Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass Anila Gill Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp., US$ 29.95, ISBN: 9780199394395 On an initial reading of Manishita Dass’s Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India one might place the book within the existing South Asian literature on vernacular and colonial print publics,1 but a closer study of her research methods reveals a break with modernist divisions between educated elites and illiterate masses. Dass identifies a challenge to the notion of Habermasian publics as arenas of social engagement, noting that a vision of the Indian city as a literate, urbane forum that conversed exclusively in print ignores the influence of uneducated populations and the subsequent modern crowd anxiety that constituted everyday life amongst film-going Indians from the 1920s–40s. Cinema, poised to traverse such class distinctions, offers a newfound social power to the consumer crowd within Dass’s book. The structure of this book reflects shifting perspectives taken of and by the masses, beginning with early mythological films that drew on the cultural cache of popularly circulated folklore and the attractions of cinematic special effects to draw audiences to the cinema. Later, Dass analyzes governmental records [End Page 44] characterizing cinema as a polluting contagion in need of prophylaxis, and then investigates the pedagogical power ascribed to the photographic image that fueled such fears. In conjunction with the archival research necessary for such a historical overview of cinema and mass culture as they coalesce under the social and economic changes dictated by “modernity,” Dass has diligently recovered celluloid films, publicity booklets, ethnographic government reports, and film journalism from research sites in Calcutta and Bombay to bring the study of early Indian cinema outside the lettered city. Early mythological films lend themselves well to the study of cinematic origins in India for their purchase on both traditional and modern narratology, yet Dass’s formal analysis of these films paired with their history of reception connects the spiritual meaning embedded in mythological archetypes to a potential for national allegory. In her estimation, early spectators willingly submitted to the sublime illusion of movement inherent in projection, mirroring the suspension of disbelief required of faith-based Hindu mythology and Parsi Zoroastrianism. Citing contemporaneous ads for the Madan Theatre in The Times of India that deployed sensational language to attract audiences to the cinema, Dass observes how print journalism socialized and produced cinematic audiences. She continues to trace this genealogy of spectacle to the Parsi theater, noting the same trust in illusion that its stage machinery demanded from audiences. Phalke’s Sri Krishna Janma (1918) and Kaliya Mardan (1919), fragments of which Dass was able to access in the National Film Archives of India in Pune, locate the magical quality of cinema and myth at the center of this study of cinematic origins. After a description of the opening scene from Sri Krishna Janma in which Lord Vishnu addresses an awestruck crowd, Dass foregrounds “the act of vision, melding the pleasures of darshan with the delights of cinematic spectatorship, inviting the audience to revel not only in the spectacle of the divine, but in the spectacular possibilities of the cinematic medium and in the pleasure of identifying themselves in the images of the diegetic audience.”2 The colonial state’s characterization of such pleasures is evident in one bureaucratic instance that Dass offers as an antecedent to the formation of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) of 1927, in which the British Social Hygiene Council alerted the Government of India to cinema’s disregard for chastity, which would lead to an increased circulation of disease. The ICC was then introduced as a moral authority to suppress the supposed vulgarity of cinema, and offered an elite perspective on filmmaking and film-going practices. A number of ICC documents as Dass analyzes them indicate a history of upper class disdain for Indian films that anticipated Hollywood’s Hays code and its moral stand against the representation of violence and sex...