachora in
Maharashtra – as well as the Burhanpur district in Andhra Pradesh – and functions
as a wide-ranging linguistic brand and regional identity. The Bombay-Agra high-
way, Central railway line and Tapti river valley railway system have played a central
role in ferrying the workforce from across regions within Maharashtra and neigh-
boring states. This link between travel and trade is key to studying how a small
town like Malegaon relies on trade and river systems that extend its identity from a
bound locality to the broader socio-economic history of the region of Khandesh.
Within less than a mile of the distance between the two sides of Malegaon, the
patterns of media ecology change drastically. The Marathi film posters and sig-
nage disappear and Bhojpuri film posters, dubbed South Indian films and cinema
halls that screen low-grade films that travel from the by-lanes of Mumbai’s sleazy
underground film circuits in Grant Road and Lamington Road replace it. In the
video parlors, pirated copies of Bollywood and Hollywood films are screened along
with black-and-white Hindi films, dubbed contemporary films from India’s various
industries, as well as commercial Pakistani plays of the 1990s. Documentary film-
maker Ruchika Negi talks about Malagaon’s unique position in the current media-
scape and calls the town the one that simultaneously belongs to “pre-modernity”
and “post-modernity” (Personal Interview: 2016).

FIGURE 16.2 A street wall, Camp area, Malegaon (L), and poster outside single-screen
theatre, Upkar (R)
Source: Personal photographs
 Locating Mollywood 247

Any attempt to narrativize a teleological story of Malegaon reveals the loca-

tion’s inability to be contained and bound. In an effort to capture the dispersion of
Malegaon’s media network, one has to adopt a theoretical framework that provides
specific evidence that can be tracked well beyond Malegaon’s fixed geographi-
cal territory. The mobile networks of material practices that link Malegaon to
neighboring towns of Dhulia, Jalgaon as well as media industries in Mumbai and
Pune pose a challenge of rescaling this location continuously to reveal a complex
and muddied media environment using the critical analytic of “located mobility,”
a simultaneous fixity of geographic located-ness that is used to re-map terrain
through a study of mobilities triggered by it.11 I use the paradigm of mobility to
register an emphasis on the materiality of media through relational spatialities that
avoid “dichotomized categories of here/there, near/far, personal/private, inner/
outer or presence/absence” (Richardson 2007, 202). The term mobility here then
refers to both virtual and physical movement that create a circuit of old and estab-
lished routes with overlapping practices, agents, texts and spaces. If we study Male-
gaon as a site that activates and renders legible a broad spectrum of linguistic and
narrative codes, screening practices and workforce, a hyperlocal place then exceeds
the confines of location that reveals a more a discernable network.
Mobility is an indicative word here that reveals identifiable movement of film
texts, labor, capital and networks activated by regional links, trade routes and infra-
structure, taking us to Mumbai B-circuits and packaging companies in Nasik,
Pune, and Mumbai while also navigating sites such as video parlors, unauthorized
manufacturing units in slums, and duplication factories and underground black
markets. At the same time, we see the circulation of Bhojpuri films and dubbed
Telegu-language films through local cable. The Bombay-Agra highway, Central
railway line, and Tapti river valley railway system have played a central role in ferry-
ing the workforce from across regions within Maharashtra and neighboring states.
In Mumbai, local vendors don’t sell Malegaon films; they sell Khandeshi films –
both are made in Malegaon but sell under two different brand names as they travel.
The Khandesh region has historically covered today’s Jalgaon, Dhule, and Nandur-
bar districts of Maharshtra but also has links with Burhanpur district of Madhya
Pradesh. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in this region the bifurcations
were calculated in terms of lineage units; under British rule they were administra-
tive constituencies and regional districts in post-independence India. The region in
India is a malleable category with shifting spatiality that is both historically rooted
and mobile. Historian Doughlas Haynes (1999) in his study of market formation in
nineteenth-century Khandesh has shown that in Khandesh there was a substantial
horizontal movement of goods, neither purely local nor originating in a single
metropolitan center, managed to flourish. Trading networks crisscrossed western
India, linking Khandesh with . . . other places of production in the larger region”
(Haynes 1999, 297). Moreover, Haynes contends that we see how local bazaars
with trade settlements allowed for an intersection of nomadic performance cul-
tures and local religious fairs (local jatras) and drew people in huge numbers. This
established a long-lasting relationship between trade and performance cultures in
248 Ramna Walia

