Sealed with a Kiss: Conjugality and Hindi Film Form

Abstract

Sealed with a Kiss: Conjugalityand Hindi FilmForm Sangita Gopal In the final sequence of Danny Boyle's 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal and Latika's lips freeze in a brief on-screen kiss. Almost immediately, Boyle goes to credits intercut with a Bollywood-style song and dance number that enacts how this kiss feels to the long-suffering, long-sepa rated sweethearts. This couple is twice constituted—first through a kiss and then in the performance register of the romantic duet. By formally separating the kiss from the song, Boyle evokes the uneasy relationship between these modes of affection in popular Hindi cinema. By locating the kiss in the film proper but consigning the song to the credits, this Bolly wood-inspired global blockbuster revises the aesthetic codes of Hindi cinema where the song sequence rather than the kiss has historically functioned as an engine of couple formation. I begin this article with Boyle's film, for it captures fundamental shifts that are ongoing in popular Hindi cinema whereby the kiss, banished from the screen since the 1930s, is making a reappearance, while the song sequence that has long served as the primary expressive device for constituting the romantic couple is be ing sidelined. At this moment of change, it is worth investigating why the song sequence rather than the kiss emerged as an engine of couple forma tion in Hindi cinema and what this aesthetic preference can tell us about the symbolic value of conjugality for a commercial cinema trying to nego tiate its relation to modernity and nationalism. I will explore these ques Feminist Studies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 154 SanflitaGopal 155 tions by focusing on the 1930s, the first decade of the sound film in India, a period in which conjugality's relation to song got crystallized. The emergence of the couple through song and dance rather than the kiss is key to understanding the conjugal field in Hindi cinema and its rela tion to the social. Although social differences such as class, race, or ethnic ity might create complications for couple formation in Hollywood cinema, the couple, once constituted, is fully autonomous and able to walk out of these determining frameworks and into the sunset. Conjugali ty in Hindi film is not similarly vested. The couple formation is almost invariably the result of free choice—girl and boy meet and fall in love, often across social barriers such as class, ethnicity, and, less frequently, caste—but social and familial frameworks remain powerful determinants. Thus, the couple must either work toward familial (and patriarchal) acceptance or meet a tragic end. The interdiction on kissing might be viewed as formal trace of this ideological pressure.1 Uncensored yet prohibited, the missing kiss serves as shorthand for the couple's thwarted sovereignty. However, the couple is not denied autonomy altogether. Rather, as I will argue, the sovereignty of the couple is given to us through song and dance, particu larly the romantic duet. Although blamed for its mimetic deficit, the song and dance sequence nonetheless brings the couple into being. This perfor mative consolidation of the couple should not be dismissed as merely escapist or compensatory. Such a reading would sell the song short, for the romantic duet does real work. While the couple loses out by not becoming fully sovereign in the narrative, the publicity of the song sequence, the multiple pleasures it offers, its extratextual circulation in other media and in everyday life grant unique power and reach to this vision of the sovereign couple in Hindi cinema. Song and dance sequences have been a feature of Indian popular cine ma from its very beginnings. Rationales for the persistence of the perfor mance sequence in Hindi film range from the culturalist (song and dance in Indian tradition), to the sociological, to the technoindustrial, although no single approach may be fully capable of explaining this enduring phenomenon.2 Song sequences come in a wide variety—devotional songs, songs celebrating festivals and rituals of family life, cabaret numbers staged in nightclubs, and even songs with no particular locus. Although such 156 Sangita Gopal song situations can be naturalized (people after all do sing at...