Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. This book is a significant addition to the study of post-Global Indian culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by beginners and scholars alike.
Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. This book is a significant addition to the study of post-Global Indian culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by beginners and scholars alike.
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Overview
Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. This book is a significant addition to the study of post-Global Indian culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by beginners and scholars alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857287823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2011 |
| Series: | Anthem South Asian Studies Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 210 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published articles on the politics of religion in nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal and is currently working on an anthology of South Asian literature; a manuscript on nineteenth century Indian nationalism’s revisiting of the Indian past; and a co-edited volume on Partition.
Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande is Professor of Linguistics, Religion, and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has written several books, including a collection of her original Hindi poems and more than sixty research articles and chapters.
Read an Excerpt
Bollywood and Globalization
Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora
By Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. PandharipandeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-782-3
CHAPTER 1
BOLLYWOOD, NATION, GLOBALIZATION: AN INCOMPLETE INTRODUCTION
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta
Bollywood, or Bombay Cinema, or Indian Entertainment Cinema went global in 1995, with Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (The True of Heart Will Win the Bride). DDLJ, as the film came to be called (in the 1990s' style of abbreviating long Bollywood titles), outperformed Maine Pyaar Kiyaa (I Have Loved, 1989) in the box office which in its day had outperformed the long-time record-holder Sholay (Flames, 1975). In DDLJ, the Non Resident Indian (the NRI), hitherto portrayed in Hindi films as the marginal outsider with affected speech and behavior was redeemed and validated as not just a possible Indian national subject, but possibly one of the best. This film had a storyline highly unusual for its time. Baldev Singh, a Punjabi storeowner in England returned to India to marry off her daughter Simran to a native Indian Punjabi. The daughter had already had a brief romantic encounter with a Punjabi British man named Raj, and was determined to marry him. But Raj, who then followed Simran and her family to India, would marry Simran only if she was 'given away' in the 'traditional Indian way,' by her father Baldev Singh. Baldev's impression of Raj from a brief encounter was that of an irresponsible individual with no sense of 'tradition,' someone who was just not 'Indian enough'. But as the narrative unfolded, Raj proved his 'worth' and Indian-ness to Baldev, 'won' the bride, and the film ended with the newly-weds returning to England, as Indians as they ever were. The film broke several established Bollywood models; the men rather than the women were projected as guardians of 'tradition' and 'honor' (albeit Simran – the woman – was still locus of the struggle as well as the prize to be won), and it was the male hero who had to atone and toil to make up for his brief youthful misgivings. Covering two continents, the drama as it unfolded was visually and verbally 'Indian'; it was openly vocal about Indian values and customs, in spite of the fact that the major protagonists lived their lives in England. Moreover, the NRI was not required to return to India and stay there – and this was the twist that made it for DDLJ – the NRI could remain NR and be the 'I,' that is, Indian. Kuljit – the Indian Punjabi groom chosen by Baldev for his daughter – was portrayed as an opportunist crook, as he and his entire family perceived of his arranged marriage with Simran as a way to climb the social ladder. At one point, Kuljit verbally reveled in his aspirations of living a hedonistic life in England – his cherished destination of personal freedom without responsibility.
The significance of DDLJ in setting the new trend for the depiction of a new form of 'identity' in the global and the national context cannot be overstated. This film is specifically relevant to this anthology because if there is a narrative that several of the essays in this book claim, it is that of the 'Return of the Nation.' Nation, despite not having gone away anywhere, has come back with a vengeance in globalized India. What has diminished radically is the 'postponement' of assertion and gratification. The Nation in post-global India is an overwhelming 'now.' Not necessarily here, but now. Since the reconfiguration of the Third World as a geopolitical entity in the new world system, India as an archetype of non-Western nation-state in this system has renegotiated its commodity-value. As the Western news and media have nurtured and projected India's turn of the millennium image as an emerging super-power, a force to be reckoned with, a 'democratic,' tamable alternative to red China, the official and unofficial ideological apparatuses in India have reflected and embellished the image, to be perpetuated at home and out in the world. One of the significances of Bollywood lies in its self-positioning as an unofficial ideological apparatus.
In addition to drawing out Bollywood into the 'global', DDLJ also created a neo-nationalist imaginary. Using the time-honored comic trope of the wedding of young lovers as the denouement, DDLJ built itself upon the spectacle of the 'ritual' itself, following on the footsteps of another blockbuster that preceded it by a year. Sooraj Barjatiya in Hum Aapke Hai Kaun (Who I Am To You, 1994) – abbreviated as HAHK – had tried and tested successfully the formula of 'celebration', by making the family (in this film, a transparent signifier for the nation) an all-rounded unit, subsuming complexities of all kinds under the aegis of a benevolent patriarchy. The 'celebration' itself is highlighted as both the foundation and centerpiece of the narrative, and as Virdi describes, 'the protracted wedding celebration maximizes the pleasure in ritualized articulations of filial and sexual tensions through folk songs, dance routines ...' The obsessive underscoring of 'family' in an isolated, almost fetishized form in HAHK echoed and mirrored a parallel ideological phenomenon: the jingoist militant nationalism that the 'war and terrorism' films perpetuated. The patriotic Non-resident Indian, the content family, and India's 'just war' against terrorists and enemy-states formed a three-pronged cultural agenda for a post-cold war, neo-liberal, resurgent nationalism.
