Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar Pamela Robertson Wojcik (bio) Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar. Duke University Press. 2019. 416 pages. $109.95 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. As the disciplines of film and media studies have expanded and diversified, with academic publishing following suit, there has been a much-needed decentering of the field but at the same time a tendency toward siloing. While many of us may have interests that align with more than one subfield, few of us read broadly across the plurality of subjects that constitute the larger fields of film and media studies; instead, we tend to focus more closely on one or a few specific areas or approaches, and our cloistered views sometimes prevent us from noticing books that may be vital to our interests. Even more interdisciplinary fields, such as area studies or spatial analyses, can become insulated specialties. A cursory glance at Priya Jaikumar’s book Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space might point one to consider it predominantly a book about Indian cinema, mainly of interest to those who specifically focus on the expansive Indian film industry. The Indian case study may lead someone who works on film and space but tends to focus on Europe or the United States to think it beyond her ken. However, Where Histories Reside not only illuminates how India has been filmed, negotiated, misrepresented, shaped, maligned, and celebrated in various cinematic forms but also offers a theorization of filmed space in general. Jaikumar is interested in both filmic space, the space within the film frame, and filmed space, the “captured artifact of an encounter between a camera and its environment.”1 In focusing on India, Where [End Page 204] Histories Reside seeks to displace film theory and criticism from its normative attention to “one (Western) modality of capitalism and modernity” and consider India not as Other but as operating in tandem with Western cultures in “mutually implicated histories of global modernity.”2 Through an analysis of filmed space in India, Jaikumar works to unseat assumptions within film theory, and especially within approaches to space, that take for granted European and American reference points. Offering a critical spatial film historiography, Where Histories Reside breaks down the notion that cinema’s indexicality gives it a privileged connection to reality and dislodges “the centrality, though not the significance, of cinema’s representational space” to focus on the ways in which Indian space and cinematic space are both constructed via “multiple underlying determinants of a moment, not only in time but also in space.”3 More than simply broaching the spatial turn in film studies, Jaikumar brings to bear on her spatial analysis of India other approaches to cinema, including the perspectives of history, the law, government, education, media industries, archival research, labor practices, authorship, and colonialism. Her analysis further draws on prior studies of feature filmmaking, useful cinema, documentary, travelogues, and Indian and European filmmaking. Where Histories Reside shows the deep interconnectedness of the many approaches needed to understand cinema and filmed space as well as the complex interplay between and among “states, institutions, economies, societies and ideologies” that constitute filmed space.4 The book aims to show how space is both a product of and an agent shaping human life and social relations; it further posits the persistence of spatial logics that exceed a normative Western spatial understanding. Overall, it convincingly argues for understanding the situatedness of film in space and synchronically through complex interwoven histories. Where Histories Reside attends to the way in which the colonial imagination shapes perceptions of Indian space. In a chapter dealing with what she calls disciplinary space, Jaikumar shows how educational British geographic films inculcate an “imperial understanding” in school children and highlight intersections between the visual practices of geopolitics and geography.5 Indian Town Series films, intended to teach British children about Indian geography, flatten differences between places in India or places with connections to India that have “distinct roles in imperial administration”— including Afghanistan, Darjeeling, Bikaner, and Udaipur— to focus on “vocation or ethnic types of inhabitants . . . an incongruous range of transportation (camels...