Enacting the Past: Locating Cinematic Dimensions of Nostalgia in Sanajy Leela Bhansali's Devdas

Abstract

This paper aims to interrogate the limits of engagement of cinema with the past by focusing particularly on the Indian commercial cinema, popularly known as Bollywood. Past cannot be defined objectively as a singular category but rather as a continuum with “authentic” history and “fantastic” imagination at both the ends and nostalgia suspending somewhere between the two. As filmmaking has always been vulnerable to the audience sentiments (uses and gratification), and similar to other forms of cultural industries, filmmakers are encouraged to invoke them, nostalgia, today, has become a tool in a filmmaker's hands which is constantly exploited to bring vicarious realities of the past back on celluloid. In this paper I will show how these discourses around nostalgia and cultural industry can be theorized for a prominent media industry Bollywood, by taking a close look at Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas (2002), film adaptation of Sharatchandra's classic Bengali novella with the same name. In doing so, I will conceptualize a reference framework by analyzing P.C. Barua's adaption of the same in 1936. Being contemporary to the novella Barua's film provides glimpses of historical authenticity. Through my analysis I will show how the “fantastic” nostalgia has been revitalized through films by manipulating the past.