Sensational Love Scandals and their After-lives

Abstract

This article revisits the sensational Nanavati case that captured public imagination half a century ago, examining its creation as an iconic media event through photographic images in the tabloid Blitz and its immediate after life in a film, Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke (The Roads that Lead to Love, R.K. Nayyar, 1963). Examining the proliferation of detail around this sudden and unexpected event, the article argues that even though the tabloid pushed the borders of photographic representation toward the realm of speculation and even fantasy, there were registers of affect that an evidential form could not express. This is where cinema made an entry, to explore the subjectivity and inner worlds of the protagonists of this human drama and to contain its scandalous excess through narrative resolution. The article explores how both forms of media allowed for the articulation of regimes of public fantasy through melodrama, if in rather different ways.