From India to India Inc.
Whether we choose to read Indian Cinema as 'social history' or not, the 'social history' of Indian Cinema has been intricately bound with that of the nation. The current, new Bollywood is the face of post-global India, and any attempt at comprehending the enormity of its social, cultural, political, and economic significance calls for a revisiting of India's postcolonial decades prior to globalization. During the cold war, India had embraced and led the Nonaligned Movement, a political alliance of African and Asian nation-states that had refused to subscribe to or be enlisted by either the USA or the USSR. Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of India was radically different from Gandhi's in terms of its relationship with development and industrialization, but nevertheless followed an overall pacifist and reconciliatory attitude towards global politics. But while the Indian government cultivated a progressive, image of itself in the international arena, and was frequently labeled as a 'socialist' state, it was continually crippled by an enormous burden of intranational problems, which it handled alternately with dismal inefficiency and with ruthless operatives. To the critics, the postcolonial Indian nation-state was a caricature of its promises. As seen from the magic realistic view of Salim Sinai (the narrator and chief protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children) on the fabled midnight of freedom from two hundred years of colonial rule, India woke not to the much-advertised dream of freedom, but to the nightmare of a chaotic and repressive nation-state. The postcolonial Indians, the 'midnight's children,' were doomed to suffering and failure.
The reality of the first four decades of the Indian nation-state is too complex to summarize. While rapid industrialization and federally controlled plans based on the Soviet model were envisioned and implemented under Nehru, most leftist movements advocating extensive land reforms and democratization of resources were either explicitly suppressed or carefully co-opted by the behemoth central government. The British imperial bureaucracy (originally put in place by the East India Company) was retained almost fully, to check the growth of indigenous capitalist ventures and liberal reform movements and curb political dissent. While the British imperial bureaucracy benefitted the British Raj, India's postcolonial bureaucracy became both the means and the end, and mockingly came to be called as the 'Permit Raj' or the 'License Raj,' a reference to the Kafkaesque system of regulations that apparently curbed the growth of wealth and capital. In spite of the progressive, secular, and left-leaning rhetoric perpetuated by Nehru and his party in the political programs, his quasi-socialist mixed economy did little to alleviate the historical injustices to the disenfranchised poor and/or the lower castes. Projecting an enlightened left-leaning image to the world, Nehru and after him, Indira Gandhi, did all to prevent leftist interventions in and critiques of economic processes. The contradiction between India's international and national politics in the first four decades of its nationhood is simply staggering. Between 1969 and 1971, Indira Gandhi used military and paramilitary might to suppress and dissipate brutally the Naxalite movement, named after Naxalbari in Northeastern India (that was the first site of the group's conflict with the local landowners). At the same time, Indira Gandhi procured the support of the USSR, sent the Indian Army into East Pakistan, and played a 'heroic' role in liberating East Pakistanis from their oppressive Pakistani government to form the new nation-state of Bangladesh. The rhetoric of development' espoused by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the interim governments invited long-term damages to environment and socio-polity that far outshone the elusive short-term gains. The 'Green Revolution' in the Northwestern state of Punjab and the Narmada Valley Dams Project in central India are two oft-discussed examples.
It was in the 1990s that India's protective economic politic of the cold war era gave way to liberalization, embracing a new market economy envisioned by Rajiv Gandhi and implemented under Narasimha Rao's government. The economic change was coeval with the parallel rise of Hindu nationalism in its most virulent form, India's revival of its nuclear program, and military encounters with nuclear-armed Pakistan. The changed economic policies of the Indian government allowed investment of foreign capital, establishment of manufacturing or service centers, many of them in Secure Economic Zones or SEZs. A new class of workers, better-paid than ever, flourished in renewed realms of consumption, carrying the bourgeois consumerist ambition to new levels. At the same time, villages lost their dwindling infrastructures, their access to clean drinking water, and agricultural bank loans, thus creating a wave of poverty and destitution that have been described as unprecedented by critics of globalization as varied as Arundhati Roy, P. Sainath, and Vandana Shiva.
