Lost Boys: The Infernal Youth of the Cinematic Teenage Vampire

Abstract

Popular cinema in India has been identified as providing rich cultural texts for understanding the legitimization of ideological and political hegemony, especially through narrative-cinematic forms popular in the post-colonial Indian public sphere. An impressive amount of literature has explored the various trajectories of discourses regarding the post colonial nation-state, family, and the iconic presence of the mother informing the narrative organization of popular Hindi cinema. However, representation of boyhood within the specific narrative and visual rhetoric of popular Hindi cinema received little scholarly attention. This essay traces the representation of boyhood and adolescence - first, as predominantly integrated within the narrative of male protagonists' early life, a popular cinematic motifs in 1970s and 1980s which, interestingly enough, has somewhat disappeared from post-liberalization Hindi cinema; and second, as a discursively formed narrative agent with specific ideological and psychological connotations. Drawing analogies from a range of Indian literary works on and for children, I explore how concomitant cinematic tropes serve to reiterate and negotiate ideological and social codes interlacing gender, sexuality, class, and caste, not however without leaving fissures for subaltern agency. Keywords: BOLLYWOOD, HINDI FILM, CHILDHOOD, POSTCOLONIAL, IDEOLOGY, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, BARNA PARICHAY New normative discourses on the in nineteenth and early twentieth century India produced a number of texts that directly dealt with children's character formation. Such discourses recurrently conceived the notion of family as an isolated private domain, separate not only from the kinship system but also as a shelter from an aggressive and cruel outside world. discursive construction of the Indian depended heavily on the ways of powers and pleasures were distributed and in the process generated a radical separation between childhood and adulthood. child was central to this construction, as a new idea of childhood helped precipitate the new discourse of the family. The child came to be regarded as a person with distinctive attributes- impressionability, vulnerability, innocence-that required a 'correct/ protected, and prolonged period of nurture. It was only through a certain practice and strategy that the child's character-building exercise was to be pursued (Bose, 1995, p. 118). Hence, to be the ideal child, it was necessary for (the him is used deliberately, because, as we will discuss later, discourses almost exclusively referenced the male child) to avoid rash confrontation with various corrupting influences and to be subjected to a system of love, affection, discipline, and punishment. Interestingly, this discourse on childhood in India underscored the fact that the was envisaged as a realm that played the most valuable task of shaping the individual's life. As Satischandra Chakrabarti, in an influential, widely read book written in Bengali, Santaner Charitra Gathan (Building the Character of Child, 1912), writes: word Hie has given a new turn to the system. In earlier times, the principal question before the was how juniors would behave toward elders and superiors and how elders would behave toward juniors. Now the main subject of discussion is how every life in the family, especially the life of children, can be developed. is now a center for the development of life. (P- 2) customary belief prevailing in Indian household was that seniority was to be respected. father was a disciplinarian, a figure of supreme authority, and the children in return offered bhakti (devotional love) to their parents, a kind of love that gods are supposed to receive. It is noteworthy that this bhakti towards parents, especially the mother, became a recurrent narrative trope in popular Hindi cinema in immediately post-independence India, an aspect that signals the normative, disciplinary ideologies that the child was to internalize from birth. …