the Khandesh region that is evident in the scope of its market across districts. These
networks reveal that Malegaon has a more schizoid history of sub-cultural practices
that include many alternative practices that range from local advertisements, music
videos, radio shows and cassette remixes, public-awareness campaigns, and other
public events of poetry, dance, and stand-up comedy. These networks defy the
logic of industrial formation that guide the entertainment industrial complex, and
thus an attempt to establish a one-way aspirational scale between Malegaon and
Mumbai obliterates the multiple mobilities afforded by it.
In their seminal editorial titled Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings, Kevin Han-
nam et al. (2006) remind us that the shift from self-enclosed territories to tangled,
polymorphic and multi-scalar geographies are enabled by mobility systems of trade,
travel, tourism and migration. (Hanman et al, 2) One of the major critiques of defin-
ing cinema (and media in general, by extension) along fixed regional and linguistic
lines is industrial convergence, history of migration, and uneven ways in which
global flows manifest themselves in media practices. For Appadurai, mobility is one
of the critical links that allow the emergence of new “diasporic public spheres.” As
interactions become more protean, cultural exchanges become more decentralized
and less tied to “large scale economies. . . [and instead, shift] towards smaller-scale
accretions of intimacy and interest” (Appadurai 1996, 28). Looking at the mélange
of ecologies traversed by Malegaon film, the mobility paradigm acknowledges the
connections between intimate and micro-geographies of a household economy of
production to shady talkies and MiscoSD card sellers in Mumbai’s Grant Road,
intermediate market centers in Dhule or Jalgaon in the Nasik District, mushaira (poet
congregations) networks in neighboring districts, equipment bought during leisure
holidays in Malaysia and nataks (plays) in Gujarat. Simultaneously, we also witness
industrial networks of studios housed in YouTube channels and relationships with
global media distribution companies like Venus and Ultra that acquire these films for
their “regional content” on social media. The Malegaon story thus doesn’t emerge
out of the digital turn; it expands its breadth and becomes partially more visible.
When we hold the lens of regional framework closer, one begins to notice that
the hegemony of formal circuits of production, distribution, and exhibition get
reconfigured in a regional context while the complex circuits of film cultures like
Malegaon get reduced to a cinephilic local fan culture. National, regional and local
medias thus cannot simply be studied as an administrative unit designed alongside
the location of the industry and linguistic and cultural parallels but the one that is
also constantly in flux. Within such a scalar framework, the infrastructure of cin-
ematic production and dissemination channels often mimic a hierarchal aspirational
order for a mammoth organizational setup and reach. Many proposed film cities are
in various stages of planning – in cities like Patna, Pune, Lucknow and Ahmedabad.
The economies of production and media practices that lie outside such infrastruc-
turally sound projects, state sponsored incentives, or definitive boundaries point to
a sustained investment in alternative media hubs besides Mumbai with the tradi-
tional understanding of industrial construction. Industrial constellations like Male-
gaon that are at once global, sub-regional and sub-local warrant new terms of
understanding production, circulation and exhibition histories of media.
 Locating Mollywood 249