The specter of 'India Incorporated' that became part of global political parlance in the 21st century was in the making throughout the 1990s, and Indian Popular Cinema underwent profound changes in that decade. In retrospect, the 'transition' of the 1990s proved to be a productive period for Bollywood, as it coordinated and re-arranged its various generic orientations to adapt to an increasingly neo-liberal attitude towards economics and culture. Besides 'naturalizing' the free-floating Non-resident Indian as an essentialist cultural signifier, Bollywood popularized various capital-driven phenomena in India, including basketball (the game and the brand merchandise associated with it) and Valentine's day, opening up the market for new 'cultural' merchandise. Interestingly, it was Bollywood again that popularized regional parochial Indian traditions like 'karva chaut' and 'dandiya' among pan-Indian audiences, and turned them into cultural capital. The greeting cards industry that up until the 1990s was limited to Christmas, New Year, and Birthdays, began mass-marketing cards and merchandises for the Indian festivals, many of them printed in Indian languages. Brand names (mostly global, such as Nike, Adidas, Diesel etc.) were displayed on-screen unabashedly for the first time in the 90s, and by the turn of the century, all awkwardness related to product-advertisement was gone, and the display of imported/global brands appeared seamless. While Indian markets were flooded with brands which were up until the 1980s available only illegally, the proliferation of cable television brought images of the world, India's view of it and vice versa, to an audience progressively eager to catch the next train to global capital. The mood of advertisements and product placements in television programs moved away from a contrived 'old world elegance' to an equally contrived 'ethnic chic,' catering to the viewership an image of affluence previously unimaginable. In a significant number of post-global Bollywood films, affluence rising out of globalization and India's presumed role in it became the diegetic signifier for national value or pride.
However contrived or believable the new image of India is, many of the questions that the postcolonial Indian nation-state faced in the era of the Cold War and the Non-aligned movement still remain valid and extremely relevant in public discourses. The juggernaut of state bureaucracy, the conflict between interests of the state and private capital ownership, and the postcolonial nation's continued struggle to follow the developmental paradigm have retained a core problematic that cannot be classified as anything but 'national.' To use Frederic Jameson's expression, there is still a 'geopolitical unconscious,' despite the 'disappearance of specifically national' culture and its 'replacement, either by a centralized commercial production for world export' or by 'mass-produced neotraditional images.' But the newly arrived corporate media (Fox, Sony, CNN) in post-global India – in an amazing retracing of the steps of the only federally owned and operated media up until the eighties – has contributed to the democratization of the airwaves, instead leading to a literal drowning of legitimate political discourses on the ground. The corporate news-channels both represent and cater to the ambitions and political niches of the upper middle-class post-global India, a niche where 'anti-government' or 'anti-populist' may actually mean 'anti-people.' And Bollywood has emerged in the recent years as a great ally of this corporate media. In her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri C. Spivak had directed our attention to a 'certain postcolonial subject' who recoded the 'colonial subject' and appropriated the Native Informant's position.' It is possible to stretch Spivak's conjecture to cover the global entertainment industry, and see in Bollywood's new discourse the advent of a popular cultural and more mercenary avatar of that 'new subject.' With the increase in the travelling power of Bollywood's merchandise, with the widening of commerce and the buyer, a power of place has been divested on the seller; and identity or self-expression has become a predominantly jouissant celebration. As Kaushik Bhaumik suggests, the new post-global melodramas of Bollywood have 'taken to emphasizing the lyrical as an occult yet substantial presence constructed both as a universalist modernist project and as an alternative to the Western modern.'
Not surprisingly, it was in the era of globalization that Bollywood cinema entered the Cinema Studies discourses, with an increasing number of courses offered not only in Film/Media or Cultural Studies programs but in literature curricula as well. The turning point in Indian Cinema Studies owes its impetus to the postcolonial moment in literary and cultural studies, inaugurated according to most scholars by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Until the 1980s, critical work on Indian cinema was limited to iconic figures such as Dadasaheb Phalke, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal and a few others. The biographical and critical works on the few auteurs known to the Western world via their presence in the film festivals at Cannes, Berlin, and Moscow followed an isolationist and individualist approach in that there was little or no intellectual involvement with the broader cultural and political milieu that these auteurs belonged to, and often drew from. It would be only in the late 1980s that Indian commercial cinema came to be counted as a 'valid' cultural product, an episteme worthy of the attention of the Anglo-American academia. Since the later eighties, the categories and terminology associated with postcolonial and cultural studies have permeated critical discourses on popular Indian cinema. Predictably, nation has been an integral part of the critical discourses. Sumita S. Chakravarty, writing the first significant critical volume on Indian Mainstream Cinema had chosen to use Nehru's The Discovery of India (1933) as the repository of national syncretism and synthesis, and showed how Indian Cinema interacted with both the 'cultural-national' project (of Discovery) and the Nehruvian socialist/liberal vision of the nation-state. In her 'Conclusion,' Chakravarty called 'Indian entertainment cinema' the 'mistress' to a 'master narrative,' 'Indian national identity.' Jyotika Virdi, writing on classical Bollywood about 15 years after Sumita S. Chakravarty, chose to highlight 'nation' in the title and content of her book (The Cinematic ImagiNation). In the period between the publication of Chakravarty's book and Virdi's, more than a dozen significant single-author as well as edited books, and at least one significant journal on South Asian Popular Culture have contributed considerably to the scholarship on Indian commercial cinema.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bollywood and Globalization by Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande. Copyright © 2011 Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; Bollywood, Nation, Diaspora: An Incomplete Introduction to Indian Cinema in the Era of Globalization; Sentimental Symptoms; Is Everybody Saying ‘Shava Shava’ To Bollywood Bhangra?; Bollywood Babes; Globalization and the Cultural Imaginary; Rang de Basanti; Between Yaars; Imagining the Past in the Present; ‘It's All About Loving Your Parents’; Select Bibliography