Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema

Abstract

Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema Parichay Patra (bio) Priya Jaikumar. Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 398 pages. $109.95 cloth. $29.95 paperback. Why should we be so scared of a cosmic or cosmological ambition in cinema? It has always been part of the potential—and destiny—of film to mix the smallest with the largest, the immediate everyday with the longue durée of grand history, the microscopic with the macroscopic. —Adrian Martin, “ ‘The Tree of Life’: Great Events and Ordinary People” (2011) Priya Jaikumar’s Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space is a spatial film historiography and much more than what it usually means. It asks a number of complex questions in the context of Indian film historiography, Indian cinema studies, and the various modes of film history writing in general. Jaikumar presents several arguments that are located in apparently disjointed temporalities and makes a strong case for the reconsideration of spatiality in cinema [End Page 101] studies. It should be noted that the historicist research dominates Indian cinema studies, as opposed to some other views that intended to locate Indian cinema in mythological time and narratives. However, spatial history remained largely ignored. Jaikumar’s work addresses this lack in its own idiosyncratic ways. The book has a complex structure and varied, deceptively disjointed areas of interest. This highly ambitious project defies categorization; it acknowledges its debt to 1970s screen theory yet dissociates itself from the continuation of such legacy through its novel sites of inquiry. Its interdisciplinarity has far-reaching connotations and consequences for Indian cinema studies. The book successfully challenges disciplinary conventions and epistemic borders within several established practices and points out the dearth of prevalent cinema studies narrative(s) in India. For Jaikumar, this dearth might mean the absence of spatiality: her book presents the dominant narrative’s inability to explore the potential of space in the discussion on Indian cinema and India as a location for cinema. In this context, Jaikumar engages with such significant works as Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Edward Soja’s political geography to develop her theoretical framework. Jaikumar presents a densely informed case that engages with filmed space, profilmic space, the politics and poetics of location shooting and abstraction, the role of the cinematographic apparatus, and above all the idea of a multiplicity of spatial histories spanning over centuries. The afterlives that she presents are mostly unpredictable, as proclaimed in the book; this only adds to the text’s own unpredictability within the larger fabric of Indian film studies. In several interviews related to her most recent (and, I would say, pathbreaking) book, Jaikumar refers to the infamous U.S. wars in the Middle East as an event that triggered her interest in the politics of specific geographies, the sudden media-induced global visibility of apparently obscure locations and spaces.1 As a researcher who worked extensively on empire cinema and the colonial lives of filmmaking practices in South Asia, Jaikumar has always maintained her distance from the more dominant trends and methodologies in Indian cinema studies. Her previous book, on empire cinema, began with a call to abandon “the rubric of national cinemas.”2 In Where Histories Reside, Jaikumar introduces a spatial film historiography that is sui generis in Indian cinema studies. Here her concentration on fragmented spaces and multiple temporalities moves beyond the dominating framework of the national. The idea of space has not been completely overlooked and ignored in Indian cinematic histories. There is historical research [End Page 102] on the formation of Bombay and its cinema, work treating the city as a cinematic archive, and a 2012 volume of verbal and visual essays that explores “the multiple subjectivities related to cinema and the watermarks it has left on the body of a city.”3 However, Jai-kumar’s work is not restricted to the urban space and the cinematic urbanity: hers is an eclectic collection of spatialities, a sustained theorization of this historiographic model. The novelty of Jaikumar’s approach becomes evident as we look at the dominant historiographies in Indian cinema studies in retrospect. According to Ranjani Mazumdar, the latter has...