Conclusion
In the last two decades, with new markets, players and studios emerging on the
horizon, industrial stakes have been redefined, and media platforms have multi-
plied. With the growing corporate investment in regional markets and emergence
of new digital platforms like Netflix, Amazo and Hotstar, content of different
languages is reaching a wider audience, no longer purely segregated into separate
channels with logistics of regional access as a determining force. Instead, we see a
dual process of ordering and disordering – content is present on the same layout,
often a click away from Hindi language content and “suggestions” bleeding into
one another, based on viewing patterns of genre choice, stars, production house,
etc. On the other hand, we see that region continues to be a leaky category that
could, for instance, be cross-listed as an art film category. Historically, what is cat-
egorized as regional cinema has always been porous, with constant inter-industrial
traffic of stars, infrastructures, and narratives. However, the digital space of the plat-
forms and a bleeding layout provides a visual map of an intertwined network that
challenges the global-national-regional-local identities of media industries outside
the overwhelming cosmopolitanism of dominant industries.
Malegaon occupies a curious position where it aligns with different play-
ers in the field while exceeding the confines of cartographical excavation of its
film culture. Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova’s seminal work “Learning
to Unlearn: Decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the Americas” (2012) fore-
grounds the fraught dichotomies of West/East, First World/Third World and colo-
nizer/colonized. The question of how and why certain bodies of knowledge begin
to erase their geo-political bodies to become universal seems to stem from our
inability to acknowledge unequal and multiple registers. The manifold and overlap-
ping economy of media cultures in India mandate that we rethink binary and linear
models and groupings. Any attempt to fill in the exclusions of other film cultures
posits another challenge of establishing a national-regional-local flow, replicates the
power bloc model and discounts the simultaneous flows among various film cul-
tures. At the heart of my inquiry then is the aim to discount critical border thinking
that creates equally territorial epistemologies of national/regional/local. The inter-
disciplinary approach of the project and multi-sited mobilities afforded by Male-
gaon film reveals a critical disciplinary disobedience that unveils the conceptual
incommensurability of the terms in which our inquiries are defined and narrated.

Notes
1 The official name of the city of Bombay to Mumbai was adopted in the year 1995.
Throughout this chapter, I use the term Mumbai to refer to the city and Bombay cin-
ema to refer to the cinema produced in Mumbai as an industrial and cultural referent.
2 A video parlor is a small license-run establishment that provides entertainment through
exhibition of video films, usually to an audience of 100 or below.
3 DNA 2011; See, www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report-malegaon-ka-film-industry-
1495032
4 Media scholar and anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti (2012) argues that the neoliberal eco-
nomic changes that led to this overt sanitization of the Bombay film industry looks
250 Ramna Walia

very different in the everyday practices and processes that continue to be antithetical to
industries such as Hollywood and remain unique.
5 See, www.livemint.com/Consumer/pXOahNWOIxuzdw7fpiz3TL/India8217s-Reliance-
Entertainment-in-Hollywood-deal.html
6 See, www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/jiomusic-and-saavn-unite-to-launch-
jiosaavn-app-music-free-for-90-days-1402195–2018–12–04
7 The term “digital turn” is a nod to J. Gee’s (2000) term “social turn” in Literary Studies.
It refers to the growing role of communication technology in a globalizing economy and
a move away from analogue technology.
8 Pre-liberalization Bombay cinema was dominated by a parochial and largely informal
industrial structure that was controlled by a few big, family run studios, the use of black
money, oral transactions and links with underground criminal networks.
9 I use the term “mongrel” to highlight to the hierarchal displacement of Malegaon
among formal channels of media centers, despite a prima-facie celebration of its spoof
industry.
10 According to Concerned Citizen’s Inquiry Report (2001) on Malegaon riots, the vola-
tile socio-cultural fabric of the town is entrenched in its history of numerous phases
of migration. Today the administrative district of Malegaon includes 150 villages and
2 towns. For full report, see, www.pucl.org/reports/Maharashtra/2001/malegoan-con
cerned.htm
11 The term “located mobility” comes from Kat Jungnickel’s essay (2007) on use of comput-
ers and wireless access in domestic space in Australia. In her essay, Jungnickel defines the
term in terms of flexibility afforded by internet technologies to move with people both
inside and outside the space of the home. Extrapolating this term from the technological
roots, I employ this term to argue that technology is one of the many symptoms of physi-
cal routes and channels that have historically afforded objects and bodies movement.

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